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.