Today's Top Ten Tuesday is a Valentine's Day freebie, so I thought I'd have a little fun and share with you some of the most unromantic stories I've ever read. Definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND if you're trying to impress your valentine. Some of them should be obvious--and some of them should be obvious. And I have a little more to say on the last one, which is one of my favorite books of all time, and in some ways one of the most romantic books of all time, but also the key to explaining why some books are not as romantic as some may think. Keep reading if you're curious:
Top Ten Books You Shouldn't Read for Valentine's Day
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- Pamela by Samuel Richardson
- My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Carey
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jane Austen on Why Romance Can't Be Trusted
Towards the end of Persuasion, Anne Eliot engages in conversation with her friend, about a mutual friend who plans to remarry a few years after the death of his fiancee. Anne declares that women love more and longer than men, but her male companion cannot agree, claiming that books and history are against her. That's easy, Anne replies, history was written by men and cannot be trusted.
We have the trope of the femme fatale, the perilous woman for whose love the world falls, our Helen of Troys, our Guineveres, women who are faithless to their husbands and hardly more so to their lovers. We have Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura. Courtly love, where the men can never attain their goal. It's not hot. Not in my opinion, and not in Austen's. Men enjoy professing love, she demonstrates, but in the actual absence of their lovers, they move on. It's what they do. Go outside. Go to sea. Join the navy, like Anne's former lover, Captain Wentworth.
It's the 21st century, and many of the books I listed above are written by women, all from earlier centuries. They write about women who were murdered or raped by their husbands and lovers, or who took matters into their own hands, and killed their lovers or themselves first. Jane Eyre isn't murdered or raped by her husband, but her husband's first wife is grossly mistreated if not murdered by him, and if Jane's isn't widely considered a tale of manipulation and grooming, it should be.
What Austen gets at is just because one of the characters thinks you're in a romance, that doesn't make it so. We can't trust Persuasion as a romance because that trust has been broken before. Anne was persuaded to break it off with Wentworth in the past. Captain Benwick broke his undying love for Fanny Harville and married Louisa Musgrove. This is a romance written by a woman and it shows that men break their promises too. So, who can we trust? Not the slippery pedophile Humbert Humbert, not cowardly Winston, and certainly not murderous Rachel or duplicitous Mariam. Innocent angelic Tess, perhaps, but even she will murder where bereaved. Romance isn't just full of liars, it's full of murderers, rapists, and victims. At least in these worlds. At least in these stories. It may all depend on how you tell it, and who's telling the story, but these aren't the ones you should reach for if you're looking to celebrate.
Comments