beasts of our own making

romantic parables, part II

Read the first part about two films I couldn’t stop thinking about after I saw them before you read this part, about two novels I’m basically always thinking about. If you want more Stormfire discussion, check out the Reformed Rakes episode!

Beauty and the Beast in particular is a common source of adaptation for romance novels. “Beauty and the Beast” stories in historical romance often involve a hero with a disability, often including facial disfigurement. Ravished by Amanda Quick (1992), Beast by Judith Ivory (1997), To Beguile a Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt (2009), and The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare (2017) are all examples of this mode. I think sometimes all it takes to label or claim something as a BatB adaptation is a grumpy male character with a physical disability or disfigurement. To me, this is a pretty boring threshold. I feel a range of things about the aforementioned books, but the interest I have in the ones I like is not really in the adaptation of a fairy tale, since that adaptive choice is repeated over and over again.

Both Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase and Stormfire by Christine Monson are less retellings of Beauty and the Beauty than stories where the tale is an ancestor or an ingredient. Both books do have heroines who are somewhat coercively or surprisingly taken to the domain of a “monstrous” man, in part out of some sense of duty, and a theme of that woman being uniquely qualified at uncovering value in that person, as well as man having to edit and restructure his domain to make space for her as mistress. And like the cinematic adaptations, I discussed in the first part, I don’t think either abandons the idea of didacticism or lesson teaching, though both do something different with that aim than the explicitly-for-children fairytale source. And the “lesson” is also not “Female reader, this is a story about the type of man you should be falling in love with. Takes notes”

monster in a marquess’s clothing

I’d put Lord of Scoundrels as my top romance of all time (this is not a hot take), if asked by a non-romance novel reader. I mostly just can’t imagine someone not having fun with it, even if they’ve never read a romance before. If a romance reader wanted to get into it with me, I might elevate something above it. But when co-workers or men I got on dates with say “Oh I’d like to try one of those books you’re always going on about,” I buy them a copy of Lord of Scoundrels.

Portrait of Francisco D'Andrade as the other most famous Italian rake, Don Giovanni, by Max Slevogt, 1912

What I love about Lord of Scoundrels is how Sebastian Dain, Marquess of Dartmoor, is made a Beast in his own head. Dain has been told his whole life he is ugly by his father, but his father the repressed marquess was already suspicious of his Italian mother before Dain was even born. He thought he was marrying a malleable teenager, but instead got a quick-tempered Italian who showed “uninhibited behavior in the bedroom.” Notably, Dain has quite a large nose that looks unwieldy on a child, though even as early as a prologue, the narration of the book acknowledges that he would grown into it well. But his father’s loathing is doubled when Dain’s mother abandons the family and Dain is sent off to private school where he is ruthlessly mocked for his non-English appearance. His sour personality has no resiliency to the mocking, which only encourages the group of bullies.

As an adult, Dain describes himself in terms of the devil, but constantly throughout the book, Chase makes it clear that what is beastly about him is his own self-image and fashioning. When the couple first meets, Dain catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and thinks “His dark face was harsh and hard, the face of Beelzebub himself. In Dain’s case, the book could be judged accurately by the cover, for he was dark and hard inside as well. His was a Dartmoor soul, where the wind blew fierce and the rain beat down upon grim, grey rocks, and where the pretty green patches of ground turned out to be mires that could suck down an ox.”

The same “darkness” in his eyes fascinates Jessica Trent: “Your eyes are very black. Intellect tells me they must be merely a very dark brown. Yet the illusion is…overpowering.” Dain performs most of his seduction of Jessica thinking he ruining her reputation as revenge for purchasing, and then refusing to sell to him, an antique that he wants. Dain totally misperceives the situation, not realizing that he is not performing seduction, he is seducing and correspondingly, he is falling in love.

After Dain and Jessica are engaged in Lord of Scoundrels, he thinks to himself: “She had kissed him back and touched him. And she hadn't seemed to mind being kissed and touched. Beauty and the Beast. That's what Beaumont would call it, the poison-tongued sod. But in thirteen days, this Beauty would be the Marchioness of Dain. And she would lie in the Beast's bed. Naked.” In-text “Beaumont” he references is not the author of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, but Dain’s close friend who is a dissipated villain, directly responsible for sowing the scandal that leads to the couple’s engagement. But the reference clearly functions doubly here. If we expand Beaumont the author of a fairy tale to be a “poison-tongued sod,” we get a hint of how Chase complicates the base of the story.

Jessica is not looking past either Dain’s “beast” like appearances or personality to find a nugget of hidden goodness to fall in love with. She is attracted to him as he is! That which has been called devilish or beastly has been maligned by vague rumors or cruel fathers. Dain does not transform by the end of the book, he opens up to meet his responsibilities and Jessica on terms that suit him.

A lot of Lord of Scoundrels is about the follies of attempting to “teach a lesson” or assess a situation from thing elevated and artificial vantage point that our hero, Dain tries to maintain. Dain views himself as removed from community, responsibilities, and emotions mostly because he totally buys into the idea that he is the beastly other, and the “lesson” he repeatedly thinks that he is going to teach Jessica Trent is that she is a fool for seeing the world any other way.

The idea that Dain is devilish or beastly has been repeated his whole life by first his father and then the ton, so he is always hearing insults with ears shaped by terrible self-image. He views his body as monstrous. He’s tall and broad (like many romance novel heroes), he has a large nose (so does Adrien Brody), and he’s olive-skinned with black hair (the horrors). This means when people react to his cantankerous and rakish behavior, he feels like they are confirming something inherent in his structure. He leans in and becomes Beelzebub himself.

Dain and Jessica’s romance is a game of chicken that neither one is sure the other one is serious about. She worries he is going to abandon her for another, more experienced woman (because she sees him as devilish in terms of rakedom—why couldn’t he just go find another woman), and he fears she is going to leave because she’ll realize that he is devilish in terms of a corrupt soul.

They meet when she wants to convince him to leave her brother alone—Bertie Trent can’t handle the rakish lifestyle that Dain maintains. Dain attempts to seduce her as a means of control, only to realize he can’t stop thinking about her hair. She flirts with him to get her way, only to be ruined in the ton’s eyes through her association with him. Even the marriage proposal is a series of one-ups. But unlike many Beauty and the Beast retellings, Jessica never has to get over the sight of Dain: she’s immediately attracted to him and clocks that his put-on wickedness with never be aimed at her.

[Speaking to her brother, Bertie Trent] “Your friend is right, dear,” said Miss Trent. “If word of this gets out, [Dain] cannot risk being seen with you. His reputation will be ruined.”

“Ah, you are familiar with my reputation, are you, Miss Trent?” Dain enquired.

“Oh, yes. You are the wickedest man who ever lived. And you eat small children for breakfast, their nannies tell them, if they are naughty.”

“But you are not in the least alarmed.”

“It is not breakfast time, and I am hardly a small child. Though I can see how, given your lofty vantage point, you might mistake me for one.”

Lord Dain eyed her up and down. “No, I don’t think I should make that mistake.”¹

On their post-wedding journey, both members of the couple are anxious about the wedding night, Jessica because she is a virgin and Dain because he assumes he is a brute and only a brute. How deeply seated his anxiety about his body is clear when he works himself into a frenzy thinking that he is doomed to break her:

“He would crush her. He would break something, tear something. And if he somehow managed not to kill her and if the experience did not turn her into a babbling lunatic, she would run away screaming if he ever tried to touch her again. She would run away, and she would never again kiss him and hold him.”

But in the same chapter, when she sees him without a shirt, Jessica thinks:

“The torchlight gleamed upon sleek olive skin, over broad shoulders and brawny biceps, and spilled lovingly over the hard angles and flexing curves of his chest. He turned, displaying to her dazzled eyes a smooth expanse of back, gleaming like dark marble and sculpted in clean lines of bone and rippling muscle. He might have been a marble Roman athlete come to life.”

This is not a body that a Regency romance novel heroine has to try very hard to love. Chase gives Dain a body that will become highly typical of romance novel heroes but stands out in a society that holds up Beau Brummell as the height of fashion. Dain exhibits almost dysphoric thoughts about it, particularly relative to Jessica’s body. His narration has a lot of “big man, tiny lady” (classic romance stuff) thoughts about Jessica, but once his anxiety dissipates he also thinks:

He could not believe his mind had been so disordered. In the first place, any cretin might have understood that if the female body could adapt to dropping brats, it must certainly be able to adapt to the breeding instrument—unless the man was an elephant, which he wasn’t, quite. In the second place, any imbecile might have recollected that this woman had never, since the time under the lamppost in Paris, recoiled from his advances. She had even spoken plainly enough—more than once, without a blink—about his breeding rights.

Dain knows, at points, that he is being irrational about his beastly body, but he returns to his comfort thoughts of himself as a damned-to-hell devil repeatedly still. Dain thinks of getting Jessica on board with this reality in terms of “teaching her a lesson” in terms of punishment, thinking if he just manages to be monstrous enough to her, she’ll finally see the truth (and subsequently abandon him).

Jessica has her own aphoristic lesson to teach Dain though, in terms of herself and in terms of Dain’s illegitimate son. Dain thinks his condemned status curses him to be an island of cruelty, but Jessica makes him see this does not excuse him from responsibilities: when he “ruins” her in Paris, he must fix it by marrying her, despite being terrified of accepting the love of a wife. When he has an illegitimate son, he must accept the responsibility of raising the boy, even if Dain is terrified of repeating the behavior of his own cruel father.

The book ends with Dain reappropriating his threat to teach Jess a lesson, about his patience and his virility. Now he is using what he once was a method of winning a method of true seduction. Jess retorts “My wicked darling, I should like to see you try.” The romance itself is not moralistically didactic to the reader in the way a fairy tale is, but the framing of character growth as lesson learning echoes something like Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête, which uses a children’s classroom as a framing device. But now the lesson because the romantic and sexual negotiation of the characters that the reader takes delight in.

laundry list of sins

Stormfire by Christine Monson does not trigger comparisons to Beauty and the Beast or Donkey Skin often or at all (based on a Google and Goodreads search of reviews), though the novel does directly reference Beauty and the Beast. But thinking about Stormfire, where the main reaction to the story is often a list of bad acts that occurs between the couple, in the structural terms of a fairy tale can be illuminating and one way to grapple with that violence. As soon as I started Stormfire I thought of the adaptations of the fairy tales that I discussed in the last part, that both have an underlying sexual violence and the promise of a happily ever after, whatever that looks like. 

Chels frequently says, in response to critiques of bodice rippers, that romance novels don’t have to be didactic to be worthy of reading or enjoyable to read. Meaning that the book does not have to depict a relationship worth emulating and in turn, just because a romance contains certain acts, it does not mean that those acts are condoned by the author or desired by the reader in a real-life relationship. I think this is an especially useful firewall in the context of bodice rippers, which I see as an important part of the genre’s history that it is disingenuous to write off as “not actually romances.” But in the case of a bodice ripper like Stormfire, maybe it can be didactic the way that fairy tales are didactic: instructive, but understandably metaphorical, because we trust the audience to understand figurative language.

In Stormfire, Catherine, the heroine, is kidnapped by Liam Culhane, at the behest of his domineering younger brother, Sean Culhane—the hero-villain of the book. Sean, Irish, has sworn revenge on Catherine’s father, an English administrator who was responsible for many deaths in Sean’s community, including his mother. Catherine is young and beautiful and has been doted on by her father since her mother passed away. The violence Sean enacts on Catherine is immediate and very tough to read. But she is kept in his manor in varying states of shackles and surveillance, continually refusing to make his keeping of her easy or to put up with abuses from the other members of his household, including many servants. 

The servants and Culhane’s men don’t quite know what to do with Catherine. They in turn suggest that Sean should be kinder, not necessarily out of concern for Catherine, but more out of worry that his continual public abuse of her will make others lose trust in him, while other times making Catherine’s life decidedly worse. They are also all Irish and don’t relish protecting the daughter of their enemy. Though not explicitly connected in the book, they function like the equally cursed servants of the Beast, who must live under the terms of their master’s curse. In Sean’s case, the curse, or that which makes him beastly, is the revenge plot that he is so obsessed with.

And Sean is beastly. He turns on a dime, is specific about his violence toward Catherine, and feels cursed by the violence he has experienced as a child. But the whole Stormfire world is violent. The reviews of Stormfire that focus on the laundry list of bad acts Sean does to Catherine sometimes ignore the extent to which violence permeates the book. Catherine is a victim of a lot of this violence, but also during her time in Ireland, she sees how pervasive the violence that enriched her family’s coffers is, all while she is planning a political betrayal of the Culhanes. 

But also, Catherine’s time away from her father, plus his demonstrated lack of interest in retrieving her after the kidnapping, illuminates elements of her father and mother’s relationship that she had blocked from her memory. Her father is revealed to be mostly interested in Catherine as a potential business-making tool, offering her up to the highest bidder as wife or mistress and Catherine realizes that the circumstances of her mother’s death, long thought to be an accident, were likely a result of her father’s intentional actions. John Enderly’s interest in Catherine does not rise to the level of the sexual fixation of the King in Donkey Skin on the princess, but it is a father’s love corrupted and distorted by his love of money and his hate of the Irish. Belle’s father in Beauty and the Beast stories may be characterized as a sweet fool, but his economic foolishness is what leads to the circumstances of Belle’s captivity. John Enderly may not be a fool, but he does prioritize his bottom line over both Catherine’s safety and her happiness. 

Sean certainly commits more directly violent acts than Dain—Dain’s beastliness primarily comes down to a cranky attitude in public, a noticeably large nose, and a shirking of duty to his illegitimate son as a misguided revenge against his own emotionally abusive father. Sean is actually sexually and physically violent since Stormfire is a bodice ripper. But like Dain, he is the character that gives us the direct Beauty and the Beast reference. After he has put Catherine, the heroine, through the ringer, emotionally and physically, they fall into a détente, where she is still clearly his prisoner, but they are growing more emotionally reliant on each other.

But after they grow closer, Catherine reveals the circumstances of her mother’s death with she was a child. The mother took a blind jump on a horse and landed on farm equipment, dying slowly as Catherine watched. As a reaction to the death, Catherine’s father locks her in her room, ostensibly out of worry for her being a danger to herself, though Catherine assumes she is blamed for her mother’s death. This is one of the first hints that Catherine’s relationship with her father is less idyllic than first characterized, even as we already know he is definitely the villain in Sean’s story. As a response to this disclosure, Sean takes Catherine on a boating voyage and after she falls asleep he wakes her by saying “Would you like to face the Beast now, Beauty, or go on sleeping?" Catherine responds "Is the Beast growling?" and Sean sweetly answers “Not much. He’s just a bit lonesome.”

So even though we do not have over-the-top one-to-one references to the motifs of the story, I am confident in classing both books as Beauty and the Beast iterations, if not direct adaptations. We have heroes who envision themselves in terms of the fairy tale’s hero’s appearance of villainy and an acknowledgment that the relationship with their “Beauty” complicates that identification with the Beast.

Stormfire also has both members of the couple learn very broad aphoristic lessons. Sean Culhane learns the futility of his desire for revenge against Enderly, a desire that led to Sean kidnapping Catherine, John’s seemingly spoiled and doted upon daughter. Catherine, on the other hand, during her captivity in Ireland under Sean’s thumb, has to reshape her worldview to accept that her aristocratic father is a perpetrator of harm, both politically to Sean’s Irish village and personally to Catherine’s own mother. Both members of the couple are transforming from a single-minded, juvenile perspective to a more adult understandings. They experience growing pains together! Outgrowing the family where you are a child to make the family where you are an adult is one of the major themes of many fairy tales, particularly those with romantic plots. (See: the last part’s discussion of Donkey Skin).

lesson learning

Fairy tales explicitly are didactic, though Donkey Skin is not an instruction manual on how to deal with a father’s sudden interest in an incestuous marriage. Charles Perrault’s included lesson in his story expands to be sweeping and universal, and mentions that it should not be hard to pick up: “It is not hard to see that the moral of this tale is that it is better to undergo the greatest hardships rather than to fail in one's duty, that virtue may sometimes seem ill-fated but will always triumph in the end.” Perrault assumes his readers will understand the genre he is in and be able to expand the message to daily lives.

Some critiques of both fairy tales and romance novels treat the consumer of the story as a fool. Gotchas of “The Beast is holding Belle PRISONER. NOT romantic” or that romance somehow simultaneously teaches women readers either to have unrealistically good expectations of love or to desire a partner who is an asshole parallel to each other. Both gotchas here assume a reader who must self-insert as the (usually female) protagonist and can only conceive any “lesson” or “moral” in terms of what is literally happening to the character.

Neither Lord of Scoundrels nor Stormfire are so explicit in their morals, but by referencing fairy tales, without attempting to be strict retellings of them, they function more closely to the adaptations that I discussed in the last newsletter. They borrow emotional structure and recontextualize it. The lessons of the fairy tales are not abandoned completely, but those lessons were never meant to be literal anyway.

1. Jessica Trent, woman that you are!!!