Making the Past Harder for Women? Mary Balogh's LONGING

Reviewers and discerning readers often criticize heroines in historical romances for acting and thinking in ways far more appropriate to twenty-first-century women than to women of the near or distant past. Coming across a Regency-era miss who spouts gender critiques that echo Ms. Magazine far more than anything Mary Wollstonecraft or her radical contemporaries wrote is a particular pet peeve of mine, and in my Goodreads reviewing, I've often joined the "this character is a historical anachronism" bandwagon.

Maybe that's why I was so surprised when I came across the following passage in the "Historical Note" of Mary Balogh's Longing, a romance novel set in early Victorian Wales, with an English Marquess for a hero and a Welsh miner as heroine:

     I have taken two deliberate liberties with history.
     Some women did attend the Chartist meetings and take out membership in the Chartist Association. For the sake of my plot I have made it seem as if women were forbidden to have anything to do with the movement. (403)

From the Caledonian Mercury, 1842

The second liberty—having the real-life mayor of Newport, who was injured in the failed Chartist demonstration in 1839, appear "hale and hearty," so he might interact with the novel's hero—is a small, inconsequential change, one hardly likely to cause much surprise. But this first liberty—changing history to make it appear that gender roles and rules were more, rather than less, stringent in the past than they actually were—now that is a change worth thinking more about.

Longing opens with the widowed Marquess of Craille, Alexander Hyatt, walking the grounds of the Welsh estate he has recently inherited. During said walk, he stumbles upon a secret meeting of the men who work in the mine and ironworks he's also inherited, a meeting during which national and local political organizers urge the men of Cwmbran to sign the great Charter that was to be presented to Parliament, a list of six basic rights working class reformers demanded the government grant them: the right for every British male to vote; the holding of annual Parliaments; the secret ballot; no property qualification for members of Parliament; the paying of members of Parliament; and that each member of Parliament would represent the same number of voters. The majority of the men are eager to sign, and to join the Chartist Association, too.

Alexander is sympathetic to the Chartist's cause, even if he disagrees with the movement's tactics (strikes, mass meetings, and public protests all too often lead to violence, he feels). But the overseer who has been managing the mines and the works for years tells Alex that the workers are happy, and that Craille, a landowner, not a businessman, doesn't understand how modern industry works. Humble in the way of many a Balogh hero, and wary of his own ignorance, Alex agrees to hold off on making any management changes, even though he is "troubled at his own inability to act from personal conscience as he usually did" (67).

A Chartist Member card, with both a man
and a woman on it

Alex is also troubled by his attraction to the woman he stumbled across also spying on the Chartist meeting, a woman whom he later discovers is a worker in his own mine. Like Alex, Siân Jones has also lost a spouse. And like Alex (and unlike the majority of the other Welsh townspeople), she has had a genteel upbringing, as the illegitimate daughter of a Welsh girl and the owner of another local mine. Because of her mother's shame, Siân has always felt like an outsider in the town, even after marrying a Cwmbran boy. Acknowledging her attraction to the town's lord, even to herself, would hardly improve her chances for greater acceptance from the wary townspeople.

Throughout the novel, Siân is presented as a curious, headstrong, courageous, and principled woman. But while she, like her fellow townspeople, deplores the pitiful wages and the poor working conditions of the miners, Siân herself isn't very interested in the Charter, or the large-scale protest her local suitor, Owen, is working to bring about in neighboring Newport. Even if she were, though, the novel presents the male Chartists as opposed to the involvement of women in their political movement, a ban that Balogh acknowledges is historically false. Why?

Because while on the level of plot, the novel is about class conflict, on the thematic level, it is far more interested in gender conflict. While Owen openly agitates for full male suffrage, he is far less progressive than many of the men in the actual Chartist movement when it comes to the rights of women. Though he loves Siân, and is eager to marry her, he believes wholeheartedly in the right of a husband to "control my own woman" (170). He chastises Siân for being too friendly to their natural opponent, the Marquess, and for encouraging their fellow townspeople to believe Siân is colluding with Craille. And he warns her that after their marriage, "You won't find me so easy to rule" as her first husband did (170). Needless to say, the strong-willed Siân finds Owen's opinions about the role of men and women in marriage more than a little worrisome.

1994's cover

In contrast, the aristocrat Alex has far different views. When Siân asks her employer how he would discipline a wife, he is surprised:

     "A wife?" He frowned. "I was talking about children. Unfortunately we need to discipline children because we have a responsibility to train them and they are never angels. I was not talking about a wife. A wife is a man's equal.
     "But what if she does not tow the line?" she asked.
     "What line?" he said. "Whose line? What if he does not toe it? Marriage is not an easy business. We have both experienced it. We both know that. It is something that has to be worked hard at every single day. If one partner refuses to make the effort, then they have a problem and an unhappy marriage. But violence would not solve anything." (176)

Constructing Alex as forward-thinking and Owen as hidebound when it comes to women's roles and rights would have been far more difficult if women were actively involved in the Chartist movement in Cwmbran. Balogh takes great pains to make Owen a nuanced, even a sympathetic figure, but in the end, it is Alex, not Owen, who proves worthy of Siân's love, because aristocratic Alex has more progressive ideas about gender roles than does working class Owen.

Thus, Siân's major plot conflicts come not from her growing feelings for aristocratic Alex, but from her unwillingness to bow down to the demands of the Chartists that she cease working for the enemy. During the course of the novel, Siân proves her own heroism several times over, making her a heroine well-worth a feminist's admiration. But because of Balogh's reimagining of history, Siân's heroism ends up pitting her against, rather than beside, her fellow workers. So, in many ways, Siân's gender triumph goes hand in hand with her town's class defeat, when the workers' planned march on Newport goes dreadfully awry—a piece of history Balogh does not change.

The 2015 cover

Longing, first published in 1994, was Balogh's "first all-Welsh" book, a book set in the Wales where Balogh was born and spent her childhood (i). I can't help wondering if the gender norms of her post-WWII growing-up years had as much, if not more, to do with Balogh's decision to change the role women were allowed to play in the Chartist movement as did the needs of her plot. And if she realized this when she penned her next Welsh book, 1996's Truly, which turns class, not just gender, on its head.


* (according to Goodreads; Balogh's "Dear Readers" note in the new edition lists 1995 as the original pub date)


Photo credits:
"Meeting of Female Chartists": British Library
Chartist membership card: Tameside Metropolitan Borough

Short Takes: New Books from RNFF Favorites

Today, a few brief shout-outs for new releases from authors whose previous work has been featured in past RNFF columns, all featuring heroines as tough, determined, and whip-smart as any you're likely to find in contemporary romance today.

Emma Barry, Party Lines (The Easy Part #3)

When Michael Picetti, deputy campaign manager for one of the leading Democratic candidates for President, finds himself sitting next to an Economics Today-reading, politically-obsessed Latina on a flight to pre-caucus Iowa, he automatically assumes his seat-mate is a liberal like himself. An assumption that Lydia Reales, Assistant Deputy Campaign Manager for Voter Outreach for Scott Stafford, Republican Presidential candidate, is all too used to hearing, and that she takes deep pleasure in scuttling, much to Michael's chagrin. Yet their almost-meet-cute is not the last; their campaign trail paths keep crossing and throwing them into each other's path, a path each is far too intrigued not to follow.

Neither Michael nor Lydia is an idealist, ready or eager to genuflect at the feet of candidates they know are far from faultless. But each is deeply committed to the central tenets of their respective political parties, as well as to the thrill of the campaign trail ("This job makes me feel like pure, concentrated awesome," Lydia tells Michael (Kindle Loc 576). And both are used to committing themselves 150% to their jobs. But as their antagonistic acquaintanceship merges into no-strings-attached sex, and then to friendship, cynic Michael finds himself unexpectedly wanting more. Can professional and personal desires, never mind political differences, be reconciled? Filled with fascinating details about life on the presidential campaign trail, the frustrations of both racial stereotypes and racial tokenism, and the precarious position one is put it not knowing whether the lack of appreciation one feels is due to sexism, racism, personality conflicts, or a combination of all of the above, Party Lines makes for a fittingly feminist conclusion to Barry's outstanding D.C. insider trilogy, The Easy Part.

Cara McKenna, Give It All (Desert Dogs #2)

On the outside, lawyer and PR manager Duncan Welch presents as cool, controlled, and utterly contemptuous of anyone who lacks his class, looks, and intelligence ("I'm exceedingly difficult to date. I posses a winning combination of impossibly high standards and stunted empathy," he opines with biting wit [969]). But when he's accused of taking bribes during a casino development project in largely working-class Fortuity, Nevada, Duncan's highly-polished surface develop a few telling cracks. Cracks that popping extra Klonopins, downing more vodka and tonics, or engaging in some obsessive-compulsive cleaning doesn't seem to fix. Cracks that never-get-attached bar-owner Raina Harper is all too interested in breaking wide-open.

The combination of English-born Duncan, an orphan who has never experienced love, and Raina, a half-Latina heroine who feels "my heart's spent," "most of the things a woman feels for a man" having been "used up" by her care for her recently deceased father, make for an unusual, dynamic romantic pairing (989). As does Raina's gender-bending admission, one accepted rather than demonized by the narrative, that "I don't like feeling like I'm being take care of by anybody... I'd much rather be needed than do the needing" (981-84). Care to guess who ends up doing the rescuing at the story's climax?

Courtney Milan, Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

Milan proves herself as adept at contemporary romance as she is at historical in this deeply intelligent story of a relationship between two people from vastly different social classes. The titular "trade" results from immigrant Tina Chen losing her cool when, during a discussion of food stamps in class,  fellow college classmate billionaire tech genius Blake Reynolds makes a thoughtless comment ("No matter what we do, we always have a permanent underclass. The only question we have is how we treat them, and what that says about us" [p. 10]). Tina knows that that "we" sweeps people like her and her family conveniently out of sight, and that Blake, and most of her fellow classmates, have no idea what it means to live outside the bounds of middle class comfort. "Try trading lives with me. You couldn't manage it, not for two weeks," Tina challenges. To her utter surprise, Blake takes her up on the challenge, and offers her his lifestyle—money, car, apartment, job—if she'll pretend to be his girlfriend for the next few weeks. 

What makes the story intriguing is that Blake's acceptance of Tina's challenge stems not from a manly desire to prove himself, but from his desire to run away from his own fears, fears that are gradually revealed over the course of the story. And tough-as-nails Tina has more than a few fears of her own, fears that have, ironically, kept her safe in a world filled with uncertainty of the financial and emotional types. And nothing about falling for a billion-point-four-aire genius with a brash, overbearing father and a boatload of psychological baggage says "safe" to Tina. Even if said genius proves to be far more than the stereotypes of a "winner of the nepotism lottery" might suggest. I especially loved the way that Milan presents each protagonist's difficult parent, a parent who in another author's hands would have clearly been labeled "villain," as rounded, intelligible, and above all sympathetic, complementing the book's larger themes of looking beyond the surfaces and understanding and confronting one's fears.

Thinking Outside the Oppresor's Box: Courtney Milan's THE HEIRESS EFFECT

As a young adolescent, I spent most of my afternoons either reading (largely romance fiction) or watching soap operas. Plots of both genres often rely on the either/or dilemma for their emotional charge: Pretend to be my lover, oh sweet young girl, says the evil villain, or I'll tell your true love that you once worked as a hooker (to support your dying mother, of course, but I won't let that relevant detail slip). Break up with your girlfriend, the conniving villainess orders our rough-around-the-edges-but-truehearted hero, or I'll play on your younger brother's penchant for gambling to ruin your family's finances. One category romance from this period (late 70's/early 80s) that still sticks in my mind featured an overbearing brother informing the heroine she would have to pretend to be his fiancée, or he'd reveal to his sister that the heroine had been dating said sister's fiancé while the poor girl had been recuperating from illness in the hospital (no matter that she'd had no idea the smarmy fiancé was engaged, and was trying to break up with him anyway)*. Soap opera protagonists, just like many heroes and heroines of romance, are put in a powerless position, faced with the untenable either/or formulated to keep true lovers apart (and keep viewers, and readers, on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how they'll ever get back together).

Courtney Milan presents the male lead of her most recent Victorian historical with just such an appalling either/or. Oliver Marshall, the bastard son of a duke, has fought most of his life to make a place for himself in the world of the privileged. As a schoolboy, he often fought back against those with more power, those who teased him for his working-class roots and his lack of knowledge about acceptable behavior among England's elite. But years of fighting can wear even the best man down; as an adult, Oliver has learned to be more politic, biting his tongue and currying favor, biding his time until he earns his own share of power and can make the men who abused their power, and forced him to grovel, grovel in their own turn.

From Punch, August 1867. Passage of the Reform Bill, extending
the franchise = "A Leap in the Dark."

Oliver's most fervent wish—to extend the vote to the working class, in particular to his beloved father (not the duke, but the man who raised him)—seems on the cusp of achievement, if only he can persuade former schoolfellow and political powerhouse the Marquess of Bradenton to switch his vote, and the votes of the men who typically side with him in Parliament. But Bradenton is wary about ceding his vote, not only because he believes that every man has his rightful place in society, but because he isn't sure Oliver shares this view. In order to convince himself that his potential ally is "going to be part of the proper order.... That he'll know his place, and expect everyone to be in theirs," (34) Bradenton demands something in return: Oliver's willingness to publicly humiliate a woman who keeps stepping outside her designated social place.

Heiress Jane Fairfield has cut a wide swath through Cambridge society, but hardly one that any other young lady would envy. Clothes dripping with ostentation designed to signal her abundant wealth, tongue wagging with entirely unintentional insults ("She asked Whitting about his studies, and when he made a wry comment about preferring to concentrate his efforts on the study of liquids, she stared at him. 'How surprising,' Her eyes were very round. 'I had not thought you to have the capacity of intellect to read physics!'" [17]), Jane has come to be known as the "Feather Heiress," for "being around her is like being beaten to death with a feather" (11). Her unintentional snubs have more than rubbed Lord Bradenton the wrong way; they've so offended him that he wants her gone, banished from Cambridge society, no longer the sharp pebble in his oh-so-proper shoe. Too lofty to undertake his own dirty work, Bradenton tasks Oliver with the job, holding out the carrot of his Parliamentary vote as recompense.

Not half as garish as Jane Fairfield's "fuchsine" dress

What makes Milan's novel so very interesting is that even while Oliver protests, insisting not only to Bradenton and his colleagues, but also to himself, that he'd never accept the Marquess's offer, inside he's not entirely certain:

     "And as for you, Marshall..." Bradenton looked at Oliver. "Take the time you need to salve your conscience. To tell yourself whatever it is you need to make this palatable. You'll be doing her a favor, you know."

     No, Oliver thought. Not a favor. And I'm not doing it.

     But that sick pit in his stomach felt differently.

     Yes, it whispered. Yes, you are.  (35)

Oliver's dilemma grows even worse when he comes to realize that Jane Fairfield is not the simpleton she pretends to be. Her feather-wielding is a deliberate disguise, one devised in order to scare away suitors for vital reasons of her own. But even as he works to befriend the friendless heiress, Oliver is honest enough to realize that he'd be doing the same, whether he intends ultimately to betray her or not. He's committed smaller betrayals in the past; can he rely on his common decency to keep his ambition from pushing him to make one last betrayal, no matter how inexcusable?

This is the point in the soap opera, or the traditional romance novel, when the protagonist would be forced to make the choice: refuse to give in to the evil villain, and watch those you love come to hate you; sacrifice yourself and your principles, and watch your own dreams fall apart at your feet.

But neither Jane Fairfield, nor Courtney Milan, believe in the inevitability of the either/or. In fact, this novel suggests, when we accede to the either/or terms that oppressors set, we help contribute to our own oppression. Jane urges Oliver, and through him, readers, to look beyond the choices those in power would force upon him, to imagine a third way, a path that simultaneously allows him to keep his self-respect and achieve his goals. And each of the story's sub-plots, most focusing on patriarchal men thinking they have not only the responsibility, but the right, to make decisions on behalf of younger women, echo this theme. Rarely is all power held in one villain's hands; look beyond the lies that keep your fellow oppressed at odds, find allies, and work together to devise a different solution to the problem, and you'll go a long way toward knocking down not only class privilege, but gender and racial privilege as well.

* If anyone knows the title of this one (a Harlequin Presents? Or a Silhouette?), I'd love to find it again!

Illustration credits:

"A Leap in the Dark": Punch cartoon, from the syllabus web site of "Mid-Victorian Britain in History and Art," Prof. Meg Cronin and Hugh Dubrulle

Fuchsine dress: Fashion Era.com

Courtney Milan, The Heiress Effect.

Self-published. 2013

The Challenges of Cross-Class Romance

In romance, the most common version of the cross-class love story is the familiar trope of Cinderella. Forced into a life of servitude by a cruel step-mother, the folktale Cinderella (with a little help from her fairy godmother) rises from the ashes of her degradation to marry into the glittering world of the royalty. Yet in most versions of the folktale, Cinderella's class background is not all that different from the prince's; before her mother's death and her father's remarriage, Cinderella lived not a life of poverty or labor, but of gentility. Cinderella's rise, then, is not really much of a crossing of class at all, but rather a restoration of a class status unfairly wrested from her.

Pretty Woman's Edward comes a-wooing
via fire escape

Many re-envisionings of the Cinderella trope in modern romance dress, ones which feature lovers from truly different class backgrounds (Pretty Woman, for example) conclude with a declaration of love or a wedding, suggesting that once the cross-class lovers acknowledge their feelings, an ending as happy as Cinderella's will inevitably follow. But as two recent blog posts on the blog of Class Action, a national nonprofit group committed to exploring social class and class privilege and bias, demonstrate, tensions in a real-life marriage between people who grew up in different social classes can often stem not just from differing personalities, but also from class-based assumptions about the way the world should and does work.

In "When Love Crosses Class Lines," Jessi Streib, a sociology professor at Duke University, writes about her research into the marriages of college-educated couples, in which one partner of the couple was raised in the middle class, the other raised in the working class. Though the 32 couples she interviewed rarely mentioned class as a cause of any of the challenges they had experienced in their relationships, Streib found evidence that the disagreements couples had could often be traced to class differences, rather than simply chalked up to individual partners' characters or personalties. "Partners from different class backgrounds typically had different ideas about how they wanted to go about their daily lives, and so marriages between people who grew up in different classes required navigating these differences," Streib argues. Partners raised in working-class families tended to take a more laissez-faire attitude toward life, wanting to live in the present, assuming the future would take care of itself. In contrast, those raised in middle-class families felt more comfortable planning for the future, and organizing the flow of daily life—what Streib terms the "managerial approach." Streib found these different attitudes affected seven separate aspects of married life: finances, paid work, leisure, housework, time, parenting, and emotions—all areas in which married couples must make decisions on a daily basis.

One of the few working-class families seen on TV: cast of Roseanne

Streib's findings are echoed in the experience of counseling psychologist Barbara Jensen, who specializes in working with cross-class couples. In her Class Action blog, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Jensen illustrates how differing cultural assumptions lead to tension in one particular marriage. Carla, raised in a working-class family, finds husband Steve, who hails from a middle-class family, overly cold to her family. For his part, Steve doesn't understand why they have to spend so much time with Carla's relatives; aren't they grown-ups now? Steve doesn't understand why Carla shares her emotions and secrets with his boss's wife; Carla doesn't understand why they need to spend social time with his boss. Both Carla and Steve bring with them the social expectations of their class: for Steve, emotional boundaries signal respect for others, excessive emotional sharing signal rudeness, while to Carla, emotional boundaries signal coldness, reserve. For Carla, social time means spending time with equals, with friends, not with people who hold power over you; for Steve, cultivating those higher up in the power structure is an expected part of life.

Romance novels often feature cross-class couples. But rarely do the conflicts the couples experience stem from the different social expectations each member of the couple brings to the relationship. Or if they do, typically one member of the couple must give up what are portrayed as "immature" behaviors and assumptions in order to become worthy of the other partner's love. For example, in Sarah Mayberry's Harlequin Superromance Suddenly You, working-class hero Harry must give over his carefree life of living in the moment, choosing instead to take responsibility for his father's business, before middle-class heroine Pippa will accept that he's not going to leave her in the emotional and financial lurch as his best friend Steve did. Much ink has been spilled suggesting that romance fiction indoctrinates readers into patriarchal values, but little has been written about its ideologies of class. After reading Mayberry's book, I began to wonder—does romance also work to instill middle class assumptions and values in working-class readers?

As both Streib and Jensen point out, negotiating cultural differences stemming from class differences need not be an either/or. The couples with whom Streib spoke "usually reported being happy together. Class infused their marriages, but it did not extinguish them." Jensen notes that a class-conscious counselor will not simply urge Carla to adopt Steve's middle-class values, but to help both partners to understand that their differences stem not just from personal preference, but from the class-based assumptions each learned from their families of origin, and to "listen with compassion to each other's needs, dreams, and fears"—no matter whether said needs, dreams, or fears stemmed from middle-class, or working-class, values.

What romance novels can you think of that truly grapple with class difference? Do any of them feature couples, like Jensen's Carla and Steve, "learning roles and rules from both of their parents' families" and sharing "their favorite aspects of either culture" rather than one set of class assumptions ruling over the other?