Romancing Jewishness: Rose Lerner's TRUE PRETENTIONS

It's pretty rare to find depictions of Jewishness in romance fiction. It's even more rare to find them in English-set historical romance. If an author wants to write a Jewish character, s/he has to content with the weighty history of past depictions of Jewishness in English literature, a history which features two quite different stereotypes. The first, epitomized by the famous figures of Shylock, Fagin, and Svengali, is of the evil Jew, the demon Other—the moneylender, the thief, the stealer and manipulator of (good Christian) children. Not quite as damaging, but equally limiting, are portraits of the Jew as cardboard saint, sometimes created by Jewish writers themselves, sometimes by Christian writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Charles Dickens who had been upbraided by Jews for anti-semitic portrayals in their previous work. Neither stereotype is likely to have much appeal to the modern romance reader. Far easier to not mention a character's cultural or religious background at all than to have to fight to overcome such a heavy burden of negative stereotypes.

The Artful Dodger introduces Oliver to Fagin

To open a Regency romance, then, and discover that your book's protagonist is named Ash Cohen, is more than a bit of a surprise. To find yourself introduced to Ash while he is in the midst of fleeing from the latest flat he and his younger brother have just swindled is nearly a shock. But Rose Lerner, the author of True Pretensions, is not simply falling into lazy stereotypes in her creation of Asher and his brother Rafe (Raphael); instead, she is confronting such stereotypes head-on.

Ash is hardly the Jew with a halo of gold. Ash uses his very friendliness to persuade others to trust him, trust him enough to hand over their money for plans he has no intention of fulfilling. While he never swindles more from a flat than the flat can afford to lose, he hardly loses much sleep over the money he takes; having grown up in London's slums scraping out a living to support himself and his brother by thieving, bodysnatching, and occasionally selling his own body, Ash figures the comfortably well-off still have more than enough to get by on, even after an encounter with the Cohens. "What's so bad about being selfish, anyway? Everybody's selfish.... Selfishness is as natural as breathing. Unlike you, I don't blame people for how they're made. Next you'll be talking about original sin like a goy," he tells his brother when Rafe protests (Kindle Loc 1180). Behind every romance bad boy is a past that made him the way he is; behind the Jewish stereotype, Lerner suggests, is a history of abuse and oppression the stereotype is meant to hide.

Molly Picon as Fiddler on the Roof's matchmaker, Yente

But if Ash is selfish, he's practically selfless when it comes to his younger brother. So when, at novel's start, Rafe decides that he's tired of the swindling life, Ash comes up with a plan for one final con, a swindle that will ensure his brother the life he never had: he will find a wealthy woman and play matchmaker (shades of Fiddler on the Roof), using his charm and skill to convince her to fall for his handsome, kindly brother.

That Ash's mark is the epitome of upright, conservative Englishness makes the irony all the sweeter when Ash finds himself falling for Tory political patroness Lydia Reeve himself. Lydia, whose father has recently died, has been unable to persuade her younger brother to support the political causes which she and her father held so dear to her heart. Such support takes not only a willing heart and hands, but substantial amounts of money: money to purchase new coats for the children in the workhouse; money to pay for an apprenticeship for the child of an ally; money to support schools, and hospitals, and the pet projects of all those who supported the Tories in the last election. Lydia has an inheritance, yes, but she can only get access to it if she marries. Rafe would seem like the perfect solution—if only Lydia didn't find herself drawn to his less handsome, but far more compelling, older brother...

Ash believes it better to keep his cultural heritage a secret: "When I have a drink with a man in a pub, and he doesn't know I'm Jewish... what's the difference between a Jew and a Gentile, really? It makes no difference, but I believe it would to him, so I don't mention it, and we can go on drinking together," he tells Lydia after Rafe lets their secret out of the bag. But deep inside, Ash knows keeping the secret isn't just a question of "practicality. But somehow he was ashamed to explain how it would hurt, to see himself turn from a fellow soul to a dirty Jew" (Loc 3935). Keeping a pane of glass between himself and those hurtful emotions allows him to go through life liking everyone he meets. But does it also stand in the way of forming deeper connections than just liking?

How does cultural identity, and our relation to it, influence our relationships? How do larger cultural stereotypes? Does it matter it we pretend to be one thing to the world, while truly we are another? If we pretend even with our most intimate relations? When does pretense become the truth? Weighty questions for a historical romance, no doubt. But when asked by a writer as skilled as Rose Lerner, their consideration proves just as much of a pleasure as the slow-build romance between two people who have far more in common than their cultural identities would ever suggest.


Illustration/Photo credits:
Fagin: Wikimedia Commons
Molly Picon as Yente: Molly Picon gallery

Rose Lerner, True Pretenses

Samhain, 2015

Feminist Moments in Georgette Heyer's VENETIA

This past weekend, I attended the New England Chapter of the Romance Writers of America's annual conference. Meeting fellow writers, attending workshops about craft, and collecting money and paying bills (I'm the NEC Treasurer) proved both intellectually invigorating and physically exhausting. When I landed back home on Sunday afternoon, all this introvert wanted to do was to grab a tall glass of water and curl up in bed with a familiar favorite book. My choice: a Regency romance by the founder of the genre, Georgette Heyer.

The heroines of Heyer's romances tend to fall into one of two categories. In many of her earlier books, the heroines are young and silly; as readers, we're invited to laugh at them as their combination of high spirits and woeful ignorance of the world leads them into one scrape after another. In contrast, her later books tend to feature older, more intelligent heroines; rather than laughing at them, we laugh with them as they match wits with equally intelligent heroes. Needless to say, the majority of my favorite Heyer books fall in the latter category, including yesterday's comfort read: the 1958 novel Venetia.

Though only twenty-five years old, Venetia Lanyon has all the earmarks of the older, wiser Heyer heroine. The oldest of her three siblings, she's long served as lady of the manor in the absence of her mother, who died when she was ten. And since the death of her father three years earlier, she's been in charge of managing the Lanyon estate for brother/soldier Conway, who has been taking his own sweet time returning from the continent after the final defeat of Napoleon. Though naturally of an equanimous temperament, Venetia has a playful wit and habit of saying what she thinks, refusing to indulge in the white lies other women of her class deploy to hide the gaps between social ideals and prosaic realities. For example, she scandalizes her more conventional neighbor Lady Denny by asserting of her departed but not sorely missed papa: "In fact... we go on very much better without him." Financially independent, Venetia plans to set up her own establishment if and when Conway should return with a wife, unwilling to cede her authority within the home to another, only to fade slowly into the background as maiden aunt to a passel of Conway's children. But in the meantime, she takes pleasure in  making decisions about the estate, looking after self-absorbed but intelligent Aubrey, and politely but determinedly fending off two equally unsuitable neighborhood beaux, nineteen-year-old Byronic wannabe Oswald Denny, and authoritarian "worthy" Edward Yardley.

The relationship that develops between Venetia and newly arrived neighborhood pariah Lord Damerel, a reputed rake of the first order, is striking not for the sexual sparks that fly, but the "enjoyment of the absurd" both share. "I have always wished for a friend to laugh with," Venetia tells Damerel the second time they meet. "To share a sense of the ridiculous prohibits dislike—yes, that's true. And rare! My God, how rare!" Damerel acknowledges (65). Venetia may be beautiful, but it is her wit, and the sense that they share a "tug of sympathy between them," that keeps Damerel lingering in the neighborhood far longer than he'd planned. And it is the friendship that develops between them, a friendship not blind to his faults, that allows Venetia to develop a mature love for Damerel. "You have fallen in love for the first time in your life, Venetia, and in your eyes Damerel is some sort of hero out of a fairy-tale!" Uncle Hendred accuses (367). Venetia simply laughs, as does the reader, for far earlier in their relationship, Venetia has shown she has Damerel's number: "I allow you all the vices you choose to claim—indeed, I know you for a gamester, and a shocking rake, and a man of sadly unsteady character—but I'm not so green that I don't recognise in you one virtue at least, and one quality." When Damerel exclaims "What is that all? How disappointing? What are they?" Venetia demonstrates her ability to see beyond black and white, beyond the flat fairy-tale villain: "A well-informed mind, and a great deal of kindness"(104).

Damerel, like many a rake whose abandoned ways serve mainly as a cover for a wounded heart, sacrifices himself at the urging of Venetia's friends and uncle, pretending that the love he feels for her is only a passing fancy. Distraught, Venetia agrees to accompany her uncle to London, to put much-needed distance between herself and Damerel. But when she discovers Damerel's lie from her loquacious, indiscreet aunt, she actively works to ensure that it is she, not her brothers nor her uncle nor even her potential lover who decides what is best for her. It is not passive self-sacrifice, but cunning, wit, and above all, humor, that win the day.

Reading Venetia this time through, I was struck by a thread that many might point to as distinctly anti-feminist, and certainly against the conventions of the romance novel. Early in their relationship, Venetia worries not that Damerel has had many loves before her, but that "perhaps he had many friends, too, with minds more closely attuned to his than she believed her own to be" (69). Friends are more of a threat than loves, she believes, because "Men—witness all the histories!—were subject to sudden lusts and violences, affairs that seemed strangely divorced from heart or head, and often more strangely still from what were surely their true characters. For them chastity was not a prime virtue" (69). Venetia then remembers that even kindly Sir John Denny had not always been faithful to his lady, and then recalls Lady Denny's words on the occasion:

"Men, my love, are different from us... even the best of them! I tell you this because I hold it to be very wrong to rear girls in the belief that the face men show to the females they respect is their only one.... One ought rather to be thankful that any affairs they may have amongst what they call the muslin company don't change their true affection in the least. Indeed, I fancy affection plays no part in such adventures. So odd!—for we, you know, could scarcely indulge in them with no more effect on our lives than if we had been choosing a new hat. But so it is with men! Which is why it has been most truly said that while your husband continues to show you tenderness you hav no cause for complaint, and would be a zany to fall into despair only because of what to him was a mere peccadillo. 'Never seek to pry into what does not concern you, but rather look in the opposite direction!' was what my dear mother told me, and very good advice I have found it."  (69-70)

The narrative piles layer upon layer of conventional wisdom here—from "histories," to Lady Denny, to unnamed conventional wisdom, to Lady Denny's mother—to support the idea that men are by nature more sexual creatures than are women, and thus expecting chastity from them would not only be unwise, but unnatural. On the one hand, this abundance of expert wisdom adds authority to an assertion with which contemporary readers are likely to take issue, particularly given romance novels' insistence on the "one true love" faithful for all eternity model. But on the other, the extreme lengths to which it must be supported can be read as a shoring up of a belief that is questionable at best. And it simultaneously works to distance the belief from Venetia herself; it is not Venetia, but history, Lady Denny, Lady Denny's mother, who asserts this belief as truth. For women like Lady Denny must believe such things in order for their husband's behavior not to "blight her marriage" (69).

But does Venetia share this belief? Toward the end of the novel, an unexpected voice from Venetia's past, one who's very identity calls into question the same assertion held up as absolute truth earlier in the story, puts the question to her bluntly: "You and Damerel!... Do you imagine he would be faithful to you?" Venetia's reply is bluntly honest, a touch wistful, perhaps, but above all, imbued with trust in Damerel's feelings for her: "I don't know. I think he will always love me. You see, we are such dear friends" (330). For Venetia, it would seem, love and friendship matter more in a husband than a promise of sexual fidelity.

But she is well aware that if she does not find a way back to Yorkshire, Damerel's rakish habits are all too likely to lead him to solace his loss in arms of other women, something she obviously wishes to prevent. And Venetia isn't one to just "look in the opposite direction," as Lady Denny and her mother advise. Her uncle's euphemistic warnings during the novel's climactic scene—"Damerel may have the intention of reforming his way of  life, but habits of long standing—the trend of a man's character—are not so easily altered!"—allow Venetia, through irony and humor, to bring out into the open the issue

Lady Denny would rather ignore:

"You mean to warn me that he may continue to have mistresses, and orgies, and—and so-on, don't you, sir?"
     "Particularly so-on!" interpolated Damerel.
     "Well, how should I know all the shocking things you do? The thing is, uncle, that I don't think I ever should know."
     "You'd know about my orgies!" objected Damerel.
     "Yes, but I shouldn't care about them, once in a while. After all, it would be quite unreasonable to wish you to change all your habits, and I can always retire to bed, can't I?"
     "Oh, won't you preside over them?" he said, much disappointed.
     "Yes, love, if you wish me to," she replied, smiling at him. "Should I enjoy them?"
     He stretched out his hand, and when she laid her own on it, held it very tightly. "You shall have a splendid orgy, my dear delight, and you will enjoy it very much indeed!" (367-68).

Haranguing Damerel over his immoral behavior, or extracting from him a promise to be faithful, are not the methods Venetia chooses to let Damerel know her feelings on the issue of marital fidelity. Instead, she teases him, laughs at him, shows him the absurdity of engaging in such behavior when a friend who has "retired to bed" awaits. That Damerel immediately takes up her joke and builds upon it demonstrates the effectiveness of speaking openly, and of expecting the same honesty from one's spouse. Rather than taking pleasure in the respectable face a spouse shows to genteel women, and ignoring the other roles a husband shows to the world, Venetia expects her future husband to show her all his faces, and to show him hers in return.


Which Heyer novels do you think contain the most feminist moments?

Georgette Heyer, Venetia.

1958.

Reprinted by Sourcebooks.

Next time on RNFF

Wicked Women in Romance