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© Judith Wilt 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–42697–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction: In the Place of a Hero 1 1 Wuthering Heights: A Romance of Metaphysical Intent 23 2 Middlemarch: A Romance of Diffusion 53 3 Exotic Romance: The Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik 87 4 The Hero as Expert: Ayn Rand’s Romances of Choice 123 5 The Hero in “Gouvernance”: Family Romance in the Novels of Dorothy Dunnett 160 Conclusion: Kingdoms of Romance in Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey 195

Bibliography 209 Index 218

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Introduction: In the Place of a Hero

The leading characters of romances … are usually 99% compounded of artifice – an assembly of heroic virtues and physical attributes based more on legends, poetry, other novels than on real men and women. Heroic characters, therefore, may be assembled from reading. But real characters – there is a different thing. If we are writers, we must all mix with people – on the street, in the bus, at work, in sport, on holiday … For there is no crash laboratory course on people. Understanding of humankind is something that must be accumulated and stored as life goes on. Dorothy Dunnett1

Today (whichever today we are in) we are empty of heroes and skeptical of the very idea. Yesterday (recent or ancient yesterday) we discerned heroes, and our worshipful admiration was their reward; and ours. This sense of loss is the condition of modernity, and “modernity” goes back to forever. This was Thomas Carlyle’s analysis in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). And in the years since the New York City firefighters went up the down staircases in the Twin Towers, the cycle of hero creation and deletion has picked up speed. Heroes are so fragile and fleet- ing, Carlyle said throughout his analysis, that he would have thought all were lost, if not for the fact that the instinct of “hero-worship” survives the death, and commands the birth, of the hero. More skeptically, Amy Lowell’s 1912 poem “Hero-Worship” commends the “Brave idolatry/ which can conceive a hero,” adding “No deceit,/ No knowledge taught by unrelenting years/ Can quench this fierce, untamable desire” (1912: 91).

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2 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance

We inherit this process as a gendered one, but it is deceptively complex. The roles of hero and worshipper seem gendered male and female respectively, but what if the worshipper “conceives” the hero? The 1982 television show Remington Steele featured a canny female detective- entrepreneur creating an illusory male as (the head of) her agency in a patriarchal world: a nameless man stepped into the empty office of the hero and there began a struggle – is there enough “agency” in the agency for two? The young Pierce Brosnan made a wonderfully wayward child to the sexily mature young Stepfanie Zimbalist, but the imbalance tilted almost immediately out of family romance to popular romance, where the premise always is that Love Changes Everything, making magically illimitable what we fear is the zero-sum game of power. “I’m holding out for a hero,” sang Bonnie Tyler in the 1984 film Footloose, “he’s gotta be strong and he’s gotta be fast … and he’s gotta be larger than life.” The drumbeat of the song calls up subtle mockery as well as “wildest fantasy,” but the lyrics by Jim Steinman and Dean Pitchford go on to locate the hero in the invisible place-between, “where the mountains meet the heavens,” where the “larger” is a mirror for what should/could be “life,” and the worshipper can feel the approach of the hero-god “like a fire in my blood.” For Emily Brontë, poet and storyteller, “a flood of strange sensations” internal to the worshipper blurs the distinction between the emphatically bodily imagination and its external trigger and object, the god, the hero, the power.2 In cultures shaped by western Christianity, whose “sacraments” insist on a mystic relationship between an external sign and an inward transformation, the hero seems a kind of sacrament. We can think about “the hero” anthropologically, psychologically, in cultural and literary representation. It is a well-traveled theme, and I want to travel it again, an avid reader and later teacher and critic, a bodily imagination gendered female, a professional specialist in Victorian fiction with a consciousness deeply structured by twentieth- century popular culture genres – fantasy, mystery, history, and the mother of them all, romance. Out of that experience I ask myself: How do the shapes of hero and hero worshipper wrestle each other in the stories of culture, and what does the rise of women storytellers bring to that encounter? Are the hero and hero worshipper an eternal dyad? Striving for incorporation? Separation? Both? Is one the instrument or prosthesis of the other? The hero emerges in culture as a pedagogical example for, but also from, the worshipper. “Conceiving the hero,” the worshipper romances her/himself. The last lines of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” ask the question whether the worshipper might actually have “put on his knowledge with his power, before the indifferent beak could let her

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The Place of a Hero 3 drop?” Perhaps the worshipper deliberately seeks the fiery embrace of the swan-god with this strategy in mind? Perhaps, as Charlotte Brontë notes of her sister’s monumental Heathcliff in her 1850 Preface to the novel, the artist creates a hybrid figure “half statue, half rock” (23), half power, half human, in an experimental (dis)obedience to chthonic persuasion? And perhaps, as in some outliers of Jewish and Christian theology, the beak is not in fact indifferent: perhaps the gods-heroes-angels actually envy the embodied and agonistic and conceptually fertile mor- tality of the human?

The hero: an invented/invested space “between.” As humanity’s thinkers began to classify the work of the human imagination, in its structure and historicity, “heroes” occupied a middle ground, a mediating/mystifying function both generative and occult, in philosophy, in sociopolitics, in aesthetic desire. Like the middle term of a syllogism, which frees “reason” to juxtapose categories and makes static binaries yield new possibilities, the hero forces space between the “all” and the “none,” opening the pro- found and variable territory of the “some”: men are not gods, but some are heroes. As cultural critic Andrew Von Hendy outlines the process in The Modern Construction of Myth (2002), the seventeenth-century philosopher Vico quotes “the Egyptians” as the source for a worldwide myth system originating the spectrum – gods, heroes, and men; the nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche quotes Plato on this. It appears that the middle term, the hero, is how we gained purchase on our individual and species history, as that other middle term between gods and men, “aristocracy,” spoke to our sociopolitical passion for the “some” – some are “naturally” lords, by blood, deed, virtue. An entanglement of real and/or utopian sociopolitics with individual and heterosexual desire was a part of European thinking during the transition from “feudal” to modern times, reflected, as literary historian Michael McKeon (1987) suggests, in the transition from romance to romantic fiction. Such a view draws attention to the erotics of politics available in such terms as “subject” and “subjection” as argued by Renaissance critic Melissa Sanchez (2011), an erotics elaborated especially effectively, I shall propose, by historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett’s handling of the concept of “gouvernance.”3 Andrew Von Hendy tracks from Vico to Carlyle and beyond the philo- sophies of language and genre, the effort at representation, through which we humans staged those intuitions of magnitude and mobility emerging from the collision of our consciousness with the dire facts and fragilities of our material situation. First in pictures and then in sound and then in the unpredictable three-dimensionality of story, representation

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4 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance stages in an “epoch” of gods the silent gianthood of origins and ends, of “all” and “none.” There follows an epoch of striving heroes outlined in song and in the changeless structures of allegorical narrative, and then an epoch of men, characterized by narratives informed by historical and eventually psychological change. In this analysis representation, art, improves in complexity but suffers a kind of declension in simplicity, stature, and vision, compensated for, early nineteenth-century thinkers hoped, by the new sciences of reason and politics and especially by the god-like gift, or re-forged tool, of the symbol. Sifting and classifying floods of new information, Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers confirmed and indeed hero-worshipped the symbol, which is first embodied, literally, as the gift of the hero. The hero and/as the symbol bridges the gap between our intuited at-homeness with the gods and our wounded lostness in mortal time. However, as picture and song generated for themselves more complicated forms of narrative, the imagination faced a conceptual difficulty, says Von Hendy, the gap between symbol as sublimely arresting presence, “as apprehended in the flick of an eye,” and symbol’s distribution over the complicating plots of narrative, “between symbol’s immediate presentability and myth’s narrative dimension” (2002: 43). It is a form of the gap between overmaster- ing insight and mastering intellect, a gap that Carlyle argues is bridged explicitly in the English tradition by that “poet as hero,” Shakespeare. For his is simultaneously “a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative … is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man” (1841: 104). A wide thing (re)constructed as narrative, the gap (almost) erased by that “in short.” Writing in the next century, in the age of Marshall McLuhan and Harvey Cox, critic Marshal Fishwick offered the quintessential American hero symbol for the dilemma: “History is meaningless without heroes: there is no score before they come to bat” (1969: 1). But the batter got processed into celebrity narratives when he laid down his bat, and myth’s narrative dimension splits him into absence and presence both: “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” asks the Simon and Garfunkel song of 1968’s The Graduate, “A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” On September 11, 2001, a group of Islamic young men, all products of middle-class aspirant parents turned heroes of an alien aristocracy of grace, wrote their message in the sky: on September 12, reports Lucy Hughes-Hallett in Heroes: A History of Hero Worship, “a group of people were photographed near the ruins of the World Trade Center holding up a banner reading “WE NEED HEROES NOW” (2006: 14).

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The Place of a Hero 5

“Heroism” is a lot of weight for flesh and bones and nerves to carry, and not only physically: the task of signification pushes the executant past comedy into farce. Ask Atlas, ask Hercules. Just one tilt of the wrestle between hero and worshipper and you are the farce instead of the force: standing up you are being set up. Ask Oliver Cromwell, ask Napoleon. Ask Colin Powell. Ask Barack Obama. Ask Richardson’s Lovelace, Dickens’s Steerforth, Lawrence’s Gerald Crich. Storytelling speaks the hero in ways that faithfully register the mind’s experience of life’s awesome presence and its awful contingency. Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) gave the nod to romance as the oldest form of storytelling and mapped its contours, its counter- forms and hybrid returns, around the hero’s “power of action” in a spectrum of imagined environments from the bitterly resistant to the yieldingly reconstructable or reconcilable. Frye’s “literature” is a wheel of eternal returns, storytelling supplying what each age requires in a “half-conscious imitation of organic rhythms or processes”; the humani- ties that study each culture’s progressive understanding of storytelling’s contribution, Frye claims, in a familiar mid-twentietieth-century gesture, are “quite as pregnant with new developments as the sciences” (1957: 33, 334). In the next decade Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) summarized a generation of new-formalist literary and philosophical criticism about the literary and cultural hero journey from antiquity to modernity, focusing first on the frantic impulse to storytelling com- pelled in western culture by the failure of the year 1000 to produce the Christian Parousia. Myths compel/express absolute beliefs; they are avatars of abidingness. But fictions are a call not merely to emulation but also to scrutiny, says Kermode: “fictions are for finding things out,” even about heroes and hero worship (1968: 39). Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History attributes to a semi-mythical Frenchman, that nation of modern rationalists, the recognition that no man can be a hero to his all-seeing valet (1996: 183), and calls on the German romantic poet Goethe and the Scots man of letters Burns to blow the spark of English hero worship into an invigor- ating flame. A nation of “valets,” he sneers, merely wants to report on the hero’s accidental micro-doings to the TMZs of celebrity culture, but a nation of hero worshippers, cherishing mystery, or at least enigma, will make a place for the hero. And the Scottish popular historian and novelist Dorothy Dunnett, who is the subject of this book’s last chapter, reaches back like Kermode to the turn of the second millennium to allow a boldly re-historicized Macbeth to understand his unexpected heroism through a wry and one might say

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6 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance

Derridean reflection originating in an early Irish Chronicle comment on the leader Brian Boru: “he was not a stone in the place of an egg, and he was not a wisp in the place of a club, but he was a hero in [the] place of a hero.”4 Like the imaginable Leda of Yeats’s poem, Dunnett’s Macbeth “takes on” the power of the mythic hero, incorporates into his human stone and wisp something of the egg’s potency, and the club’s: the hero is always/only the hero when he is in the place of a hero.

Fiction needs heroes even more than life does. Storytelling “goes” because of the “agon”: the hero, protagonist and/or antagonist, is the one who goes through it. He goes and he undergoes; he dares and he is destined; he is (in) the place where the divine inevitable, and the human/random this-and-that, manifest simultaneously. Thomas Carlyle wrote and delivered On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History as a series of six lectures on the parlous state of a British nation addicted to such puny modern values as “happiness” and “personal freedom,” countering with storytelling about the moments in human history where the right action of the “great man” and the reciprocally active gaze of the community created a “force” that released into the human world the social energies that mastered the most usable energies of light, wind, and water. For Carlyle, the hero as we have him in representation is a mixed god– man: his light-bringing lies in the vivid eye flicks of symbol, and when we stoop to diffuse him in the narrative of his doings and his times we find him clouded. In the great myths Odin and Thor appear to desert their worshippers, but the fact is the other way around: it is the worshipper who subjects these figures to “the law of mutation” (1996: 39). Heroes are actually humanity’s tools of its own evolution; here Carlyle is sharpening a modification to Virgil’s original version of the hero. A decade later in his Past and Present (1843), “the proper Epic of this world is not now ‘Arms and the Man’ … it is now ‘Tools and the Man’” (2000: 208). Confusions and ambitions aside, Carlyle argues in the earlier work, Cromwell was the necessary “third act” of English Protestantism (1996: 237): overtaken by “charlatanism” as he was, Napoleon put the necessary stamp of “form” on the idea of Revolution: “a great implement too soon wasted” (1996: 243). For some nineteenth-century thinkers these heroes are instruments in the hands of a transcendental God, working in counterpoint and synthesis toward an imaginable harmony of freedom and order. However for others, like Marx and Hegel, it is the community and more specifically the nation that makes (and unmakes) the hero, and the moral as well as

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The Place of a Hero 7 political future. Carlyle may not really be “the father of hero-theory,” as Bruce Meyer proposes in Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imagination (2007: 7), but Carlyle does establish history as the place of (waiting for) the hero. And the hero in history as well as the hero in pan-cultural myth suffers what Joseph Campbell calls the double focus in the role of the hero, through whom we experimentally make both what we (need to) believe – myths – and what we (need to) find out – fictions. From the hero we want a story of linear action/achievement – a fiction of exploration – which really amounts to a remembering – a myth of unveiling. The doing shows what already is. The hero journeys and quests, becoming what we make him to have been. The obscure peasant is actually the lord’s son; the dubious or impossible deed is already written; the talent discovered is the one we always had (Campbell 1968: 39). In the “monomyth” behind Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) the hero goes out to come home, withdraws in order to be brought to light/enlightenment. He expends/empties his force to accomplish “the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world” (1968: 36); it is that energy that puts the man in the hero’s place. And as his very example hardens into habit, or tyranny, as the ancient legend said of Minos (1968: 14), the hero disappears, so that the vacant place of the hero incites worshippers to test out a new candidate, at first substitute or sham, for the role of the real thing. In this deliberately occulted representational process, the burden of “modern” consciousness is severe. The inciting symbols emerge from fertile darkness and command an entry into darkness; the hero’s work cannot be consciously done. With all his emphasis on song and speech, the Carlyle of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History above all worships silence, recognizes the hero’s rugged, or inept, or even abashed, silences, and valorizes them. What the hero cannot articulate he cannot falsify; what he cannot or will not reason to we can trust as the most authentic and sincere of visions. Worshipper and hero unite in half-understanding, evading, for a time, the corrosion of consciousness. A century later the dilemma worsens. With so many of the “great co-ordinating mythologies branded as lies,” with every individual called to hyper-consciousness of “meaninglessness” outside himself, Campbell ends his book, the hero’s work can happen not in the mode of action or reason but rather “in the silences of his personal despair” (1968: 388, 391). His stories are told, Kermode comments a generation later, in the novels of Sartre and Camus and Iris Murdoch, fictions where personal despair in a wrestle with pure “contingency” nevertheless evokes at least an approach to the shapeliness of coordinating mythologies of freedom,

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8 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance or love (1968: 135–143). Writing in 2004 but with an emphatically twentieth-century perspective, Theodore Ziolkowski finds examples of his Hesitant Heroes as far back as Orestes and Aeneas, but contends that modernity (our own modernity, not that of Euripides or Virgil) introduces a new dimension figured in the name of Walter Scott’s first novel hero, “Waverley,” for now the hero’s uncertainties “do not stem, as earlier, from the simple conflict of two opposing ideologies but from the perceived frangibility of existence itself and the ethical consciousness of universal guilt” (2004: 139). It is the new (old) modern discovery. The hero will always waver in and out of “place,” mobile as symbol is mobile, in an eye flick first there and then not-there. For the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, Frye and the other defenders of romance and its hero make a good case for the form’s “vitality,” even for its temporary utility as “the place of narrative heterogeneity and freedom” when late capitalist “realism” becomes ossified. But for Jameson the hero is really not-there; the awe- ful presence of individual identity itself is altogether too theological and bourgeois a concept. Heathcliff, for instance, is really, in distanc- ing quotation marks, “Heathcliff.” That is, history (see The Political Unconscious [1981]: 105, 125, 131, 128). As if the narrator of Vanity Fair had not already written “a novel without a hero.” As if the 700 plus pages of David Copperfield had ever really answered its opening question: “whether I am the hero of my own life.” Well, actually, the last page of Dickens’s novel does suppose an answer, imaged in a female face both shining on him from Heaven and “serene” at his side. Actually, Thackeray’s novel does have a hero. His name is Becky Sharpe.

What about women in all this? Can a woman be a hero? “Hero theo- rists” of the past, Carlyle and Nietzsche, Bentley and Kermode, conduct their surveys, inquiries, and evaluations of heroes and hero worship with men in the title role and both men and women in the place of the worshipper. Joseph Campbell’s chapters on female figures in the great old stories outline woman’s functionality, and fungibility, as the “all/ world” from which the hero comes and which he must master: she is present as mother, sister, mistress, bride, goddess, but also as the “other” part of the hero himself, the other of his own self that he must quest to incorporate, as the symbol of Adam’s Rib suggests (1968: 111, 342). Writing A History of Hero Worship, Lucy Hughes-Hallett chooses eight heroes, all male; in European tradition, she admits, the heroes generate one another, and not even Joan of Arc, dressing for her hero’s task as a

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The Place of a Hero 9 man, could break that tradition (2006: 10). The father of Achilles may have dressed him as a girl when the warlord came round recruiting, but Agamemnon laid out the signing bonuses and the hero seized not the cup or the robe but the sword, “unable to suppress his true nature” (2006: 9). Heroes’ stories actually resemble women’s stories in one respect, Hughes-Hallett comments: like the woman, the hero is “simultaneously adored and marginalized, being more often an object of veneration than a holder of power” (2006: 8). Nevertheless, to propose a female or two, perhaps Elizabeth Tudor, perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, in the tradition that moves from Achilles through Garibaldi, she cautions, would present a falsely rosy picture of a hero form actually accessible to women. It mainly is not. Virginia Woolf offers a suggestively mixed picture of heroic women in A Room of One’s Own (1929): the books of the British Museum describe a “queer composite being” who appears “heroic” in world literature but insignificant in real history (1989: 43). But she created a powerful myth of her own in the hero who was “Shakespeare’s Sister,” moving in and out of anonymity, there and not-there, speaking and writing of things as they actually are in the lives of men and women, and in every generation “putting on the body she has so often laid down,” but only “with effort on our part,” when “we work for her,” when the hero worshipper calls a woman into the place of the hero.5 Woolf thought the nineteenth century the “epic age” of women’s writing in England (1989: 79), and Ellen Moers’s trailblazing 1976 account of women writers and their characters, Literary Women: The Great Writers, takes for its starting point Woolf’s heroic characterization. She coins the term “heroinism” for the variously emblematic journeys, tasks, and con- flicts pursued by the (female) protagonists of nineteenth-century women novelists, but the term does not satisfy her, for it smacks of the secondary, the second thought, the second rate, especially in an age where feminism’s resistance to standard patriarchal structures put the gender question in every debate, a modernity where, as Woolf commented in Room, everyone always has to think of their sex (1989: 103–104). Expressing a dilemma and dismay noted by Woolf and familiar to all readers of nineteenth-century women novelists, Moers warns: “Feminism is one thing, and literary feminism, or what I propose to call heroinism, is another” (1976: 122). Heroines from Elizabeth Bennet to Clarissa Dalloway have mastered the all/world by marrying their masters, a problematic enigma; female questers from Brontë’s Lucy Snowe to Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf have passed through and beyond the “master” to find the place of their own heroism in the all/world. Yet the place seems equivocal, the quest in pause, the world not yet “all.”

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10 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance

Much contemporary feminist criticism, dissatisfied, finds these quests promising, but insufficiently revolutionary. When Janice Radway conducted her groundbreaking study of actual women reading actual romance novels, she discovered that readers often value the heroine- quester’s independent resistance to cultural norms evident in the first 90 percent of the narrative and then ignore or creatively re-shape in imagination the meaning of the happy endings, to allow her, like the hero of epic or the “sunny imagination” of the reader of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, to keep both her independence and her community. This utopian intervention by writer and/or reader, Radway mourned, leaves the reader without that “comprehensive program for substan- tively reordering the structure of her life in such a way that all [her] needs might be met” that literature ought to offer (1984: 215). However, the notion that a novel has the power to supply such a “comprehensive program,” Pamela Regis counters, is itself a utopian premise (2003: 12–13). Storytelling with a romance structure, she argues, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to the best contemporary practitioners, rather charts the progress of its feminine and its masculine consciousness equally toward a field of freedom that requires the dismantling of “barriers” socially imposed and internally adopted: the freedom that both reach “is not absolute. It is freedom nonetheless” (2003: 30). What marks it as such, Regis suggests, using a term coined by Northrup Frye, is the story’s staging of the barrier, whether pride or prejudice, law or family or property or politics or even temperament, as resisting the possibility of change up to even “the point of ritual death” – the denial of the possibility it has raised and brought the reader to invest in (2003: 35). The resurrection of this possibility of mutual change, of romantic union, confers a sense of freedom even while, fresh from “the betrothal” that restores the sense of possibility, the romantic quester-couple confronts a social state whose gender and class assump- tions are less changed than they themselves are, and begin to work with each other and with that social state in the sturdy but “provisional” freedom that their own change has conferred (2003: 16).6 Those who study and theorize about the woman writer, who is of course first of all the woman reader, remind us that in the early stages of education and canon formation women readers are invited to and actually do live the experience of the “self” through both the female protagonist and the standard male hero. Working from insights developed by Rachel Blau Du Plessis and later Kate Flint, Pamela Regis notes in A Natural History of the Romance Novel that women have classically “read across the gender barrier much more readily” than men, taking the part

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The Place of a Hero 11 of the hero, and therefore the (male) writer, devouring (male) genres like history and biography, science fiction or detective fiction, more easily than men classically identify with the heroine, or read the romance novel (2003: xii). In The Woman Reader Flint stresses that “awareness of the possession and employment of knowledge” was fundamental to women’s novel-reading, and further argues that gaining knowledge is a matter not just of identifying with characters but also of occupy- ing the reading space itself as a stage on which, silently vocalizing the storyteller him/her/itself, the woman reader experiences a knowledge fully equal to its subject, a masterful subjectivity (1993: 40). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), later Irene Tayler (1990), suggest too, with special reference to nineteenth-century British women writers, that the “excess” of created “master” relationships in works like Jane Eyre, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, evokes a dynamic like that of the classic (male) poet and (female) muse, a mirroring dynamic of self circuiting between a divine/demonic Other and a receptive/empowered storyteller, whose power the reader reading simultaneously surrenders to and acquires, as in Yeats’s fantasy that Leda “put on” the knowledge of Jupiter while putting up with his seduction.7 Not one of Moers’s “great writers,” Olive Schreiner depicted this mirroring dynamic, self-splitting toward fusion, in The Story of an African Farm (1883), written around the massive nineteenth-century hero figure of Napoleon. As a child the hero, Waldo, artist and inventor, desires and suffers the alternate presence and absence of a god of power, eventually rejecting the Christian God and in some plot-occult way, it seems, making room for the visit of a trickster figure self-named Bonaparte Blenkins who in the end destroys his work. As a girl, the freedom-seeking but power- averse hero/ine, Lyndall, conducts a curious romance with the idea of Napoleon as a self-creating speech act: “when he said a thing to himself, he waited and waited and it came to him ... He had what he would have, and that is better than being happy” (12). He said his word and then his Word became flesh. As a young woman Lyndall spoke the feminist condemnation of conventional marriage, but unsatisfying quests in the direction of education and work gave way to a precipitous elopement with a “stranger” designated as “R,” whom she ordered away from her when “R”(omance) offered its usual reconciliation in Another. The “soul” she seeks then emerges in a mirror-scene colloquy between an outer and an inner self: “we are not afraid, you and I; we are together” (218). But her word, in the end, becomes the flesh of the baby she conceived with “R.” You and I: hero and hero worshipper, story and storyteller, the swan and Leda, writer and reader putting on the power – the original

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12 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance romance narrative. This experience is fundamental to the production of the woman writer, and as writers and readers in the English tradition crossed into the twentieth century, toward the third millennium, a century and a half of increasingly communal practice gave women equality, some would even have said ascendency, in this process. Feminism was an intellectual player all through late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, and often gave as good as it got in direct debate, but as it entered the new forms of the modern hero story, its assertiveness, like the hero’s, became distributed and obscured by the structures of narrative. Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism, her intent to cre- ate a heroic structure for female voice and action, mark both A Vindication Concerning the Rights of Women and Mary, a Fiction, but the preface to the latter, Moers comments, is an early example of a common writing experience; namely, the stated intent “encounters an order of reality perhaps more intractable than social fact – the literary” (1976: 123). It is not merely a matter of capitulating to standard literary form, or to the economics of the reader-driven market; in the domain of the literary the engines of enthusiasm and inspiration may overwhelm the argument. And the very language available can shift the ground – Moers wonders whether the pronoun “her” or “she” can really enforce woman’s participa- tion in the mind’s highest tasks (1976: 212); noting as well how childish was the English “governess” as against the French “gouverneur,” as a name for the heroinism of educative power (1976: 214). Yet Moers also notes that this shifting in the domain of the novel from the mythic transparency/sufficiency of the hero story, this opening of the writing mind to the manyness of experience, affects not just the woman writer but also the male, and not just the depiction of the heroine but also the behavior of the hero. “George Sand” created a moderate and manageable man for Corinne, and Anne Radcliffe a dis- tanced and bewildered lover for the traveling heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Walter Scott’s antique hero Richard the Lion-Hearted thought ridiculous the modern world’s insistence that its heroes negotiate with “reality,” but his comic hero Athelstane the Unready knew he was ridiculous and resigned the position. The new-modern titular hero of Ivanhoe showed up to rescue the lady barely able to sit on his horse and unable to strike a serious blow. But he showed up nevertheless, and that was all the show needed. In the order of reality called the novel, he was a hero in (the) place of a hero. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ivanhoe’s alter ego and competitor in the subscription libraries of 1819, told its own story in the image of a monstrous “child” bending over its exhausted “mother,” each figured (disguised)

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The Place of a Hero 13 as masculine, so that first writer and then reader could experience the double trauma of bearing and being born, of creating and experiencing createdness. Moers was the first critic to use Mary’s journals of preg- nancy and miscarriage, reading and writing, to foreground the gender tangle in that novel (1976: 94–99). For critics after Moers, including Gilbert and Gubar and the George Levine of The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1981), the monster- hero eventually takes on the identity of the unactualized female being whom the scientist destroyed, but the authoress let live, an Eve who continues what the creature calls “the series of my being,” the romance of story and storyteller, a new great tradition of the hero of romance and the woman writer.

The essays in this book pursue an “argument” about some women writers and the hero of romance, arising out of reading and teaching and talking about books, and incorporating brief elements of this experience as well as of the reading and writing of critics. As the novelist Dorothy Dunnett remarked in a 1992 speech to the Walter Scott Society of Scotland that forms the headnote to this Introduction, women writers and the hero of romance is a reciprocal series between living and dead writers, between writers and readers and their experience of both literary and real people, and, of course, generations of reading-writers of books like myself. The texts I consider are the ones that still call to me after years of re-reading and teaching; the patterns I think I see in them con- tinue to draw me to new texts in the “now” of this reader of romances. They seem to me to play out, and with, two alternate or more often interlocking patterns in the “conceiving” of heroes – as generated from or in the scenario of “worship.” In one pattern the writer-conceiver of the romance calls to (out of) herself an Other as “instrumentality” for a human desire too epic to be housed in one body, too sublime even to be satisfied with two separate bodies in love: a desire represented in the inherited canons of “romance,” and most forcibly novelized in the submissive/possessive “I am Heathcliff” of Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw. In another pattern the conceiver represents this desire as fundamental to the hero or heroism him/itself, but the desire is seen as a conundrum, nourishingly epic, problemati- cally inhuman. George Eliot’s Savonarola figures this conundrum, as her Daniel Deronda shrinks from it and so, in a more interestingly humdrum register, as I shall argue, does her Will Ladislaw. Reading heroes in romance novels written by women, one can also see two foundational desires in the implied author of these texts – perhaps

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14 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance in the real authors as well, desires linked with the patterns of the epic or the problematic conception. One aspect of the “hero” takes shape in the fiery imagination of the girl, the “maiden”: he is her proxy for a kind of being “half savage and hardy and free” of the entanglements of the world and its narratives. Another aspect takes shape in the complexly controlled heat of the maternal imagination, which remembers a utopian freedom but is also deep in experienced negotiation with the “all-world” in its always already structured political and literary forms: her hero must be drawn to join her there. How to blend these aspects of the feminine imagination at work on the hero of romance is the dilemma of the writer who would work in romance, the aspect that many critics argue makes it inherently “conservative.” Radical indeed might be the indictment the girl’s imagination levies against the scripts of gender, complex and compelling might be the writer’s handling of the discourse of love, but if in the story she gets what she wants, even worse if she wants what she gets, they’ve got her, the argument goes. Contemporary feminist resistance to an all-too-eager “post-feminist” popular culture is ably summed up by Hila Shachar in a study of film and television adaptations of Wuthering Heights that truncate or subvert the insistent “interrogations” of feminism (2012: 156–157). Properly cautioned, writers and readers of (and about) the dangerous genre proceed nevertheless. Wuthering Heights is in fact my first example of the interaction of these patterns of hero creation and the feminine imagination; the second is its apparent opposite in the canon of nineteenth-century fiction, Middlemarch. Writing Gothic romance, Emily Brontë creates two play- mates who attempt together to encompass and transcend all that they understand of the material, social, and spiritual world, as it impinges on the emerging “I” of the child self. But the novel needs to imagine two generations of story in order to find out, through this fiction, what would be the results of such an experiment. Writing realist romance in the next generation, George Eliot stages an experimental first romance, deceptively conventional, in which the knowledge hunger of the young bride eventually explodes the heart of the hapless hero. However, a second and cryptically allegorical romance, between a widow and her Will, is promiscuously entangled with this conventional one, a romance that plays with climaxes from low naturalism and high sublimity before attempting a new synthesis for the epic in the ordinary. In Wuthering Heights it appears that the boy and the girl are equals in body and soul boundary crossing, each of them afflicted with the desire, in terms that D. H. Lawrence would later use of Poe’s passionate twins Madeleine and Roderick Usher, to “love, love, love … merge … be as one thing.”8

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But it is not hard to pick out the omnivorous girl as the “conceiver” here: the boy hero who enters the family at Wuthering Heights as a “gift” to the non-inheriting daughter of the house reciprocates with boundless admiration – “she is so immeasurably superior to … everybody on earth, is she not Nelly?” (62) – and that is the context for her famous and paradoxical resistance to the “containment” represented by her own family-and-culture-entangled selfhood – “Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind … as my own being” (85). Culturally pliable to the many representations that fascinated criticism has seen in him, the orphaned or colonial or working-class Other, Heathcliff is more fundamentally the excess (or counterpoint or contradiction) of Cathy’s humanity: the imagination is the maiden’s, and the conception is the enlarged, or what I will call the “preternatural,” self. Chapter 1 reads this argument through the work of a feminist and a philosophical critic: both of whom see what Gilbert and Gubar call the “metaphysical intentions,” even the ontological intentions, that link Wuthering Heights back to Frankenstein and other foundational Gothic texts (1979: 249). Robin Morgan, in a bold re-formulation of the hungry woman’s “demon lover,” sees Heathcliff, Cathy’s “whip,” as a “terrorist,” who “already lives as a dead man … fearless because as a dead man he is unconquerable by any life force” (1990: 63). Refining this intuition, Daniel Cottom takes him seriously in “the constitutive role of the unhu- man,” projected as “the figure of misanthropy through which the thought of modernity must pass if it is adequately to establish and estimate itself” (2003: 1069) in a world where identity itself has been destabilized forever, he argues, after the thought experiment of Descartes put the “I am” of men (and heroes and gods) into question. In Middlemarch the submission of Dorothea in conventional marriage to Casaubon, and as a heroine within the omniscience of the narrative, obscures to a degree the Catherine Earnshaw–like romantic ambition and excess that are all too clear to her “middling” neighbors, who recognize with varying degrees of curiosity, alarm, and contempt that she sees the world quite differently – or a quite different world. Marian Evans wrote anonymously and slightingly of the “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” of the 1850s, but when she took up her pen as George Eliot she found herself enmeshed in the romantic and Gothic conventions of her time and put them to productive use.9 In the omniscience of the narrative, itself troubled occasionally by the intrusions (“Why always Dorothea?”) of the questing female, the excesses of the normatively human are walled off in the Gothic imagery associated with conventional figures – Rosamond Vincy’s strangling snake, Nicholas Bulstrode’s

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16 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance

Evangelical/economic vampire, Casaubon’s dusty mummy. Yet the unconventional Dorothea has a Gothic side too: throughout the novel she is the site of a passionate quasi-Brontëan struggle toward the unhu- man excess of “the perfect Right” (741) whose “throne” she “wills,” as an instrument of her will toward no will, an allegorical struggle toward, and against, the exotic and fungible figure of Will (Ladislaw). Convertible as desire, as compulsion, as erotic and anti-erotic, as self and selflessness, the quester and quest object, this “Will” is both vir- ginal and maternal, shifting as I shall try to show in Chapter 2 between the bright and free (masculine) youth that the girl covets, and the world-trammeled wisdom that the woman seeks. The deck is stacked, the quest is weighted, in the latter form, by the realist tradition support- ing the fiction of omniscience (the omniscience of the fiction), and no doubt by the experience of the not-wife and not-mother Marian Evans, who writes as “George Eliot” from her anomalous position in the house- hold of and among the mothered sons of her married lover. For the female protagonist of “George Eliot,” Will is from the first the antitype of the conventional husband – the youthful lover, both “nephew” and outlaw. And in the climactic scene of the novel he is the doubled and split son of an emphatically maternal Dorothea, “a mother who seems to see her child divided by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the lying woman that has never known the mother’s pang” (739). Gaining brief stature as allegorical hero, split by/between women, Will diffuses after this crisis and its/his resolution back into realist narrative and the Darwinian space–time that marks modernism, where experi- mentation, variation, and the gaze that recognizes micro-motion in the apparent stasis of the limpet replace the medium in which “ardent deeds” take place. By the turn of the twentieth century the “high modernism” of Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce has successfully reframed Middlemarch’s vision of the “incalculably diffused” into a new kind of grandeur, gaining unprec- edented status and a place in universities for English fiction. Unabashed, romance continues in a separate space of popular bookstalls and low modernist action genres – twentieth-century fantasies of outlawry and “ardor” set in exotically imagined pasts and futures, where the hero can be re-conceived and worshipped, doubled and split and evacuated again from the “place” into which, by our reading millions, we call him. I want to look at four of the writers who stand out among the many women who mastered the genres and subgenres of romantic fiction in the twentieth century. Of the exotically doubled aristocrats of genre

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The Place of a Hero 17 romance I still remember most vividly The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik, produced in Britain by the Hungarian-born Emmuska Orczy and Welsh-born E. M. Hull (Edith Maude Winstanley) at the height of Empire, ancestors of a thousand thousand pulp romance covers. From the utopian/dystopian tradition come the “perfect men” of Ayn Rand’s still-popular blockbusters, philosophical fables that the Russian-born American writer insisted were “romantic realism.” Into their company I want to put the Scottish historical novelist Dorothy Dunnett and the flamboyant heroes of her intellectually and stylistically demanding historical romances, men written over 10 and 20 years of their develop- ment to bear and finally confront the gifts and scars of early modern “self-making” in a literary form, the long novel sequence, which itself is certainly epic and arguably “heroic.” Chapter 3, then, will take up the re-appearance of the idea of aristocracy in the romance genre for the masses, “demmed elusive” heroes charged with national and politico-racial fantasy in whose sadomasochistic shadow the female protagonist can call up and withstand the thunderbolts of abjection and rape, “putting on” the hero’s knowledge with his power, forcing compulsion into the “indifferent beak” of the god.10 New scholarship on The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik draws them back into the light. Martin Hipsky’s Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925 astutely places each of these texts in subgenres of the recently emerged category of that bestselling “low” or “bad” modernism that differed less strongly than we might imagine from the “high” modernism of Conrad and Woolf, adding that these two novels are the only ones in his study where the book’s title figure “took on a life of its own” as a continuing media term (2011: 116). Sally Dugan’s Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: A Publishing History brings to contemporary times the fascinating story of the Hungarian aristocrat’s identification with English nationalism and notes an interesting turn in more contemporary readers of the novel to fascination less with the hero than with the female protagonist, Marguerite (2012: 212). Chapters 4 and 5 will pick up Carlyle’s characterization of the new- modern hero of epic and romance, no longer arms and the man but “tools and the man.” In the increasingly complex twentieth century, the hero as “expert” announces a new centrality for economics and inventive entrepreneurship of all sorts in popular hero-making. Ayn Rand, recently in the headlines of the national debate about socio-political regulation and the light-bringing thunderbolts of capita- lism, heroized western culture’s commitment to the aristocrat of brain and tool whom Carlyle had called “the captain of industry.” “Men of

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18 Women Writers and the Hero of Romance the mind,” scientific inventors all, these captains are the new model for the dynamic creativity she equivocally respects but subordinates in the artist figures, sculptors and musicians, who are among the first to recognize the hero. As a lover of early film, an ambitious novelist, a prac- titioner of what she would call “romantic realism,” she wrote famous scenes of romantic rape, dynamically resistant plots of love, which, transferred to the plots of political philosophy in her novels, engender indeed the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon, all forms of aristocracy except the “expertness” of her heroes – dead.11 Dorothy Dunnett’s heroes have expertness too, foundationally in mathematics – a hard thing to make a hero out of until the mathemati- cal brain engages the enterprises of the early modern world, economic, military, political – and the arts – drawing, theater, and above all music. Dorothy Dunnett, who had careers in several of these areas before or during her four decades (1961–2001) as a writer of bestselling historical romances, is less well known than she should be, partly because her main work in sequences, the six-novel Lymond Chronicle, the eight- novel Niccolo sequence, is difficult to mainstream into teaching or even handle in criticism.12 Like Rand, Dunnett has pedagogical designs on the reader: both women’s heroes are marvels, “Captain Marvels” as Dunnett gaily admitted and Rand would not, of intellectual and cultural power. Dunnett’s heroes have one thing that Rand’s do not, however: they have mothers, and therefore a sense of their own historicity and materiality to go with the arrogant self-making confidence that marks the expertise of the hero of “the new learning” of the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries. Rand’s heroes emerge, simply and right as rain, from the desiring brain of the novelist and her butch-virgin female protagonists; Dunnett’s have the duality, even duplicity, of men pursuing inherited paternal epic tasks under the sign, and training, of the mother. One thing more they have, along with their writer: a Scottish identity. The Scotsman Carlyle went south to write hero theory in London, but turned in each of his last hero typologies toward north Britain. There is always self-portraiting in hero theory as in hero writing, but the modern tradition hints at something more: it is as if for Carlyle Scottish Celticism is both a hidden ground for his exploration of the Anglo-Saxon mind and a kind of wild gene in the mix of the modern hero. The wild gene lives as the “gypsy” in Heathcliff, the “something fermenting and Polish” in Will Ladislaw, the gypsy and Jewish disguises of Sir Percy Blakeney; and though one wants to characterize the “Arab of my dreams” as the wild gene in the hero of The Sheik, it turns out

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The Place of a Hero 19 to be the wild Scottish-sounding British Earl of Glencaryll who really fathered Ahmed Ben Hassan. Ayn Rand, who surely never read Carlyle though she reflects his nineteenth-century romanticism in a hundred ways, picked an astonishing name, in retrospect, for her most godlike hero. Her John Galt was the hero-god Atlas: English literature’s John Galt was a Scotsman who wrote urgent Presbyterian novels in Carlyle’s homeland for 30 years, but then came like Ayn Rand to North America, as a colonial entrepreneur and politician, founded the city of Guelph and the town of Galt in Canada, before returning to the land of his birth. Dorothy Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond and Nicholas de Fleury, stateless and outlawed though they are, make the same “return” to Scotland, both wilded and tamed by the destiny always already written for the hero. Multiple men jostle for the place of the hero in contemporary popular culture, but the Twilight series and its fan-fiction daughter the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is my choice for a concluding riff on the subject, not least because their heroes have the Gaelic names of “Cullen” and “Grey,” but especially because Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James place their novels in the footprint of Wuthering Heights. Vampire or mega- capitalist, the hero in both these popular series is Heathcliff, a “lost little boy” impervious to all but the feminine soul that pursues him toward her own enlargement. “Why do you read [Wuthering Heights] over and over?” the hero-vampire asks the reading girl in the Twilight series’s third volume, Eclipse. “I think it’s something about the inevitability,” she responds: “How nothing can keep them apart – not her selfishness, or his evil, or even death.” “I hope you’re smart enough to stay away from someone so selfish,” she concludes duplicitously. “Catherine is really the source of all the trouble, not Heathcliff.” “I’ll be on my guard,” the hero promises, recognizing his fate (29).

Notes

1. Speech to the Walter Scott Club Dinner on March 6, 1992, 7–8. Among the comparisons Dorothy Dunnett makes between the earlier Scottish historical novelist and herself in this shrewd and entertaining talk are the relative merits and perils of revising on paper vs. revising on a word processor, and the rewards and dangers of making changes to suit the whim or wisdom of an editor. Many of her talks, including this one, are in the Howard Gottlieb Archival Center at Boston University. 2. In her 1846 poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” the god-within-my-breast solitarily/continuously confers existence on all things – a startling analogue to the Heathcliff of Brontë’s 1848 Wuthering Heights, whose mistress/worshipper

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Catherine Earnshaw affims would guarantee her existence even if everything in the universe perished but him. 3. In The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, McKeon links the early modern “instabilities” of literary genre and of social class with the two newly urgent “questions” of how to tell the truth in narrative and how to determine “virtue” or value in others (1987: 20). The romance genre, allied to aristocratic ideology, produces narratives in which the positive power of “love” appears to naturalize new kinds of social and political status by “the ascription of internal merit,” while at the same time conceding love’s negative power to “institutional- ize inconstancy, to disrupt and destabilize, to transform downward” (1987: 143–144). In Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature, Sanchez explores the “queering” of erotics between sovereign and subject, interested especially in “how representations of courtship, seduction, and desire, which we might see as offering the prehistory of both marital and political contracts, expose irrationality and ambivalence as invariable aspects of political affiliation, rather than irregularities to be avoided” (2011: 7). 4. This praise of Brian, from a collection of medieval texts published in 1867 by J. H. Todd as The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaell, or The Invasions of Ireland by the Danes and Other Norsemen, is quoted in slightly updated language in T. D. Kendrick’s 1968 A History of the Vikings (289). Dorothy Dunnett’s Macbeth quotes it wryly, of his less successful nation-making attempt in Scotland, in King Hereafter (295). 5. Woolf first imagines the life, and too early death, of “Shakespeare’s Sister” in Chapter 3 of A Room of One’s Own (46–49), and describes the achievements, and lapses as she feels, of Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot, in Chapter 5. The last long paragraph of the essay (113–114) resurrects the figure of Shakespeare’s Sister and emphasizes the role of the audience listening to the narrator, and the readers reading the text, the waiting hero worshippers, in making her, generation by generation, into a real and “continuing presence.” 6. Regis writes as a reader and defender of the romance novel, arguing for the psychological complexity and expert structural and rhetorical versatility of contemporary romance writers like Nora Roberts, and indicting “high culture,” rather sweepingly, for its suspicion of the role of emotion and the affective in literature (2003: 206). In Reading the Romance, Radway empha- sized a sociological focus on a chosen sample of general readers, respected “their engagement with the books they so love” (1984: ix), but held herself aloof from that engagement. Her later work, A Feeling for Books: The Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1997), recalled her own youthful engagement both with epic romances and novels of “affect” like Marjorie Morningstar and The Thorn Birds and with the approved high literary culture she met in college and especially graduate school, which seemed to require strong disparagement of her other reading self. The later book traces the emergence of the Club’s middlebrow selection committee as a contender with high culture for cultural authority in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and proposes “multiple literacies” for readers, since her own “ambivalence [remains] persistent and real” (1997: 242, 13). 7. Gilbert and Gubar’s influential 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic continues Woolf’s analysis of the partriarchal confinements of the nineteenth-century

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English woman writer, outlining the strategies of revision and impersonation by which creative authority and autonomy, culturally gendered male, could be claimed by women under the cover of “madness” in the case of created characters, or in the case of both characters and narrator-speakers under the cover of appeal/surrender to the “genius” of a male muse or “master” (1979: 208). Madwoman studies this process in Mary Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Irene Tayler’s Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (1990) explores this strategy further in the poems and stories of the two writers in whom the biblical resonances of Protestant theology and private interpreta- tion allowed a special intimacy between the creator God and the writing hero worshipper, privileged in her submissive creativity to breathe in and out the very “breath of God” (1990: 41). 8. In his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence developed his own myth of the “Holy Ghost,” where under the standard boasts of American Puritanism and individualism lies a hidden desire to “merge” in this way with the racial or gendered Other, a desire that “betrayed the isolate Holy Ghost” of the private self and drags it “down to death” (1956: 344). Lawrence’s novels vividly depict love as a wrestle not (only) between men and women but also between the individual’s desire to merge/die and his/ her desire to remain a singular self. In that, and in his dogmatically outra- geously sublime and bitter rhetoric, Lawrence is, says Robert Polhemus wonderfully in his Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence, “the Heathcliff of novelists, a scary, romantic underdog … child of the Victorian age” (1990: 280). 9. In George Eliot and the Conventions of Popular Women’s Fiction (1993), Susan Rowland Tush describes the relationship between several of the romance novels that the young Marian deplored as examples of shoddy or fantastic plot and character construction and the handling of these same conventions by the mature author of Middlemarch. The critical tradition has also been interested in Eliot’s handling of the Gothic romance elements bequeathed her by popular fiction. My own work in Ghosts of the Gothic (1985) and “He Would Come Back” (1987) explored this territory with special reference to Romola and Daniel Deronda, and more recently Royce Mahawatte’s George Eliot and the Gothic Novel has approached what I want to suggest about Middlemarch, characterizing Dorothea’s aggressiveness in pursuit of “good works” as in some respects that of a “quasi-vigilante, a type of sensation heroine” (2013: 131). 10. Of the two aristocratic-exotic novels I look at here, it is The Sheik that has captured the most critical interest from historians of popular romance, for its role in the history of pornography and its availability to post-colonial analysis: both Pamela Regis’s The Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) and Deborah Lutz’s The Dangerous Lover (2006) make this point. In violently yoking these two popular romances together, however, I want to draw to the surface the violence and the racial content of The Scarlet Pimpernel as well, and to highlight in both novels the doubleness of the heroes and the murkily presented aggressiveness of the heroines. 11. Always controversial, Rand’s novels were for decades mostly ignored by literary and even cultural criticism, partly because for decades her literary

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executors refused access to her papers except for branded devotees of her philosophy. That situation is changing. Mimi Reisel Gladstein began the literary assessment of Rand’s work in an essay in College English in 1978; more recently Robert Mayhew assembled collections of essays on each of her novels; and in the last decade the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has begun to publish essays both literary and philosophical. Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999) included a section of essays on her fiction, including an important one by Karen Michalson on Atlas Shrugged’s Dagny Taggart as “an epic hero/ine in disguise” (1999: 199). 12. Scholars in Scottish studies have been aware of Dunnett from the start, as Francis Hart’s early mention in his 1978 The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey makes clear; so have students of the historical novel. More sophisticated attention is starting to focus on Dunnett, as witness Glenda Norquay’s essay “Genre Fiction,” in the Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing. Describing Dunnett as “one of the most interesting and underrated” modern Scottish writers, Norquay discusses the contemporary twists that Dunnett brought to the “generic hero” of historical fiction, including “the fluidity of his identity formation” (2013: 138).

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Index

Note: “n” after a page reference denotes note number on that page. Ablow, Rachel 24 plight of 103 Achilles 9, 166 recalcitrant 100 Aeneas 8 rejection by paternal family 177 Aesop 99, 104 renewed enthusiasm for 119n(4) Agamben, Giorgio 206 rescued and reformed 106 Agamemnon 9, 18, 87 Aristotle 142, 157n(12) agnosticism 63, 85n(10) Armstrong, Nancy 24 Algeria 93, 109, 110, 112, 118 Arnold, Matthew 67, 85n(11), 108 allegory 4, 14, 16, 42, 58, 64, 181, Ash, Eric H. 194n(11) 197 Asmis, Elizabeth 194n(13) Christian 78, 79 atheism 63, 165 climactic and puzzling 57 defiant 124, 135–6 foundational 62 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 22n(11), 123, realist 59, 73 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 137, romantic 56, 83n(3) 139, 140, 141–54, 158nn(14/15), true 75 159nn(16–18) altruism 61, 78, 126, 145, 149, 152, Augustinian philosophy 61 158n(13) Austen, Jane 10, 20n(5), 120n(5), egoism and 62, 77, 81, 84–5n(8), 198, 206 135–6, 142 Austrian Empire 121n(10) evil 143 autoeroticism 78, 86n(15), 101, 102 limits and dangers of 62 Ayn Rand and the World She Made maximalist demand of 84n(8) (Heller) 155n(3) predatory 134 Ayn Rand Institute 159n(17) self-tormenting 132 Ayn Rand Nation (Weiss) 155n(2) useful caution about 157n(12) Ayn Rand Objectivists 206 aristocracy 3, 16–17, 18, 20n(3), Ayn Rand Reader 160 21n(10), 56, 59, 67, 96, 98, 107–9, 111, 112, 115, 121nn(10/11), Baltimore Sun 194n(12) 130, 132, 199, 200, 205 Balzac, Honoré de 163 alien 4 Barrie, J. M. 93 ambiguity of origins 120n(8) Barrymore, John 116, 122n(14) bloodsucking 208n(3) Barthes, Roland 207 capitalist 147 Baum, Caroline 124 end of 119n(4), 129 Belgium 95 endangered 97 Benjamin, Jessica 92, 101, 116–17, idea of 94 118, 119n(2) meritocratic 129 Bentley, Eric 8 minor 75 Bergson, Henri-Louis 59 permanent myth of 95 “between women” relationships 16, pirate 153 76, 78, 85n(12), 86n(14)

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Blake, William 83n(3) Cabot, Sebastian 194n(11) Blau Du Plessis, Rachel 10 Calais 104, 108, 173, 176, 189, 190 blockbusters 131, 132, 196 Campbell, Joseph 7, 8, 26 still-popular 17 Camus, Albert 7 Bloomberg.com 124 Canada 19, 123 Blumberg, Ilana M. 61–2, 84n(8) Carlyle, Thomas 3, 4, 8, 17–19, 27, Boccardi, Mariadele 161, 191n(2) 59, 121n(13), 128, 158n(15), 181 Booker awards 161 French Revolution, The 106 Boston 155–6n(5) On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Boston College (Women’s Resource Heroic in History 1, 4, 5, 7, 106 Center) 23 Past and Present 6, 124 Boston University (Howard Gottlieb Catherine Earnshaw (character) 198 Archival Center) 19n(1) see also Wuthering Heights Brandon, Barbara 156n(6) Certeau, Michel de 195, 207n(1), Brandon, Nathaniel 156n(6) 208n(1) Braudel, Fernand 192n(5) Champagne, Maurice 156n(6) Brian Boru, Irish king 6, 88, 168 Charles I, king of England, Scotland British devolution 164 and Ireland 98 British Empire 17, 162 Chekhov, Anton 159n(19) colonized Irish and 89 Chicago 127 dismantled 164 chivalry 34, 96, 112, 116, 117, 165, British Parliament 107 172, 174, 177 Broadway 158n(13) noble if bloody emotions of 189 Brontë, Charlotte 9, 10, 20n(5), Christianity 61, 78, 79, 164, 169, 21n(7), 25, 26, 36, 37, 46, 52n(9), 170, 172, 173, 191 117, 124 Reformed theology 51n(7) Jane Eyre 11, 26, 51nn(6/7), Cicero 183, 194n(13) 120n(9), 208n(2) Clardy, Alan 158n(14) Preface to Wuthering Heights 3, 4, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 30, 207 51n(6) Brontë, Emily 2, 21n(7), 59, 117, 129 Collins, Suzanne 196–7 see also Wuthering Heights Communism 125–6, 129, 141 Brosnan, Pierce 2 Hollywood 159n(17) Browning, Robert 196 Comte, Auguste 61, 62 Brummell, G. B. (“Beau”) 94, Conan Doyle, Arthur 96 122n(14) confession 34, 77, 92, 109, 171 Brussels 25 broken 105 Buchan, John 164 scenes of 31, 33 Bunyan, John see Pilgrim’s Progress solemn 172 Burdick, Eugene 159n(18) unconscious 114 Burgundy 176, 177, 178, 181, 184, Connor, Steven 163 188, 190, 194n(14) Conrad, Joseph 16, 17 maternal 167, 168, 169, 189 Copernicus, Nicholas 193n(8) Burns, Jennifer 159n(17) cosmopolitanism 93, 115, 119, 163, Burns, Robert 5 164, 165, 181, 188 Burton, Sir Richard & Isabel 94 Cottom, Daniel 15, 26 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 27, courtly love 24, 31–2, 34 50n(5), 94 Cox, Harvey 4 Byzantium 189 Cromwell, Oliver 5, 6

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Culloden, Battle of (1746) 106 Eagleton, Terry 24 Cunningham, Valentine 51n(7) Edinburgh 162 Cyprus 178, 179, 187, 189 Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing 22n(12) Daily Express, The 121n(10) Edward VI, king of England & dangerous lovers 96 Ireland 194n(11) Darrow, Clarence 158n(13) egoism 26, 78, 141, 152 Darwin, Charles 16, 55, 59, 84n(5) altruism and 62, 77, 81, 84–5n(8), Davies, Norman 193n(8) 135–6, 142 Davis, Mike 159n(18) healthy 62 Dee, John 182, 184 heroic 143 DeMille, Cecil B. 127 paradise of 151 Demory, Pamela 206–7 victorious 154 Derrida, Jacques 6 Elias, Amy J. 191n(2) Descartes, René 15, 26, 154 Eliot, George 99, 135, 136, 197 Desert Song, The (film 1929) 88 Adam Bede 59, 61–2, 84n(8), Dickens, Charles 113, 117, 155n(3) 85n(9), 86n(14) Bleak House 124 Daniel Deronda 13, 21n(9), 55, Christmas Carol, A 52n(11) 85n(10), 86n(14), 88 David Copperfield 5, 8 Felix Holt, the Radical 59, 71, Hard Times 120n(9), 151 84n(5), 85n(9), 114 Little Dorrit 124 Middlemarch 14, 15, 16, 21n(9), Oliver Twist 104 53–86, 101, 117–18, 164 Our Mutual Friend 124 Romola 21n(9), 85n(9) Tale of Two Cities, A 99, 106 Silas Marner 85n(9) Dickinson, Emily 11, 21n(7), 49, Elizabeth I Tudor, queen of 50n(5) England 9, 175, 193n(8) diffusion 6, 16, 96, 118, 164, empire(s) 89, 109, 115, 119n(1), 192n(3) 178, 188 romance of 53–86 dismantled 164 Dillard, Annie 36 exposure to the exotica of 88 Disraeli, Benjamin 94, 96 family railroad 126 dominance-domination/ real estate 137 submission 89, 92, 93, 118, 199 see also Austrian Empire; British Dorothy Dunnett Companion 193n(9) Empire; Turkish Empire Dorothy Dunnett Readers’ English Civil War (1642–51) 107, Association 162 191n(2) Dorothy Dunnett Society 193n(9), English nationalism 121n(11) 194n(14) Hungarian aristocrat’s identification Dracula 201, 202, 208n(3) with 17 Dreiser, Theodore 158n(13) English Protestantism 6, 194n(11) Dugan, Sally 17, 120–1nn(10–11) Englishness 95, 96, 120n(7), Dukes, Nicholas 155n(2) 174 Dumas, Alexandre 192n(5) romanticized version of 87 Dunnett, Alastair 162 Enlightenment 4, 24, 50n(5), 61 Dunnett, Dorothy 1, 3, 5–6, 13, erotic romance 119n(3) 17, 18, 19, 20n(4), 22n(12), unwritten 23 119, 120n(5), 121n(13), 160–94, Erzen, Tanya 205 199, 206 Euripides 8

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Evangelicalism 16, 62, 65, 76, 79, Footloose (film 1984) 2 85n(10) Ford, Ford Maddox 119n(4) Evans, Marian see Eliot Forecast Xpert Training 124 Examiner, The 59 Forster, E. M. 119n(4) exotic romance 87–122 Fountainhead, The (Rand) 124–5, 128, 130–41, 142, 143, 144–5, Fairbanks, Douglas 122n(14) 146, 148, 150, 155nn(2/5), Famagusta 189 157n(11), 158–9nn(13/15–16), family 10, 15, 29, 33, 36, 69, 100, 166, 167 147, 149, 157n(12), 201, 204 Fraser, John 52n(10) baronial 163 free will 65, 75, 168 biological 126, 143, 144, 145 French Republics 107 chosen 141 French Terror (1792) 93, 97 consolidating the power of 66 Freud, Sigmund 34, 126, 133, 167 continuity of 67, 78, 86n(14) Frost, Laura 108, 121n(12) conventional 72 Frye, Northrup 5, 8, 10, 208n(1) displacement of 44 encumbering 126 Gabaldon, Diana 192n(4) forbidding negatives in the Galaxy 53 structures of 73 Galt, John 19, 123 genteel 31, 68 see also Atlas Shrugged; John Galt history of 75 Corporation immigrant 155n(1) Gargano, Elizabeth 94–5 impugned 98 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 9 little 71 Gaskell, Elizabeth 36, 52n(9), 124, mercantile 56, 180 151 prospects for 52n(10) Gerin, Winifred 25 responsibility to 72 German idealist/romantic romantic love diffused in 62 philosophy 61 someone operating within 57 Gilbert, Sandra 11, 13, 15, 20–1n(7), support and dismantlement of 180 24, 29, 50nn(2/4/5), 54 traditional 28 Girard, René 156n(8) well-furnished 70 Gladstein, Mimi Reisel 22n(11), family romance 2, 56, 126, 160–94 155n(1) Fand, Roxanne 157n(12) Goethe, J. W. von 5, 60 Fascism 125–6, 141 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) 87, feminism 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 25, 26, 131–2 40, 78, 92, 148, 205 Goodreads (website) 205 critics 54, 77, 85n(12) Gordon, Gen. C. G. 94 first-wave 116 Gothic romance 14, 15, 21n(9), important journal 86n(14) 38–9, 90 resistances of 9, 12 gouvernance 3, 12, 203 Feuerbach, Ludwig 85n(10) hero in 160–94 Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy Graduate, The (film 1968) 4 (E. L. James) 19, 116, 195–208 Gravelines 189 Fishwick, Marshal 4 Gray, Peter 50n(3) Fleming, Ian 165 Greek Orthodox Church 185 Fletcher, Lisa 92, 108 Greenblatt, Steven 52n(11), 60, Flint, Kate 10, 11 160

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Gubar, Susan 11, 13, 15, 20–1n(7), historical romance 162, 192n(6), 24, 29, 50nn(2/4/5), 54 193n(10) Guelph 19, 123 bestselling 18 Guryland, A. 159n(19) heroes in 96 intellectually and stylistically Hafley, James 52n(10) demanding 17 Haight, Gordon 54 popularly and critically Hakluyt, Richard 194n(11) well-received 119n(5) Hanoverian dynasty 106 wildly popular 90 Hardy, Barbara 84n(7) history 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 61, 62, 96, 137, Hardy, Thomas 206 145, 147, 159n(16), 161, 167, Harriman, David 157n(11) 170, 171, 173, 174, 177, 197, 199 Hart, Francis Russell 22n(12), 161 “alternate universe” that could Hazlitt, William 51n(6) rewrite 158n(14) Hearst, Patty 26 Anglophile 99 Heathcliff (character) 107, 129, complex record of 182 174 compulsory heterosexuality 92 see also Wuthering Heights cultural 181 Hegel, G. W. F. 6, 157n(11), 167, damning 162 168, 193n(7) divine 168 Heger, Constantin 25 double-edged 200 Heilbron, Carolyn 50n(4) drawing parallels from 121n(10) Heller, Anne C. 155n(3), 159n(16) history European 175 Henry II, king of England 173 events true to 190 Hercules 5 facts or truths of 193n(7) Herman, Arthur 164 family 54, 75 hero theory 8 global 164 father of 7 God’s plan in 193n(8) self-portraiting in 18 hero in 7, 164, 165–6, 169 hero worship 2, 11, 20n(5), 21n(7), historical novelist’s 32, 168 (or historian’s) 191n(1) aggressive 121n(11) individual and species 3 finding out about 5 international 195 invited and manipulated 172 island 94 natural 158n(15) Jewish 85n(10) reluctant 183 literary 3, 164, 165 see also Carlyle (On Heroes); national and psychological 163 Hughes-Hallett personal 164, 168, 181 heroinism 9, 12, 149 popular 5, 90 heterosexuality 3, 110, 124, 169, pornography 21n(10) 182, 192n(4) publishing 121n(11) autoerotic prelude to 101 real 9 compulsory 92 role of romance in 176 old imperatives of 90 spiritual 73 teaching to adolescents 78 study of 192n(7) Heyer, Georgette 94, 96, 119–20n(5), theory of 163 165 two uses of 192n(3) Hidalgo, Alexandra 206 vampire 203 Hipsky, Martin 17, 90, 120nn(6/8) western imagination 59

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women’s 116 Karl, Frederick 83n(1) writing to make 127 Kearns, Cleo McNelly 161, 162 Hitler, Adolf 125, 140 Kendrick, T. D. 20n(4) Hollywood communists 159n(17) Kermode, Frank 5, 7, 8 Homans, Margaret 86n(13) Keynes, J. M. 128, 142 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 91 Korda, Alexander 88 Hopkins, Lisa 191n(1) House UnAmerican Activities Lacan, Jacques 125, 157n(10) Committee (1947) 159n(17) Lawrence, D. H. 5, 14, 21n(8), 34, How, W. W. 194n(13) 90, 108, 121n(12), 126, 133, 206 Howard, Leslie 87 Lawrence, T. E. 95, 108 Hughes, Helen 96, 120nn(5/7), LeGoff, Jacques 52n(11) 192n(3), 193–4n(10) Lessing, Doris 163 Hughes-Hallett, Lucy 4, 8–9 Levine, George 13, 59, 84n(5) Hugo, Victor 101, 113 Lewes, George Henry 86n(13) Hull, E. M. 17, 18–19, 21n(10), Lithuania 170–1, 193n(8) 87–122, 127, 128, 132, 156n(6) Liverpool 24 Hunt, Robert 158n(14) Loiret-Prunet, Valerie 156n(8) London Library 181 Iceland 179, 187, 189 Lonoff, Sue 25 incest 23, 46, 73, 174, 178 Los Angeles 127, 159n(18) hero is a child of 173 low modernism 16, 90, 95, 121n(12) indefiniteness 57–8, 61, 62, 64, 71 denial of 20th-century political crippling rather than fertile 66 modernism 107 key moment of 70 Orczy’s classic of 88 very definition of 83 schizophrenic heroes 91 Independent Labour Party (UK) 107 Lowell, Amy 1 Irish Chronicle 6 Lutz, Deborah 21n(10), 96, 101 Islam 4, 164, 168, 169, 172, 173, 191 magical narratives 195–6, 207n more pacific side of 192n(6) Mahawatte, Royce 21n(9) maiden character 24, 25–6, 28–9, 30, Jackson, Peter 196 31, 34, 36, 40, 42, 115, 179, 207 James VI and I, king of Scotland & maiden’s imagination 14, 15 England 193n(8) Malcolm, Anne 163, 192n(5) James, E. L. 19, 197, 198, 202 Malta 189 James, Henry 53–4, 55, 83n(2), Mandela, Nelson 121n(11) 120n(9) Manhattan project 159n(16) Jameson, Fredric 8, 195–6, 207–8n Mantel, Hilary 161 Jeffers, Susan 206 Marcus, Sharon 78, 86n(14) Jewish history 85n(10) Marsden, Simon 51n(5) Joan of Arc 8–9 Martin, George R. R. 192n(4), 196 John Galt Corporation 123–4, Marx, Karl 6, 125 155n(2) Marxists 8, 84n(5), 129, 156n(9), Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 22n(11), 166, 194n(10), 208n(3) 157n(10) Hegelian 157n(11) Journals of Ayn Rand 127, 128, Mary I Tudor, queen of England & 157n(11) Ireland 194n(11) Joyce, James 16, 30 Mary Queen of Scots 175, 190

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Mason, Emma 51n(5) adoptive 199 maternity 80, 86n(13), 106, 197, ambiguous task of 40 202, 204 attracted to sin 173 god-like power of 200 benign 199 insistent drive to 199 blackmailed 183 peculiar 93 blood of 121n(13) perfected and asexual 81 clueless 126, 199 route to or placeholder for 56 confused longing for 180 strong women whose lives were cosmopolitan 164 split by 166 dangerous 43 unacted 91 dead 177, 199 virgins on the way to 78 degraded 178 Mathison, John 52n(10) delicate 134 Mayhew, Robert 22n(11) demon 203 McKeon, Michael 3, 20n(3) disappointed 71 McLuhan, Marshall 4 exhausted 12 McMaster, Juliet 54 false 79 Medina 189 family trauma centered in 163 Meredith, George 108 foster 36 Meyer, Bruce 7 gentle 80 Meyer, Stephenie 19, 23, 40, 197, imbecile 97, 103 198, 202 learning from 167, 171 Michalson, Karen 22n(11) listening 52n(10) Middlemarch (Eliot) 14, 15, 16, loving 167, 180 21n(9), 53–86, 101, 117–18, 164 lying 79 Milgram, Shoshana 156n(7) mad 44, 91, 107 Mill, John Stuart 59–60, 62, 63, 84n(6) managing 73, 87, 126 Miller, J. Hillis 24, 86n(16) missing 91, 97 Milton, Colin 164, 192n(6) nagging 126 Milton, John 50n(5) nation-building in the country of 168 Minos 7 “newborn” vampire 204 Minsaas, Kirsti 159n(15) parasitic 144 Mitchell, Margaret 120n(9) sad 180 Gone with the Wind 87, 131–2 sardonic style as teacher 56 Moers, Ellen 9, 11, 12, 13, 23–4, 54 second edition of 27, 42–9 monomania 102, 107 somewhat ditzy 198 Montmarquet, James 157n(12) sons conscious of 166 Moretti, Franco 200 strong 175 Morey, Ann 206 terrified 180 Morgan, Robin 15, 25–6, 31, 35–6, true 79 38, 42–3 violence on 115 Morrison, Elspeth 193n(9) vulnerable 172 Morrison, Toni 191n(2) whore 177, 178 mothers 2, 8, 16, 18, 26, 31, 68, 72, widowed 177 74, 76, 77, 85nn(10/12), 88, 89, see also maternity 101, 109, 129, 133, 174, 176, 187, Motion Picture Alliance for the 188, 189, 190, 207, 208n(4) Preservation of American abused 200 Ideals 159n(17) admiration and rage for 180 Murdoch, Iris 7

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Nabokov, Vladimir 141 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 51n(7), Nancy (France) 181, 190 56–7, 59, 56–7, 59, 74, 78–9, 80 Napoleon 5, 6, 11, 130 Pitchford, Dean 2 National Library of Scotland 181 Plato 3, 29, 125, 136, 142, 183 New Criticism 24, 160 Platt, Lenn 94, 95, 119n(4) “new woman” paradigm 90, 91 play 14, 25, 27–9, 33–7, 38, 41, 56, New York City 137, 159n(18) 67 firefighters 1, 123–4 childhood, ubiquity and see also Twin Towers importance of 50n(3) New York Daily News 155n(2) pleasure 27, 68, 81, 91, 101, 138, New York Review of Books 205–6 162, 165, 192n(1) New York Times 155n(2), 163, affection and 86n(15) 192n(4), 202, 205 contradictory 145 New Yorker 124, 205 defense of 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 8, 25, 135, forbidden 207 157nn(11/12) pain and 49, 203 Nin, Anaïs 206 rapture and 131 Norquay, Glenda 22n(12), 161, 191 unendurable 147 North Sea oil 164 value and 207 Novy, Marianne 83n(4) Poe, Edgar Allan 14 Nussbaum, Emily 205, 208n(5) Poland 170–1, 193n(8) Nussbaum, Martha 85n(8) Polhemus, Robert 21n(8) Polidori, John 200 Obama, Barack 5 popular romance 2, 21n(10), 89, 90, objectivism 125 92, 93, 112 see also Ayn Rand Objectivists analysis of 206 O’Brien, Patrick 192n(4) heroes of 91 Oedipal longing 177 Postrel, Virginia 154–5n Oppenheimer, Robert 159n(16) Powell, Anthony 163 Orczy, Emmuska 17, 87–122, 124, Powell, Colin 5 156n(6) preternatural conditions 27, 31, Orestes 8 40, 47, 48, 51n(7), 52n(11), 199 Paglia, Camille 123, 154–5n(1) gifts 33, 51n(6), 201, 204 Paley, Morton 51n(6) powers 89, 196, 200, 204 Papke, David Ray 158n(13) self 15, 25 Parks, Tim 205–6 Purgatory 48–9, 52n(11) Pasternak, Boris 141 Pyncheon, Thomas 191n(2) patriotism 169 Pyrhonen, Heta 120n(9) exploration/interrogation of 164 hero’s complex argument Qualls, Barry 85n(10) about 171 old-style pageants 94 Radway, Janice 10, 20n(6), 206 riddle of 171, 172, 188, 189 Rand, Ayn 17–18, 19, 21–2n(11), 62, right-wing 121n(11) 119, 123–59, 160, 165–6 Paul of Tarsus 125 see also Atlas Shrugged; Fountainhead; Peel, Robert 63, 73 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies; Petrograd 127 Journals of Ayn Rand; also entries Picasso, Pablo 133 prefixed “Ayn Rand”

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226 Index rape 17, 95, 128, 132, 139, 150 Roberts, Nora 20n(6) bruising 109 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 51n(7) hierogamous 111 Roiphe, Katie 205 licensing for public Roman Catholicism 63, 85n(10), discourse 120n(6) 194n(11) male as well as female 110 romance see erotic romance; exotic obligatory 113 romance; family romance; Gothic rescue from 113 romance; historical romance; romantic 18 popular romance; romance submission and 88 narrative; romance triangle violent 89, 148 romance narrative 207 Raymond, Claire 28 mass-market 92 Readman, Paul 94 original 11–12 Reage, Pauline 117 romance triangle 31, 32, 40, realism 16, 54, 58–9, 73, 78, 81, 89, 86n(15), 121n(10), 130–41, 148, 90, 120n(9), 139, 191n(2) 150, 156nn(6/8), 181 antipolitical 119n(4) romantic realism 14, 17, 18, 83, 131, definition of 155n(4) 146, 155n(4) dialectic between romance ferocious 62 and 84n(5) self-defined 124 endearing but diminished would-be 158n(14) heroes of 91 Roosevelt, Eleanor 9 gesture to the demands of 55 Roosevelt, F. D. 128, 142 half-reluctant advance toward 108 Roosevelt, T. R. 122n(14) idiosyncrasies of 181 Rosenbaum, Alice see Rand late capitalist 8 Rossetti, Christina 11, 21n(7) see also romantic realism Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 81 reason 3, 4, 7, 96, 126–7, 136, Rowling, J. K. 192n(4), 196 151–2, 204 Russia 127, 157n(11), 163, 164, 173, camouflaging 185 176, 182, 192n(6) capacity for 51n(6) Russian Revolution (1905) 93 consequences of 167–8 Russo-Japanese War (1904) 93, 106 insistent ethics of 154 iron law of 167 Sabatini, Rafael 96 mystic of 142 Said, Edward 94 nexus between desire and 57 Sanchez, Melissa E. 3, 92, 170 right 85n(11) Sanger, C. P. 23 sensation and 60 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7 union of feeling and 82 Sayers, Dorothy L. 192n(5) Reason (magazine) 155n(1) Scarlet Pimpernel, The see Orczy Reed, John 61, 85n(9) Schor, Hilary 80, 120n(9) Regency dandies 88, 91, 94, 96 Schreiner, Olive 11, 130 see also Brummell Sciabarra, Chris Matthew 155n(1), Regis, Pamela 10–11, 20n(6), 157n(11) 21n(10), 74, 92, 176, 206 Scotland 75 Reisner, Gavriel 23, 50n(1), 52n(10) clan feuds 172 Remington Steele (TV show) 2 English invasions of 172, 190 Rice, Anne 200, 201, 208n(4) nation-making/building 20n(4), Richard III, king of England 98, 190 164, 168, 173 Richardson, Samuel 5, 40 national identity 163

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paternal 167, 169 Siegel, Carol 54, 81, 84n(7) possible 188 Simmons, Ernest J. 159n(19) resurgent 164 Simon & Garfunkel 4 “return” to 19, 163, 164, 176 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 86n(14) union of the crowns of England Snitow, Ann 206 and 193n(8) Snow, C. P. 163 see also Buchan; Carlyle; Conan Snow, Richard 192n(4) Doyle; Culloden; Dunnett; Socialism 157n(9) Fleming; Galt; Hart; National Solomon’s judgment 57, 79 Library; Scott (Walter) Son of the Sheik, The (film 1926) 127 Scotsman, The 162 Spencer, Herbert 62, 84n(8) Scott, Paul 163 Spillane, Mickey 155n(1) Scott, Walter 35, 51n(5), 96, Stalin, Joseph 142 104, 164, 165, 172, 191n(2), state terror 129 194nn(10/14), 197 see also French Terror Ivanhoe 12, 112 Steinman, Jim 2 Waverley 8 Stephen, Leslie 53–4 see also Walter Scott Club; Walter Stockton, Katherine Bond 77–8, Scott Society 86n(15), 101 Scottishness 174 Stoker, Bram 200 Second Reform Bill (UK 1867) 64, 73 Stone, Oliver 155n(2) self-negation 116, 117, 118 Strachey, Lytton 94 September 11 (2001) 4 Strauss, Friedrich 85n(10) see also Twin Towers Stuart, Mary see Mary Queen of Scots sexuality 90, 107–8, 148, 159n(15), 177 Studlar, Gaylyn 116, 122n(14) adventurous 185 Styan, J. L. 159n(19) Beastly aspect of 50n(2) submission 13, 15, 104, 107, 138, female 120n(6) 168, 200 heroine’s access to identity in 202 curious erotics of 98 hysterical flight from the desire for 117 ambiguity of 178 dominance/domination and 89, making the path to full possession 92, 93, 118, 199 of 169 licensed 116 marital 179 pang of love gives access normative 92 through 202–3 Orientalist 113 rape and 88 playroom 206 tacit, voluntary 134 robust and genial 169 Symbolist movement 157n(11) silently secure 149 see also heterosexuality Tayler, Irene 11, 21n(7) Shachar, Hila 14 Telegraph, Daily 123 Shakespeare, William 4, 10, 54, 57, Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 34, 51n(8), 78 60, 81, 83n(4), 191n(1) Teo, Hsu-Ming 115, 120n(6) Macbeth 181 terrorists 15, 26, 31, 35, 38 Sheik, The see Hull malevolent 39 Shelley, Mary 21n(8) see also French Terror Frankenstein 12–13, 15, 23, 26 Thackeray, William Makepeace 8, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 27, 30, 51n(6), 120n(9) 83n(3) Thomas, Lowell 95 Shunami, Gideon 52n(10) Thormahlen, Marianne 50n(5)

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228 Index

Timbuktu 164, 176, 178, 189 Wilde, Oscar 96 Todd, J. H. 20n(4) will 16, 51n(6), 85nn(8/9/11), Tolkien, J. R. R. 196 86n(16), 89, 129, 133, 151, Trebizond 178, 186, 189 157n(10), 173, 184, 204 Tripoli 189 allegorical romance between Trollope, Anthony 163 widow and 14 Trotter, David 54 enigma of 167 Tudor England 9, 161, 175, 176, indefiniteness of 57–8 194n(11) perverse 43 Turkish Empire 108 powers and forces that Tush, Susan Rowland 21n(9) generate 169 Twilight series (Meyer) 19, 23, 27, 40, realistically experimental and 49, 116, 195–208 romantically driven 56 Twin Towers (Sept 11, 2001) 1, 191n(2) re-cognition of analysis is essential Deutsche Bank building 124 to the domain of 168 Tyler, Bonnie 2 see also free will; will-in-the-world will-in-the-world 58–66, 74, 75 Valentino, Rudolph 88, 116, accession to 79 122n(14), 127 chance metamorphoses into 76 vampires 16, 23, 25, 49, 126, 208n(4) need to exert 82 born again 200 Winkworth, Catherine 52n(9) desire to be/desire for 40, 198 Winstanley, Edith Maude see Hull ethically sensitive 201 WNYC (public radio) 155n(2) good/bad 203 Wollstonecraft, Mary see Shelley hero 19, 198, 202 (Mary) international clans of 201, 204 Woolf, Virginia 9, 16, 17, 20nn(5/7), vampires can’t have children 50n(2), 88, 90, 119n(1) with 203 Wordsworth, William 85n(10) werewolf love and 199 “world apart” picture 81 Veiller, Bayard 158n(13) World Trade Center 4 Venice 178, 189 see also Twin Towers Vico, Giambattista 3 Wright, Frank Lloyd 133 Vigderman, Patricia 78, 86n(14) Wright, Richard 158n(13) Virgil 6, 8 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) 8, Volterra 189 13, 18, 19, 20nn(2/5), 23–52, 53, Von Hendy, Andrew 3–4, 27 57, 79, 89, 116 Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa 24 Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to 3, 4, 207 Wallace, Diana 120n(5), 192n(3) film and television adaptations 14 Wallace, Hal 159n(16) forbidden pleasures of 207 Walls, Jerry L. 52n(11) intentions that link back to Walter Scott Club 19n(1) Frankenstein 15 Walter Scott Society of Scotland 13 Wylie, Philip 133, 156–7n(9) Ward, Mary 124 Washington, DC 159n(18) Yeats, W. B. 2–3, 6, 11, 87, 89, 128 Weiss, Gary 155n(2) Wheeler, Harvey 159n(18) Zimbalist, Stephanie 2 Whispering Gallery (magazine) 162 Ziolkowski, Theodore 8, 36 White, Hayden 193n(7) Žižek, Slavoj 157n(10)