Georgette Heyer's The Quiet Gentleman on second reading: a rant

[cimorene]

It's not exactly that I didn't notice these things the first time I read it, but I didn't frame the critique in these terms...

Martin stands out throughout the book as a potential rapist for attempting sexual assault twice. (I'm going to refer to him as a rapist because that level of determination coupled with a violent conviction that he's right just makes it seem likely that he's a future one, even if on the occasions in question he just meant to forcibly make out with her our whatever.) Everybody in the book agrees that his behavior is bad (except his mother), but nobody seems to take it seriously either. The discussion is in terms of insulting and frightening the girl, not the basic fact that he doesn't respect her bodily autonomy. We're told that he feels ashamed the first time which is why he gets so angry, but it seems evident that his shame is because he knows his behavior is socially unacceptable, and not because he's traumatized Marianne or because he sees anything wrong with his intent. It seems clear that he literally believes that it's okay to grab and kiss a girl who's led you on and also that this will be efficacious in causing her to realize that she didn't actually mean to say no in the first place.

Then there's Theo and his multiple attempts to murder/frame for the murder (respectively) these two cousins he was raised with as a brother. Now, nobody in the book presents this as okay, but the hero sets himself apart from everybody else when he plans to cover up this crime as well and send the cousin to Jamaica, i.e. to simply make it impossible for him to murder them from a logistical standpoint, without addressing the fact that he made like six attempts in a row to commit murder. The hero is allowed to pontificate and reflects that Theo was raised to value nothing but the property his cousin was to inherit, while being treated unfairly by their dad. Now, obviously, an unfair upbringing by a bad uncle can engender resentment and the values you're taught as a child can shape what you value, but the hero skips over the distance between that and premeditated murder, presenting it as a natural consequence. The solution of exiling him to Jamaica presupposes that his determined murderousness was caused by his motive, as opposed to there being anything wrong with his temperament or character. In fact he's obviously crazy and violent and there's nothing to stop him from being a sociopath in Jamaica as well now.

To say nothing of the way the narrative is basically all about illustrating how the Right Way to do things for the upper class, which is also presented as the morally correct and JUST way to do things, is to break the law whenever they feel like it in order to keep all other upper class people from being dealt with by the criminal justice system. In other words, this book is basically about how, according to Georgette Heyer, the British upper class is and should be above the law because of their inherent superiority; how the law applies and is meant to apply to lesser mortals only; and how it is the business and duty of the members of the upper class to protect its other members, no matter their crimes, from the inferior judgment of the law, and to keep their sentencing private. (Heyer's characters don't just circumvent the law to protect upper class baddies from the law; they also circumvent it to mete out their own punishment, which is in other novels sometimes murder.)

But it's more than that, because it seems that the author agrees with the hero that Theo isn't really a bad guy, he just suffers from one particular idée fixe about killing people and ruining lives in order to take their wealth for himself (an unequal inherited wealth that he's already profiting from by living as a member of the family in luxury!). It's even more evident that while the book considers Martin's behavior awful, it also considers him to be basically a good, nice guy. The text explicitly blames his flaws of character on having been spoiled multiple times, and considers his sexual assaults on that combined with a too-innocent teenaged girl 'accidentally' 'leading him on' because of being too young to know that he would take her behavior for sexual invitation. Whoops, too bad! Essentially, him being an attempted rapist is his parents' fault for being shitty parents.

Not only is being a future rapist not his fault, but it's not even anything he or anyone else appears to think they need to seriously address in his character, by, for example, reinforcing when it's okay to sexually assault women (never) or pointing out that women have feelings, or that in general you can't just get what you want and when you don't, violence or force is not an acceptable response. Nobody even addresses his apparent willingness to duel a close family friend to the death for the heinous crime of defending themselves from his assault! They tell him that that's not how the code of honor works and he had no right to call the guy out, but they appear to think that an intense desire to kill someone for *returning* his punch is just a mild anger management problem, and not mentally unbalanced and seriously wrong.

So in conclusion, the thing about reading Heyer is... it's not just the "people like me" issue (i.e., we are not to be found in the books and she would hate us) - how Heyer is always on the side of the powerful, rich, hegemonic masculine, white, heteronormative, conservative, and in fact, plutocratic (Heyer's characters show moral fiber by being against any sort of representative government). It's also that even if you presuppose those interests her worldview is still... reactionary. But also kind of bugfuck, sometimes. We totally need a criminal justice system and the inherently wise noble people did a great job of setting that up, but we definitely don't want it to have power over rich people! Etc.

Comments

[waywren]

...Wow. I'm really glad I gave that one up in the first chapter, then. I do like SOME Heyer, like Grand Sophy (the great problems of her massive anti-Semitism as demonstrated in the figure of the usurious moneylender and her tendency to blame Eugenia's profound lack of empathy on being a bluestocking acknowledged, railed at, and regretted), Cotillion, and Venetia, but I couldn't get into Quiet Gentleman at all and I don't think I'll ever care to reread Slyvester, or The Wicked Uncle.

[cimorene]

I can't stand Sylvester for the embarrassment and the "but this wouldn't be a problem if you people hadn't acted dumb and could be solved by a conversation at various points" factor (and I couldn't the first time I read it, which was when I was like 12 or something, and I haven't read it since then, so I have no memory of any of these more meta factors about it. At all.) However, it's pretty remarkable to me for the fact that that plot has been ripped off so brazenly and so amazingly widely throughout the romance genre, especially Regencies, but not even limited to that. It's truly staggering. (My mom had a Giant Room full of paperback romances, 2/3 regencies, the kind you can buy at used bookstores by the bagful, which I used to read pretty frequently in between other books.)

[vass]

Your last paragraph reminds me a lot of my reaction to Agatha Christie.

We don't exist, we shouldn't exist, everyone is the same.

[krait]

Yep. I have to read Heyer with a very tight grip on the reins of my Disbelief Suspension, and a hand lightly redirecting the needle of my Moral Compass. The ones I've read have been fun, and thankfully I've avoided any outright rapists, but even so I've hit smaller things that threw me for unexpected loops.

[cimorene]

I think I've read all of them minus two or three. Many of them I was familiar with before I was capable of interrogating the text at that level, and I do consider them in general preferable to most of the television available to me since at least they feature multiple female characters while consciously and unconsciously reinforcing dubious ethics/morality/'lessons'. And of course, also, I do read them in that way. I think it's easier to do so because a) she's dead and b) most of her dumbest, wackest ideas are no longer currently socially acceptable. Like, it's possible to shake my head and scoff at them instead of feeling attacked by them.

[stranger]

I love Heyer, and yet... all these things you note are true. I've come to see the books as a fantasy of the Regency era, ahistorical in that classism is somehow good, which doesn't negate the skeevy bits for the reader!

The issue that bothers me most is the routine if marrying teenaged young women to older men whom they don't know or like. Most storylines show a couple getting to know each other and falling in love as a grand exception to this custom. What about all the brides who think the new husband isn't attractive or even livable-with? Most of the arranged matches of a Season are effectively rape.

(Also, just how many handsome, monied and well-mannered noblemen can there be in London? But every heroine gets one.)

[cimorene]

Oh yeah, I love her books too. Her style, that is, and maybe a third of her fictional worlds. It's impossible nowadays for me to read without noticing these embedded messages, but it's also possible to not take them seriously in most cases. As far as the ideologies of her heroes and heroines, it's understandable given the time period. I can regard the fact that the metatext evidently also agrees as an embarrassing slip-up and set it aside while reading.

It's rare that one of her books enrages me as badly as this one does (Though Cousin Kate was worse). It's the specific rapeyness even more than her ludicrous moral philosophy. In general, many romance novels can be quite rapey and Heyer's are probably better than the average actually; this is the first one that really stood out so badly like that.

[fredericka_dragontea]

I know you are right about all of this. I still love this book but have not read most of her books for a decade. She is sexist and classist, and anti-Semitic. Attempted rape against the heroine is dealt with a bit more sternly. This is still one of my favorites, as well as Sylvester. The sexy older man from Arabella and others of that ilk has always set my teeth on edge-- too supercilious. As has been remarked many times, often the most likeable character is the side kick (in the Quiet Gentleman the hero has the character of a side-kick in many ways, and that is its charm.) Jane Austen, too, was sexist, classist, and hostile to feminists. The few romances that are not hostile to feminists just show their hostility by making the feminist heroine be silly and unreasonable. A lot of what I read these for is the other characters-- the opinions of the dandies, the butler, the younger siblings, the aunties and parents. Mainly the dandies!

[cimorene]

It's true, Austen was. Christie was also some of these things, but I think that a few things in this book in particular stand out to me as distinct from them:

1. The endorsement of rape-indicative behaviors and
2. The author's obvious moral conviction about the upper class being above the criminal justice system; her delusion that they are naturally, as members of the upper class, inherently better qualified to act as judge and jury, for other members of their class.

To address #2 first and why I think it's a big deal:

Of course, Christie, like many murder writers, does have instances of people going above the law because of their superior wisdom which she appears to endorse, but I consider her view more nuanced, even than Arthur Conan Doyle's. For example, when he does this in Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot is really conflicted about it, and doesn't consider himself qualified to do so, but does it anyway because he considers it the action which causes the least harm.

In Miss Marple and also in Sherlock Holmes, when the detective circumvents the law for what they see as a fairer outcome, it is often in favor of the lower classes, and Christie, too, often shows upper class people to be morally bankrupt, and occasionally nouveau riche to be deeply moral. She does believe in some people's innate gentility which causes them to be more worthy of judgement, but she doesn't believe that this is associated with actual nobility/genetics/social class.

Unlike Heyer.

And back to #1 and your point about anti-feminism in Austen and Heyer:

Of course, in some ways Heyer was a feminist - the qualities many of her heroines have, and the way she shows them and other women, of multiple classes even, to be more capable of independence and problem-solving than society or sexism would consider them. On the other hand, she probably subscribed to the old-fashioned "difference" feminism, as one does see "Men are naturally bad at these things and women are naturally bad at these other things" a lot (even more obviously in her mysteries as they are set later in time).

It's normal for dudes in Heyer and other romances to make an attempt at rape, and be under-punished for it, by the hero beating them up, or being forced to flee the country, or obviously doomed to some poor fortune monetarily or otherwise, or just to understand that they have been taught a lesson (usually not a lesson about rape though), something that is actually very rare with delusional wrong people, who tend to be incapable of having any realizations at all. (Example: the end of Cotillion when after Freddie punches Jack, he becomes good-humored about Freddy and Kitty's impending nuptials and wishes the other characters the best without bitterness, as well as coming to understand that Kitty and Freddy fell in love, when he had been claiming that she was hunting a title. In actuality, dudes who assuage their egos with some ludicrous excuse to explain why a woman doesn't want them won't give up these fictions at any cost, usually.)

But usually the attempted rape is definitely associated with the perpetrator being a Bad Guy. The difference in The Quiet Gentleman is how firmly Martin is associated with the good guys. He's seen at the end of the book to be firmly situated in the role of the over-eager, quite young man who idolizes the hero's coolness, which is something Heyer loves to write. Apparently the attempted rape was written into the story as part of the 'mystery', to make the reader mistakenly believe that he was being set up as the bad guy when he wasn't.

But he also makes TWO attempts, quite close together, WITH an attempted apology in between, to the SAME girl, and he's not only really determined about it, but reacts with actual extreme violence - in fact with attempted murder!! - to the other men who intervene to stop him from raping. And that is a REALLY EXTREME EXAMPLE, one that I can't recall seeing in any of her other books, or indeed, very many books at all. Those factors combined show me pretty clearly a person who is a rapist, uncontrollably violent, probably an abuser when he's married - someone to whom women aren't people and have no agency, and other people (men) are believed to have agency, but he doesn't care about it and still earnestly believes they deserve to be KILLED for going against his wishes (even when he explicitly acknowledges they had an understandable reason for doing so).

Well, I mean, when the hero puts THAT kind of behavior pattern down to youthful indiscretion and being a spoiled brat... it's... crazy. And I think more anti-feminist because she seems to endorse men considering women as objects.

This post is not about the merits of the book - the hero and heroine are charming - or about the merits of her other books - I obviously like them, but it's not relevant. It's just about the embedded messages about morality and worldview in her books and, basically, how utterly bonkers and really slimy they are.

[fredericka_dragontea]

You are right about Martin, and I think she probably did it to muddy the waters. That part of the story is depraved. Theo attempts murder more than once and gets sent to manage and own slaves as a punishment, I presume.
Actually, that whole line about not liking feminists because your character so firmly shows how YOU are not a victim is the equivalent to the argument that women do not need the vote because they have enormous power in "pillow talk."
It is offensive.