This is one man’s attempt to counteract the dangerous mythology of falling in love as a basis for marriage, but it is not convincing. Such a vague but deeply committed view never inspired a single love poem. The lure of the psychedelic experience of love which makes the world a beautiful place, puts stars in your eyes, sweeps you off your feet, thumps you in the breast with Cupid’s bird-bolt is not lessened by such bad prose. The magical mania still persists as a powerful compulsion in our imagination. ‘Was he very much in love with her?’ the second wife asks of her dead rival. ‘He was crazy about her,’ they say of the man who killed his faithless wife, and the jury recommends mercy. ‘I knew he was a murderer but I was in love with him,’ says the lady who married the man in the condemned cell. Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness. ‘We were not made to idolize one another, yet the whole strain of courtship is little more than rank idolatry.’10 It may seem that young men no longer court with the elaborate servilities that Mary Astell, the seventeenth-century feminist, was talking about, but the mystic madness of love provides the same spurious halo, and builds up the same expectations which dissipate as soon as the new wife becomes capable of ‘calmly considering her Condition’. In the twentieth century a feminist like Ti-Grace Atkinson makes a similar point more crudely: ‘Love is the victim’s response to the rapist.’11
Not all love is comprehended in such a description, but the sickening obsession which thrills the nervous frames of the heroines of great love-affairs whether in cheap ‘romance’ comic-papers or in hard-back novels of passionate wooing is just that. Women must recognize in the cheap ideology of being in love the essential persuasion to take an irrational and self-destructive step. Such obsession has nothing to do with love, for love is not swoon, possession or mania, but ‘a cognitive act, indeed the only way to grasp the innermost core of personality.’12
Romance
Perhaps it is no longer true that every young girl dreams of being in love. Perhaps the pop revolution which has replaced sentiment with lust by forcibly incorporating the sexual ethos of black urban blues into the culture created by the young for themselves has had a far-reaching effect on sexual mores. Perhaps young girls have allowed an actual sexual battle to replace the moony fantasies that I certainly fell for in my teenage years. Nevertheless, it is only a perhaps. Dr Peter Mann’s researches at the University of Sheffield show that twenty-five to forty-five-year-old women are avid readers of romantic fiction, especially housewives and secretarial workers. Some buy as many as eighty books a year. The market is bigger than ever before.1 Romance still lives! cried the Woman’s Weekly, ‘famed for its fiction’, as recently as August 1969.
For all their new freedoms, the majority of ‘young people of today’ still dream the same dreams, find life as adventurous and appreciate the best values as have the generations before them.
…Kathy, on the lawn that evening might have been modelling an illustration for a Victorian love story. Her white dress, of some filmy material, was high at the throat and went down to her black satin slippers. She had a black velvet ribbon round her small waist and wore an old gold chain with a locket, and her black hair was parted in the middle…‘She’s going to her first ball,’ her mother said to me…‘She’s wildly excited.’
…For every sad daughter whiffing in marijuana in some darkened discotheque, there are thousands like Kathy, ‘wildly excited’ in their first formal dance frock.2
This apparently is romance. The stress placed by the male author of this piece on the dress which is appropriate to romance is typical of the emphasis which characterizes such lore. The dance is the high mass in which Kathy will appear in her glory, to be wooed and adored. Her young man will be bewitched, stumbling after her in his drab evening dress, pressing her cool hand, circling her tiny waist and whirling her helpless in his arms about the floor. He will compliment her on her beauty, her dancing, thank her for an unforgettable evening.
Debutantes still come out every year, in their virginal white, curtseying to the Queen, the Mayor, the Bishop, or whomever, pacing their formal patterns with down-cast eyes. The boys ask politely for dances while the girls accept prettily, or try to find pretexts for refusing in the hope that someone nicer will ask. Their beaux ought to have given them flowers. But every girl is hoping that something more exciting, more romantic than the expected sequence of the social event will happen. Perhaps some terrifyingly handsome man will press a little closer than the others and smell the perfume of her hair. Perhaps after supper, when they stroll upon the terrace, he will catch his breath, dazzled by the splendour of her limitless eyes. Her heart will pound, and her cheeks mantle with delicious blushes. He will say wonderful things, be strangely tender and intense. She may be swept into his masterful arms. Nothing more sexual than a kiss, no vulgar groping embraces, only strong arms about her protecting her from the coarseness of the world, and warm lips on hers, sending extraordinary stimuli through her whole body.
In the romantic world, kisses do not come before love, unless they are offered by wicked men who delude innocent girls for a time, for they will soon be rescued by the omnipotent true lover. The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called Sweethearts, Romantic Secrets and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. Many a young man trying to make out with his girl has been surprised at her raptness and elation, only to find himself lumbered with an unwanted intense relationship which is compulsorily sexless.
When it happens it will be wonderful, unforgettable, beautiful. It will be like Mimi and Rodolfo singing perfect arias at their first meeting. Perhaps they will not fall in love all at once but feel a tenderness growing until one day POW! that amazing kiss. The follow-through would have to be the constant manifestation of tenderness, esteem, flattery and susceptibility by the man together with chivalry and gallantry in all situations. The hero of romance knows how to treat women. Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical. Some heavy breathing. Searing lips pressed against the thin stuff of her bodice. Endearments muttered into her luxuriant hair. ‘Little things mean a lot.’ Her favourite chocolates, his pet names for her, remembering her birthday, anniversaries, silly games. And then the foolish things that remind him of her, her perfume, her scarf, her frilly underthings and absurd lace hankies, kittens in her lap. Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence—women never have enough of it. Most men know nothing about this female fantasy world because they are not exposed to this kind of literature and the commerce of romanticism. The kind of man who studies this kind of behaviour and becomes a ladies’ man whether for lust or love or cupidity is generally feared and disliked by other men as a gigolo or even a queer. Male beauticians and hairdressers study the foibles of their customers and deliberately flirt with them, paying them compliments that they thirst for, hinting that they deserve better than the squalid domestic destiny that they bear.
If Sweethearts and the other publications of the same kind with their hallucinated love imagery are American, it is unfortunately true that they find a wide distribution in England. There are also trash weeklies called Mirabelle, Valentine, Romeo and, biggest of all, Jackie selling upwards of a million copies a week to girls between ten and sixteen years of age, which set forth the British ideals of romance. The girls are leggier and trendier, with tiny skirts, wild hair and sooty eyes; mostly they avoid the corniness of the psychedelic kiss. The men are wick
edly handsome on the lines of the Regency Buck, more or less dapper and cool, given to gazing granite-jawed into the glimmering eyes of melting females. The extraordinary aspect is the prominence given to fetish objects. Romance appears to hinge on records, books, knick-knacks, and, in one case which appears to the detached observer to be almost surreal, a park-bench. Kate and Harry are sweethearts. They sit on a bench in the park and exchange dialogue thus:
‘Oh, Kate, I love you more than anything on earth.’
‘And I love you more than anything in the whole universe, darling.’
The bench becomes enormously important in their relationship and when the council decides to move it Kate dashes to Harry’s office in the Town Hall with a demand that they sit in, on it. Harry does so until his boss, the borough surveyor, tells him he’ll lose his job if he holds out any longer. He gives in, leaving Kate to defend her bench alone. She takes it as an indication of the shallowness of his love for her. But one of the people involved in the moving of the bench, obviously a lover because of his granite jaw and Byronic hair, takes his place beside her. ‘We’ll save this bench for you, for the past and all the lovers to come.’ The last frame shows our heroine peering dewily at him through tear-dimmed eyes, her baby pouting lips a hair’s breadth from his rugged prognathous contours. ‘But you’ll lose your job for nothing. Do…do you really think we can beat them?’ says her balloon. ‘I know we can beat them,’ his balloon rejoins. ‘People can do anything if they try hard enough and love well enough. Let’s try…’3 The end, to say the least.
The lover in romance is a man of masterful ways, clearly superior to his beloved in at least one respect, usually in several, being older or of higher social rank and attainment or more intelligent and au fait. He is authoritative but deeply concerned for his lady whom he protects and guides in a way that is patently paternal. He can be stern and withdrawn or even forbidding but the heroines of romance melt him by sheer force of modesty and beauty and the bewitching power of their clothes. He has more than a hint of danger in his past conquests, or a secret suffering or a disdain for women. The banked fires of passion burn just below the surface, muted by his tenderness and omnipotent understanding of the heroine’s emotional needs. The original for such characters is in fact romantic in the historical sense for perhaps the very first of them were Rochester, Heath-cliff, Mr Darcy and Lord Byron. However, the sense of Austen and Brontë is eclipsed by the sensibility of Lady Caroline Lamb. Exploiting the sexual success of the Byronic hero in an unusually conscious way Georgette Heyer created the archetype of the plastic age, Lord Worth, the Regency Buck. He is a fine example of a stereotype which most heroes of romantic fiction resemble more or less, whether they are dashing young men with an undergraduate sense of humour who congratulate the vivacious heroine on her pluck (the most egalitarian in conception) in the adventure stories of the thirties, or King Cophetua and the beggar maid.
He was the epitome of a man of fashion. His beaver hat was set over black locks carefully brushed into a semblance of disorder; his cravat of starched muslin supported his chin in a series of beautiful folds, his driving coat of drab cloth bore no less than fifteen capes, and a double row of silver buttons. Miss Taverner had to own him a very handsome creature, but found no difficulty in detesting the whole cast of his countenance. He had a look of self-consequence; his eyes, ironically surveying her from under world-weary lids, were the hardest she had ever seen, and betrayed no emotion but boredom. His nose was too straight for her taste. His mouth was very well-formed, firm but thin-lipped. She thought he sneered…
Worse than all was his languor. He was uninterested, both in having dexterously averted an accident, and in the gig’s plight. His driving had been magnificent; there must be unexpected strength in those elegantly gloved hands holding the reins in such seeming carelessness but why in the name of God, why must he put on such an air of dandified affectation?4
Nothing such a creature would do could ever be corny. With such world-weary lids! With the patrician features and aristocratic contempt which first opened the doors of polite society to Childe Harold, and the titillating threat of unexpected strength! Principally, we might notice, he exists through his immaculate dressing—Beau Brummell is one of his friends—but when he confronts this spectacle—
She had rather have had black hair; she thought the fairness of her gold curls insipid. Happily her brows and lashes were dark, and her eyes which were staringly blue (in the manner of a wax doll, she once scornfully told her brother) had a directness and fire which gave a great deal of character to her face. At first glance one might write her down a mere Dresden china miss, but a second glance would inevitably discover the intelligence in her eyes, and the decided air of resolution in the curve of her mouth.5
Of course her intelligence and resolution remain happily confined to her eyes and the curve of her mouth but they provide the excuse for her naughty behaviour towards Lord Worth, who turns out to be that most titillating of all titillating relations, her young guardian, by an ingeniously contrived mistake. He, confronting her in this charming dress—‘a plain round gown of French cambric, frilled around the neck with scolloped lace; and a close mantle of twilled sarsenet. A poke bonnet of basket willow with a striped velvet ribbon…’6—and most compromisingly placed shaking a pebble out of her sandal, and so having to hide her stockinged foot in her skirts, sweeps her up into his arms and hurls her into his curricle (for at this point neither of them knows their relationship) where he ‘took the sandal from her resistless grasp, and calmly held it ready to fit on to her foot’. Then to provoke her charming indignation still further he kisses her. At such a rate of conquest the novel would be merely twenty pages long, if it were not that as her guardian Worth is too much a man of principle to pay his addresses to her. She becomes, with his help, given sternly and diffidently, the belle of the season, wooed by all but loving none (but him). She has eighty thousand pounds a year, which is the motive for one sort of suitor; lustful desire for her is the motive of the rest, the most remarkable being the Prince of Wales, whose advances are so repugnant that she faints dead away to be brought around and carried home by her masterful father-lover, who alone loves her without greed or self-interest (being fabulously wealthy), steadfastly and strong. He protects her all the time, even though most of the time she is unaware of it, until her majority when, after a moment of looking down into her face, he sweeps her into his arms. Georgette Heyer has a streak of discretion, or perhaps prudery, which prevents her from exploiting the sexual climaxes in the writing: Barbara Cartland, on the other hand, overwrites the imagery of embracements and thereby reveals much more of the essential romantic preoccupations. In The Wings of Love she divides the love interest in two with Lord Ravenscar the forty-year-old lecher who covets tiny Amanda’s lovely body and forces his hideous attentions on it…
His hold on her tightened; his lips fastened to hers were like a vice [sic]. She felt his passion rising within him like an evil flame; and then suddenly he lifted her in his arms.
‘Amanda!’ he said hoarsely, ‘Damme! Why should we wait?’ He was carrying her to a large sofa in the corner of the room; and as she struggled, fighting with every ounce of her strength, she knew how small and ineffectual she was and that her resistance was merely exciting him.
‘Amanda! Amanda!’
His thick lips were on her eyes, her cheeks, her throat. She felt him lay her down on the sofa, while she fought fruitlessly to regain her feet, knowing as she did so that she was quite powerless. She heard the fichu of her gown tearing beneath his hands.7
The utterly ineffectual heroine is the most important part of the story, ineffectual against ravishment (for how could such a delicate thing kick a peer of the realm in his rising passion?) and against more agreeable forms of sexual conquest, at the hands of the other male, the hero who will protect her from his own animal passions and the crimes and follies of the world.
She turned towards the door and then suddenly Peter Harvey had
dropped on one knee beside her. She looked at him wonderingly as he lifted the hem of her white muslin gown and touched his lips with it. ‘Amanda,’ he said, ‘that is how a man, any man, should approach you. No one—least of all Ravenscar—is worthy to do more than to kiss the hem of your gown. Will you remember that?’8
That’s the kind of man you marry. On his knees chewing her muddy hem and still her moral tutor. Miss Cartland’s taste for titillation as far exceeds Heyer’s as Heyer’s researches into historical colour exceed her own. By a series of preposterous contrivances the lovers meet in a brothel bedroom where he is engaged in rescuing her. Amanda confesses her love in a more decorous setting.
‘Amanda, you are making it unbearable for me’ Peter said, and his voice sounded as if it was strangled.
‘You do not want me,’ she said.
‘One day I will make you apologize for that,’ he said. ‘Just as one day I will kiss you until you cry for mercy. Until that day comes—and pray God it will come soon—take care of yourself, my little beloved.’
He took both her hands and raised them to his lips. Instead of kissing the back of them he turned them over. She felt him kissing the palms with a reverence, and, at the same time, a hungry passion that made her thrill until her whole body trembled with a sudden ecstasy.9
They have not actually kissed yet because Peter has said ‘If your lips touched mine I should not be answer-able for the consequences.’ Indeed when handkissing results in orgasm it is possible that an actual kiss might bring on epilepsy. She is at the altar repeating the vows which will bind her to Ravenscar for life when her lover unmasks him as a traitor, duels with him, and takes his place at her side.
The Female Eunuch Page 18