Friday, May 09, 2008

Sandra Schwab - Bewitched


The response of reviewers to Sandra Schwab's Bewitched has ranged widely, from an A- at The Good, The Bad, The Unread, where Sandy M. stated that Schwab's "books are always innovative," through a 4-star review at Romantic Times where Kathy Robins rather intriguingly declared that it "captures the aura of the Regency," to a D at AAR, whose Cheryl Sneed felt that the language in which the book was written was anachronistic:
At times it is very modern in tone and I felt like Schwab was channeling Chandler Bing when Sebastian says things like, "I am so going to break your heart." And then there's Sebastian's favorite expletive: "heck." Heck?! This seemed so out of place that I had to look it up. First recorded use: 1865. But more than the historical inaccuracy is that this is so not how an English nobleman, a rakish man about town, would choose to express himself when perturbed.
One might, of course, feel that the anachronisms are innovative. You can read two long excerpts, of the whole of the prologue and first chapter, and see what you think. Sandra herself has written that "the prologue for Bewitched opens with a panorama of the English Midlands, which was inspired by Tennyson's 'Lady of Shalott.'" That poem, first published in 1833, "recasts Arthurian subject matter loosely based on medieval sources" (Wikipedia) but reflects Victorian attitudes towards women.

One can perhaps see parallels between Schwab's Victorian-influenced Regency setting (with medieval, and even more ancient elements) and the Victorian period's medievalism which, as Sandra has observed, created a "romanticized version of the Middle Ages."

If the Victorians' Middle Ages was a romanticised and idealised version of the past rather than an accurate recreation of it, Schwab's novel, which draws on Victorian sources and is clearly marked as unreal by the inclusion of magic, has a similar approach to history. Many of the details are historically accurate, but the end result is like a fruit punch which takes the Regency period as its basic ingredient, passes it through a modern sieve and then mixes it with a good dollop of magic and a splash of Victorian spirit.

The description of the way in which Amy and Fox savour the taste of an alcoholic beverage they consume reminded me of a scene in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:
she found a little bottle on it, [...] and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters. [...] It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not' [...] However, this bottle was not marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off. (Chapter 1)
Fox and Amy's drink isn't marked as "poison" either, so they drink and:
A wave of red rolled towards him. Cinnamon and clove enveloped him in their mingled scent as the punch flowed into his mouth and exploded on his tongue. Wine and cinnamon and clove and a dreadful bitterness. And salty like tears. He grimaced and put his glass down. [...] He took another cautious sip. The bitterness was still there, if somehow muted. In fact, it tasted better now. (45)
Like the drink which causes Alice to shrink, the punch that Amy and Fox consume has a very unexpected side effect (it seems extremely apt that the novel was published under Dorchester's Love Spell imprint). There is an echo of this scene later in the book, when a non-magical punch is prepared while Amy plans to tell Fox the truth about their earlier drink (217). Here's the description of Admiral Reitz preparing punch:
a special punch ceremony was held at Rawdon Park [...] the whole family assembled at a table in the drawing room. Admiral Reitz, it appeared, would act as the Master of Ceremonies. The children skipped from one foot to the other with excitement. "Feuerzangenbowle, Feuerzangenbowle," [....] The door opened and Ramtop, the butler, appeared, carrying an enormous pot filled with fragrant, steaming red wine. [...] Admiral Reitz made a bow in Amy's direction - "what we need for it is this: dry red wine boiled with orange slices, sticks of cinnamon, and cloves. A pair of tongs" - he picked up the item from the tray - "long enough to be laid across the top of the pot, and a sugarloaf." He took the white cone and wedged it into the tongs before he put them onto the pot. "And then, the most important ingredient: rum." (214-15)
Schwab's Admiral Reitz, like Carroll's Alice, is a real person placed in a fictional world.1 As we are told in the author's note, "Bernhard Reitz is one of the leading critics in the field of British theatre [...] and he always serves Feuerzangenbowle at our annual Christmas parties at his house." Schwab also mentions there that "he is known to have reacted adversely to the suggestion to stage a performance of in-yer-face theatre (which usually includes a certain amount of violence, rape, exploding trash cans and the like) in his sitting room." In Bewitched the performance takes place elsewhere:
The admiral, coming to the table [...] "[...] have you heard of the latest theatrical scandal, Rawdon? [...] It has come to my ears that a certain nobleman, who shall remain unnamed, chose to have a production staged in his private theater [...] what if I tell you that the aforementioned production involved some ... um ..." He coughed delicately. "Flinging off of clothes?" [...] Underneath his mustache, the admiral's lips twitched. "And not only that. There were also some monkeys involved, or so I've heard. To top it all, a rubbish can was blown up onstage. Followed by a potted apple tree." [...]

Shaking his head, Lord Rawdon took a fortifying sip of coffee. "I must say, this sounds quite in-yer-face." (111-12)
In the course of her research for her PhD thesis Sandra's been working on Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, including those of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. One secondary text she acquired on the subject,
Frankie Morris's ARTIST OF WONDERLAND, [is] a book on the life and art of John Tenniel. It has already turned out to be a great find: one of the most exciting things, imo, is that Morris argues that many characters in Tenniel's illustrations are simply children or adults in costumes instead of a "real" rabbit or a "real" Duchess with a really big head.
The almost bewildering number of animal metaphors Schwab uses to describe the human characters reminds me of Tenniel's illustrations, and their occasional metamorphoses may recall those of the baby in Alice in Wonderland who turns into a pig. The Admiral's "short, grayish blond moustache and dark suit lent him a faint resemblance to a sea lion - an uncommonly lean sea lion. One who wore a white and green striped shirt" (92). I imagine him looking a little like Tenniel's illustration of the walrus. The hero of the romance is Sebastian "Fox" Stapleton. He "stretched lazily, like a great cat before it goes on the prowl" (6) and he can look "like a big, fat tomcat that had just devoured a particularly tasty mouse" (16) but Amelia, our heroine (also known as Amy), believes that he is "as cold as a fish" (7). Amy herself, whom Fox admits is "lovely [...] in the way of a plump, golden partridge" (40), or perhaps "a quail" (42) is his prey. The predator will find himself trapped: an observer seeing them together states that "the Fox was stepping up to the bait in the trap" (39). Amy is also described as the worm that attracts the cold fish: "the fish has caught the worm" (39) and others are keen to ensure that "the fish is truly hooked" (40). Amelia is not, however, an entirely defenceless creature, for Fox imagines she would be capable of "peck[ing] [...] the poor chap to death with her sharp retorts" (41) and he observes her "Snapping and yapping like a rat terrier" (42).

Other characters are also compared to animals. Fox's servant sometimes looks at him "like a wounded doe" (29). A mysterious stranger has "movements as graceful as a cat" (13). Amy thinks that Fox's friend Drew, "With his curly blond hair and soulful brown eyes [...] reminded her of an overlarge puppy dog" (23) and when in love he "spout[s] the most nonsensical notions that would do any March hare proud" (16). Isabella Bentham observes that "all men sighed over Amy like a herd of dimwitted mooncalves" (11) and Isabella's mother had "what would have been a kind smile if her eyes hadn't glittered like a mad ferret's" (24), although Drew describes her as a "jabbering magpie" (31) . During a society event "the hum of voices rose and fell as if the guests had turned into a swarm of bees" (42). No wonder Amelia concludes that "all of London was filled with the strangest people" (24-25) and we, the readers, can imagine them in all their animal strangeness in a similar fashion to the way in which Alice's sister imagines "the strange creatures of her little sister's dream" (Chapter 12).

Part of the action of the novel is described in chess terminology:
Stapleton will want to go and visit his family soon. [...] thanks to our little intervention, he won't be able to stand even the thought of being apart from the object of his lovesickness for too long. [...] You should make sure your daughter accompanies them. [...] And then we shall make our Sicilian Dragon breathe fire.
Bentham looked at him blandly. "Dragon?" he asked.
The man looked him up and down. "Not a player of chess then." (52-53)
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass "is loosely based on a game of chess, played on a giant chessboard with fields for squares" (Wikipedia).

Another connection between Bewitched and the Alice stories, though perhaps a rather tenuous one, may be made via Alice's fall down a rabbit hole:
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. [...] suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. (Chapter 1)
Goldschmidt suggested that "The fall down the rabbit hole was a symbol of sexual penetration, the doors surrounding the hallway represented female genitalia" (Leach) and William Empson
thought it all came down to wombs:

the salt water {of the pool of tears} is the sea from which life arose; as a bodily product it is also the amniotic fluid ... The symbolic completeness of Alice's experience is, I think, important. She runs the whole gamut: she is a father in getting down the hole, a fetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid... (Leach)
Leach may state that these are "historically baseless womb-analogies" but they have indubitably helped to shape the reception of the text, which has long been perceived to have sexual undercurrents. Schwab's novel, being a romance, can be quite explicit about sexuality and sexual symbolism, and it ends, rather than begins, with a scene set in the "womb of the Earth Mother" (305), through which the characters seem to have "slipped through the web of time into the pagan past" (306) and in the epilogue one might think of them as having arrived, to quote the words from Alice in Wonderland, "upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over."

One other issue which attracted my attention while reading the novel was the apparent doubling of some of what Pamela Regis would describe as the "eight essential elements of the romance novel" (30). There would appear to be two points "of ritual death," an element which Regis describes as marking "the moment in the narrative when the union between heroine and hero, the hoped-for resolution, seems absolutely impossible" (35). In the first of these scenes the heroine must literally "die first, if only in ritual" (211) and there is then a second, longer period later in the novel during which Amy again comes close to death. It's also possible to think of the characters as falling in love twice and thus undergoing two "Declaration" (34) scenes "in which the hero declares his love for the heroine, and the heroine her love for the hero" (34), and undergoing two betrothals, scenes in which "the hero asks the heroine to marry him and she accepts; or the heroine asks the hero, and he accepts" (37). This doubling perhaps reflects the way in which the world of the novel exists on two levels, one more normal and rational, and the other magical.

There may also be a doubling of one of the "accidental elements characteristic of the romance novel" (Regis 38). Cheryl Sneed commented that the "There is a 120 page section, right in the middle of the book, in which Amy and Sebastian are sickeningly, treacly, blissfully in love" and "all is sweetness and light, which, frankly, was mind-numbingly boring." It occurs to me that this central section, in which the hero and heroine are blissfully in love and surrounded by the hero's loving family (including cute nephews and a niece) who are gathered together to celebrate both the hero and heroine's engagement and Christmas, is not dissimilar in tone to that of many epilogues. Regis has written that the "Wedding, Dance, or Fete" is one of the three "accidental elements" and is a scene which demonstrates that "Society has reconstituted itself around the new couple(s) and the community comes together to celebrate this" (38). The celebratory tone that usually accompanies the "Wedding, Dance, or Fete" is one which characterises this section of the novel. The true epilogue of the novel in fact includes much less "sweetness," though its function of demonstrating that society is "reconstituted" is made quite explicit: "they walked on into the reborn world."

  • Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0.
  • Carroll, Lewis. Alice Through the Looking-Glass. The Millennium Fulcrum Edition.
  • Leach, Karoline. "Tony Goldschmidt and the Freudian Influence." The Victorian Web. Adapted with permission of author and publisher from the opening chapter of Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild. London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1999.
  • Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.
  • Schwab, Sandra. Bewitched. New York: Dorchester, 2008.

1 The real people whom Carroll placed within his fictional world are described here. It is perhaps interesting to note that both Carroll and Schwab are incorporating elements of their academic life into their fiction. Both also include text from other fictions in their own work:
In the Victorian Era children had to learn many moralizing poems by heart. Carroll altered some of these (once very familiar) verses for the Alice books, of course to the amusement of the Liddell sisters. Unfortunately these poems are hardly remembered nowadays, so the fun of the parody has disappeared for the greater part. (Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site)
For her part, Schwab includes excerpts from a number of poems (including John Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci) and The Horrible Histories of Mayence. This is "a fictional book, yet the direct quotations are all taken from an 1824 edition of The Seven Champions of Christendom" (Author's Note). [The entire text of Richard Johnson's The Seven Champions of Christendom is available online and in pdf via Google Books.] Schwab has quoted from this text, but changed the names of the characters. I think one can safely assume that she has given them the names of members of "Team Reitz" to whom she dedicated the novel, with the hope that they would "enjoy your adventures as bold knights and fair maidens!"

Fox notes how some of the events in The Horrible Histories recall events that have happened recently to him, Amy and the other characters: "It seemed fantastical, as if the characters of a book had stepped out of their story and into the real world" (293). In Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass the relationship between texts and reality is a little different, since Alice steps into a world inhabited by characters from nursery rhymes, such as Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn.


------

The illustrations for this blog post include Evelyn de Morgan's The Love Potion, from Wikipedia and John Tenniel's illustrations of the Drink Me scene in Alice in Wonderland, via Wikimedia Commons. I also think there's some similarity between Jessie Willcox Smith's version of Alice (1923) and Annett Louisian, on whom Schwab based her description of Amelia Bourne.

14 comments:

  1. I have actually read the original SEVEN CHAMPIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. The best I can say for it is that it's not as bad as Hawes's PASTIME OF PLEASURE--more formally known as The History of Graunde Amour and la Bel Pucel, conteining the knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Mans Life in this Woride or The Passetyme of Pleasure.

    WV -- ejowk
    Inuit word meaning "romantic comedy"

    ReplyDelete
  2. Personally, I loved Bewitched. I thought it was interesting and different. As someone who came to romance from reading fantasy, I am completely unpertrubed by anachronism so that was never an issue for me. I didn't even notice it to be quite frank.

    For me, the most interesting part of Bewitched was in fact the middle. I like the way Schwab had Amy and Fox trying to behave properly but being totally overwhelmed by their emotions and the love potion. The make-out scenes prior to the first sex scene are pretty intense without going all the way. I appreciated that for both its novelty and because I think it reflects something about young love that we forget; namely how powerful just kissing and heavy petting can be for two people in love. In additon to that, is the fact that what's stopping Amy and Fox isn't a villain or an external force like a misunderstanding or a class difference (since they are engaged and belong to each other already, in a way) but each one's own sense of honor and propiety. That was very interesting to me because often that social force is only demonstrable in romance novels not as something that arises from an internal sense of morality, ethics and social responsibilty but as an external force that is compulsive and punishing.

    I also really liked the whole idea of using a love potion as a catalyst to True Love. Something that is, of course, echoing Tristan and Isolde. I thought the way Schwab dealt with the tension between the inauthenticity of love brought on by the potion and the power of the authentic feelings that it evoked was fascinating and not something I have seen very often in romances. Which is strange since the love potions was/is a common trope.

    ---Angela Toscano

    ReplyDelete
  3. Laura, thanks for this analysis of Bewitched!

    You are right, of course: the dramatis personae of The Horrible Histories are indeed named after my colleagues at university. In addition, some of the episodes without direct quotations are references to our various research projects: Mark's PhD project dealt with the British history drama, Alexandra (his girlfriend) is writing a dissertation about the Green Man in literature, and much of Sigrid's work deals with (Scottish) ballads.

    The almost bewildering number of animal metaphors Schwab uses to describe the human characters

    I am rather fond of animal metaphors, aren't I?

    Some of the doublings that you describe can also be regarded as a result of what I call the double-way structure in romance. In The Writer's Journey, Christopher Vogler explains the principles of contemporary storytelling on the basis of the Hero's Journey Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation - initiation - return. [...] A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man" (Campbell 30). Both Campbell and Vogler's scheme feature only one central hero (or heroine). Romance, however, features two protagonists and thus two different journeys, which results in the aforementioned double-way structure. Depending on the story, it is more or less explicit. Thus at different points of Bewitched both Amy and Fox undergo a kind of initiation consisting of (ritual) death and the gaining of new knowledge / power.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The AAR review:

    At times it is very modern in tone and I felt like Schwab was channeling Chandler Bing when Sebastian says things like, "I am so going to break your heart."

    Thanks to your link to Wikipedia I now finally know whom I had supposedly channelled. (I've never been a fan of Friends, and I don't think I've ever watched a whole episode.) (And if I did, it was probably in German, anyway.)

    And then there's Sebastian's favorite expletive: "heck." Heck?! This seemed so out of place that I had to look it up. First recorded use: 1865.

    "Heck" is such a nice euphemism for "hell", and I considered a bit politer than "damn".

    But more than the historical inaccuracy

    The historically-inaccurate-language question has, of course, caused many a big discussion in the romance community. Personally, I don't think it is possible to accurately recreate the language of the early 1800s when writing for a 21st-century audience. in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language David Crystal points out that "the language at the end of the 18th century is by no means identical to what we find today. Many words, though spelled the same, had a different meaning. If we had tape recordings of the time, we would also notice several differences in pronunciation, especially in the way words were stressed. [...] This world [of the early 19th century] is linguistically more removed from us than at first it may appear." And naturally, the further we go back in time, the more unfamiliar the language does become. But would anybody want to read a medieval romance in which all of the dialogue was written in Middle English or even Old English?

    What makes things more complicated is that many readers who claim to disdain inaccuracies don't really want an accurate presentation, but romanticized version of the past that includes the language: for example, even though "to screw" is a perfectly nice Regency word that's even included in The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, some readers will claim it sounds too modern to use in a Regency novel.

    [...] this is so not how an English nobleman, a rakish man about town, would choose to express himself when perturbed.

    I have to admit this sentence cause a raised brow when I read the review for the first time. I mean, those rakish men about Town were the guys who considered it a great joke to have sex with the wives of their friends; who enjoyed brutal sports and crude jokes; who drunk themselves under the table on a regular basis and associated with prize fighters and stage-coach drivers. One of them had his front teeth filed to make for a better whistle, and another extinguished candles by flinging them onto the floor. In other words, most of these men were no Mr. Darcy ...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Angela, I'm glad to hear you've enjoyed the novel so much! What you write about the middle is exactly what I aimed for.

    As someone who came to romance from reading fantasy, I am completely unpertrubed by anachronism so that was never an issue for me.

    Hmmm - this might also be the reason why most linguistic anachronisms don't bother me either: I came to romance from reading and writing fantasy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. what's stopping Amy and Fox isn't a villain or an external force like a misunderstanding or a class difference [...] but each one's own sense of honor and propiety. That was very interesting to me because often that social force is only demonstrable in romance novels not as something that arises from an internal sense of morality, ethics and social responsibilty but as an external force that is compulsive and punishing.

    That ties in with the posts on your blog about virginity and romance heroines and the values ascribed to virginity/the choice to remain a virgin. You said in the latter that

    the problem with virginity is that you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. [...] Whether it is valued in our culture today depends on who you are standing next to at the time. Are they conservative or liberal? Promiscuous or prudish? Do they view the empowerment of women as denying men what they want (that being sex, obviously) or as taking what women want (also sex)?

    I suspect that you could make a similar argument about Amy and Fox's attempts to express their sexual feelings for each other. Some readers might feel as you do, but others might suggest that Amy and Fox's "sense of honor and propriety" was the product of their social context, and that they've internalised oppressive ideas about what constitutes honour. And on the other hand, although it's obvious from the first few chapters that the two did find each other attractive initially, could it be suggested that the potion has weakened their free will and so their sexual activity is an indication of the evil nature of the potion? Perhaps people who associate virginity with virtue would read it that way.

    Some of the doublings that you describe can also be regarded as a result of what I call the double-way structure in romance. [...] Both Campbell and Vogler's scheme feature only one central hero (or heroine). Romance, however, features two protagonists and thus two different journeys, which results in the aforementioned double-way structure. Depending on the story, it is more or less explicit.

    Admittedly I tend to notice details more than structure, so perhaps I've just missed lots of other examples of this, but what you did with the structure in Bewitched seemed unusual (and innovative) to me. Maybe this is a particularly explicit example? I suspect that could be the case, because it's quite likely I'd only notice a point of ritual death if (a) there's literally a ritual going on and/or (b) one of the characters comes physically close to death or (c) I set out to analyse a novel in relation to Pam Regis's theory.

    I'm sorry to have inflicted a re-run of that AAR review on you. But it did raise some interesting issues and got me thinking about them, which was why I mentioned it. And also, of course, I tend to link to reviews for the benefit of anyone who wants to read some, given that when I'm writing about books, I'm not producing a review.

    What makes things more complicated is that many readers who claim to disdain inaccuracies don't really want an accurate presentation, but romanticized version of the past that includes the language

    It's certainly the case that modern romance novels set in the Regency period don't have characters who speak like Jane Austen's do. So yes, pretty much all modern romance authors must be writing in language which is more accessible to modern readers.

    I have to admit this sentence cause a raised brow when I read the review for the first time. I mean, those rakish men about Town were the guys who considered it a great joke to have sex with the wives of their friends

    I read the review a bit differently. I thought the reviewer was saying that she thought the language should have been stronger, to match the rakishness you describe. As you say, "heck" sounds "a bit politer than 'damn,'" and I think the reviewer would have preferred "damn."

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm sorry to have inflicted a re-run of that AAR review on you.

    No, don't apologise, it's fine. And besides, you needed the review for your analysis.

    I read the review a bit differently. I thought the reviewer was saying that she thought the language should have been stronger, to match the rakishness you describe.

    Ah! Now there's a thought! Of course the danger of using stronger language is that it might turn your readers off. Perhaps in a future novel I should try the 19th-century presentation of curses: initial letter and dash.

    Re: Annett Louisan: here's a link to the video clip that inspired me to use her as Amy. The song is called "Das Spiel" - "The Game" -and is about a woman who only wants to play at relationships and men in contrast to her lover, who's fallen in love with her and wants a proper relationship. Thus the song plays with stereotypical roles and behaviour and turns them nicely upside down.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I suspect that you could make a similar argument about Amy and Fox's attempts to express their sexual feelings for each other. Some readers might feel as you do, but others might suggest that Amy and Fox's "sense of honor and propriety" was the product of their social context, and that they've internalised oppressive ideas about what constitutes honour. And on the other hand, although it's obvious from the first few chapters that the two did find each other attractive initially, could it be suggested that the potion has weakened their free will and so their sexual activity is an indication of the evil nature of the potion? Perhaps people who associate virginity with virtue would read it that way.

    I firmly believe that we are products of our social context, just as we are products of our biology and our temperment/character. I also firmly believe in free will. It is there but like the imagination it is forever constrained by the external world. They are inextricably intertwined with each other. It is both a phenomenological question and an existential question. The very nature of existence is coercive and yet we have free will. Does my identity exist outside of the structures in which it was formed? Or is my identity solely a product of those structures? Can I ever be without them?

    So the love potion is an intriguing idea to me because it explores these very tensions between the constructs, the limitations of the external world and the free will, the spirit of the internal world. There is no pure action; it is tainted by a thousand incidentals. The love potion was coercive and yet, had that force not been there would Fox and Amy have ever come to know each other? Would that desire have ever manifested?

    There is another reason I find the love potion such an interesting device; it is the material expression of the way in which we view falling in love as this thing that happens to us. The coup de foudre, that outside force that comes and knocks us flat against our will. Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, it is an unlooked for, and often times, violent grace that reshapes our world. More importantly, there is the idea both with the abstraction of falling in love and the tangibility of the love potion that while the initial emotion may have been a force beyond our will, the continuation of that emotion is a choice. As Octavio Paz said in The Double Flame "The nexus between freedom and destiny [sic] is the focal point around which all lovers revolve."

    ReplyDelete
  9. I've just come across a new review of this novel which I thought was interesting, so I'm adding a link here. Aztec Lady writes that:"Bewitched is very much a romance [...] it is also something more, something else, something different. We could, perhaps, [...] say that this book is historical urban fantasy."

    ReplyDelete
  10. I thought the book "Bewitched" by Schwab was written at about a grade 5 level/that of about a 10 year-old (albeit a sexually precocious one).

    It was lacking in historical accuracy, and did not even supply a feeling for the period in question, in my view.

    I will not waste time reading anything else by this author. What a disappointment! I expected better from her, especially as she flaunts her so-called higher education, including English Lit.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I will not waste time reading anything else by this author. What a disappointment! I expected better from her, especially as she flaunts her so-called higher education, including English Lit.

    Anonymous, I can tell that you didn't enjoy reading Bewitched. As you can see, at the beginning of my post I included a wide range of reviews. Some readers loved the book, others clearly didn't.

    I think part of the reason that some people were disappointed in the novel was due to their expectations that there would be "historical accuracy." However, the novel quite clearly has strong fantasy elements so it isn't a straight historical and was never intended to be read as one but, as I also noted in my post, there are some elements which are historically accurate.

    As for the question of whether or not the novel was "written at about a grade 5 level/that of about a 10 year-old" I'd suggest that few, if any, 10-year-olds could achieve the complex intertextuality displayed in Schwab's work.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Dear Ms. Vivanco,

    Thank you for your response to my email. It was not my intention to hurt anyone's feelings, by the way, and my apologies if I have done so.

    I suppose my disappointment in the novel "Bewitched", expressed in my (perhaps unkind) review, was intensified by my high hopes for the book, based on its initial appearance. As an occasional reader of gothic mysteries or romances, both the title and cover illustration sparked my interest.

    I'll be honest with you... the kind of experience I was seeking was akin to that of a regency version of Ellis Peters' Cadfael series. Granted Ms. Schwab's book was not advertised as a murder mystery per se, but I would like to suggest that the late Ellis Peters remains as an author par excellence, when it comes to conveying a feeling for the historical period in which her characters' adventures take place.

    In contrast, as a reader, I was never able to immerse myself in Ms. Schwab's book in question. Such things as the heroine jabbing her lover in the ribs with her elbow or hitting him on the arm did not seem like a realistic method of flirtation for her supposed character--more suitable to that of a current highschool girl in North America, instead.

    Also--and please correct me if I am in error--but since when did England, in any period, have such a thing as a "General Store", for example? There were several other such discordant notes in the book, as well as incorrect use of language, both in grammatical and historical terms.

    Anyway, must dash; but since you were so kind as to read my spontaneous sharing of opinion, I thought it only polite to respond.

    'Bye for now,

    Anonymous-for-the-present

    ReplyDelete
  13. "As an occasional reader of gothic mysteries or romances, both the title and cover illustration sparked my interest."

    It's a sad truth that covers can often be very misleading. Schwab's Castle of the Wolf is much more akin to a gothic mystery/romance, but if you didn't enjoy her style of writing in this novel, you probably wouldn't enjoy that one either.

    Such things as the heroine jabbing her lover in the ribs with her elbow or hitting him on the arm did not seem like a realistic method of flirtation for her supposed character--more suitable to that of a current highschool girl in North America, instead.

    I'm sure I've read of flirtatious characters in Regency romances who tap people with a fan, which is not very dissimilar. I do agree though that some of the ways the characters behaved/expressed themselves perhaps did feel a bit modern/American but as I said, this was a fantasy historical so it wasn't intended to be entirely accurate to the real historical period.

    Also--and please correct me if I am in error--but since when did England, in any period, have such a thing as a "General Store", for example?

    I don't know for sure, but I think that usage might well be accurate. The British History Online website's entry for Weston-on-the-Green, for example, includes the following:

    the appearance of the old village has altered little since the mid-19th century. (fn. 11) Many of the cottages, built of stone from local quarries, are still thatched, although slate roofs are gradually replacing the thatch. Some like Manor Cottage, once the dower house of the manor, (fn. 12) and the 'general store' (dated 1617) are of 17th-century origin.

    And, here's a photo of a "general store," taken in 1932. On the shop front is written "Confectionery, Tobacco, F.V. Shepherd. General Stores."

    Here's another mention of a "general store":

    Iron ore was not exported from Barrow till the year 1745 when the Backbarrow Iron Company began occasionally to ship ore here; but no great quantity was shipped till the year 1782 when the Newland Iron Company made Barrow their principal shipping port.
    About that time one or two additional cottages were provided for ore-loaders, and before the close of the 18th century, a grocer's shop and general store had been established in the village.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I just finished Bewitched and am rather flummoxed that it has apparently gotten a reputation as sounding "inauthentic." Nothing about it clanged in my ear, and when I think about the ridiculous language and situations in many books that pass as historicals these days, it seems very unfair that this book, which has so much originality to offer, has gotten such a bad rap.

    I get the feeling some readers went in with particular expectations--perhaps caused by the title evoking memories of a very different kind of witch and a very different kind of story. It is hardly fair to blame a book because it wasn't the story you were expecting to read. -- willaful

    ReplyDelete