Beauty and the Beast a la Loretta Chase

Title: Lord of Scoundrels
Author: Loretta Chase
Published: 1995, Avon Books

I was losing steam with Mary Balogh’s oeuvre, so decided to change it up by going all in and expanding my author list. While google “best Mary Balogh books”, I came across this list, and it has proved pretty sound.

I picked Lord of Scoundrels, cheesy title notwithstanding, and I was swept away from page 1.

Okay, now’s a good time to pause and consider why I have suddenly developed this voracious appetite for racy, romance novels, the kind my mother and grandmother used to devour and which I would sneakily read the sex scenes of, thereby furthering my sexual education and also my sinfulness (my mother made me confess to a priest when she caught me once. Three Hail Marys was the penance I was allocated by the bored padre).

Although this blog is supposed to be dedicated to chick lit, the subject of my PhD, I find I can no longer read these novels. Sure, I have my favourites, whose new offerings I will read no matter what, but by and large, the genre does not seem to interest me anymore (gasp!).

Instead, I am drawn to romances of the more sensational variety, the classic romance genre that Janice Radway studied in her pathbreaking reader response work. From her interviews with women readers in small-town America – usually married housewives – she unearthed the fantasy at work in successful romance novels, a fantasy she theorised of recouping the unconditional love girls experience with their mothers. The romantic quest, then, is a quest for the kind of intimacy women do not usually find possible with men.

I’ll admit that my recourse to romance (novels) rebooting my near-dead libido to heights I haven’t experienced in the past decade. Though there were other factors involved in this, one must remember that romance novels have been described as “pornography for women”, most famously by Ann Barr Snitow. Her argument though does not hinge on the sexual – though these novels do serve up a heady dollop of steamy sex – but rather that they serve up a particular fantasy that cuts to the heart of male-female relations as we know it:

The shape of the Harlequin sexual fantasy is designed to deal women the winning hand they cannot hold in real life: a man who is romantically interesting – hence distant, even frightening – while at the same time he is willing to capitulate to her needs just enough so that she can sleep with him not but often.

If the essential fantasy is the unbending of the “distant, even frightening” man unbending enough to meet a woman halfway, the fairytale embodiment of this fantasy is Beauty and the Beast. The Beast is the personification of the man who has taken the distancing that masculinity as we know it requires to extremes that make him monstrous because he has cast of not just the demands of women, but also the norms of society. Beauty will tame him, and in doing so, make him human once again, and not just worthy, but capable, of being loved.

Lord of Scoundrels is an update on Beauty and the Beast. The update is twofold.

First, before we even meet Beauty, we are given an in depth introduction to the Beast in the form the Marquess of Dain that goes back to even before his birth, to his parents ill-fated union. We are made to understand the psychological underpinning of the Beast, that underneath this monstrous man is a boy who was abandoned by his mother and treated cruelly by his father, and then the world he was thrust into, until he learnt to master it.

This, we must understand, explains all his subsequent behaviour.

He will meet his match in a woman who is not only supremely intelligent and confident, but also one who has raised young boys and thus understands them. Even for her, though, Lord Dain is a challenge.

Jessica Trent is a bluestocking who has no interest in marriage. She locks horns with Dain, because she wants to rescue her brother, who is ruining himself as he carouses with Dain’s set.

Instead, they end up married.

The book, or course, does not end there. Dain is determined not to be mastered by his wife, although she is trying her very best to soothe his nerves. In the end, she prevails.

But first, she seduces this. In this, the novels turns the tables somewhat. Dain desperately desires his wife, but is afraid of hurting her. He has internalised society’s view of him as not just inwardly, but also outwardly, monstrous.

Jessica, a virgin but not of the blushing variety, tempts him into bed, but first she has an orgasm and falls asleep before he can finish.

She also decides that he must be a father to his bastard son. But while she masterminds this reconciliation, it is Dain who forges a relationship with his own child, and in doing so, frees himself from the traumas of his own childhood.

The novel does rather hammer home its point. Dain behaves terribly, but we must forgive him because of his terrible childhood (while also expecting better of him as Jessica does). Time and again, he throws what are essentially tantrums, and she soothes him, until she finally loses patience.

The fact is, we are to understand, all along, Dain was terrified of loving her (or anyone) because loving her would mean losing her. Her threat to leave before their marriage literally unhanded him (he loses the ability to move his arm), until he finally realises she is here to stay.

I know, I know, but I loved it all.

Have you read this novel? Any (other) Loretta Chase favourites?