Heyer-Stanhope-Kinsale
Jan. 27th, 2004 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAs my previous post (rather cryptically) indicated, Mélusine has been entrusted to the tender care of the U.S. Postal Service and is on its way to New York. I had the let-down last night; at the moment I've got the euphoria. I'm certainly in no condition to work.
My plan (not the invasion of Normandy, but still a plan) is to make a silly and self-indulgent post comparing The Dream Hunter to Venetia and then spend the afternoon (aside from a projected expedition with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck to acquire things like envelopes and paper) peacefully resorting and rearranging my paperbacks. I feel positively decadent.
But, in the meantime, some odd thoughts about Laura Kinsale and Georgette Heyer.
The point of convergence between these two novels is Lady Hester Stanhope, who was the sort of woman no novelist would dare to invent. The Dream Hunter begins with her funeral, and her influence permeates the novel in ways both obvious and obscure through the protagonist, Zenobia, the daughter bestowed on Lady Hester by Kinsale. But Lady Hester also makes an oblique appearance in Heyer's Venetia:
In Venetia, Lady Hester is merely a cautionary tale, the sort of woman even the rakish Damerel doesn't want Venetia to become. In The Dream Hunter, she is far more than that; Zenia categorizes her as a demon, and she is viewed by the characters as variously compelling, dangerous, insane, and evil. Heyer's viewpoint reflects the likely attitudes of the upper-class English of Lady Hester's own day; Kinsale's seems to come closer to the woman herself.
I want to reason backwards for a moment. Zenia is nothing like Venetia (except that both are, of course, Beautiful), but between Damerel and Winter there are some points of comparison that I have been finding instructive. Both disdain polite society: Damerel simply because it bores him, Winter because he's shy and maladroit. They are both extensively travelled--although I think Damerel would sneer at Winter's ill-bred excesses. They're very similar in looks: tall, dark, "[Damerel's] countenance lean and rather swarthy, marked with lines of dissipation" (Heyer 27), "Lord Winter's face had an elegant severity, the unyielding, impenetrable look common among men to whom sun and distance are familiar companions. The austerity of his expression was accentuated by a pair of very dark and diabolic eyebrows, high cheekbones and an uncompromising set to the mouth and jaw" (Kinsale 1). (Winter clearly gets his eyebrows from Sylvester Rayne, but that's neither here nor there.) Both of them have extensive sexual experience. Both of them travel in part to avoid their families; both of them have a great scandal in their pasts. The nature of the scandal is where Kinsale's project begins to diverge from Heyer's. Winter is responsible (and just how responsible not even he knows) for the death of his fiancée; Damerel eloped with a married lady much older than himself (and in that way his career echoes Michael Bruce rather than Winter).
Both Damerel and Winter are possessed of a metaphorical demon, and I think the difference in their demons, and the way their demons are treated, says something interesting about the world-view of their respective novels. Winter's "demon" is a passion for freedom and autonomy, which he can only find by putting himself in tremendous danger in various barbaric corners of the world. Damerel's is the demon of cynicism, ennui, and self-hatred:
(Which seems an appropriate, if off-color, place to mention another difference between Kinsale and Heyer: this is the only ejaculating Damerel's going to get to do in the whole book, poor lamb.)
Heyer writes comedy of manners, and in fact one might argue for this scene as troping the action of comedy of manners. Damerel's dark passions and sordid past are real--we get enough evidence of that in oblique ways in other places in the novel--but Heyer keeps then neatly at arm's length, via a lively sense of the ridiculous and the characteristic habit of characters in comedy of manners, which Carolyn Heilbrun, quoting Auden, describes as "bring[ing] ... more energy to his conversation than the situation requires" (Heilbrun 457). Venetia and Damerel, like Peter and Harriet, conduct much of their conversation by matching quotes (which is probably one of the reasons Venetia is my favorite Heyer). And the energy and wit of their conversation serves beautifully to sublimate the sexual tension, allowing the novel to dance lightly through its potentially hazardous plot.
While Kinsale can be funny, she does not write comedy of manners. Winter and Zenia are not as self-aware as Venetia and Damerel, and Kinsale takes them seriously. Heyer, it always seems to me, loves her characters, but always partly because they are ridiculous. Even Vidal in Devil's Cub, who is allowed to be Byronic without irony, is freely admitted by the narrative to be young and spoiled and--while not stupid--not very good at thinking. Heyer is civilized, polished, always a little detached; Kinsale's down there in the thick of things.
This difference in their world-views explains the difference in their interpretations of Lady Hester Stanhope and in the different ways they deal with their heroes' demons. Damerel's demon can be tamed by finding a woman who can match his wit--a woman who won't bore him; there's no suggestion that Venetia has any demons of her own. Winter's demon is not that sort of demon, and the narrative is very explicit about the fact that Zenia doesn't tame it. Zenia's demon matches Winter's, does breathless, endless battle with it. Her passions are equal to his. Civilization is necessary in Kinsale, but not a virtue. Wit cannot match need.
Where am I going with all this? I don't quite know. I'm not arguing that Kinsale is better than Heyer, or vice versa. Perhaps all I'm doing is pointing out the ways in which The Dream Hunter mirrors Venetia, looking at the same problem from the other side of the glass.
---
WORKS CITED
Heilbrun, Carolyn. "Sayers, Lord Peter and God." Lord Peter. 1972. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1990. pp. 454-69.
Heyer, Georgette. Venetia. 1958. New York: Jove Publications, 1981.
Kinsale, Laura. The Dream Hunter. New York: Berkley Books, 1994.
My plan (not the invasion of Normandy, but still a plan) is to make a silly and self-indulgent post comparing The Dream Hunter to Venetia and then spend the afternoon (aside from a projected expedition with
heres_luck to acquire things like envelopes and paper) peacefully resorting and rearranging my paperbacks. I feel positively decadent.But, in the meantime, some odd thoughts about Laura Kinsale and Georgette Heyer.
The point of convergence between these two novels is Lady Hester Stanhope, who was the sort of woman no novelist would dare to invent. The Dream Hunter begins with her funeral, and her influence permeates the novel in ways both obvious and obscure through the protagonist, Zenobia, the daughter bestowed on Lady Hester by Kinsale. But Lady Hester also makes an oblique appearance in Heyer's Venetia:
"... You have travelled a great deal, haven't you?"
"Oh, yes!"
"I envy you that. It is a thing I always longed to do. I daresay I never shall, because single females are so horridly restricted, but I still indulge myself with planning tours to all the strange places I've only read about."
"No, no, don't do it!" he begged. "Such dreams, believe me, are the seeds from which the eccentric springs! You would end, like that ramshackle Stanhope woman, queening it over hordes of evil-smelling Bedouins!"
"I promise you I should not! It sounds very disagreeable--and quite as boring as the life I've known! You refer, I collect, to Lady Hester; did you ever meet her?"
"Yes, at Palmyra in--oh, I forget!--'13? 14? It doesn't signify."
(Heyer 53)
In Venetia, Lady Hester is merely a cautionary tale, the sort of woman even the rakish Damerel doesn't want Venetia to become. In The Dream Hunter, she is far more than that; Zenia categorizes her as a demon, and she is viewed by the characters as variously compelling, dangerous, insane, and evil. Heyer's viewpoint reflects the likely attitudes of the upper-class English of Lady Hester's own day; Kinsale's seems to come closer to the woman herself.
I want to reason backwards for a moment. Zenia is nothing like Venetia (except that both are, of course, Beautiful), but between Damerel and Winter there are some points of comparison that I have been finding instructive. Both disdain polite society: Damerel simply because it bores him, Winter because he's shy and maladroit. They are both extensively travelled--although I think Damerel would sneer at Winter's ill-bred excesses. They're very similar in looks: tall, dark, "[Damerel's] countenance lean and rather swarthy, marked with lines of dissipation" (Heyer 27), "Lord Winter's face had an elegant severity, the unyielding, impenetrable look common among men to whom sun and distance are familiar companions. The austerity of his expression was accentuated by a pair of very dark and diabolic eyebrows, high cheekbones and an uncompromising set to the mouth and jaw" (Kinsale 1). (Winter clearly gets his eyebrows from Sylvester Rayne, but that's neither here nor there.) Both of them have extensive sexual experience. Both of them travel in part to avoid their families; both of them have a great scandal in their pasts. The nature of the scandal is where Kinsale's project begins to diverge from Heyer's. Winter is responsible (and just how responsible not even he knows) for the death of his fiancée; Damerel eloped with a married lady much older than himself (and in that way his career echoes Michael Bruce rather than Winter).
Both Damerel and Winter are possessed of a metaphorical demon, and I think the difference in their demons, and the way their demons are treated, says something interesting about the world-view of their respective novels. Winter's "demon" is a passion for freedom and autonomy, which he can only find by putting himself in tremendous danger in various barbaric corners of the world. Damerel's is the demon of cynicism, ennui, and self-hatred:
She looked up at him searchingly, trying to read his mind, for although he jeered, she thought his voice had a bitter edge. Then, as she stared into his eyes she saw them smiling yet fierce, and a line of Byron's flashed into her head: There was a laughing devil in his sneer. "Oh, do let me go!" she begged. "I've suddenly had the most diverting thought! Oh, dear! Poor Oswald!"
He was quite taken aback, as much by the genuine amusement in her face as by what she had said, and he did let her go. "You've suddenly had the most diverting thought?" he repeated blankly.
"Thank you!" said Venetia, giving her crushed dress a little shake. "Yes, indeed I have, though I daresay you might not think it a very good joke, but that's because you don't know Oswald."
"Well, who the devil is he? Your brother?"
"Good God, no! He is Sir John Denny's son, and the top of his desire is to be mistaken for the Corsair. He combs his hair into wild curls, knots silken handkerchiefs around his neck, and broods over the dark passions in his soul."
"Does he, indeed? And what has this puppy to say to anything?"
She picked up her basket. "Only that if ever he meets you he will be quite green with jealousy, for you are precisely what he thinks he would like to be--even though you don't study the picturesque in your attire."
He looked thunderstruck for a moment, and ejaculated: "A Byronic hero--! Oh, my God! Why you abominable--"
(Heyer 30-31)
(Which seems an appropriate, if off-color, place to mention another difference between Kinsale and Heyer: this is the only ejaculating Damerel's going to get to do in the whole book, poor lamb.)
Heyer writes comedy of manners, and in fact one might argue for this scene as troping the action of comedy of manners. Damerel's dark passions and sordid past are real--we get enough evidence of that in oblique ways in other places in the novel--but Heyer keeps then neatly at arm's length, via a lively sense of the ridiculous and the characteristic habit of characters in comedy of manners, which Carolyn Heilbrun, quoting Auden, describes as "bring[ing] ... more energy to his conversation than the situation requires" (Heilbrun 457). Venetia and Damerel, like Peter and Harriet, conduct much of their conversation by matching quotes (which is probably one of the reasons Venetia is my favorite Heyer). And the energy and wit of their conversation serves beautifully to sublimate the sexual tension, allowing the novel to dance lightly through its potentially hazardous plot.
While Kinsale can be funny, she does not write comedy of manners. Winter and Zenia are not as self-aware as Venetia and Damerel, and Kinsale takes them seriously. Heyer, it always seems to me, loves her characters, but always partly because they are ridiculous. Even Vidal in Devil's Cub, who is allowed to be Byronic without irony, is freely admitted by the narrative to be young and spoiled and--while not stupid--not very good at thinking. Heyer is civilized, polished, always a little detached; Kinsale's down there in the thick of things.
This difference in their world-views explains the difference in their interpretations of Lady Hester Stanhope and in the different ways they deal with their heroes' demons. Damerel's demon can be tamed by finding a woman who can match his wit--a woman who won't bore him; there's no suggestion that Venetia has any demons of her own. Winter's demon is not that sort of demon, and the narrative is very explicit about the fact that Zenia doesn't tame it. Zenia's demon matches Winter's, does breathless, endless battle with it. Her passions are equal to his. Civilization is necessary in Kinsale, but not a virtue. Wit cannot match need.
Where am I going with all this? I don't quite know. I'm not arguing that Kinsale is better than Heyer, or vice versa. Perhaps all I'm doing is pointing out the ways in which The Dream Hunter mirrors Venetia, looking at the same problem from the other side of the glass.
---
WORKS CITED
Heilbrun, Carolyn. "Sayers, Lord Peter and God." Lord Peter. 1972. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1990. pp. 454-69.
Heyer, Georgette. Venetia. 1958. New York: Jove Publications, 1981.
Kinsale, Laura. The Dream Hunter. New York: Berkley Books, 1994.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 11:52 am (UTC)SEIZE THE FIRE is also interesting with the way it turns tropes on their head, though its plot is just wacky.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 11:53 am (UTC)I sort of feel like all the banter, delightful as it is, only exists to set up and set off these moments that are past words. Lord Peter and Harriet do this, or Miles and Ekaterin, or Richard and Alec. Often it's trust that provokes the letting down one's guard, but sometimes it's merely exhaustion or necessity. The effect is the same, though -- it is conscious, at least on some level voluntary, and mutual.
And I'm having trouble thinking of a Heyer where it happens. Her characters see through one another's social poses with fair frequency, but usually against each others' will and often unequally.
"Wit cannot match need" Gave me all kinds of shivers, like a line of poetry.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 12:01 pm (UTC)And Heyer's worst books (like the godawful Penhallow) are the ones where she tries to leave behind comedy of manners and write about real passions. I think she needed the restraint of the drawing room to do her best work.
But, yes, I think you're right. For comedy of manners to transcend itself, we have to get glimpses of the monsters under the ice and every once in a while get dropped down among them.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 10:01 pm (UTC)Monsters under the ice -- yes, that, exactly. Not only do we have to know they're there, but we have to understand that the characters consider them monsters too -- that they don't chatter away because they're shallow, but because they're restrained -- which means there's something they believe needs restraining. Heyer I think does in her best work give us glimpses of monsters, but rarely do we see the characters show them to each other.
In that way she's closer to Austen, who seems to think showing the monsters to anyone at all is a serious mistake. (Except perhaps in Persuasion, which seems to me something of a new direction in her thinking.) But I think it's notable that the model marriage partners held up in Mansfield Park are those that are forebearing and tolerant and govern both their own and their spouses' passions to their greater respectability, not intimates with whom the restraint can be safely laid aside.
Re:
Date: 2004-01-29 06:33 am (UTC)Notice that Austen's favorite poet was Cowper, a pre-romantic big when she was growing up, and as Persuasion shows, she read Byron with appreciation with the caveat that on its own it's too much of a good thing.
---L.
Sorry to hijack the comments like this
Date: 2004-01-29 07:11 am (UTC)People without passion -- cold, shallow, selfish -- are certainly criticized, and strongly too. But once you have strong feelings I don't see many examples of keeping them on too firm a reign.
In any case, my primary point was not whether one can be overgoverned as well as undergoverned in Austen, as that the role of the Good Spouse is presented as one of (helpful, patient, well-judging) governor rather an than escape from the sphere of governance. Darcy is a check on Elizabeth, Sir Thomas is a check on his wife, as is Mrs. Grant on the good doctor; The major critique of Fanny's mother is that she fails to be a check on husband, children, or servants, as the major critique of Mr. Bennet is that he fails to be a check on Mrs. Bennet and Lydia. Even the Admiral and Mrs. Crawford, while far more egalitarian and exuberant than previous model relationships, are presented with her tweaking the reigns while he drives.
What intensifies this for me is that we hardly ever see spouses when they are alone together, with the exception of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Bennet in the library, and a cameo of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, both discussing absent third parties. Possibly the unmarried Austen thought that was either something she couldn't believably recreate or an unsuitable subject for public portrayal because of the implication of sex, but it also prevents moments like the ones we were talking about, which pretty much have to be tete a tete.
Re: Sorry to hijack the comments like this
Date: 2004-01-29 12:58 pm (UTC)(I'd argue that Elinor, Fanny, and especially Anne are all shown as having bad consequences from their being overgoverned — the main difference from some of the ungoverned passionates being that they always overcome the difficulties, possibly because they're heroines not in tragedies. Okay, those are your vissitudes, but they have to loosen up to overcome them. Fanny, for example, explicitly becomes a full human being only when she's leaves behind her shyness and unwillingness to cross authority when it is wrong — and her first action of doing so is the start of her final transformation.)
---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 01:55 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:48 pm (UTC)