C-
Title: Purity's Passion
Author: Janette Seymour
Publication Info: Pocket 1977
ISBN: 978-0671810368
Genre: Historical: European
Well. That was…unpleasant.
I’m done with the 1970s-early 1980s OG Old School. That was one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I’ve ever had, and I read The Phantom of Manhattan. I finished it because I was kind of interested in where this story would end (and how much shit can be heaped upon the head of the heroine), and I have a finely developed case of trainwreck syndrome. (Also, my copy didn’t stink, so that helped.)
I’m having a really hard time coming up with a Letter Grade, because I’ve read worse, and I’ve read better. I had a more entertaining time reading Passion’s Bold Fire than this, but Purity’s Passion wasn’t badly written, not by a long shot. I just hated reading it. But it doesn’t deserve an F. I’m going to call it a qualified C-.
The heroine is Purity, whose beauty and fine young body drive men wild. She is born in France on the eve of the French revolution, the daughter of the bailiff on the estate of the Marquis de Fayelle. When she is about 8 or so, the French Revolution shows up on the doorstep and kills almost everyone in the chateau. Purity witnesses all of it.
And it’s pretty clear what kind of a book this is when a woman begs for the life of her lover, and in exchange, goes to the bed of the riot leader, and finds herself orgasmically enjoying the rape.
It’s pretty awful.
So Purity is rescued from a life of poverty in France by Mark Landless (you can tell he’s the hero because the cover copy says he’s the hero) (Also he has a scar on his face that does not mar his hotness), and brought to Bath where he is her guardian. The reason Mark comes for her is because the Marquise was his cousin, and Purity’s father tried to help the Marquise escape from the evil Marquis, and Mark swore to take care of the bailiff’s family, or something. He did a bang up job, considering the bailiff and his wife were murdered by the French Revolution. If you think this makes no goddamn sense, you would be right.
Anyway, in the course of the next 8 years or so, Purity falls in Girlish Infatuation with Mark, and makes him the Ugliest Tea Cozy In The World, which he tosses into the fireplace (not realizing she made it) and she is packed off to an upper class, ladies boarding school. In her dorm, the other girls have found porn, and, as happens in all these stories, start experimenting in all ways that they can without losing their all-important virginity. They make a pact to tell each other everything about their sexual exploits.
In the course of all of this, Purity meets Freddy, a wastrel younger son who thinks she’s very pretty. At one point, to discourage his attentions, she shoves him in a fountain.
The lead Mean Girl, Phillida, hauls up the mentally deficient son of the gardener to experiment with, and when he is in bed with one of the girls, he rapes her and she eventually kills herself due to her loss of virtue. Purity is disgusted by all of this, and refusing to tell them about Freddy, so for her punishment, she is tied to her bed hand and foot. The Mean Girl tells her she is going to let the gardener’s son have his way with her.
Yeah.
One of the other girls knocks over a candle and unties Purity, she runs home to Mark, to find him in the process of screwing a maid, and she flies into a rage and goes to Freddy’s house, where she tells him she will marry him, and they go to bed. Mark is like, “Hey ’grats on the wedding, see you there.” After the wedding (where he is cold and indifferent) he goes off with the Army to go fight Napoleon.
And on the wedding night she discovers that Freddy is a sadistic rapist who beats her and ravishes her every night, he’s in serious debt and only married her to make his rich great-aunt happy so the rich great aunt wouldn’t disinherit him. At some point, she runs into this 18-year-old soldier who was about to leave for a rendezvous with fate at Trafalgar, so she very generously has sex with him so he need not die a virgin.
Her coachman saw all of this go down, and blackmails Purity into screwing him many many times to keep him from telling her evil husband. Purity falls pregnant, and doesn’t know who the father is- it might be the young soldier or it might be the coachman- but it’s definitely not her husband. The coachman takes her to a midwife who gives her an abortificant, and in the process the coachman gets killed by a Plot Mob.
Purity doesn’t take the abortificant, and the rich great aunt realizes she is pregnant and is so thrilled she confirms Freddy as her heir. Freddy is fine with the fact that he’s not the father, until his cousins overhear Purity telling him that she doesn’t know who the father is, they promptly go tell the great aunt, and Freddy beats the shit out of Purity, rapes her (again), and she loses the baby and….he dies, somehow.
He owes a crap ton of money to everyone in the world, so she’s left with nothing, so she heads off to go find a job, because going home to Mark and his slutty screwing of the maids is not acceptable. This does not work well, since she went to a ladies finishing school and knows NOTHING about ANYTHING. She gets picked up by a woman who offers her a “position” as a “ladies maid” to a “family” but really it’s a position “on her back” as a “high-class whore” to “men who can afford the fee.” Purity runs out of the house, nekkid, and is picked up by Alastair Monmouth, who does “stuff” but is also pretty clearly a hypnotist. He hypnotizes her into taking a bunch of men to her bed. She knows that she did all these things, but had no control over herself when doing them. The men, I mean.
The shit hits the fan when Mean Girl from boarding school shows up at the same time as Mark (who showed up because Hypnotist is a war criminal) and Mean Girl throws all this crap in Purity’s face- hypnotist was using her as part of the payment to get these men to do things to further his Evil War Criminal Agenda. Mark is completely enraged that Purity would fuck men at Monmouth’s command and rapes her as she’s shrieking “Don’t rape me, Mark! Please don’t rape me!”
We’re at the midpoint of the book, and let us tot it up: Purity has had consensual sex twice, been raped by six men (two of them multiple times), and nearly raped by a seventh.
So she runs away from Monmouth and finds a Gypsy man that she knew in her previous term of homelessness, and he nearly dies in a prizefight, and while he is in recovery, they trek to Wales and become lovers. After a year or so, the Gypsy leaves her, and she goes back to Mark’s house in Bath with the intent of confronting him. And saying that she now knows what she had for him was just Girlish Infatuation, but now that he’s raped her and she went off on a Gypsy hermitage for a year, she’s forgiven him and loves him. And if he’s still angry with her for all the things that weren’t really her fault, that’s fine, she’ll leave. Mark has resigned from the Army and spent the past year looking for her, because he realized that Raping The Woman You Love Is Bad.
Oh, well, then. Good for him.
Turns out, Purity is not the daughter of the bailiff at the chateau in France, she was the daughter of the Marquise and some dandy at Versailles, and was smuggled out to be raised by the bailiff and his wife. And the Marquise was the childhood sweetheart of Mark, who fell in love with her daughter (That’s Purity), and was angry at the Marquise because he never got to have sex with her, so he took it out on Purity.
As long as he can identify his anger, or something.
So they get married, he rejoins the Army to defeat Napoleon once and for all, and she follows him to the Iberian Peninsula. Where who should show up while Mark is away killing Frenchies but Monmouth, who tells Purity that he has proof that Mark let him get out of the country ahead of a charge of High Treason, because of her, thus committing high treason himself, and in order to get possession of that evidence (a letter), she must allow him to fuck her in her marriage bed.
So she does, many times (because he can set a world record for turnaround time). And then in the morning, he tells her that Mark wouldn’t be so stupid has to put that kind of offer in writing, Monmouth just wanted to fuck her while she was in her full possession of her senses. And then Monmouth leaves and Mark comes home and it’s all good, except for this whole shame thing she’s got going on, and Monmouth shows up as the guest of honor at a dinner party they were invited to. Monmouth tells Mark EVERYTHING, all the depraved stuff he got Purity to do, Mark kills Monmouth in a duel and Purity is like “well fuck this noise” and goes back to the Chateau where she grew up and whips all the peasants into shape.
Mark goes on to Waterloo, where he finds a bunch of French POWs that are also Purity’s Peasants, and finds her and they run into each other’s arms and… curtain.
Okay, so there’s a lot to unpack here. And I really can’t separate the fact that I am a woman in 2010 reading this, with the benefits provided to me by second and third wave feminism, the fact that I live with an activist whose primary goals are ending rape and promoting healthy sexuality (I’ve learned a lot from her), and just the changes in perceptions of women’s sexuality that has happened in the 30 years since this book has been written. In addition to all of that, there has been several sea changes in the romance genre since the 1970s. I can’t look at this book in the context in which it was written; because that’s not the context I read it in.
This is about as subjective as you can get. I admit that.
First and foremost is all the rape. ALL THE RAPE. Seven rapists (three may not have know she was not consenting to sex with them, but we’re looking at her POV), including the hero. Six near-rapes I can think of. Four partners consensually, two of which raped her before or after she consented. It’s seriously fucked up.
And even when she is having consensual sex, the author talks about the men “taking her.” As if she’s not really active in the sex. Even in the case of the Gypsy dude, where he’s broken and battered and “not yet a real man” she goes to him and offers herself for him to take. The lesson here is passivity in all encounters.
(I am SO SO glad I was reading Zoe Archer’s Scoundrel on my iPod during my commute to school while reading this book at bedtime. Archer knows how to write a heroine that knows what she wants from sex and life and is an active participant in both. Sometimes even the instigator. Thank you, Zoe, you may have saved my sanity.)
We have several tropes of female sexuality here, and they are all disturbing. First, there’s Purity herself, who is only allowed to be a passive recipient. She’s cursed with having this body that drives men wild (says so on the cover copy) and the only man that could bring her to orgasm (I think… if I’m reading the 70s euphemisms right) was Mark, until Monmouth comes along (and comes, and comes, and comes- shortest turnaround time known to man, for real) and he deliberately brings her to orgasm several times because that’s the revenge on Mark that he wanted. (Instead of flinging herself off a mountain, she’s flinging herself into a pit of perfect despair. I don’t even know.)
The second trope is “those women who embrace their sexuality are evil whores” and we see this is Mean Girl Phillida. She was the one who organized the whole “let’s experiment with the porn!” thing, and she’s presented as mean, conniving, evil, and without morals- she’ll screw anything that moves. She told Purity that she fucked Mark just to make Purity upset. She told Mark about Monmouth being Purity’s pimp and being a war criminal, and gets killed but Monmouth’s men on the way (and tries to fuck her way out of it, and fails).
The other girls from boarding school we run into both die as a result of sex- one I previously mentioned killed herself because she couldn’t prove her virginity to prospective in-laws, and the other becomes a low-class whore Purity runs into while with the Army in Portugal, and dies of the pox.
Purity’s own mother is said to have Purity’s same problem- her body just drives men crazy and they can’t help but fuck her, but Purity’s mother didn’t have the same strength of character or whatever that Purity has. I really don’t know what that means, except maybe Purity refusing to “give her heart” to any man but Mark is strength of character? I mean, her other options were to give heart to one of her many rapists, so….
Oh, wait.
I know this seems kind of disingenuous, since I liked Magnus from Season of the Sun (to an extent), yet I want Mark dead. But I do. I hated all the men in this book. I feel bad for Purity because her author give her nothing- not a backbone, not a personality, not a talent, not a scrap of luck, nothing. Hot guy with scar doesn’t make all this better.
Here’s another thing, and I don’t know if it’s a OG Old School issue, or just a result of my small sample size, but there’s no flesh to the character of Mark at ALL. He’s this guy who stalks in an out of the story with a stony expression, and sometimes Purity thinks wistfully about him (or gets mad at him for screwing the maids. In fact, she’s more mad at him for screwing the maids than she is mad at him for raping her), but there’s nothing about what he thinks, or feels, or wants. I mentioned in my review of Adora I want a romance to be a story about a relationship. Yes, they tend to be more about the heroine than the hero, but the hero has to have something to him other than a scar. This is all Purity’s story, not their story, and we have no idea what makes him tick, or why she loves him, or why he loves her. They do, because the story requires them to love each other.
But really, I want to have some words with the author, because who puts her heroine through all this shit? Seriously? And to have the end be “and they run across the field into each other’s arms to swelling orchestral music” and THAT IS IT? No conclusion to what happened with Monmouth? Does Mark know about the blackmail or not? WHY IS THE DANGLING END OF THIS ANNOYING THREAD BOTHERING ME.
The argument of “IT’S HISTORICALLY ACCURATE OKAY” doesn’t really fly with me, or at least, not when the abuse of your main character is this thorough. You don’t have to put your heroine through all of this shit. You don’t have to make your hero a cardboard cutout with a scar on his face. You can make your characters likeable, even with all the abuse and horror (okay, that’s more of a dig at Bertrice Small, I admit that Purity was sort of likeable, if you like your friends rather dim). You can be historically accurate and not make the reading experience so miserable.
On a more shallow note, the writing was, on the whole, not bad. It wasn’t as over-wrought as Bertrice Small, (can you tell I really don’t like her?) and the dialogue sounded like the author had at least listened to how people talk (and then mixed it with a more formal “this is how people in Olden Times talked”). However, and this is another convention of the 70s, I’m pretty sure, while there was a LOT of sex (like a LOT), it’s not explicitly described. There are a lot of mountains of pure bliss, and jumping off mountains, and taking, but no specifics. Even when Monmouth is making her do all these depraved things, she revolts at his “most outrageous demand,” and he offers to get his servant to make her do it…. But I have no idea what that could be. Oral on him? Oral on her? Anal? Did they know about heterosexual anal in the 70s? Watersports? SERIOUSLY THIS DEMAND WHAT IS IT I NEED TO KNOW.
I know that the mores of how explicit a sex scene can be has changed over the past 40 years- I think we were talking in the Book Club Discussion in September about how nothing is complete without anal anymore, whereas about 20 years ago, the idea of her going down on him was like, DIRTY. I can’t be the only one that’s read The Pearl, the Victorian magazine of erotica. For the time, the stories are rather lewd, but not as graphic as they could be. And as I was reading the section of Purity’s Passion that takes place in the boarding school, it almost seemed like I was reading a cleaned up version of Victorian porn.
Someone in the comments of the Season of the Sun review talked about how these OG Old School books with all the rape are more like forced orgasm fantasies. Which, if the main audience for this type of book is women who are just old enough to feel like they missed the Sexual Revolution, and are still stuck in the idea that active enjoyment of sex is something forbidden, then yes, I can accept that argument. It makes me incredibly sad, that this is one of the few acceptable places where women’s sexuality is even up for discussion, and even then it’s all passive reception on the woman’s part. You are allowed to enjoy it, as long as you didn’t initiate it, and you’re not an active participant.
My own theory on rape fantasies is that part of the attraction is that the onus of the active portion of the sex on the top, so if the bottom has no idea what they are doing, it’s okay. This is a completely unscientific theory, and does not, obviously, apply to everyone.
Here’s something that’s been turning over in my head for the past week: In the time these were written, by women for women, we, as a society, were still deep in the throes of putting the onus of preventing rape on women (“She shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt” and “Well what the hell did she expect, being in a bar and having fun”) and still defining rape as unwanted sex that the woman resisted “to the utmost.” (You want an exercise in Rage? Look at the Model Penal Code’s suggestions on what rape statutes should be like. And then thank your lucky stars that very few jurisdictions even considered them). Anyway, I feel like there is some connection between the romance novels by and for women being so rape-heavy, and the culture being even more rape-culture-y than it is now. I don’t know if the rape culture created the trend in the literature, or it is just correlation, not causation. I’ve been pondering this for a while now, and haven’t reached any conclusions. Any thoughts, or am I just making shit up?
To conclude, as Abigail Bartlet says, “It’s our history. Better or worse, it’s our history. We’re not going to lock it in the basement or brush it with a new coat of paint. It’s our history.” The evolution from this leads to Vivian Vaughn (one of my favorite early 90’s writers, who we will be discussing in the future), La Nora, and the awesomeness that is Joanna Bourne, my beloved Caroline Linden, and my new favorite person, Zoe Archer. (SERIOUSLY. SAVED MY SANITY.) But just because it’s history and we can’t ignore the fact that it exists doesn’t mean I have to read it.
I don’t mind reading with a look of perpetual “WTF” on my face. I think I’ve made that pretty clear. But this? Reading with my lip curled in disgust the entire time? No. Many times no. No more OG Old School- I’m going to stick with the early 90s bubblegum.
EDITED TO ADD: I see while digging up the publication info that there is two more books in the Purity Series- Purity’s Ecstasy and Purity’s Shame (and no summaries for either, except apparently there are pirates involved (OF COURSE THERE ARE))). So I suppose that my complaints about the rather abrupt ending were addressed, and it’s possible that Mark and Purity have an actual conversation (but no money on that bet. Why would they start now?). However, looking at just the title for Purity’s Shame makes me go, “…my god, Seymour is going to heap another 800 pages of crap on her heroine’s head?” Of course my Trainwreck Syndrome is shouting, “Oooooo! We HAVE to find out how bad this gets. WE ARE A COMPLETIST IT MUST BE DONE” but I’m going to resist that urge for as long as I can.
I agree with Olivia’s point in that snark for snark’s sake gets tiresome, but I don’t think this review is completely guilty of that—I think it’s important to look at the evolution of romance, even if that discussion begins with a snarky review of a really bad book which is at the same time a really good example of some very bad scenarios prevalent in 70s/80s romance.
Specifically, this book was reviewed by request- someone asked if I would review, I said sure I’ll read it, and more fool me. Having done that, there’s nothing left to do but share the pain.
And I wanted to discuss the rapey-ness. Which we’ve been doing, so success on the merits, there.
Generally, this is what I do here- I do the older stuff because I like it, and even when the plot makes no sense (See Surrender to the Night), I still generally enjoy myself. I know that a lot of people won’t read the books I review, so I try to make the review as entertaining as possible (not just for the people reading it, they are generally fun to write, too). If that involves calling a spade a Plot Spade, well, there you go.
I have a romance novel from the 70s sitting, waiting to be read, and now I am afraid to touch it. I’ve never read any romance written prior to, I think, the last 1980s, and even the earliest of the ones I’ve read have occasionally had bits where I felt…uncomfortable, knowing that certain scenes were probably expected to be enjoyed by the reader.
I like reading these kinds of reviews because 1) they’re well-written and entertaining and 2) they remind me of how much the genre has improved, something I’m still absorbing since I used to read romances in high school (in the ‘80s) but was turned off by many of the elements discussed here and when I picked them up again a couple years ago it was like, hey! This is so much better! I do think these function less as book reviews (ie. information on a book you might actually seek out to read) and more of a historical/contextual/literary function—both the review itself and the comments here are intelligent and interesting. However if this book shows up in my library’s paperback donation pile, not only will I not read it I will be highly tempted to throw it in the recycling bin. And redheadedgirl, I understand the completeness urge but spare yourself the sequels. Please. Spend your time reading some Georgette Heyer so you know there were writers back in the day who could actually write AND didn’t feel compelled to submit their heroines to multiple rapes. Everyone has their favorites: I recommend The Nonesuch and The Toll-Gate.
Do not fear the 70’s. If it hadn’t been for Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss, I never would have found Linda Howard, Nora Roberts or Elizabeth Lowell and from them to the WTFry that is Shannon McKenna or the incredibly fabulous Meljean Brook. Would I recommend Sweet Savage Love to my 16yo goddaughter? No, but then 30 years from now she may be saying the same thing about the Twilight series. We learn, we grow, we take the good with the bad & we keep reading.
p.s. I live for snark.
Very busy at work, but I can’t resist adding to the conversation. RHG, you’re to be commended for finishing this piece of whatever. I’m a completist, too, so I understand (I’ve also read Scoundrel, and agree with you – thank god for writers who assume their audience has intelligence and a sense of self worth). Give yourself a break on the next book, because we don’t want you self-combusting on public transportation.
Do I really want to do this? I guess I do.
Hi, I lived and read through the 70’s. It’s not really fair to call a book in the Purity series (or Angelique, or one of a dozen others) a romance novel. Unless you consider all levels of heat and partner swapping today to be equal the most inspirational hand holding work today. Then, like, now, the market was a pretty diverse place and not all of it was palatable then or is palatable now.
Most self defined Romance Readers of the era would not have considered that a Romance. Exactly. Plantation books, serial ‘he just raped me and all I did was fall on his dick, or and his too, plus that guy over there’ books, there were a lot of ‘acceptable’ porn reads marketed as romance because Women Could Not Read Porn.
This is still somewhat true today. There is not relationship development because relationships are not the point. The point of those books was to have the heroine in as many ‘forbidden’ sexual situations as possible, excusing her with her lack of consent, often involving the nastiest most hobo-esque guys, and the most soaps-wouldn’t-dare plot twists possible.
Then there was Laurie McBain.
I mean, I don’t want to say I liked those series, I personally did not, but I don’t want people to file this under ‘70’s romance’ when it’s really ‘70’s erotic read’. You didn’t leave one of these books on the top of our nightstand unless you were participating in key parties. And if you don’t know what a key party was, that’s another conversation.
Erin—what do I have to say about that?
I’m sorry you read a crapy Fern Michaels book? I’m not sure what your point is as the Fern Michaels book is a reprint and readily available to any unsuspecting person, and Purity’s Passion is not.
Redheadgirl—you were asked to read the book and report on it. Fair enough. My intention isn’t to give you a hard time. Your review was funny. It simply struck me as easy pickings based on antiquated tropes. That’s all.
Isabel—I agree with most of what you are saying. Only I think that the people who make fun of romance out of ignorance use examples based on the stereotypes these older novels created. For us to do the same seems rather pointless. We all _know_ these older tropes are ridiculous. It’s kind of like making fun of bellbottoms. Yeah, it makes me laugh but well, duh, they’re bellbottoms.
-FWIW, I started reading SBTB because of a bad review, Savage Moon. I laughed until I cried. I have no problems with bad reviews.
What I left out, and should say, is that I think it’s important to study those books not with horror but with understanding. Yes, they’re dreadful to us in a way some books today are dreadful to me, and will no doubt be dreadful to others, but they were the beginning of women being allowed to want to read sexually.
We might be stuck with “Romance = porn” partly because of them, but without them do we ever move into “woman can read porn if they want”? I don’t think so.
Ahh, see, I’m quite happy to make fun of bell bottoms/mullets/sideburns. Sure, they’re easy targets—but not everything in life has to be a challenge. 😉 Sometimes, it’s nice just to kick back, have a few drinks, and mock the thing that’s really, really mockable.
God knows I’d go insane at family weddings otherwise.
Besides, I’d say making it through this one would be challenge enough.
Olivia,
It seemed that you were busting down the review as being pointless, when I feel that it was not. Maybe originally it was meant to be a fun snarky review and turned into something else. Then again, I like snarky fun reviews that make me laugh for the sheer joy of it. IE: The Classic from this site the “Playboy Sheikh”. This subject hit close to home for me because I just read a reprint of one of these so-called romances and discussing it is interesting. If I didn’t express myself clearly enough, my apologies. We all have different opinions and are entitled to them.
Oh, one more point that I forgot to make. They are reprinting these lovely “Romance Classics” and who knows maybe “Purity’s Passion’s” will be among them. They after all reprinted “Whitefire” not just once, but twice. Now I have a head’s up…just in case they do!
this reminds me of my very first romance by Fern Michales. Captive series. Sounds like the most ridiculous WTFery ever.
Meoskop: Interesting, yeah. The plotline does resemble the Beauty’s Awakening type thing more than most novels I’ve seen reviewed here: the wide variety of men and so forth. Still leaves the gender issues pretty creepy, but it’s good to point out that this was closer to Penthouse Letters or whatever.
And I think you can read with both horror and historical perspective/understanding. We read Pamela in one of my college courses, back in The Day, and it was…interesting: on the one hand, yes, this is fundamental in the development of the novel, and it was a not-too-bad view of sex for its day, but on the other hand, most of us alternated between telling Pamela to die in a fire, needing to take a shower every two chapters, and thanking God we weren’t alive back then. So it’s possible to say simultaneously that books like the Purity stuff—or the rapier bits of actual romances—played an important part in getting to where we are now, but DEAR GOD DO NOT WANT GET IT AWAY.
I…am having a slow day at work, clearly. 🙂
I’m with Meoskop. These aren’t romances.
This is not to say that they shouldn’t be reviewed (and snarked) here. But like chick lit, they were a category of fiction written by and marketed to women that were not necessarily focused on a courtship and a happy ending. I think a better term for them would be something like “female melodrama.” Christine Monson and Theresa Denys et al were writing sprawling books that spanned decades and continents and whose heroines had endless gothic adventures and lots and lots of sex, much of it against their will. The limited opportunities for women that made these books popular fantasies are pretty easy to parse (and the review does a nice job of this) just as the societal conditions that make chick-lit popular today are pretty obvious too. And like most of the commenters, I find the fantasies of my particular era a lot more palatable.
But I dislike lumping these books in with romance, because they don’t tell the story of a courtship. Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, The Sheik (and yes, I realize that there are consent issues in that book complicated by the coyness with which it is written) all tell the story of a courtship between two people resulting in a happy union. As do the books of Nora Roberts and Mary Balogh and all the other authors we love today. Based on the puny number of pages devoted to the hero and heroine on stage together in what I’m dubbing the female melodrama (usually a tiny fraction because there was so much raping to do and what with the slow speed of international travel in days of yore) it’s tough for me to think of these as romances.
Isabel C: It’s an awkward position to be in – defending Purity. I totally agree we can refute it. I just hate seeing it get conflated into being a typical representation.
Meoskop: If anything, it’s a nice reminder that the categories were as broad and the dividing lines as fuzzy then as they are now. (Is Black Lace romance, for example? Hard to say: some seem to be, some really don’t.)
And it’s interesting that consent and gender issues seem to span both romance and melodrama, and that attitudes shift roughly in parallel. Could be a thesis here, except that grad school frightens me deeply.
Published 1977. I never read this one, but there was stacks and stacks of books like this available. Sort of a pedigree of daughter of Sweet Savage Love out of Forever Amber by Some Really Bad Paperback Original Male Oriented Historical.
I have never understood why these books were so popular and I lived through that period. But they were all over the place. I used to work at a job where women would bring in bags of these type of books—the rapey romances—and trade them in the lady’s lounge on break. I have the couple I read burned in my brain after all these years.
And, yeah, there were considered romances by the people who read them. The current definition was made up by RWA and RWA didn’t come into existence until 1980.
Fortunately, these books were before my time. 😀 I’ve seen them used but have always avoided them because you can tell by the cover copy that they’re depressingly unromantic ergo they must not be Romance. I thought they were “historical novels” actually, the salacious reading of yesteryear. 🙂
Is this the type of book generally considered to be Old Skool Romance? When I think “Old Skool,” I think of Kathleen Woodiwiss, Virginia Henley, Johanna Lindsey, etc. The H and H weren’t always likable, but at least there did tend to be a single relationship in the pattern of today’s Romance.
If this book is what is meant by “Old Skool,” I feel more tolerant of people who diss Romance based on Old Skool books.
I don’t understand why some of them are still so popular or why they ever were. There is a huge community of readers (myself included) that hunt down the old out of print books to read. Based on others recommendations etc. Sometimes it is hard to find the details about these books. The book I mentioned earlier was part of a reading challenge for myself. I have been hunting down romances that feature exotic locations, unusual heroes or heroines etc and this one was recommended to me. I was looking for something out of the norm and boy did I get it, to my displeasure. On the same token I have found some real treasures. It is a crap shoot. I love the reviews on this site, the snarky ones especially.
I agree with DM, I don’t consider this a romance at all. It’s more an epic or soap (especially considering there are two more books with the same heroine). Also agree that it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be reviewed or discussed here. I’m not sure if this was considered or labeled a romance back then, but I’m just so glad that it wasn’t my intro into romance as I might not have read another.
I’ve read one book where the heroine was raped (by villian) and I could barely stomach it. RHG, I’m impressed that you acutally made it through the horror that is this book. It would have gotten a big DNF from me.
I think it’s important to re-read and re-examine older romances because they are part of the genre whether we like it or not. If you look at them clinically or academically or even with huge whopping basketfuls of sarcastic humor, they need to be looked at because without the large-scale perspective to match the examination of heroes, heroines, tropes, plots and trends right here-and-now, you miss a full understand of what and how the genre is and came to be.
Clearly there’s a huge difference in the heroine’s sexual journey between 1977 and 2010 novels, and when I saw the date of publication in RHG’s review I thought, “Oh, I know what this will involve.” But look at how many older romances are being reissued in print and in digital format. The hunger for old backlist is a avid and growing one, and romances from way-back-when that may contain anything from forced seduction to rape by the hero and the villain (maybe they’re twins, maybe they’re the same person) are being reissued. There is an audience for older romances.
So when the “bodice ripper” accusation is flown again and again because those tropes keep reappearing in reissued books, it’s important that romance fans who take a lot of crap for their reading know why, and can locate a book like this one in the larger timeline of heroine agency, sexual agency, and for-the-love-of-God-thank-you a greater understanding of female sexuality in popular culture.
I think RHG should read The Windflower next. Sort of a cleanse-the-palate experience.
Whether one wants to argue the 70s Romance vs. 70s Erotica categorization, many posters have passed over this point, which I find to be excellent. Female authors and readers have certainly come a long way in defining female desire and ownership of that desire. But we also like to ignore the past because it can often be unpleasant. Most of us talk about history, especially women’s history, in terms of “Whew! So glad we’ve moved on and do not need to revisit those sets of hellish circumstances,” and so modern Women’s Studies departments frequently do not require or provide medieval courses for students because they function under the supposition that the past sucked universally for all women, and so we need to move on to change the things we can now. So, in essence, young women are taught, at least liminally, that the only successes with regard to feminism have only come in the last 30 years or so. As a medievalist who specializes in looking at rape in literature and in Women’s culture in the Middle Ages, I can tell you that this is a myopic view. Yes, women had it bad, in particular with prosecuting rape cases because medieval society called rape raptus from the Latin meaning “to grab, to seize, to abduct, or to take by force.” It was still a crime of power that used the act of sex to assert that power; yet, it was often excused based upon the perceived level of purity of the victim, much like today. In other words, you were worth more as a rape victim if you were an inexperienced woman, than if you were a widow because, in the latter case, you had no virginity to “ruin” and enough sexual knowledge having been a wife that you might have “enjoyed it” (which aligns with all the above conversations about rape victims experiencing orgasm without consent). But, this was not the sum total of female experience in the past, and in fact, women were more likely to be able to read and write in the Middle Ages than men (because it was seen as a leisurely activity), and because women were the most literate portion of the populace, albeit in the vernacular, many authors, such as Dante and Chaucer, chose to write solely in the vernacular. And, in the case of Chaucer and earlier English authors, such works were written at the behest of powerful women (e.g. Anne of Bohemia, wife of King Richard II). In other words, much like the romance novels today, women in the Medieval world determined Romance literature as well as the themes within it. And so, much like in the past, heroines and the representations of their sexuality have changed because, over time, we have demanded that they change, just as we continue to strive for equality in all aspects of society.
As much as we want to forget and move on, we must both acknowledge and contextualize, or we will not have progress. We will continue to be, as the above author notes, pawns, not to because we are women but because of how society defines what “woman” means. It is important to critique this literature because if we do not say what we do not want, need, or desire in explicit of terms as possible, society will continue to assume that rape fantasy is actually rape reality, and as we can see from this discussion, none of us are comfortable with that reduction.
I should probably clarify that I think these books are important reading for romance scholars and critics and writers, and that I do understand that they were marketed and bought by some women as romance, though certainly by others as historical adventure distinct from romance. And I concede that they share some characteristics in common with romance. And I know the definition of romance settled on the by RWA post dates these books.
But I still believe that these books were a distinct, manifestation (I resisted saying “flowering”) of their era, and that what I’ll call courtship romance (does Pamela Regis use that term? someone does) existed long before these books, and was published alongside these books, and that the development of the relationship between hero and heroine that distinguishes romance from other genres is sorely lacking in these books. That is why I think they form a distinct category.
This might explain the two 60-something nurses in Reno who said they couldn’t read romance because of “all the rape”. My jaw dropped, and I asked what on earth they were talking about. And they replied “Well, how else does the heroine loose it?” *insert sound of jaw hitting floor* Clearly they were reading books of this type when they were first published.
I was reading romance novels at the time these books were being printed. I remember Natasha Peters’ “Savage Surrender” a book that starts with rape (by the hero) and continues through out the long book () being raped over and over. But I remember the novel because at the time (I was young) it was a ‘racy’ novel. And I was curious about what went on…but that did not make it good reading. I mean the heroine did learn to sword fight and stand up for herself, but she also was tortured..(there were the horrid “sadist” rape scenes, vs the simply horrid one by the ‘hero’). I also remember “The Flame and the Flower” by Woodiss, which featured rape as a ‘meeting’ between the hero and the heroine, (though there is that excuse that the hero did not know the heroine was not a doxy bought for his pleasure). But point is rape as a plot within romance novels for a while was used I believe to allow the ‘good girl’ to have sex. Why authors chose this route rather than another I have no idea. Combined with the horrific rapes, they also seemed to have very few minor psychological problems afterwards. I think this is almost worse than the rape scenes themselves, to have characters undergo torture that mentally is very damaging to self image, to sexuality, to who the woman (or man) see themselves, and to have them ‘bravely face the world’ is hog wash. Some survivors are able to do this in real life, but not without serious support, and strong self esteem already being there. But whereas apparently ‘rape’ was considered fine, the realistic portrayal of how this affected the survivor was not…so toss realism aside for the next horrific thing to happen.
And rape scenes have not gone away, they still pop up when any character says ‘No’ and the other protagonist proceeds without that ‘No’ changing before hand to a “Yes, yes, (cue herbal essence commercial) Yes” then it is RAPE. When a protagonist gets another drunk, or under the influence, or crawls into bed while they are sleeping…it is RAPE. Having Consensual sex is an active thing, a choice by both parties. So if you are reading a book where there is any doubt of that, you are reading a book that has a possible rape being portrayed.
spam word: Shown28 I could have shown you 28 examples of books with just as horrific rape scenes, but I prefer not to read them any more.
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I read all three Purity books back in the early eighties and actually enjoyed them. I got rid of them many years ago because I felt I had outgrown them.
I will offer fair warning to anyone who feels compelled to read the other two that the WTFery reaches a level I don’t think I have ever read anywhere else in the third book.
Oh come on! Don’t tell me that! That just makes my OCD and Trainwreck Syndrome ping WORSE.
SOMEONE HELP ME
I’m wondering if this: http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/mike.html is the Michael Butterworth who may have written them. He coauthored some Elric novels with Michael Moorcock in the 70’s.
There is another Michael Butterworth, also a British author writing about the same time, but he seems to have claimed his female pen name of Carola Salisbury.
Since so many people have already said everything of actual significance that came to my mind, I just want to mention how much I like the term “Plot Mob.” Also, that I mentioned “Potato Rage” at an SCA event last Saturday, and it was immediately adopted by everybody at my table at feast.
P.S. As something being set in the French Revolution is usually enough motivation for me to read it, I’m glad that I found out I shouldn’t read this before I might stumble across it in a library one day.
Speaking of male authors masquerading as women during the 70s, 80s and early 90s era:
Jennifer Wilde, aka Tom Huff
Christina Savage aka Kerry Newcomb
Shana Carrol aka Kerry Newcomb
Elizabeth Bright, aka Tim Myers
Christina Nicholson, aka Christopher Nicole
Pamela South, aka Donald Bain
Lee Jackson, aka Donald Bain
Stephanie Blake, aka Jack Pearl (cousin to author Donald Bain)
Saliee O’Brien, aka Francis Leroy (Frankie-Lee) Janas
Francesca Greer, aka Frankie-Lee Janas
Madeline Brent – Peter O’Donnell
Just found out this information recently, really interesting.
Yuck… Not my cup of tea at all but if you must continue the train wreck go over to PaperBackSwap and order them 🙂
@Kristen: Go get The Forbidden Rose by Joanna Bourne RIGHT NOW. No, you do not have time to put on pants. RIGHT NOW.
Unless of course you have it already. Then you obviously don’t need to.
I have already read The Forbidden Rose– actually I was in such a hurry to read it I requested it from two library systems to see which one came in first.
anything that compels you to read it to the awful bitter end deserves at least a D+! and now that my curiosity is piqued by the sequels….DO IT!! READ THEM…REPORT BACK TO US!!! *said in hypnotic tones*
I can’t understand why people would buy and read a whole genre of rape fiction. I was uncomfortable just reading this review. There is a whole slew of WTFery to address (which has already been done), but mostly, I just don’t get how this ever had a market. At least the super mushy over romantic romance novels—I can see how those would make someone happy, how they could be an enjoyable read without necessarily being great literature. So, ew.
I think a large part of the appeal is this:
We wanted to read about women who were at the center of an adventure. We were tired of being Rowena instead of Ivanhoe, of being Constance instead of Dartagnan. And the author whose imagination could compass a heroine who moved great events, who was actuated, but was also a person of her time, was rare. So we got women who moved at the fringes of great events, mostly in and out of beds.
First off on anal – um, yeah, if there’s anal in a book I do NOT want to read it! Sorry, that’s an exit only hole and unless he’s a doctor doing something medical like giving her an enema for extreme constipation, NOTHING should enter the anus.
It’s my theory that the rape and rape fantasy is really a badly executed forced orgasm fantasy. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, some women have been taught to believe they are not suppose to enjoy sex. My mom told me repeatedly that “Only men and whores enjoy sex. Good girls never have orgasms.” She also kept saying that sex for women should only be about procreation, not pleasure. She absolutely flipped out when she found out my gynecologist wanted me to masturbate on a daily basis. Exploration is a big time no-no far as mom is concerned.
I think that’s why so many women have the rape fantasies – because it takes away the guilt – and why so many old school romances have rape in them. But as it becomes more acceptable for women to orgasm the less we’ll see this. Novels are already trending that way. Now it’s just a matter of getting it into women’s heads.
First, I just wanted to say that Romance Reader at Heart seems to have the summaries for the other books:
The basic summary for each of the three.
Two more seemingly only
vaguely related reviews for Purity’s Ecstasy.
Second, I just wanted to say what a great discussion is happening! It’s discussions like these (causes and influences on the rape-as-only-acceptable-sex trope! feminism in medieval times! the “evolution” of modern romance novels!) that keep me coming back. Okay, these and the fantastic (and fantastically amusing) reviews. 😉