PopCAANZ 2018: Byron, Disenchantment, FBI, Feminism, Gender, Italy, "Magical Negroes", Names, South-East Asia, Telenovelas, Twitter, YA

Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.

Donna Maree Hanson - Popular romance fiction: flirting with feminism

popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies — ‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules, values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary popular romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and concepts of feminism have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of feminism with writing and reading in the genre.

Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of the Byronic hero in romance novels

Two hundred years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero - ‘that man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’ - is a figure who continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.

The influence of this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills & Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel Jane Eyre, and the Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.

The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot, conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.

Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud - Cross-cultural romance, feminism and femininity in Southeast Asian fiction

In this paper, I explore how the negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in three texts: Zen Cho’s The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls (2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s Jewel (2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity that allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread on Hanson, Sheerman and Daud's papers.

Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a corpus study of gay and straight romance character names

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes – gay and straight – as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.

Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender representation in popular romance

The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes — niche even in small LGBTQ presses — are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community. Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into the mainstream.

French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Francesca Pierini - “He looks like he’s stepped out of a painting”: The idealization and appropriation of Italian timelessness through the experience of romantic love

Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots. Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be the timeless life and culture of Venice. At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy” occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of two Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged relation with ancient traditions and the past.

Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Carter, French and Pierini's papers.

Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an homage to the popular Latin American television genre. Among the many unusual features that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed, and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin American magical realism. [...] This paper will provide an overview of the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the romance novel — both as genres and as philosophies of love — that permeate the narrative.

Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in the digital age

Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and #romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By using anonymous user login information, unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.

Jodi McAlister tweeted a thread about Ramos-Garcia and Hart's papers before stopping so she could present her own.

Jodi McAlister - Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short but complex history of “New Adult” fiction

This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the “genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.

Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and popular romance fiction

Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains, modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’ to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.” Of particular interest will be Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan is Not Obliged and The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of “hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s Hold Me, which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem both love and popular media culture.

Nattie Golubov - The surveillant gaze in FBI romance

This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior; the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Selinger and Golubov's papers.

Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in Nora Roberts’ novels

Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels in which the violent murder of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance Hot Ice (1987), the category romance Convincing Alex (1994), the stand-alone mystical romance Three Fates (2002), and Morrigan’s Cross (2006), the first installment of a paranormal romance trilogy.

The Milk of Human Kindness

Laura Vivanco

World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year from 1 to 7 August in more than 170 countries to encourage breastfeeding and improve the health of babies around the world. (WHO)

So, in honour of World Breastfeeding Week, and on the principle that it's better to post something late than never, here are some examples of breastfeeding in the romance genre, and a short discussion about them.

In LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory Elly breastfeeds her baby (Lizzy) while Will looks on:

She sat on one of the overstuffed chairs with Lizzy in the crook of her arm. Will rolled onto his belly, crossed his wrists beneath his chin and observed as his wife looked down, took a nipple between two fingers and guided it to the baby's open mouth. His eyes became dark as onyx, his body aroused as he imbibed the image, both maternal and sexual. (279)

Here Will "imbibes" the image, not the milk, but there are some romances in which heroes do imbibe breastmilk. The attitudes of heroes who watch breastfeeding and/or drink breastmilk can differ significantly: "Hayden's desire for access is the 'typical' masculine desire for female breasts as secondary sexual characteristic, not Hawk O'Toole's desire for the maternally sexual/sexually maternal female, nor Trey's desire for the glory of the God(dess)'s love" (Frantz 29).

Another breast-feeding hero can be found in Lisa Kleypas's Dreaming of You. In the epilogue we learn that "Motherhood had brought a new radiance to Sara's features, while her achievements in her work had given her maturity and confidence" (366). However, motherhood has made Sara less confident about her sexual relationship with Derek:

She could find no way to explain her reluctance to him. She had gone through so many changes ... She was a mother now ... She wasn't certain that making love with him would be the same at all, and she didn't want to find out. She was afraid of disappointing him, and herself, and it was easier to keep putting off the event than to face it. She shrugged lamely. "I'm afraid it won't be the same as before." (370)

Derek's response is to undress her and kiss her until

She stirred in awakening desire, clasping him closer. To her sudden mortification, a few milky droplets seeped from her breasts. Pulling away with an apologetic gasp, she tried to turn from him. Derek pushed her shoulders down and bent over her breasts. His breath flowed in deep gusts as he stared at her. The moist nipples were a darker pink than before, surrounded by a delicate tracing of veins. The lustily maternal sight sent a wave of aching excitement through him. He touched the tip of her breast with his tongue, teasing and circling, then fastening his lips over the tautness. Gently he pulled with his mouth.
"Oh, you mustn't," Sara gasped as she felt a tingling ache in her breast. "It's not decent ..."
"I never said I was decent."
She gave a breathless moan, caught beneath him as he drew a surge of milk from her body. (371)

I can't help wondering if Sara's disinclination to resume sexual relations after becoming a mother has a lot to do with something I mentioned in an earlier post about motherhood: "Images of motherhood in western society have most often ignored maternal sexuality, notwithstanding the sleight of hand that this entails" (Pascoe). This scene in Dreaming of You certainly brings maternal sexuality to the forefront of the reader's attention: the breast is a "lustily maternal sight" and Derek and Sara learn that post-partum sex is "not the same as before ... It's even better" (372).

However, although it may be positive for maternal sexuality to be acknowledged and celebrated, "cultural notions of the female breast as a primarily sexual object place the act of breastfeeding in a controversial light and can be one of the most influential factors in a woman's decision not to breastfeed" (Rodriguez-Garcia and Frazier). As Cindy A. Stearns has written,

Breastfeeding is an embodied experience that is likely to provoke important insights and apparent contradictions concerning women's bodies. Breastfeeding, like being pregnant, is a state in which the body is in some ways a public good and thus open for public comment. However, unlike pregnancy and childbirth, the expression of breastfeeding is a continuous activity that requires the ongoing participation of another person. To the extent that breastfeeding occurs in the presence of others and/or symbolizes good mothering, it is also a visual performance of mothering with the maternal body at center stage. [...]

The prominence of the sexualized breast poses a problem for breastfeeding women and their maternal bodies. The good maternal body is not commonly believed to be simultaneously sexual, despite the obvious facts of human reproduction (Davis-Floyd 1992; Newton 1977). The sexual aspects of women and the maternal aspects of women are expected to be independent of each other. Thus, breastfeeding raises questions about the appropriate uses of women's bodies, for sexual or nurturing purposes. (308-309)

Romances in which breastfeeding heroines are "both maternal and sexual" would, then, seem to challenge ideas about what is "decent." At the same time, however, if they sexualise breastfeeding without showing heroines breastfeeding in public, it could be argued that they leave unchallenged, or perhaps even reinforce, the idea that breastfeeding should be performed in private. I don't think romances should be instruction manuals on how to breastfeed (just as I don't think, pace Quilliam, that it's fair to judge romance novels primarily in terms of whether they provide "sex and relationships education" (179)), but I'm fairly sure that there are plenty which include discussions about breastfeeding and/or have scenes of public breastfeeding. Right at the moment, though, I can't think of any examples. Can anyone help?
-------

• Frantz, Sarah S. G. "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power." Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Eds. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. 17-36.
• Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: UP, 2000.
  
• Kleypas, Lisa. Dreaming of You. New York: Avon, 1994.
• Pascoe, Caroline Myra. Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988. PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2006.
• Quilliam, Susan. " 'He seized her in his manly arms and bent his lips to hers…': The Surprising Impact that Romantic Novels Have On Our Work." Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 37.3 (2011): 179-181.
• Rodriguez-Garcia, Rosalia and Lara Frazier. "Cultural Paradoxes Relating to Sexuality and Breastfeeding." Journal of Human Lactation 11.2 (1995): 111-115. [Unfortunately I didn't have access to this journal, so I've quoted from the abstract.]
• Spencer, LaVyrle. Morning Glory. 1989. New York: Jove, 1990.
  
• Stearns, Cindy A. "Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body." Gender and Society 13.3 (1999): 308-325. [Excerpt]
  

The illustration is by Hans Sebald Beham and is from Wikimedia Commons (there's a detailed description of it here, which is mostly in German). It illustrates the story of Cimon and Pero, which has inspired a number of artists. Some other artistic interpretations of the story of Cimon and Pero can be found here. According to Wikipedia "The story is recorded in Memorable Acts and Sayings of the Ancient Romans, Book Nine (De Factis Dictisque Memorabilibus Libri IX) by the ancient Roman historian Valerius Maximus, and was presented as a great act of filial piety and Roman honor." The Rijksmuseum describes Reubens' painting of the story like this:

At first this seems a strange subject for a painting: a young woman giving her breast to an old man tied up in chains in a bare prison cell. In fact it is a story from Roman history: the tale of Cimon and Pero. Cimon is Pero's father. He is in prison awaiting execution and has been given nothing to eat. Pero has recently had a child and saves her father from starvation by secretly giving him her breast. This relatively large picture was painted by the famous Antwerp artist, Peter Paul Rubens. To enliven the scene, Rubens has added two prying prison guards on the right.

One may suspect that the "prying prison guards" are not simply impressed by the "filial piety" of Pero's motives but rather have a more sexual interest in the scene. Byron, though, focused on its 'purity':

The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story’s purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds: — Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe. (Childe Harold, Canto IV, Verse CLI)

Breastfeeding takes place in a similar context in a story in Barnaby Rich's Farewell to Military Profession (1581), although the plot is more similar to that of a modern romance since it features a wronged woman and the man who must learn to appreciate her goodness:

In the seventh story, ‘Of Aramanthus born a leper’, King Rodericke believes false accusations of adultery against his pregnant wife Isabell and sends her into exile, but when he is overthrown and imprisoned by the Turks she leaves her baby and returns in disguise to help him. In a graphic image of female nurturance, she comes to his prison each night, where ‘She would leane her self cloase to the grate, and thrustyng in her Teate betwene the Irons, the kyng learned againe to sucke, and thus she dieted him a long season’ (p. 175).
Because of Queen Isabell’s disguise, ‘Neither wiste the kyng what she was, that bestowed on hym so greate grace and goodnesse: yet he blessed her more then a thousande tymes a daie.’ While his companions in prison die for lack of sustenance, his gaolers observe him miraculously growing in strength from his unseen nightly ‘banquettes’. The episode has much of the resonance of mediaeval iconographies of the Virgin sustaining adult believers with her milk. (Hackett 88-89)

Loretta Chase - Miss Wonderful

Laura Vivanco

Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful has been reviewed here, here, and here and there's an excerpt here. As usual what I'm going to say is not a review and will include plentiful spoilers.

Alistair, the hero of Miss Wonderful, is someone who had

always been particular about his clothes. Perhaps, of late, he devoted more time and thought to his appearance than previously. Perhaps it kept his mind off other things. The fifteenth of June, for instance, the day and night he couldn't remember. Waterloo remained a blur in his mind. He pretended he did remember. (6)

and "He was sure Gordy [his best friend] knew or at least suspected that something had gone awry with Alistair's brain box" (9). As is the case for Lydia Joyce's heroine, Victoria, clothing is a defense and a mechanism by which the character can exert control over his or her life. In Alistair's case the protection he seeks is not against a perception that he might have loose morals, but a defence against the possibility that others might realise that he has a screw loose. Precise and controlled though he may be in his dress, the excessiveness of his interest in it is apparent in his expenditure on such items. As his father observes, "For what he spends on his tailor, bootmaker, hatter, glovemaker, and assorted haberdashers [...] I might furnish a naval fleet" (2).

This excess invites comparison with Mr Oldridge, Mirabel's father. Mr Oldridge's extreme devotion to the study of plants is diagnosed by Alastair as "monomania [...] Alistair was familiar with the malady. He had an evangelical sister-in-law and a cousin obsessed with deciphering the Rosetta stone" (29). Monomania was a condition identified by the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol "in the first decade of the nineteenth century. [...] Monomaniacs were sick persons whose mental behaviour appeared perfectly healthy in all outward respects but one, a single flaw neatly localised" (Boime 80).¹ Alistair's own monomania ensures that he is almost as easily distracted by Mirabel's bad fashion sense as Mr Oldridge is by botanical thoughts. In his turn, Mr Oldridge quickly becomes aware of Alistair's mental health problem, though of course he frames his description in terms related to his own monomania: "he put me in mind of a cactus" (37) and

"I knew something was wrong. It is like the cactus spines. [...] I strongly suspect Mr Carsington also suffered a head injury without realizing. I have heard of such cases. That would explain, you see."
"Explain what?"
"The cactus spines." (40)

Later, Mr Oldridge clarifies that "My botanist's instinct told me your attire was armor of some kind. [...] Cactus spines" (317) and he reveals that it was as a result of trying to understand Alistair that he recognised his own ailment:

"I have not attended much to business," the old man said sadly. "It was remiss of me. The great Dr. Johnson suffered from melancholia, you know. A strange ailment, indeed. How ironic that one should read about it in order to understand a young man, only to discover it in oneself." (301)

and

Perhaps I recognized your difficulty because it was something like my own [...] I did not retreat from the world on purpose after my wife's death. The thing came upon me, like a sickness or a pernicious habit, and I could not break its hold upon me. I found myself wondering if your grievous experience at Waterloo had a similar effect upon you. I retreated into botany, and you [...] into the arcane science of dress. (317-18)

However, although both have mental health problems, Mr Oldridge's is depression, whereas Alistair is suffering from what we would nowadays term post-traumatic stress disorder. At first the "cactus spines" are the main indication that something is amiss. One of the criteria for diagnosing PTSD is "Persistent efforts at avoidance of the memories and numbing of general responsiveness by adjustments in behavioural and cognitive patterns with emotional blunting" (Gabriel and Neal). The progress of his disorder resembles that of Case number 4 described by Gabriel and Neal, who was able to appear relatively unaffected until an incident occurred which triggered the memories and "forced him to re-experience the initiating trauma. His nightmares, insomnia, poor memory, fatigue, and irascibility became worse, and he developed headaches, musculoskeletal aches". It is during a walk with Mirabel that Alistair falls into Briar Brook and "got your brain knocked about your skull" (108) and this forces him to relive the horror of battle. Dr. Woodfrey diagnoses "symptoms of a fatigue of the nerves" (111).

In the cases of both Alistair and Mr Oldridge the mental health problem and its symptoms are related to love, a fact which may recall the ways in which other romance novelists afflict their characters which diseases caused by, or metaphors for, love.² Mr Oldridge's monomania came on after the death of his beloved wife; Alistair's romantic tendencies have been stifled by the onset of PTSD: "He'd avoided women until his leg was healed and working, more or less. Since then ... Well, he wasn't sure what had held him back. He'd been numb or not fully awake in some way" (132-23). One of the symptoms of PTSD is that "You may not have positive or loving feelings toward other people and may stay away from relationships" (National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) and Alistair's return to mental health is caused, at least in part, by his deepening love for Mirabel.³

Rosario, in her review of the novel, writes that

Miss Wonderful was a keeper until the last part, where a suspense subplot kicked in, out of the blue, and took over much of the story. Not only wasn't this needed to provide conflict, because there was more than enough tension between Alistair and Mirabel due to the canal, it didn't fit in well with the tone of the rest of the story.

It seems to me that the suspense subplot enables both Alistair and Mirabel's father to overcome their mental health problems. The climax of this subplot takes place down an air shaft which formed part of an old mine. The airshaft, a dark "hole, a ragged shape, only a shade darker than the surrounding darkness" (307) down which Mr Oldridge falls, can, I think can be read as symbolising the mental health problems of both Alistair and Mr Oldridge, much like the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress). In Bunyan's book the Pilgrim is not alone in his fall into the Despond, and his companion escapes first. The Slough in Bunyan's work represents the despair created by the sense of shame and guilt the Pilgrim feels about his sins but in other, less religious contexts, it has been used to allude to depression.

Mr Oldridge falls in first, which is fitting as he's been depressed for many more years than Alistair: "after her [Mirabel's] mother's death fifteen years ago, he had grown increasingly preoccupied with plant rather than human life" (26). The result is that Mirabel manages the large "estate and all her father's business interests" (42) and she says that "I have considered engraving [...] as his epitaph: 'Sylvester Oldridge, Beloved Father, Detained Elsewhere.'" (17). The literal "detention" caused by his abduction parallels the emotional "detention" he has been in for fifteen years, and it jars him out of his depression, as he explains to Mirabel:

"A great deal passed through my mind between that time [immediately after Caleb Finch's death, when Mr Oldridge found himself alone in the hole] and your arrival. Nothing on earth is so dear to me as you. I am heartily sorry that I've been like a stranger to you, and that it wanted the recent series of shocks to bring me to my senses." (314)

Not only this, the abduction gives Mr Oldridge the opportunity to put right one of the key problems he failed to resolve for Mirabel: "At the time of Finch's dismissal, Mr Oldridge had been sunk in the lowest depths of the melancholia from which he'd only recently begun to emerge" (255). Due to Mr Oldridge's deteriorating mental health, Finch, his "incompetent - and possibly dishonest - estate manager had made chaos of estate affairs and in a few years nearly destroyed what it had taken generations to build" (82). Finch now believes that "Eleven years ago, Miss Oldridge had committed the hateful crime of making him stop righting matters for himself with her father's wealth. She had dismissed him without a reference, saying he was incompetent" (126-27) and the suspense sub-plot involves Caleb Finch's attempt to get revenge on Mirabel, who had sacked him. Caleb abducts Mr Oldridge and attempts to murder him: "Caleb Finch was holding a knife when we fell," he said. "On impact, it might easily have entered my body instead of his" (314). Having thus disposed of Caleb, whom he should have dealt with himself many years before, Mr Oldridge can literally and metaphorically emerge from the dark hole of depression into which he had sunk.

In the course of the novel Mr Oldridge also makes reparation to Mirabel for the other major problem he caused her: for his sake "She'd given up [...] her one chance at love, because the man she loved was not ready to relinquish his hopes and dreams to make a life with her here" (82). Alistair "had a growing suspicion that some sort of communication had passed between Oldridge Hall and Hargate House prior to his arrival in Derbyshire last month" (331), "'I was lured there,' Alistair said. 'On purpose. They set a trap, the two of them. My father saw the opportunity, and he took advantage. [...]' " (332). Mr Oldridge, by playing a crucial role in bringing Alistair and Mirabel together, provides Mirabel with a new fiancé to replace the one she lost when she had to devote herself to caring for Oldridge Hall.

Alistair's experience in the hole is different. Alistair's mental health problem began after Waterloo. Although he cannot remember how he behaved during the battle, others consider him to be a hero. Alistair, however, cannot accept this description of himself:

"you are the famous hero."
His mouth twisted. "I merely contrived not to disgrace myself during the short time in which I fought."
"You are far too modest. You risked your own life several times, to save others."
He gave a short laugh. "That's what men who don't think do. We plunge in without considering the consequences. It hardly seems right to call sheer recklessness 'heroic.' [...]" (83)

His fall into Briar Brook while out walking reactivated his memories. Now he does not fall, but instead makes a deliberate choice to descend into the hole. This choice, and his actions there, give him the opportunity to prove to himself and Mirabel that he truly is a hero not simply a survivor. This time, he does consider the consequences and still chooses to "plunge in", risking his life to save another's.

The experience of being down the hole also makes Alistair confront the horror of battle:

"We'll fetch a rope and have you out in a trice."
"I fear it is more complicated than that. [...] Caleb Finch fell on top of me. He is ... dead."
Nausea welled up. Alistair took a deep breath, let it out. He remembered. The mud. The cold, stiffening body keeping him down. The stench. He thrust the memory away.
"In that case, I'll come down to you, sir," he said. (307)⁴

and "As he went lower, he became aware of the smell that wasn't wet earth. It was all too familiar. Blood. And excrement. The smell of sudden, violent death. [...] He wanted to retch , but he wouldn't let himself" (309).

Having ensured Mr Oldridge's safety, it is then Alistair himself who is in mortal danger: "The hole was caving in, and he was going to be buried alive" (311). Mr Oldridge, as in the matter of Alistair and Mirabel's love life, offers indirect help, "We've run the rope through the stirrup leather. The horse will pull him out. I'll guide the animal" (311), while Mirabel, "At the top of the hole [where] the blackness lightened to dark gray" (310) and with her hand outstretched, is to "assist Mr. Carsington" (311) .

Reliving the trauma of seeing the aftermath of violent death, and once more being in mortal danger himself, enables Alistair to emerge from the hole emotionally healed, able to live without his protective clothing. He's been helped by Mirabel who, literally and metaphorically, brings him out of his darkness into the daylight (or, when they make love, takes him into a darkness of pleasure rather than pain: "they fell together into a sweet, cool darkness" (340).

This is prefigured in their first meeting when Alistair sees Mirabel

racing up the terrace stairs, skirts bunched up to her knees, bonnet askew, and a wild mass of hair the color of sunrise dancing about her face.
Even while he was taking in the hair--a whirling fireball when a gust of wind caught it--she darted across the terrace. [...] He opened the door, and she irrupted into the drawing room in a whirl of rain and mud, taking no more heed of her bedraggled state than a dog would.
She smiled.
Her mouth was wide, and so the smile seemed to go on forever, and round and round, encircling him. Her eyes were blue, twilight blue, and for a moment she seemed to be the beginning and end of everything, from the sunrise halo of hair to the dusky blue of her eyes.
For that moment, Alistair didn’t know anything else, even his name, until she spoke it.
“Mr. Carsington,” she said, and her voice was clear and cool with a trace of a whisper in it.
Hair: sunrise. Eyes: dusk. Voice: night.
“I am Mirabel Oldridge,” the night-voice went on.
Mirabel. It meant wonderful. And she was truly--
Alistair caught himself in the nick of time, before his brain disintegrated. No poetry, he told himself. (17, emphasis added)

If Alistair's being poetic, his poetry is not totally dissimilar to Byron's She walks in beauty, like the night -

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

It is Mirabel who brings Alistair forth from darkness into an emotional daytime, a glorious sunshine from the north who turns his mind from horrible recollections of war to thoughts of love. In Shakespeare's Richard III

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now,--instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,--
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber (Act 1 Sc 1)

At their very first meeting, Mirabel turns Alistair's thoughts away from the winter of his discontent:

Derbyshire was not where Alistair wanted to be at present. [...] In mid-February [...] The landscape was bleak shades of brown and grey, the weather bitterly cold and wet.
But Gordmor's - and thus Alistair's - problem lay here, and could not wait until summer to be solved. (15)

to her own beauty: "He could not allow his thoughts to linger, even for an instant, upon any woman...no matter how lovely her skin or how warm her smile, like the first warmth of spring after a long, dark winter..." (17, emphasis added), "She smiled then, and his heart warmed as though it basked in summer sunshine" (90, emphasis added). She may be from Darbyshire, rather than York, and her beauty speaks to him of spring rather than winter, but she too turns Alistair's thoughts from war to love and capering "nimbly in a lady's chamber".

• Boime, Albert. "Portraying Monomaniacs to Service the Alienist's Monomania: Géricault and Georget." Oxford Art Journal 14.1 (1991): 79-91.
• Chase, Loretta. Miss Wonderful. 2004. London: Piatkus, 2006.
  
• Gabriel, Roger and Leigh A. Neal. "Post-traumatic stress disorder following military combat or peace keeping." British Medical Journal 324 (2002): 340-341.
• Meyer, Stephen. "Marschner’s Villains, Monomania, and the Fantasy of Deviance." Cambridge Opera Journal 12.2 (2000): 109–134.

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1 According to the Stanford School of Medicine website,

Time changes all concepts. "Obsessive-compulsive disorder" is no exception. [...] In his 1838 psychiatric textbook, Esquirol (1772-1840) described OCD as a form of monomania, or partial insanity. He fluctuated between attributing OCD to disordered intellect and disordered will. After French psychiatrists abandoned the concept of monomania in the 1850s, they attempted to understand obsessions and compulsions within various broad nosological categories.

Stephen Meyer similarly notes the ways in which terminology has changed while the symptoms described remain broadly the same:

The symptoms that Esquirol describes in his case histories of monomaniacs: increasing delusion centred around a fixed idea, lack of fever or other physical signs of disease; the ability to reason on topics unrelated to the delusion, etc. are hardly new. Earlier writers, however, saw these symptoms as indications of another disease, the disease of melancholia. [...] the idea that too great a concentration on a single idea could lead to insanity stretches back at least to Roman times, and was particularly associated in the works of many authors with melancholia. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621), for instance, Robert Burton develops the idea of ‘love-melancholy’, a kind of mental disease growing out of an erotic fascination. The association between obsession and melancholia was widespread and consistent: in his Dictionary (1755) Samuel Johnson defined ‘Melancholy’ as ‘a kind of madness, in which the mind is always fixed on one object’. Esquirol’s ideas were thus not completely original; nevertheless, by singling out the idea of ‘fixed delusion’ as the primary cause of a separate disorder he refocused the discourse surrounding insanity. (114-115)

It is perhaps worth noting that Miss Wonderful is set in 1817 and so in making his diagnosis Alistair is at the cutting edge of psychiatry. According to Boime "the term 'monomania' soon filtered down to the non-medical French intelligentsia and entered the literary mainstream by the late 1820s" (80). Meyer notes that "In her book Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century Jan Goldstein cites numerous examples to show the broader dissemination of the idea of ‘monomania’ in early nineteenth-century public life. By the late 1820s, she writes, ‘the term had already percolated down to the nonmedical . . . intelligentsia and been incorporated into their language’. " (113).

Alistair's malaise is also described as "melancholy": "He'd hardly noticed his state of mind, it was so familiar, this melancholy. Then she'd burst into the room and he'd thought his heart, in pure joy, would burst from his chest" (156). Lord Gordmor's sister diagnoses Alistair's condition as "a pernicious melancholia at the very least" (209).

2 Mirabel also describes love as a form of mental illness: "You make me deranged" (242).

3 Alistair thinks that it was "typical that after nearly three years of apathy toward the fair sex, he should choose now" (133), but the reader knows that this is not a matter of choice, or the mere result of the passing of a suitable length of time, but a direct consequence of Mirabel's effect on Alistair. From the very first moment they met "the sight of her had lightened his heart" (221). Up until that moment, however, his "emotional blunting", the result of his PTSD meant that although in the past he was someone who "fell in love quickly, deeply, and disastrously" (3) more than two years had passed since both the last love affair and his return from Waterloo. His father observes that he has "stayed out of [love] trouble only because you were incapacitated for most of that time [...] Meanwhile, the tradesmen's bills arrive by the cartload. I cannot decide which is worse. For what you spend on waistcoats you might keep a harem of French whores" (6). What his father does not know is that Alistair's "incapacitation" is mental as well as physical.

4 Once again, one can see clearly that Alistair's experiences parallel those of Mr Oldridge. During the Battle of Waterloo, Alistair was trapped under dead bodies (147) and had to be rescued: now it is Mr Oldridge who is in that position. The two may also be alike in the intensity of their romantic love:

"Your father loved her very much," he said.
She nodded. [...]
"If she was at all like you, I can understand your father's shutting himself off from the world for all these years," he said. "It is only a few days since last I saw you, yet to me it has seemed a dark and wearisome eternity." (224)

"Researchers have long noted that women tend to be drawn to men who are a lot like their fathers, for better or worse. [...] Now a new study from Europe suggests that the attraction doesn't stop at personality" (Allday, San Francisco Chronicle June 2007). It is not mentioned whether Alistair and Mr Oldridge also resemble each other physically, but recent research has found that women "who had close relationships with their fathers as children tend to be attracted to men who look like them when they grow up" (Henderson, Times Online June 2007).