Wanting what you're not supposed to want: Cecilia Grant's A LADY ENTANGLED

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.


Between high school, college, graduate school, and miscellaneous other intellectual venues, I've listened to more than my fair share of lectures on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The one I remember the most, in an undergraduate Victorian novel class for which I was serving as a Teaching Assistant, began with the professor reading aloud the above opening line of Austen's novel. Rather than pose the expected question—what does this line say—he asked the fifty undergraduates to consider what it didn't say. What is Austen deliberately leaving out, even as she calls our attention to it by its absence? The answer—that a single gentlewoman, at least in Jane Austen's day, must be in want of a husband in possession of a good fortune. Or at least a fortune sizable enough to support her in the manner to which she has been brought up.

Mrs. Bennet in raptures...

Austen's female characters openly gossip about potential suitors' yearly income ("Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted") in a way rarely found in novels published during the Victorian period. Yet, like those later novels, Austen's romance simultaneously suggests that thinking too much about "worldly advantage," as does Charlotte Lucas, is to "disgrace" oneself to a humiliating degree. Women must care about how much their potential suitors earn, Austen indirectly suggests, but, just as she does in her opening line, they must do so only without openly acknowledging that this is what they are doing. Actively work to secure your financial future through marriage, and, like Charlotte, you're punished, wedded to a Mr. Collins. But scorn a man in spite of his fortune, and you're rewarded with the fortune anyway. This paradox—only when a woman rejects material gain does she prove herself worthy of it—serves as the central organizing structure not only of many a 19th century novel, but also in much 20th (and 21st) century historical romance, in the trope of the romance heroine choosing to throw over a wealthy fiancé in favor of the poorer man she has truly come to love. Rewarding women for denying desire—not the most feminist of messages.

So my heart sank just a bit when I turned to the latest offering from Cecilia Grant and discovered that its female protagonist, Kate Westbrook, intends to hunt down and snare a man of fortune, one who can open "the door to that glittering world of champagne and consequence—the world that ought to have been her birthright." Though her father is the son of an earl, he married not only a commoner, but an actress, an alliance which his family refused to acknowledge. Kate may have other, more altruistic reasons for wishing to slip through that aristocratic door—to "haul her family back into respectability," to save her sensitive youngest sister from constant teasing at school, to reunite her father with a brother for whom he obviously cares deeply—but Kate also wants, wants the beauty and the luxuries, the "courtesy, consideration, and etiquette" lacking in her current life as the daughter of a gainfully-employed barrister.

Of course, there's a young barrister just waiting in the wings, who once thought of winning her hand but who big-heartedly takes an interest in her assault on the ton, and offers his help in her mercenary endeavor (the brother of Martha and Will, the Blackshear siblings featured in Grant's previous two books). And, by the way, Kate's amazingly beautiful, and she knows it, too: "stupefaction was her stock-in-trade, and she would not stoop to the tedious false modesty of pretending not to know it." For readers conditioned by romance tropes with two hundred years of history behind them, Kate is a heroine made to hate on-sight. It seemed, disappointingly, I was in for a story of a "bad" girl's reformation, a schooling of a young woman in how not to want.

But Grant's first two novels (A Lady Awakened and A Gentleman Undone) openly rejected many of the traditional romance novel tropes, so I kept reading, counting on her to do something with this very traditional storyline other than make Kate give up her material dreams in order to achieve her romantic ones. And while the romantic outcome of the novel is never in doubt (the novel is told in alternating hero/heroine points of view), the reasons why Kate chooses her impassioned barrister rather than the newly-ennobled Baron are far from the expected. Kate discovers what to most women during the period must have been obvious, but that many romance writers seem to have forgotten—that not only marriage, but female friendship, can help advance a woman's standing in society. That helping another realize her own romantic prospects is almost as gratifying as realizing one's own. That marrying into a life of consequence and ease might just be "dreary beyond imagining. What did you do all day, once you'd married Mr. Darcy?" That the challenges and industry required to strive for a goal such as marrying well might be at least as much of a pleasure as achieving the goal itself. Though it might take a bit longer than she had first imagined, Kate doesn't have to give up her material desires altogether; she just has to have the patience, and the drive, to achieve them by working with a husband, rather than accepting a hand-out from a husband.

In a blog post back in March, Cecilia Grant questioned whether there is such a thing as feminist romance. Romance certainly does privilege relationship over all other aspects of a person's life, which may disqualify the genre as a whole from being inherently feminist. But I would argue that there are many books within the genre that certainly align with feminist sensibilities. Especially those written by Cecilia Grant.


ARC courtesy of Netgalley

Photo credits:
Mrs. Bennet: Fanpop
Marrying for Money: CollegeTimes TV

Cecilia Grant, A Woman Entangled. 

Bantam, 2013.

Next time on RNFF:

Sexism in the SF community

Romancing the $s and £s

To date, I've not reviewed any category romances on RNFF, having made the assumption that the most mass-produced of titles in a decidedly mass-market genre would hardly be likely to hold feminism in high regard. Literary scholar Laura Vivanco, however, suggests that such an out-of-hand dismissal on my part may be premature. In her article "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances,"* Vivanco reports on the results of her reading of 120 category romances published between 2000 and mid-2007. Sixty of Vivanco's books came from Harlequin/Mills & Boon's "Modern"/"Presents" line, sixty from the "Romance"/"Tender" line.

Heroine Natalie is "no women's libber"

Though she discovered a "small number" of books which "appeared to be antifeminist in that they either explicitly critiqued moves towards equality or they end with the hero exerting significant control over the heroine in some way," and an unspecified number in which "little evidence of either a positive or negative engagement with feminism" appeared, 26 of her 120 books either "explicitly express positive attitudes towards feminists and feminism" or directly engage with feminist issues or ideas (1062, 1063). If we extrapolate from Vivanco's sample, her findings suggest that a little over 20 percent of Harlequin/Mills & Boon category romances portray feminism in a positive light. A distressingly low percentage in our purportedly "post-feminist" age, yet a percentage greater than conventional wisdom has previously assumed.

Just how deeply do these romances embrace feminism? I sometimes find myself frustrated after picking up a children's or YA book that a reviewer or expert has touted as featuring positive female role models, only to discover after reading that its feminism is no more than surface-deep, or that my definition of feminism seems quite different from that of the recommender. Often I find such books explicitly declare their alliance with feminist principles but then proceed to undermine said principles on the level of implicit, rather than explicit, ideology. I'm eager to take a look at some of the books Vivanco discusses, to see whether they are wholehearted in their embrace of feminism, or whether they present conflicting attitudes toward feminism. (I know that Laura Vivanco is a frequent reader of RNFF, and hope she will chime in here on this issue).

Until I can round up and read a few of these books, though, I thought I'd share another issue Vivanco's article raised for me: the issue of women's relationship to money. Vivanco notes that many of the heroines in the Modern line "struggle not to be seen as 'gold-diggers,'" a struggle she suggests "may be read as attempting to redefine the institution of marriage so that it is no longer a sexual/financial transaction but a relationship built around emotional trust and intimacy" (1070). This struck me as an surprising argument, as I'm guessing few unmarried young people today regard marriage as a financial transaction at all, never mind feel a need to "redefine" it as something distinct from financial matters. Why then should "emotional trust and intimacy" be placed in opposition to money?

The quotes Vivanco includes to support her argument, and the language in which she couches them, made me wonder if these books weren't just attempting to redefine marriage as no longer a financial transaction, but also, simultaneously, setting up a binary opposition between money and love. In this binary, love in placed in the superior position, money in the inferior, the opposite message most Western men are socialized to believe. Such a binary construction unconsciously suggests to women that money is not, and should not, be important, at least not to them.

Vivanco argues that in order for Stasia, the heroine of Sarah Morgan's Public Wife, Private Mistress,"to prove her point that marriage is not an exchange of sex for financial security, when she left him [her husband]," Stasia says:

 "I left everything because there was nothing I needed." She met his gaze full on, the message clear in her eyes. I was never interested in your money and I can't believe you don't know that. (1070)

Vivanco later suggests that Stasia

thinks of her work as something which benefits others and gives her more than merely financial rewards: "Life isn't always about money.... There are other things that matter, like independence and self-belief. I like my work. I need to know that I'm good at something. Making a contribution that matters." (1072)

While a belief that money is the end-all and be-all of life is one most feminists would find troubling, the completely opposite view—that money is "merely" a "reward" given for acting in ways that "benefit others," rather than something women earn so they can support themselves —seems equally problematic. Life isn't always about money, but it is often about money, especially life in a marriage. As myriad studies, including this 2012 study from  the  American Institute of CPAs,  have shown, the most common reason married or co-habitating couples fight is over finances. If romances function to persuade women that money should not be of much concern to them, then how will they be able to function as equal partners in a relationship in which many, many decisions about money occur?

The lines from Morgan's novel made me begin to wonder—have I ever read a romance, either category or single-title, in which a woman is proud of the money she earns? In which earning money through work is seen as a positive, empowering act for a heroine? A romance in which a heroine earns more than her potential love interest? A romance in which a woman does not want to give up her job after finding her true love, not because giving it up with be a sacrifice of personal fulfillment, but because earning her own money makes it easier for her to feel like an equal partner in a relationship with a fellow wage-earner?

I could not think of a single one. Am I just being forgetful? Or do some come to your mind?




* Vivanco, Laura. "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances." The Journal of Popular Culture 45.5 (2012): 1060-1089.


Photo/Illustration credits:
Women Minimum wage: Center for American Progress

Next time on RNFF:

BDSM & feminist romance