Desert songs
Quentin Bell
The Purple Heart Throbs, the Sub-Literature of Love Rachel Anderson (Hodder and Stoughton £2.95) One falls upon this book with horrid delight, a relish which is increased by the pictures (although in truth it is good enough to deserve far more numerous and far richer illustrations); half amused and half appalled one prepares for an elitist giggle, which is just wnat, in ner secona chapter, the authoress tells us that she wants to avoid. She is perfectly right; the theme is indeed serious, but there must be some merriment — the plots of Ethel M. Dell, the pretensions of Marie Corelli, the inventions of Ouida are tremendously comic. It is therefore no easy matter to find an appropriate tone in which to write about them. Miss Anderson has done so, she is amused but never coy, grave but never pompous; the only fault in her manner is that at times she writes a little carelessly. Of her matter one may say that she never quite defines her subject; but for the rest, this is an enormously enjoyable, readable and instructive study.
The sub-literature of anything is an important part of the history of a people, and the history of the popular romance is the history of the changing day dreams of society and therefore a matter of the greatest interest. Of what then do we dream? Broadly speaking we dream of lives rather more interesting and dramatic than our own; we identify with people who are usually younger, more attractive, of a better class and better natured but not much more intelligent than ourselves, people whose tragedies and tribulations end, not like ours in the annihilation of the tomb, but in the eternal bliss either of paradise or of the nuptial couch. Miss Anderson is not concerned with the historical romance but with the 'true life story,' the kind of thing that could — or almost could — happen to us and which is therefore more easily assimilated by the day dreamer. The actual life and actual desires of the consumer—that is, the dreamer — is mirrored but magnified by the author. Hence the great historical importance of this branch of literature.
Here, in a history which begins in the middle of the nineteenth century and continues to the present day we may see how firmly, in the last century, the inner longings of the multitude were tied to religious belief, then later to a less definable creed and finally to a 'wider hope' of 'somewhere, somehow, something good.' But, from the first, there were doubts to be dispelled (indeed this was one of the main functions of the popular romance). Somewhere in the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge, I think it is in Magnum Bonum, a girl left in charge of her younger sisters writes with shy courage to tell her mother that she has been explaining to her juniors the agonisingly embarrassing facts of geology. Still for Miss Young the world was in the main one of certainties, a moral gymnasium in which one performed increasingly difficult exercises under the guidance of the Reverend Mr Keble. This was in the 'fifties and 'sixties, in the eighteen eighties we find John Strange Winter (alias Eliza Stannard) in a harsher theological climate. In The Soul of the Bishop fond hearts are torn asunder because the heroine and her episcopal hero are unable to agree as to the manner in which we should accept the thirty nine Articles. As Miss An
derson remarks, this could have been a fine subject, a conflict between affection and intellectual honesty; it was not quite that, a popular romance cannot be written in those terms; but it was, like Robert Elsmere, based on a serious theme and directed to a public which, at least, did not suppose that the thirty-nine Articles was a novel by John Buchan.
The battle for the faith (no popular novelist could ever have preached free thought) was continued by Marie Corelli, by Hall Caine and by Ethel M. Dell: indeed, it still continues in a mild non-sectarian way. But of course the essence of the romantic novel is love, and as faith declines love conquers all, although in so doing it changes its character. Only a Girl Wife by Ruth Lamb, published by the Religious Tract Society, deals with connubial love, but it is very different from the violent emotions that shake Ouida's lovers not to speak of the passionate creatures of Elinor Glynn. Religion withdraws in the new century, it retreats in the Great War; meanwhile passion advances. In 1919 Miss E. M. Hull by creating The Sheik gave a million women their hearts' desire. But was it the heart to which she addressed herself? For here under a thin veil of romantic circumlocution, with very little that could be described as ethical or religious adornment, the romantic novel became an erotic daydream of courtship and capture.
Misleadingly, The Sheik and its many imitators have become the emblem of popular romance. But this is very far from being the case. Nowadays the romantic novelists have left the subject of rape to the professional pornographer and to those who write for a smaller public; their talents serve other needs or, to put it crudely, another market. Unlike the pornographers, these writers have in a way to be realists, their creatures inhabit the same world as those bright, attractive, glossy but fundamentally decent people who, in other media, encourage us to buy motor cars, TV sets, gin and cigarettes, who live in a world of bright, prosperous domesticity in an enviable but not improbably glamorous manner. Dalliance is their business but marriage their end. "Sort of sensitive, with standards" says Miss Anderson, quoting from one of the chief producers of this kind of fiction. The standards are traditional standards, for the popular novel must of necessity be a little old fashioned, being aimed at the widest possible public. It asks us to imagine that we are young again, and this we are very willing to undertake, but it must not, in so doing, expect us to imagine that we in any way resemble the wholly unsatisfactory young people of today:
Romantic fiction champions cosily domestic and bourgeois values, which are the very antithesis of the aims and aspirations of Woman's Liberation.
This is surely true, and when one considers that twenty five million new romantic novels a year are sold in this country and that each of these twenty five million is read by more than one person, and usually by several people several times, when, furthermore, one considers that a large proportion, probably a great majority of these readers are women and that of the writers the overwhelming majority are certainly women, one may weep for Germaine Greer. Women, it seems, are ready not only to wear but to make the fetters of their servitude.
In the face of such facts should the apostles of sexual equality despair? I think not. One of the characteristics, and indeed one of the charms of 'sub-literature' is that we need not take it very seriously. Emma Bovary and Jude and Prince Andrei live on outside the pages in which they were born; but not all the passion of Miss Hull, nor all the seductive charm of Rudolph Valentino can give permanent existence to The Sheik. When we close the book he dies and with him whatever moral or message his creator may have in tended to convey. As this work very clearb' shows, the popular novelists made an enot-1 mous effort to keep Christians within the fold, and yet they failed. They may fail equally in their efforts to keep women in the home.
Quentin Bell has recently published Virginia Woolf — A Biography.
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