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Toni Bowers – Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance 1660-1760

A whale of a book; ‘Force or Fraud’ is ‘about’ far more than its immediate subject – in this case early genre fictions of seduction and abandonment. Before we ever reach those books, we take a lengthy tour through the meanings of our terms, starting with the medieval idea of rape as theft; a crime against the father, not the woman herself, whose consent (or otherwise) was of little interest. Through the C18th period, our modern definitions of ‘seduction’ and ‘rape’ began to be constructed, both legally and linguistically, according to the response (collusion or resistance) of the woman in question, who emerges – slowly – from the shadows as a subject. The political dimension – or, more pertinently, the blurring of distinction between the personal and the political – is Bowers’ fascination, as she looks at how seduction stories allowed contemporary readers to consider the problem of virtuous resistance to authority. She would like us to go beyond the rape-or-seduction dichotomy (‘Force or Fraud’), arguing that if it limits the woman’s agency to mere consent, her voice is just ‘yes’ or ‘no’. “What if we choose to doubt that sexual interactions… are adequately described as either consensual or non-consensual?” she asks. As female desire is complicity in seduction, Bowers’ project is thus to find a space between force and fraud; both politically and privately, in what she calls ‘collusive resistance.’

And so we start, not really in the 1660s, but in the multiple political crises of the 1680s. Tory ideology had long argued for political non-resistance, for passive obedience to the King as God’s representative on Earth. But what if the King’s actions were manifestly wrong, as with the hated King James II? Whigs – the mainstream political Left – had executed Charles I in 1649; had grumbled through but colluded in the reign of the weak and flawed Charles II. But upon Charles II’s death in 1685, the crown passed to his catholic brother James II, against whom even Tories might wish to rebel. Enter: the Duke of Monmouth. Bowers argues that Monmouth – Charles II’s illegitimate son, who led a failed rebellion against James II that summer – was a seducer who was himself fatally seduced. She notes how contemporary metaphors have him flipping between male and female roles; a charismatic hermaphrodite, an universal object of desire. His person, as a dashing and gallant commander, and his position as a (crucially) protestant Prince made him a seducer, one who carries all hearts with him, but, his faults (as his father once quipped) were never his own, they were his advisors’: the rebellion was always something into which he had been seduced by false counsellors.

After this, finally, we reach the novels; beginning with one of the first true novels in English, Aphra Behn’s “Love letters between a nobleman and his sister” (1684-7). Based upon the true story of Lord Grey, Monmouth’s right-hand man, who eloped with his wife’s younger sister. But where are the woman’s wishes/desires in all this? Court records of the prosecution denied them entirely (it was the man who was on trial) until, dramatically, she appeared to speak in his defence, arguing her own willingness. For Behn, coming from a Tory standpoint, this showed the perversity and degeneracy of the Whigs in all their deeds; the seduction a kind of petty sedition. The woman’s mock-resistance in the book does not in the least mask her real desire to be seduced, something Behn sees as both unwomanly and uncitizenly conduct. Neither Grey nor Monmouth turned out to be particularly heroic in the real world in the end, and again, Behn sees it as almost inevitable that one who would break his allegiance and duty to his King and father, would do the same to his wife and followers also. Behn died in 1689; to see how Tory writers would go on to generate a concept of virtuous subordinate resistance we have to look at the seduction stories of her successors; Manley, Haywood and Richardson. In this section I got some way out of my depth, since I am familiar with a lot less of the source material, but I’ll try to do it justice.

Before we discuss them, however, we briefly look at the Tory Bishop Berkeley’s contribution to the ‘passive obedience’ debate in the post-1689 era. Berkeley subtly redefined the terms of such obedience, as being due to the Sovereign, and not to the person thereof, thus eliding hereditary right. So, when James II, faced with William of Orange’s invasion, abdicated the throne and fled the country, he ceased to be sovereign and his subjects were released from their allegiance. This must have salved the consciences of many; against him came the thunderings of the old-Tory Sacheverell against dissenters, who he thought were, just as much as catholics, seducers from the truth. Sacheverell was briefly a hero to High Church mobs who in 1710 pulled down meeting-houses and stoned the dissenters; there was apparently no irony in the fact that this was all done in the name of ‘passive obedience’! Berkeley’s narrowing of definition of what was rebellion to “Force and open violence,” did however allow new space for all sorts of quietly resistant behaviours and attitudes – which leads us back, once more, to Bowers’ big idea: collusive resistance to authority; in which the subject may remain virtuous despite complicity.    

In the seduction novels, Bowers sees the Crisis of the Abdication (or ‘the Glorious Revolution,’ as it was known by Whigs – one person sees the cloud, his neighbour the silver lining) looming over all. The disappearing King leads to a collapse of patriarchal authority, and an obsession with defrauded inheritances, and faithfulness to vows. Female desire is not criminal, but agency – its expression – is. The occasional heroine, in Haywood, for example, who is allowed to retain both effective sexual agency and virtue is a rare one, and seems to walk to the altar over the bodies of scores of her ruined, unhappy sisters. The genre reaches a climax (as it were) in Samuel Richardson’s epic ‘Clarissa,’ the bane of every literature student I have ever met. Bowers sees Clarissa’s refusal to marry the man who raped her – a decision that is beyond the comprehension of every other character in the book – as a radical refusal of the reductive binary ‘Force or Fraud;’ a simple statement that these choices are not enough. I fear I’ve gone on too long already in this review, but that is perhaps as good a place to end as any. A wonderful book.

 

Alan Halsey – The Text of Shelley’s Death

‘Everybody knows the text of Shelley’s death,’ this book begins. And the bare bones, I guess, are common knowledge: Percy Shelley setting off in his new yacht from Leghorn on a clear day, the storm whipping up within a few hours, the disappearance, the anguished search, the eventual discovery of his corpse on the shoreline.

Halsey – a fine poet himself – takes all of the varied and varying accounts of the poet’s death and does an interesting thing; instead of sifting through them as an historian might, he butts them up against each other, forcing the contradictions to rise to the surface. Thus, constantly repeating and self-contradicting, it becomes a story of doubling; people and boats change names, books change titles, people appear in two places at once. It is not so much ‘What or where is the truth?’ but ‘All of this is the truth.’ All this myth-making, setting off in different directions, on different days… in the end, it is the chaos, the storm, that is the truth.

Mary Shelley – The Last Man

A post-apocalyptic science-fantasy (written in 1826), “The Last Man” is Shelley’s howl of rage at all the deaths she had witnessed; a revenge fantasy on the straight world that she had seen take from her, in the space of 6 or 7 years, almost every single person for whom she cared – her sister, husband, three of their four children; Byron, Claire Claremont’s daughter, etc. Even before she came to write this novel, the author was picturing herself in her journals as the last man standing, “last relic of a beloved race”. Now in ‘The Last Man,’ she beheads both Enlightenment optimism and traditional Christian promise and hope, in its picture of a devastating plague that can extinguish the entire human race. The narrator, a typically Rousseau-ean hero (was that actually a word?) and Adrian, based on Percy Shelley, seem at first epitomes of Romantic Man, destined to triumph over all. Adrian even addresses a company – in Windsor Castle, of all places! – in stirring Churchillean “fight them on the beaches” terms. But still it is in vain; even England succumbs.

The SF elements – the book is set in the 2080s – seem curiously conservative to a modern reader. This is an entirely pre-Industrial Revolution landscape; a world of servants, carriages and post-chaises. People hop dashingly into a hot-air balloon to travel long-distance, but that still means three days from London to Scotland; six days to cross Europe. Mary Shelley has the wit to imagine an end to monarchy; but unlike France in her own day, in Great Britain it has simply withered away. The aristocratic party remains strong in parliament, and scheme to get ‘their man’ – the last scion of the House of Windsor – elected Lord Protector. And there is an interesting echo of her mother’s political sensitivities at times; her obvious distaste for Methodism in Volume III has an air of old-Tory Anglicanism to it. Some might argue this would have been for the benefit of her readership – since Shelley at this point was writing to survive and keep her only remaining child – but I would argue that she was independent-minded enough for me to suspect that this was more her own beliefs coming through. She and her mother were both some little way to the right of where their husbands painted them to be.

The single problem with this book is essentially the three-decker format that popular novels of the day were required to fit. Volume I is thus bloated and in places boring; it is only the reader who perseveres through to Volumes II and III who gets the good stuff. I’ll leave the last words to her narrator, Verney (his own name, I think, an echo of Volney, author of ‘The Ruins’): “…my human mind cannot acknowledge that all that is, is right; yet since what is, must be, I will sit amidst the ruins and smile.”

 

I’m locking myself in till I finish this book!

The book that was written almost entirely in scraps on the backs of envelopes whilst looking after children, patched together, shown to friends, reworked to fill in the gaps, tinkered with, and tinkered again, really is nearly done. In a month in which I’ve tried to book myself several splodges of free time, culminating in an almost-unprecedented five days off childcare (when I visit my friends in Scotland), I have decided to actually finish my Victorian novel. I’ve just got detailed comments  on it back from another reader and I am going through those; at this point it is just a decision to bring it to a close, in a way. I mean, everything is there in a narrative sense: it’s mainly a case now of bringing out characters’ motivations that might be clear to me but weren’t to my readers, and trying to get the voices right, as it’s all done in the form of letters and diaries. And finally, when you work so hard to make something flow naturally and seem effortless, trying to make sure you don’t lose the freshness of what you originally wrote – in some cases, several years ago now. The ‘NaNoWriMo’ (National Novel Writing Month) phenomenon – in which people try to write a novel in a month – has never really appealed to me, but simply finishing one in a month? This seems possible. And so, for all those friends of mine whom I have bored stupid talking about this book, I pledge to finish it by the end of May, get it out there in some way, and then shut up! I bet you can’t wait.

Kathleen Winsor - Forever Amber

Amber fulfils what may be many a young girl’s dream, by being spit-makingly beautiful and absolutely horrible.  Abandoned penniless and pregnant on the streets of 1660s London at the start of the novel, Amber is, let’s be fair, not just no better than she should be, but considerably worse. She steals her lovers from other women and crows about it; she lies, cheats and schemes, locks an old woman in a room to die alone of the Plague; she is utterly feline, sybaritic and selfish. I’m not the only person to have noticed that this book is in some ways a rewrite of “Gone With The Wind;” Amber can’t have the man she loves, she can’t love the man she has, and so she ends up treating everyone horribly, making everyone miserable, and deserves everything she gets. But still, she is a heroine to women. Not so much to male readers I suspect; we don’t tend to like Scarlett O’Hara much either, we think she’s a bit of an annoying tit, but somehow women, even if they dislike her, are drawn to her like magnets. I don’t think this book would have sold three million copies if Amber wasn’t somehow oddly lovable – she lives by her wits and she has spirit, even if, like Scarlett, she has a singular talent for unhappiness. “No woman is ever satisfied unless she knows she can hurt the man who loves her,” is one of Winsor’s precious pearls of wisdom, which might I suppose be true, but is a pretty depressing thought.

It sounds as though I didn’t like this book, but I did. For a start, I have never read a thousand-page novel faster, and the Plague section at the heart of the book (roughly pages 450-550) is amazing. This isn’t just Defoe re-told, it’s a visceral journey through hell that really doesn’t seem to belong in a romantic fiction novel, with all the symptoms described in horrific detail as she kills off and disposes of three nurses in quick succession, mopping up blood, pus and sick – and finally falls ill with the Plague herself. But of course she survives. Pepys is the background to the book, 1660-1670, and he seems to provide the majority of Winsor’s research, as she firmly takes the ‘official line,’ seeing the Puritans as a kind of Taliban and the corrupt Stuart court as a golden age. The Americanisms throughout (‘in back,’ ‘standing in line,’ ‘mad’ for ‘angry’ etc) sit a little oddly in the context, but not as much as the occasional complete misunderstandings of custom (a young person seeing their aristocratic father and calling out “Dad!” for instance, when it could only have been “Sir” – and they would never have dared speak first) and a bizarre ignorance of how boats work. The book was published in 1944 (eight years after ‘Gone With…”) and I felt at times there were slightly heavy-handed parallels being drawn between London in the Blitz and the ‘Great Fire’ section. But none of these things stop it being utterly compelling. Since finishing it, I found a short piece by Elaine Showalter about the book, who describes the breathless accounts of Amber’s outfits, which can go on for a page at a time with all the silks, laces and layers, as a kind of rationing-era fashion porn. My mum told she remembered nursing my older brother whilst reading the passage where Amber’s first child is taken away from her, and how that affected her. It reminded me too of the Margaret Lockwood film “The Wicked Lady,” which I saw at the age of 5 or 6 and loved. As a child I loved the central character; watching it again as an adult I found myself wanting to identify instead with every other character around her, and wish her a sticky end herself. I’m not going to tell you what happens at the end of the book, though.

 

Virginia Woolf’s Diary, 9 January 1915

“On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed. We found a market going on at Kingston… we bought a pineapple for 9d…”

 

There is a curious double voice in this passage. On the one hand, Woolf is merely expressing the prevailing attitudes of the day; these people should be put away at the very least, they shouldn’t spoil our days out in the country. Eugenic arguments were almost universal among the left-wing of the day; the compassionate would argue for sterilization; the less compassionate for murder.

 

Reading it a second time however, I can’t help feeling there’s a note of panic in this piece. This is a woman who has already suffered and recovered from two breakdowns; she is horribly afraid that there is something very wrong with herself, and her reaction here is half revulsion at herself, or at what she could become or seem to others, and half a hard-lipped determination to distance herself from these people. With the benefit of hindsight, we know how she finally decided to dispose of her own fate, and that realisation lends a terrifying poignancy to her anger.

 

Climbing the bookcase

  My small daughter wanted to climb the bookshelves this morning. I heard the British politician Shirley Williams on the radio recently talking about doing just this when she was young. Her father had always encouraged her to do as much as she was able, to get as far she could, and when she wanted to climb up the bookcase he didn’t tell her off, but helped her. It’s a nicely symbolic act, and in fact she made it the title of her autobiography (as an aside, it could work even better in Welsh, where the words for ‘ladder’ and ‘school’ are the same). I mention it because my initial reaction to my daughter was to stop her, and only then did I remember this other story. It made me think at once of all the times I’ve seen other girls warned off activities that are really only tomboy-ish and thought it a shame, and I wondered whether I’m doing enough to encourage her. Then again, other times, when I see her standing on a table bellowing out some scatologically-altered nursery-rhyme, I find my thoughts tending in another direction entirely.

William Wordsworth – The Idiot Boy

Wordsworth's long poem of 1798 opens with a poor woman in near-despair at the illness of her elderly neighbour. Unable to leave her, she as a last resort puts her developmentally-delayed (or ‘idiot’ in the unflinching language of the time) son on the saddle of her horse, and sends him off to fetch the doctor. The boy, of course, forgets his errand immediately, if he ever understood it. When he fails to return, she sets out herself to find him; she runs to the town, she searches the woods, fearing the worst. Just as she finally finds the boy and the horse happily wandering the woods in the moonlight, the old woman arrives too, the crisis having given her strength to get up from her sick bed to join the search. In effect, the poem has performed a magical healing through a combination of the mothers’ love, the son, and the symbolic figures of the horse, owls and the moon. Conventional medicine is dismissed in a line, when the doctor refuses to get out of bed – although we wonder how much use he would have been anyway, and of course the mother would have struggled to pay him anything. I don’t think we should underestimate that horse though; its wisdom has been stressed earlier, he is “a horse that thinks” (see lines 108-112 in particular) and he becomes here a kind of spirit guide. Is this Wordsworth as shaman? Perhaps I’m going too far, but he is in general a writer more attuned to the sublime than the supernatural, and it’s an unusual event.

 

What exactly is the boy’s ‘disability’? My friend John suggested cerebral palsy, and then objected that he just says ‘burr burr’ early on, and then suddenly speaks at the end, but he gabbles (at lines 65-6), and he's clearly been given a simple message for the doctor. I don’t think that the boy is paralysed; at line 76, he is motionless "for joy," not because he can’t move. In a way, it could be anything; Downs, palsy; John also points out that phenylketonuria was once a lot more common than now, and was then untreatable. The boy (and here I have to stop myself; the mother is in her late 50s herself, so he is probably actually a young adult, but functions as a child in the society) may well be a composite figure from many the poet had encountered, but I don't think he's a completely unlikely one. In a way – and to most contemporary readers – it would have been immaterial. I think he functions as a kind of ‘holy innocent,’ and it is perhaps precisely his inattention to his task – the fact that he didn’t fetch the unsympathetic doctor – that has worked the cure.

 

Gina Ochsner – the Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight

  Now, although I wouldn’t want you to think that I only ever read books in order to steal ideas for my own, it’s true in a way, and once again, I found this book full of life and ideas and spent half as much time scribbling in my notebook as I read, as I did with my eyes on the page. It’s a big sweeping novel about the absurdity of Russian life, and the combination of lyricism with that absurdity is heartbreakingly sad at times. Although the blackly comic ending brings resolution to some of the characters at least, part of the point of the book (and the constant complaint of the mothers) is that nothing ever really changes in Russia; things just get a little bit worse. The book is centred on a trio who all work in a run-down, small-town museum, faking exhibits; the hard materialistic Zoya, her boyfriend Yuri who is haunted by what he has seen on military service in Chechnya, and the clumsy, poetic Tanya who is the real heroine of the book, as real and breathing a character as I’ve read in a long time. They haven’t been paid for months, but they keep coming in to work, largely because it’s warm and has a toilet, unlike the condemned and (literally) sinking block of flats where they all live. At one point they are huddled together in a café over an application for funding from an American charity, trying to make sense of the phrase ‘positive work ethic.’ “But do such words even belong together?” one asks, in exasperation. Their mothers back at the flats also form a trio; one Orthodox, one Jewish and one Muslim, they are at once at each others’ throats and shamelessly in need of each other. The author manages a very light touch, even when dealing with big issues, and a wistful humour in the midst of a lot of darkness, that I would copy if I had the ability, but as I probably don’t, I will just admire.

Karen Armstrong – The Spiral Staircase

This is Armstrong’s third volume of autobiography, and it attempts to completely undermine her second. Apparently, after the success of her first (“Through the Narrow Gate,” which told the story of her seven years as a Catholic nun, her breakdown, and her leaving the convent) her publishers hurried her into writing a second volume, which, they argued, should come across as bright and breezy as possible; she, being new to publishing, agreed. The result was a book I haven’t read, but that she describes as the worst thing she ever wrote, and now happily long out-of-print.

It is also probable, it seems to me, that it was just too soon after the events to give a mature reflection on things. Thirty years later she can tell a story that takes her through her catastrophic loss of faith, and along a curious arc that finds her now living quietly, by herself, as a writer on comparative religion; not exactly a nun, I suppose, but she has certainly moved some distance back towards the position of being a believer. Perhaps she has simply reinterpreted the formless desires and questions that led her to join the convent in the first place, having gone through the anger and rejection and out the other side. Certainly the biggest surprise of the book is that it is funny: Armstrong left her convent in 1969 and most of this book is about the 1970s – she has sufficient distance to laugh at things she did or said, or at situations that could only have been blackly comic at best at the time. Her long-undiagnosed epilepsy and her brushes with psychiatric institutions could have been profoundly disturbing, but her sense of wonder and delight at many things often seem as pure as a child’s. It’s as though the ‘loss’ of the years 17-24 from her life insulated her in some way… not that the convent was a cocoon: it comes across as a bleak and harsh environment in many ways, but whilst it was teaching her not to feel or think for herself, it saved her the acquisition of cynicism that so many learn in those years. She would probably agree that it shaped the whole of her life, not just part of it.

The most vivid section, for me, was the part where she finds herself a part-time nanny to a delightful but severely autistic child in a barmy bohemian household. It might seem the most alien environment you can imagine after a convent, but you realise that her experience has realigned any idea of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘crazy’; it certainly doesn’t seem any crazier than the rounds of student life and student parties that so baffle her. Maybe she has just a trace of the savant about her herself, and that is her precious pearl of wisdom. I certainly think it’s a positive thing that, though she writes and lectures widely, she is not an academic. She brings to her discussions of Judaism, of Islam, of modernist poetry, both a probing intelligence but also a will to enter into someone else’s world that is both liberating and enlightening.