Dancing with Metaphors

Laura Vivanco

As Lakoff and Turner observe, all of us use metaphors, but some of us use them better than others:

great poets, as master craftsmen, use basically the same tools we use; what makes them different is their talent for using these tools, and their skill in using them, which they acquire from sustained attention, study, and practice.
Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omnipresent: metaphor suffuses our thoughts, no matter what we are thinking about. [...] Great poets can speak to us because they use the modes of thought we all possess. Using the capacities we all share, poets can illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticize our ideologies. (xi)

In romance novels metaphors often make an appearance during sex scenes. According to Laurie Gold, "What comes to mind immediately are these phrases: ‘the dance as old as time,’ ‘filling her tight sheath,’ and ‘impaling himself into her femininity.’" Here's an example of the dance metaphor from Cathy Maxwell's Because of You. As the villagers of Sproule are gathered in the village inn to celebrate Sam's wedding to Yale, upstairs she "felt his body slide into hers" (131). The couple consummate their union as

The fiddler played a sprightly jig. The sound of it seemed to come up through the walls and Yale caught himself moving to the rhythm of the music.
They were dancing, an intimate dance as old as time. He watched the changing expressions of her face, awed by her fresh, unguarded response to him. The music faded as Yale lost himself in the magic of her body. (135)

In comparison with the more aggressive, militaristic metaphors of the woman as a “sheath” for the man's weapon, or an object impaled on the hero’s mighty phallic rod, the metaphor of dance is one which suggests cooperation, the couple moving literally and metaphorically in harmony: "She set the pace now, rising eagerly to meet his thrusts" (135).

The reuse or reworking of metaphors such as that of the "dance as old as time" is not limited to the romance genre:

General conceptual metaphors are [...] not the unique creation of individual poets but are rather part of the way members of a culture have of conceptualizing their experience. Poets, as members of their cultures, naturally make use of these basic conceptual metaphors to communicate with other members, their audience. (Lakoff and Turner 9)

Jane Austen, for example,

choreographs courtship literally by employing dancing as both a metaphor and a model for marriage, as dance partners become marriage partners [...]. She employs the same terminology for dancing as for marriage: a man “offers his hand,” “engaging” the woman as his “partner” in the parlance of the period, suggesting that this mating dance may be a prelude to matrimony. (Stovel)

Indeed, taken out of context, the sentence

When those dances were over she returned to Charlotte Lucas, and was in conversation with her, when she found herself suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy, who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him. (Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 18)

might easily be assumed to be about the acceptance of an offer of marriage, rather than about a woman agreeing to dance with a man. Austen, then, draws on her culture's way of "conceptualizing their experience" but she also makes the metaphor of dance her own. In Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney states that

I consider a country–dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours. [...] You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with anyone else. (Northanger Abbey, Chapter 10)

Although there are times when we can "get nothing [...] serious from" (Chapter 14) Henry and it is not entirely clear how serious he is being on this occasion,

This extended simile, Johnsonian in its amplitude and in its precise use of abstract words and significant in being one of the few fully developed figures of speech in Jane Austen's works, defines a major theme of the six finished novels. (Elsbree 114)

Segal and Handler agree with Henry that there are parallels between dancing and marriage. They “interpret the etiquette of dancing as a complex metaphorical prefigurement of marriage” (323) and note that because

dance is a metaphor not simply of marriage but a metaphor for creating it, [...] married women often provide the music that allows everyone else to dance. Similarly, Anne Eliot’s sad slide into spinsterhood is signalled by the fact that her friends have come to depend on her ‘services’ as a musician for their dances; and when Captain Wentworth, newly reacquainted with her, inquires about her status as a dancing partner, he is told that 'she has quite given up dancing. She had rather play.' (326).

Later in the novel, however, after

The reconciliation of Anne and Wentworth, [...] dancing figures prominently, and here it is used as a metaphor [...]. Charles Musgrove, Anne, and Wentworth have been walking together; Charles suddenly remembers a gun he wishes to look at and begs leave of the other two (all the italics are mine):

There could not be an objection. There could be only a most proper alacrity, a most obliging compliance for public view; and smiles reined in and spirits dancing in private rapture. (Elsbree 134)

Romance novels vary greatly in their styles: some authors choose to employ metaphors sparingly and subtly while others adopt a type of writing which is quite distinctive in its use of metaphors. Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz argue that this "language of romance is more lushly symbolic and metaphorical than ordinary discourse" (22) and they acknowledge that it

is frequently denounced by critics as being overly florid. But effusive imagery has a purpose. As we have already noted, the primary task of the romance writer is to create for her readers a vision of an alternative world and to give mythical dimension to its landscape and characters. Piling on the detail by means of a generous use of the romance codes is an effective way to achieve this goal. Lush use of symbols, metaphors, and allusion is emotionally powerful as well as mythologically evocative. (23-24)

Metaphors can indeed be evocative and emotionally powerful, but when they go wrong they can seem ridiculous.


I recently came across the following rather problematic metaphor: "when [...] she'd wafted into view his lungs had gone into cardiac arrest" (Cleary 26). I know "cardiac arrest" can also be referred to as "cardiopulmonary arrest" and the "pulmonary" bit refers to the lungs while the "cardio" part refers to the heart, but I still have some difficulty with the idea that, even metaphorically, a set of lungs could have a "cardiac arrest." Instead of conveying deep emotion, this metaphor sent me off on an anatomical tangent. Smart Bitch Sarah is "not one to shrink away from a metaphor" and earlier this year she commented on a striking assemblage of metaphor and simile:

Honey would sometimes think of Dusty, and it was like she twisted a dial and opened a steel door to a safe in her heart where she kept her grandest jewels—bittersweet memories, surrounded by a poignant moat. Some were vivid as fallen red bougainvillea petals, while others drifted by aimlessly, as vague and faded as old photographs in a dark flooded cellar.

I feel like I’m watching one of those informercials about educational programs guaranteed to improve your memory. Safe! Jewels! Poignant moat! Petals! Photographs! Flooded cellar! French drains! Homeowner’s Insurance! Flood Policy! (Wendell)

Given that metaphors when misused or overused can be distracting at best, and unintentionally hilarious at worst, it's perhaps not surprising that Leslie Wainger, in her Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, advises authors to

Use metaphors in moderation. Incorporating a lot of metaphors in your descriptions can be tempting, because they give you a chance to be creative and stretch your skills. Do your best to resist the temptation, though. Too many metaphors - just like too many adjectives - get in the way of your real goal: involving the reader in your characters' relationship. When used sparingly, metaphors add to a description; so each time you're tempted to add one, make sure that it contributes to the overall impact of your story. If you're just showcasing your own skills, cut it. (143)

----

• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. The Republic of Pemberley.
• Austen, Jane. Persuasion. The Republic of Pemberley.
• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The Republic of Pemberley.
  
• Barlow, Linda and Jayne Ann Krentz. "Beneath the Surface: The Hidden Codes of Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. 15-29.
• Cleary, Anna. Do Not Disturb. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2011.
  
• Elsbree, Langdon. “Jane Austen and the Dance of Fidelity and Complaisance.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15.2 (1960): 113-36.
• Gold, Laurie. “Laurie’s News & Views: Issue #62.” All About Romance.com.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P., 1989.
• Maxwell, Cathy. Because of You. 1999. London: HarperCollins: 2005.
• Segal, Daniel A., and Richard Handler. “Serious Play: Creative Dance and Dramatic Sensibility in Jane Austen, Ethnographer.” Man ns 24.2. (1989): 322-39.
• Stovel, Nora. "An Invitation to the Dance and a Proposal of Marriage: Jane Austen’s Emma and Two Film Adaptations." Persuasions 28.1 (2007).
  
• Wainger, Leslie. Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004.
  
• Wendell, Sarah. "Walkin’ Dusty Roads of Metaphor." Smart Bitches Trashy Books.
  

The first image, created by Carlos Luque, is of "Sabrina y Hector" dancing the tango. I downloaded it from Wikimedia Commons under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. The second image is a "Drawing from Punch magazine humorously depicting couple dancing the tango." It too came from Wikimedia Commons .

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.

----

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).

Mary Balogh - The Secret Pearl (1)

Laura Vivanco

Mary Balogh's The Secret Pearl was first published in 1991 and Balogh writes that "It is often named by long-time readers as one of their favorites among my books." You can read an excerpt here and there are glowing reviews available from The Romance Reader and All About Romance.

The central metaphor of Mary Balogh's The Secret Pearl is obvious from the title: it clearly concerns a secret pearl. Adam, the hero, says that in his "pre-Waterloo days [...] I thought the world my oyster with a priceless pearl within. I suppose we all believe that when we are very young" (122). Fleur, the heroine, then thinks about what he has said:

Once he had been young and handsome and carefree. Once he had thought the world to be his oyster, life a priceless pearl. In his pre-Waterloo days, as he had described them. And yet he had spoken sadly, as if those dreams had proved to be empty, worthless ones. (123)

The repetition serves to emphasise the metaphor. The symbolism of the pearl shifts, however, as Adam begins to see glimpses of the happiness he might have with Fleur:

She was coming to dominate his thoughts by day and haunt his dreams by night. He was coming to live for the moments when he could see her, listen to her music, listen to her voice, see her eyes on his. She was beginning to give light and meaning to his days.
In her he was beginning to glimpse the precious pearl that he had once expected of life. (234)

Again the metaphor is emphasised through repetition. Adam describes Fleur as his "pearl beyond price" (323) and he dreams of a time when he could

love her by night. [...] And he would fill her with his seed. He would watch her grow with his children. And he would watch those children being born and watch her giving birth to them. [...] He would be happy again and happy forever. He would open the oyster shell and find the pearl within. (327)

Fleur's name suggests that she is a flower but she in fact has multiple identities.¹ I'd like to suggest that this multiplicity of names and roles also characterises her relationship to the pearl/oyster metaphor. Clearly she is, at times, Adam's "pearl beyond price", but when she is being filled with seed, and growing "with his children", she perhaps more closely resembles the oyster. As an oyster she brings forth objects of great beauty and worth, whether these be love, happiness or offspring.

I'm going to further explore the pearl/oyster metaphor by comparing Fleur's experience with that of the oysters used in the cultured pearl industry. Admittedly this industry did not come into existence until well after the Regency period in which the novel is set, and it could be argued that I'm pushing the metaphor far further than it was intended to be taken, but I think the comparison with cultured pearls is both interesting and, in many ways, appropriate. This is not solely because I'd like to play on the word "culture", though Fleur is clearly a cultured woman in the sense that she appreciates the arts (she possesses musical talent, can dance and paint well, and has an appreciation for literature and the theatre) but because the cultured pearl is in part man-made, just as Fleur's troubles are.²

The process of creating a cultured pearl begins when a man-made implant is inserted into the oyster's gonad:

Cultured pearls are formed in a pearl oyster, thanks to human interference. In any pearl formation, two things are required, the outer epithelium of the mantle lobe and core substance or nucleus. It was found that cut pieces of the mantle epithelium would provide the pearl secreting cells and that processed shell beads would be accepted by the oyster as the foreign body. Through careful surgery, the mantle piece graft tissue and the shell bead nucleus are implanted together, side by side, into the gonad of the oyster. (James)

That clinical procedure which affects one of the oyster's sexual organs sounds unappealing and painful for the oyster, even if the worker, like Adam, might claim that "The treatment I gave you [...] was not rough" (9). It is, in fact, rather like Fleur's first experience of sex:

He leaned across her and took her by the upper arms, moving her so that she lay across the bed instead of along it. He grasped her hips and drew her forward until her knees bent over the side of the bed and her feet rested on the floor.
He slid his palms between her thighs and spread her legs wide. He pushed them wider with his knees [...]. And he spread his fingers across the tops of her legs and opened her with his thumbs. [...] He positioned himself and mounted her with one sharp deep thrust. (5)

And so the irritant, the foreign body, is inserted into Fleur. Oysters take some time to recover from the procedure and "A common cause of death is serious infection of the wounds inflicted at the time of the implantation operation" (James) . Fleur "bled intermittently throughout the day. She was so sore that sometimes she squirmed against the sharp pain of her torn virginity" (10).³ That Fleur's loss of virginity is also emotionally traumatic is quite clear: "she had discovered that survival after all was not necessarily a triumphant thing, but could take one into frightening depths of despair" (10) but "Never, even during this day of blackest despair, had she considered suicide as an escape from her predicament" (12).

To give them time and a safe environment in which their wounds can heal, "Freshly operated oysters should be reared undisturbed for a few days" (James), often in the laboratory, before being placed in the waters of the oyster farm. It is "five days after she had become a whore" (17) that Fleur is offered a post as a governess, and by then 'The bleeding had stopped and the soreness had healed" (17). It is a further "six days later" (21) that she is ready to be transplanted to Adam's country estate, Willoughby Hall, where the process of transforming her trauma into something rare and precious will begin.

It is from this point onwards that the process of creating the pearl is identical in both natural and cultured pearls. Although the industrial procedure deliberately introduces a bead into the oyster, naturally occurring pearls also result from the oyster's "response to an irritant inside its shell" and in both cases the oyster "secretes the calcium carbonate substance called nacre to cover the irritant" (Wikipedia). The layers of nacre build up, creating the pearl and thus the oyster, like Fleur, makes something valuable out of a process that has caused it distress.

Finally the pearl will be removed. If this is done carefully, the oyster will survive: "In case the oysters need to be re-used for a second time, the pearls are carefully removed by opening the pearl-sac through the gonad taking care not to damage nor stress the oyster" (James). The extraction of the "pearl", Fleur's love for Adam , is both a relief and a source of renewed pain to her, since the pearl must be kept secret and Fleur herself, the oyster, is left alone in her native environment to recover from her loss. She must remain a lowly oyster (a schoolmistress), albeit one who has produced a secret pearl (her love for Adam, an object created by the overlaying of layers of respect and desire over the initial, implanted and traumatising man-made bead) until, though the open acknowledgement of their relationship she can be fully identified as a cultured pearl, a duchess.

She takes the place of the previous duchess, Sybil, who never learned to behave like an oyster and is instead destroyed by her troubles.⁴ Like Fleur, Sybil lost the chance to marry the man she loved, but unlike Fleur she never accepted this or became a stronger person:

she could have helped herself. [...] But Sybil's character was not a strong one. Had she been given happiness, doubtless she would have remained sweet all her life. But she was a taker, not a giver, and once everything she held dear had been taken from her, there had been nothing left in her life except bitterness and hatred and a desperate reaching out for sensual gratification (374)

Fleur's predicament and her response to it are therefore contrasted with those of Sybil. This romance would appear to be one with a moral, and that moral is that even if the world isn't your oyster, you should behave like one and make precious pearls out of life's harsh realities.

• Balogh, Mary. The Secret Pearl. New York: Bantam Dell, 2005.
• James, P.S.B.R.. Pearl Oyster Farming and Pearl Culture. Cochin, India: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, 1991.

1 Fleur's name may also be a pun on her loss of virginity, since it means "flower" and Adam is her "deflowerer" (14). It is the taking of this flower that ensures that Adam "could not help feeling responsible" (15). The other man responsible for her fate is Lord Brocklehurst, who calls her by her first name, Isabella, perhaps suggesting that the source of his obsession with her is her beauty, since the name sounds like "is a bella" ("is a beauty"). [The true origin and meaning of the name is in dispute.]

2 When interviewed for the post of governess Fleur reveals that

I was proficient in all my lessons. I speak French and Italian tolerably well, I play the pianoforte and have some skill with watercolours. I have always been particularly interested in literature and history and the classics. I have some skill with a needle. (18)

In addition to these abilities she can dance well, as is demonstrated various times in the course of the novel, when she returns to her home village to work as a teacher she plans to teach the children to sing, and she has "a poise about her, a sense of dignity" (391). She is, then, an "accomplished woman' even by Mr Darcy's stringent definition:

observed Elizabeth, "you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman."

"Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it."

"Oh! certainly," cried his faithful assistant, "no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved."

"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

"Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?"

"I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united." (Austen, Pride and Prejudice Chapter 8)

3 The extent of Fleur's bleeding and pain as a consequence of her loss of virginity is clearly a deliberate choice on Balogh's part. As has been noted, Adam was not particularly rough in his handling of Fleur, and many women experience little or no pain during their first experience of sexual intercourse. According to one article by Betina Arndt in The Sydney Morning Herald

no-one really knows how common it is for women with intact hymen to bleed on first intercourse. Sara Paterson-Brown, an enterprising British gynaecologist at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London, surveyed 41 colleagues about their first intercourse experiences and found 14 bled, 26 did not and one did not remember.

Arndt notes that tampon usage may play a part in this and apparently it's also reflected in the descriptions in romance novels:

Sandra Pertot is a Newcastle clinical psychologist who has specialised in sex therapy for three decades. She's struck by the fact that these days the hymen rarely rates a mention by her clients. [...] Pertot believes tampon use is contributing to this change, not just through stretching of the hymen but by changing girls' attitudes to first intercourse. [...] This probably means fewer women are experiencing pain or trauma the first time around. Pertot mentions a recent shift in the plot of Mills and Boon romance novels. "When we were growing up the novels always described the first time as 'pleasure mixed with pain'. Today the pain is gone. It's always wonderful right from the start with him taking her to heights of ecstasy she never knew before."

Anyway, after that not very brief, but hopefully interesting digression, I'll get back to Fleur. It seems to me that her experience is particularly bloody and painful and the fact that it's so traumatic is not simply a reflection of reality but at least partly symbolic of her emotional trauma at becoming "a member of a profession the very thought of which had always horrified and disgusted her. She was a whore. A prostitute. A streetwalker" (11).

4 I can't help but wonder if Sybil's name is significant. Sibyls, in ancient times, were pagan prophetesses. T. S. Elliot's The Waste Land includes an introductory epigraph:

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere . . .”, [which] translates “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked the Sibyl, 'what do you want?' she answered 'I want to die'.” (The Literary Encyclopedia)

Another suicidal Sibyl is to be found in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray:

Living in a theatrical world of make-believe and melodrama, Sibyl cannot accept the reality of Dorian's rejection. When she decides to give up acting for his love, she is shocked at Dorian's callous, "without art you are nothing" (100), followed by his desertion. Steeped in theatrics, Sibyl commits suicide. (Gates)

Lydia Joyce - The Veil of Night (1: Home and Heart)

Laura Vivanco

Lydia Joyce 'achieved bestsellerdom with The Veil of Night' (Publishers Weekly), her first published novel. Here are some reviews: an extremely positive one from A Romance Review, a fairly good one from All About Romance, and a not quite so positive one from The Romance Reader. You can also find an excerpt here.

As usual, this is not a review, and I may include spoilers. I want to focus on just one aspect of the novel: the imagery and symbolism of buildings.

The first chapter opens with the words

Graceless and sprawling, Raeburn Court was a pile of mottled limestone atop the bald hill. Lady Victoria Wakefield spied it while the coach was still some distance off, and she watched it steadily as they approached the park gate; after all, there was nothing else in the bleak landscape to catch her eye. As they drew near, the squat manor house grew only more blunt and ugly, its saw-toothed crenellations pierced by random, unbalanced spires stabbing the slate-gray sky. (2005: 3)

It would appear to match its master, Byron Stratford, Duke of Raeburn. The Court is 'sprawling' and when we first meet Byron he reclines at his ease, waiting for Lady Victoria's approach and later his signature 'sprawled across the sheet' (2005: 27), a word which appears again in another description of the house of which he is the centre: 'there was more unknown in the room behind her [where she has left Byron] than in all the rest of the sprawling, rotting manor house' (2005: 28).

During that first encounter Byron's 'presence filled the room' (2005: 24) in the same way that his house dominates the surrounding terrain, while his eyes match the colours of the landscape, 'brown or moss-coloured' (2005: 25). Joyce describes him in architectural terms:

The lineaments of his face were bold and strong - almost crude, as if he'd been blindly carved of stone - but they were no less attractive for a lack of patrician daintiness. How old he was she could not guess: certainly younger than the roughened skin of his face suggested. It was not marked with the scarring left by youthful blemishes but with a deeper weathering, as if he had stood barefaced to wind and sun for a score of years. [...]
His appearance was certainly unconventional, but it was also compelling (2005: 25, my emphasis)

Externally, then, Raeburn Court matches the appearance of its master. As for the interior, it parallels Byron's reputation:

Victoria took the opportunity to survey the room. The vast, unlit chamber stretched before her--the manor's original great hall, no doubt--its deep shadows scarcely pierced by the gray light filtering through the filthy mullioned windows, which trembled in their frames as another peal of thunder cracked overhead. Ancient, moldering tapestries flapped like living things in the steady draft flowing through the room, and enormous cobwebs fluttered against the black rafters in the dim recesses of the ceiling. (2005:7-8)

Such decay and neglect might seem to indicate Byron's immorality. He has a 'well-deserved reputation for being a dissolute reprobate' (2005: 12). Lydia Joyce provides the online equivalents of footnotes to the text, and one of those notes states that Raeburn Court,

has no "real world" model. I didn't like the traditional castle-ish construction so common in Gothics, so instead, I made it a mishmash of styles from many periods, which would give it a suitable spookiness without following the cliché too closely.

That unconventional 'mishmash of styles' might in architectural terms make the isolated Court not dissimilar to Byron who's 'a pariah not because of the acts he committed but because of the conventions he failed to keep' (2005: 4).*

Despite the apparent similarities between Byron and Raeburn Court, he only intends living there until the renovation of the Dowager House is complete. Victoria thinks it 'Strange that he should want to leave a house that seemed to suit him so well' (2005: 37), but Byron has reached the conclusion that it 'had been inhabited far too long by other men who had left their impressions upon it more indelibly than he could ever hope to. That was the secret of Raeburn Court, he had finally decided; it always made one feel a stranger' (2005: 72).

While the Court may resemble Byron's exterior appearance, it is the Dowager House which, as Victoria quickly realises, represents his inner life: 'She had the growing sensation that the house was a portrait of the duke, done in such precise detail that every idiosyncrasy in his nature was laid bare, if only she knew how to look at it.

Commenting on the Dowager House, Joyce admits that

I am an architecture freak. [...] Philip Speakman Webb [the architect] was part of the aesthetic movement in architecture that eventually birthed the Arts and Crafts style. In its early forms, it was simple and medievalist, though it had a number of characteristics that any Craftsman enthusiast would immediately recognize and appreciate. I wanted something that worked for Byron and spoke of who he was, and this movement really spoke to me. [click here for a short biography of Speakman Webb and links to photos of some furniture he designed]

The Dowager House 'speaks of who Byron is' because it combines the historical and the modern, making use of rich colours which are in keeping with Byron's connection with his lands:

She stood at the midpoint of a long, narrow chamber, once a hall, now divided by furniture and rugs into two distinct parlors decorated in tones of scarlet, purple, and umber. Like a Yorkshire sunset, she thought [...].
She crossed into the parlor [...] noting the heavy, simple lines of the furniture and the archaic paintings that hung on the walls. But the most striking feature was the narrow stained glass windows that flanked the fireplaces at the ends of the hall, four jewel-toned glowing pictures of slender, long-faced women with intricately draped robes and tumbling hair. [...]
"It is very different," she said. [...] "Most people would have made the house lighter, more delicate. This seems positively medieval." (2005: 86)

It is, literally 'positively medieval'. In Victorian medievalism

"[...] The Middle Ages were idealized as a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity [...] The Middle Ages became a metaphor both for a specific social order and [...] for a metaphysically harmonious world view. [...]" Chandler [...] convincingly shows us how the nineteenth turned back to the past as a way of criticizing the present and as a means to a better future. (Landow, quoting Chandler, 1973: 366)

I can't help but think that the stained-glass of the house (as contrasted with the covered windows of the Court) represent Byron's spirituality. He may appear evil to those who judge on appearances and he has 'behaved with the flamboyance of a born reprobate' (2005: 100) and encouraged all the 'mysterious rumors' (2005: 100) about him, but in truth it is simply the case that for him the seeing 'through a glass, darkly' (1 Corinthians 13: 12) is literal as well as metaphorical.

In addition, it becomes clear that Byron's medievalism extends to his attitude towards his tenants. The estate is in some difficulty as a result of the Industrial Revolution:

"I can't even find tenants for two tracts, and I've had to cut the rent on the others. There's not the money in wool there used to be, and the Raeburn flocks are poor at best. [...] Stoneswold and Weatherlea are half deserted because the weaving is all done in factories in Leeds. The weavers' families have all left or been reduced to menial labor."
Victoria realized that he cared - not just about property and income, but about the common villagers, too. There was perhaps something medieval in his concern, but if it was stained with feudal overtones, it had a certain chivalric element as well and was rather touching. (2005: 108)

While Byron's exterior appearance and his inner soul are symbolised by the two houses, Victoria, who owns no houses, nonetheless has a similarly deceptive 'façade of imperturbability' (2005: 10) which is later replaced by clothing which more accurately reflects her real personality. As far as society is aware, Victoria is what she appears to be:

she was fair [haired] and dowdy [...] austere to the point of severity [...] almost fiercely self-contained. [...] Every line of her bearing declared that she was a respectable old maid, from her tight, pale blonde bun and her prim, haughty smile to the hideously unflattering carriage dress. (2005: 11)

No-one apart from Victoria knows that her clothes 'had been marked by unrelieved austerity for fifteen years now, first from an excess of puerile anguish, then from self-abhorrence, and now partly from habit and partly from the intangible security such a uniform offered' (2005: 5). Byron, however, quickly notices that:

From the back, not even the awkward lines of her unflattering corset could disguise the grace of her lithe figure, the unconscious seductiveness in the arch of her neck.

The prim dress and severe bun angered him suddenly. He saw them thrust between them as a barrier, keeping him beyond her spinsterish defenses. (2005: 19)

The crinoline and corset are 'defences': the dress and crinoline forming the outer walls, while the corset is an inner barrier, all demonstrating the severe austerity of a medieval castle. Byron is sure that Victoria has chosen to 'lock herself' (2005: 22) within them and looks at her with a 'proprietary gleam [...] in his eyes, that of a lord surveying territory soon to be his' (2005: 40). He senses that which is hidden within her walls: 'the soul of the wind-mad woman who escaped the stifling parlors and drawing rooms of Rushworth Manor to gallop across the tenants' most distant fields' (2005: 22). What he doesn't realise is that Victoria has 'locked herself' within the citadel of her clothing because, 'There was no barrier, no stronghold of virginity to interrupt his entrance' (2005: 66-67).** What she had hidden within the fortress of her austere clothing was not her virginity, but her sexuality, and when Byron buys her new clothes 'there was a native sensuality that permeated the air about her now that she no longer imprisoned it behind walls of whalebone and black taffeta' (2005: 79, my emphasis).


* Regarding the 'mishmash' of styles:

The first time he'd seen the building [...] he'd seen the hideousness of it, the sprawling wings of every imaginable age of architecture appended to the main mass of limestone at haphazard angles. Yet even then, it had called to him. Even then, it had whispered of secrets and darkness and ancient passions burned into the rock. (2005: 72)

** I touched briefly on the metaphorical aspects of virginity as depicted in romance in my post about metaphorical medicine and 'the sexual metaphor which casts woman as a castle besieged by suitors is a commonplace in the erotic literature of the classical world and Middle Ages (it is the metaphor that underpins the whole of the Roman de la rose)' (Foster Gittes 2005: 21).

• Foster Gittes, Tobias 2005. '"O vendetta di Dio": The Motif of Rape and Retaliation in Dante's Inferno', MLN, 120.1: 1-29.
  
• Joyce, Lydia, 2005. The Veil of Night (New York: Signet Eclipse).
• Landow, George P., 1973. 'A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. By Alice Chandler. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. pp. 278', Modern Philology, 70.4: 366-369.
  

I apologise for using the Foster Gittes, and Landow's review of Chandler's book. I could no doubt have found more authoritative texts dealing with these subjects, including Chandler's book, but as I'm blogging rather than writing an academic paper, I tend to use sources I can access via the internet.

The picture on the cover of the book is taken from 'a photograph of a famous mission in Arizona'.

The castle is Krak des Chevaliers, a '"concentric castle" in which each ward was placed wholly within another which enveloped it' (Wikipedia). It 'was built by the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem from 1142 to 1271' and is now a World Heritage site.

Melissa McClone - Blueprint for a Wedding

Laura Vivanco

This is my first analysis of a novel with the theme of home is where the heart is, or perhaps, in this particular case, the heart is where the home is, since both Gabriel Logan and Faith Addison have ambitious plans for the

1908 Craftsman-style mansion - the stone-covered pillars, the multi-paned windows, the exposed beams the wraparound porch and the three dormers jutting from the long-sloping gabled roof (2006: 9)

that is the home in question. This isn't a review, so I'll be including plenty of spoilers. If you do want to read a review, there's one available from Romantic Times. I'm not sure why the reviewer felt that 'The characters' motivations don't always ring true', because they seemed understandable to me, but I suppose this is probably a matter where personal opinions will vary. A description and excerpt are available from Melissa McClone's website.

Conflict arises between Gabriel and Faith because both feel they have failed in their emotional lives and for each of them the house represents a last opportunity to succeed with at least part of their life-plans. Gabe

had once thought he had it all figured out. At eighteen, he'd marry his high-school sweetheart, by the time he was thirty, he'd have a minivan full of kids and be living in the Larabee house. Instead he was thirty-two with no wife, no kids and no place to call home [because he sold his house in anticipation of buying the Larabee mansion]. (2006: 12)

Gabe had made a plan and set out to achieve it. He'd married the girl of his dreams right after high-school graduation. Next on the list were children. But his wife hadn't wanted to stay in Berry Patch. He hadn't wanted to leave. So they'd divorced.
But he wasn't about to let his dreams die. [...] He had to remain strong, steadfast, to protect the house from Faith. (2006: 30-31)

Gabe's a builder and his plan which, appropriately enough, he thinks of as 'his blueprint for a perfect life' (2006: 31), is centered around his love for the mansion; his refusal to leave it behind was obviously a significant contributory factor in his divorce. As we shall see, the mansion stands in the way of his relationship with Faith too.

Faith (a movie star) also feels that she's failed and that the mansion is the only way she can achieve something worthwhile:

No one had divorced or even separated during the past two hundred years of her family's recorded history. Faith wasn't about to ruin the streak. She'd failed enough.
Broken engagements. Broken hearts. Broken promises. [...] That's why she'd sunk every penny she had into this B and B project. Renovating an old house had to be easier than finding her one true love. She might not join the ranks of her family who had found their soul mates, but she could certainly join them in their successful hotel business. (2006: 34-35)

The emotional intensity with which they both desire the house means that the story almost becomes a love triangle, with the house taking on the role of a lover for both the hero and heroine. The description of it contains personification: 'a grand lady [...] The most beautiful in Berry Patch, Oregon, and she was supposed to be his' (2006: 9). Gabe's grandfather 'had been obsessed with restoring it for as long as Gabe could remember. It hadn't taken long for him to feel the same way. Each time the bus passed by here on his way to school, his own desire had intensified' (2006: 29-30, my emphasis). When Faith gives Gabe the key to the mansion he thinks that

This wasn't the way he'd planned to get it.
He knew where Miss Larabee kept a spare hidden on the back porch. That's how his crew had gotten inside to take the measurements for the floor plan.
Now, to be given his own key ... but he couldn't forget, it was only temporarily his [...] he watched Faith insert her key into the lock [...]. [...] He wanted her to hate the house. [...] But he knew it wasn't going to happen. Anyone with half a brain would love the house (2006: 42)

Locks and keys have a well-known sexual symbolism: 'In early modern Europe, keys and the locks they penetrate, swords in scabbards, bolts in doors, pestles in mortars, leeks, parsnips, crosiers, apples, pears, figs, carrots, obelisks, and arrows were visual and verbal clues for sex' (Crawford 2007: 1). Freud was of the opinion that in dreams 'penetration into narrow spaces and the opening of locked doors are among the commonest of sexual symbols' (online, see below) and in fairytales such as Bluebeard a key may be 'a phallic symbol which is often emphasized in illustrations as overly sized. The wife is flirting with sexual knowledge and perhaps promiscuity by accepting the key from her husband'. In this context, one can read the passage about the keys in Blueprint for a Wedding as meaning that Gabe wants neither an illicit (using the spare key) nor a short-term relationship with the house. Now, however, he has to watch Faith taking possession of the house that Gabe loves and wanted for himself. And he knows that Faith too will fall in love with it.

Clearly while their love is directed at the house, Gabe and Faith's relationship is going to be in trouble. Faith wants to convert the mansion into a B&B and has made 'glitzy, glamorous and thoroughly modern changes to the remodeling plans. [...] Gabe didn't like the notes or her' (2006: 29). Faith's 'glitzy, glamorous' plans parallel the glitzy, glamorous life she's been leading as a famous movie star. Now, however, she plans a change of career and so she's able to leave glitz behind both professionally, personally 'She wore no makeup, not even lipstick' (2006: 20) and in the remodelling when she agrees with Gabe that the objective is 'to have the place look as if I've never been there and all the work I've done look as if it's been there forever' (2006: 48). Continuing the metaphor of the house as a woman, one can perhaps think of the remodelling as a makeover for a still-attractive woman. As Gabe says, 'The house has good bones' (2006: 59) and he can see it's potential:

"You might not see it, but it's there. Beneath the ugly interior and the horrible remodeling [done by previous owners] and all the snakes and lizards."
When he spoke, his voice had an almost reverent tone, and his eyes softened. Faith felt a tugging on her heart. One day she hoped a man would look at her like that. (2006: 60)

Faith's original plans would perhaps be more like extreme plastic surgery, completely changing some of the original features:

"I want a romantic, fantasy bathroom," she explained. "Marble, double Jacuzzi tub, two-person shower, pedestal sink, gold or brass fixtures."
"Sounds Victorian."
"Yes. [...] The bedroom will match. A brass bed. Lace curtains. Antiques." [...]
His lips thinned. "This house isn't a Victorian. [...] Each room is a piece of the whole and needs to be consistent." (2006: 66)

Gabe has a much less radical makeover in mind: he wants to preserve the original structures, carefully cleanse the skin and then apply some light, natural-looking makeup, '"Craftsman has clean lines, natural materials, warmth," he explained. "Whereas Victorian is ornate, ostentatious, overdone."' (2006: 68). [For comparative purposes, here are pictures of the interior of a Victorian-style B&B, and here are some restored Craftsman-style interiors] Faith eventually decides to keep the Craftsman style, and she joins the rest of the crew in working on the house:

He [Gabe] liked having her around and helping with the work. Her touches made the house better. Faith wanted to turn it into a B and B, but she'd made the house a home. She admired every step of the process and exclaimed over every detail. She'd been an apprentice, interior designer and cheerleader all rolled into one. (2006: 183-184)

The mansion and the remodeling work become a metaphor for the work that Faith and Gabe must both do on their relationship.* The ideas with which they begin the story are their 'blueprint for a perfect life', and these, like the mansion, require remodelling to preserve some of the original features of the plans but also ensure that the final outcome will suit their new needs. As Faith and Gabe work together both literally and metaphorically they learn to compromise in order to find solutions which are acceptable to both of them:

"All we've done on the house is compromise."
It was true. She thought back to that first day. "Victorian versus craftsman."
"Sage-green paint versus celadon."
A smile tugged at her lips. "Drapes versus blinds in the bathroom."
"Compromising wasn't always easy, but by doing it we created something wonderful together." (2006: 225)

Gabe himself makes the comparison between this working relationship and his non-functioning marriage: 'With my marriage, it wasn't like that. I had this idea of the perfect life and pulled Lana into it, never asking what she wanted out of life herself' (2006: 225). As they cooperate on the remodelling, their plans for both the mansion and their lives become more and more similar so that, despite a few crises on the way to finding true love, by the end of the novel they have a 'Blueprint for a Wedding'. They can combine their skills, their ability to work together:

"Home improvement shows are popular. We could take what we both like to do and do a remodeling show together."
She loved the idea. "You'd have to leave Berry Patch to do that."
"Being with you is more important than any town." (2006: 249)

and this compromise demonstrates that their relationship is more important to both of them than the mansion which had previously been the object of their desire.

• Crawford, Katherine, 2007. European Sexualities, 1400-1800, New Approaches to European History, 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Excerpt available here.
• Freud, Sigmund, 1913. The Interpretation of Dreams, online, quotation from Chapter 6 (part 2): The Dreamwork.
• McClone, Melissa, 2006. Blueprint for a Wedding (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).

* Gabe and Faith's relationship is depicted as one of equals. This perhaps first becomes apparent as they become symbolic suitors and competitors for the right to determine the mansion's future but is shown much more clearly when, during the remodeling, Faith is both Gabe's employer, and his 'apprentice' whom he instructs in various building techniques, including the correct way to use a nail gun. Gabe may be a builder, but he's not a macho builder. In fact, his employees in the firm include his sister Kate, who draws up the designs and plans for the work and another sister, Bernie, who's a 'master carpenter [...] Almost as good as [...] My oldest sister, Cecilia [... who] hung up her hammer to follow in our father's footsteps and become a farmer' (2006: 84). It's also Faith who asks Gabe to marry her because 'I haven't had much luck the other way around. I thought I'd try something different" (2006: 249). Also, although Faith has dreams throughout the story of a knight who will rescue her because she is 'lost and cannot find my way home' (2006: 240), and eventually recognises this knight as Gabe, 'her one true love' (2006: 240), when she wakes she doesn't sit passively waiting for rescue: 'She could wait for her knight to find her, or, Faith smiled, she could rescue him herself (2006: 244). She arrives in front of the mansion just as Gabe is about to set out to find her. Gabe is prepared to be thought of as 'Mr Faith Starr', while Faith will 'settle for Mrs. Gabe Logan' (2006: 250) and the two then elope not in Gabe's truck, but in the rather more speedy jet plane that Faith has borrowed from her family's firm.

Metaphorical Medicine: Diagnosing Lovesickness

Laura Vivanco

'Lovesickness' wasn't always thought of as just a metaphor. In the Middle Ages authoritative sources which were thought to justify the classification of lovesickness as a real disease included the works of Ovid, which 'taught that sickness could be an artful strategy in the game of love, and that unwanted love could be cured by his remedies' (Wack 1990: 15) and

the story of Amnon and Thamar in 2 Samuel 13 (2 Kings in the Vulgate) and the refrain in Canticles, “for I am sick with love” (Cant. 2.5, 5.8).
The biblical episode of Amnon’s love for his sister Thamar both portrayed the reality of lovesickness and, in its narrative details, offered a vision of the disease that overlapped with those of medicine and secular literature. (Wack 1990: 19)

Medieval physicians were of the opinion that love was

a disorder of the mind and body, closely related to melancholia* and potentially fatal if not treated. [...] The university physicians were trained to recognize symptoms of love. By interpreting signs in the patient’s body and behavior (for example, by testing his pulse to see if it changed dramatically when the beloved was mentioned) the doctor could diagnose the malady even if the patient were unwilling to reveal its source. He would then prescribe a regimen designed to restore the body’s strength and to distract the mind from its obsession. Baths, good food, wine, and sleep insured the return of physical vigor, while therapeutic intercourse, business affairs, legal difficulties, real or concocted, and various types of sports and games, like riding or chess, distracted the mind from its fantasies. If left untreated, however, the disease of love could degenerate into melancholia, thought to be even more difficult to cure than lovesickness. (Wack 1990: xi-xii)

That tastefully worded phrase 'therapeutic intercourse' refers to the fact that medieval doctors thought one of the most efficacious remedies for lovesickness was

intercourse with the desired person; if that is not possible, then with another. All the authors recommend it highly; Avicenna and Gerard claim that the disease cannot be cured perfectly without it. If the desired person cannot be obtained legally and according to the faith, then recourse was to be had to "buying girls, and sleeping with them, getting fresh ones, and delighting in them". (Wack 1984: 56-57)

It makes me wonder if some romance heroes also ascribe to this medical theory since there are a fair number who seem to believe that one night of sex with the heroine will help them get over their feelings for her and they're often quite prepared to resort to blackmail in order to get the 'cure' they desire.

Medieval doctors may not have understood the mechanisms by which illnesses were caused, and we may question the efficacy of many of their suggested cures, but they weren't completely wrong in their diagnoses. Modern doctors are concluding that the strange effects caused by love may be due to chemical changes in the brain:

Science is beginning to pay more attention to the chemical storm that romantic love can trigger in our brains. Recent studies of brain scans show that being in love causes changes in the brain that are strikingly similar to serious health problems like drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. [...]

Studies in Italy looking at blood levels of the brain chemical serotonin have suggested that love and mental illness have much in common. They compared serotonin levels of people recently in love; patients with obsessive compulsive disorder; and a "control" group that was neither. The researchers found that the love-struck participants showed a drop in serotonin levels similar to those with obsessive-compulsive problems. (Parker-Pope 2007, Wall Street Journal)**

For all that medieval doctors' scientific knowledge was lacking by modern standards, their descriptions of lovesickness nonetheless demonstrate an understanding of the symptoms and feelings caused by love and in this respect they may have a lot in common with modern romance authors.

Most romance novels (with the obvious exception of medical romances) don't make accuracy in medical matters a high priority and it's perhaps better to think of many medical details in romances as having a strong metaphorical and psychological significance rather than view less than total accuracy as a flaw. I'm not suggesting that romance authors never bother to get medical details right, because many do make great efforts to ensure accuracy, but it's certainly not always the case. Some romances seem to use medical matters almost metaphorically, with the emphasis on emotion and psychological exploration rather than strict attention to medical detail. This really isn't very different from the ways that 'wallpaper historicals' use historical details and settings to create a romantic backdrop for the drama but are not overly concerned with total historical accuracy, or, to take some more literary examples, the way in which Ionesco uses the metamorphosis of his characters into rhinoceroses to describe the spread of fascism, or the role of cholera in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, where the disease can be read as an indicator of moral decay.

One of the most common romance medical metaphors concerns the location of the hymen. As Kalen Hughes observes,

Contrary to what appears to be popular mythology (at least among the writers of romance and erotica) the hymen is not a “barrier” (except in RARE cases that require surgery; 1 in 2000 per Blaustein's Pathology of the Female Genital Tract) nor is it up inside the vaginal canal as it is commonly represented to be in fiction.

Here's an example of a description of the piercing of a romance heroine's hymen:

Her hands were scrabbling through his hair [...] blindly seeking some course that would answer the tumultuous need within. And finally he answered it, lifting himself over her, knowing she was open to him, open and waiting tremulously, wanting the ultimate fulfilment of all he could give her, and she sighed with intense relief as she felt him push into her, felt her inner muscles contract around him, felt the glorious fullness moving slowly onward, meeting the resistance of her virginity, pausing.
Even in that brief moment of panic she couldn't bear the thought of him stopping. If there was pain, there was pain. She didn't care. (Darcy 2003: 95)

While this heroine has clearly got a hymen located somewhere anatomically impossible, the barrier here represents the way the heroine is letting down her emotional defences, opening herself to the hero emotionally as well as physically. Where she had previously avoided falling in love, now she is willing to take a risk, even if it causes her pain. Another medical condition common to romance is what Maria K labels 'AIR Syndrome':

The word amnesia may sound scientific and impressive but Amnesia In Romance (AIR) has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with air-headed research. Many novels romanticize head injury and portray amnesia patients in a completely unrealistic manner.

I recommend you read Maria's article if you want to know more about the reality of brain injury and how it compares with the descriptions in romance. Maria concludes, with her tongue firmly in her cheek, that AIR Syndrome is probably

caused by conversion hysteria, some sort of confusional state or delirium, dissociative disorder or psychosis rather than a head injury, although romance authors seldom choose these alternatives. Someone might forget a traumatic event to protect herself from severe emotional distress or they might have a multiple personality.

I agree, and I think that yet again what the romance authors are trying to do is portray for the reader the emotional intensity involved in falling in love.

Another medical problem I've noticed in romances are heart conditions. A striking example of almost literal broken-heartedness can be found in Anne Mather's Jack Riordan's Baby. After Jack becomes estranged from his wife, Rachel, he tries to take his mind off his problems by devoting himself to his business (one can imagine that the medieval medical practitioners who suggested that the love-sick individual should be distracted by 'business affairs' would have approved), unfortunately the treatment is not successful (though his business flourishes) and he develops physical symptoms of heart disease, collapses and ends up in hospital. It also appears that, as feared by medieval doctors, his illness has almost developed into melancholia (a term which ancient and medieval doctors used to describe a variety of different mental health problems, including what we'd now term 'depression'*):

He certainly didn't believe the shrink who'd come to see him while he was in the hospital. Obviously someone who was recovering from an attack that had limited the amount of blood entering the heart might be suffering depression [...]. His diagnosis - that Jack's problems were possibly as much psychological as physical - hadn't won him any favours. [...] Okay, he [Jack] thought now, so maybe their estrangement had played a contributory role in the way his body was behaving now. Losing three babies [his wife had miscarried three times] and the wife you loved more than life itself could do that to you (2006: 155-156)

Once Jack and Rachel are reconciled Jack's health returns and in fact 'had never been better. He'd had a comprehensive check-up [...] and according to Dr Moore his arrhythmia had corrected itself' (2006: 181). I'm not sure what modern doctors would think about Jack's symptoms and his rapid recovery, but I'm sure that their medieval colleagues would have had little problem diagnosing Jack's problems as being caused by lovesickness, nor would they have been surprised by his swift return to health. There's another Jack with heart trouble in Maggie Cox's The Pregnancy Secret and here the heroine quite explicitly makes a connection between emotional heartbreak and his heart attack:

clearly Jack's lifestyle up until now must have been impossibly stressful to have caused him to need heart surgery at the too young age of thirty-seven [...] She already knew that he was angry and bitter about what had happened between them. If he'd been carrying around that rage inside him all these years and on top of that the stress of a demanding job, then no wonder he had suffered a heart problem!
Caroline had read in a self-help book she'd bought that one of the possible metaphysical causes of a heart attack was when a heart felt deprived of joy due to a person's pursuit of making money over everything else ... that, plus long-standing emotional problems that eventually helped harden the heart. (2006: 164-165)

If, rather than feeling upset at a lack of accuracy in modern romance novels, we treat the descriptions in the novels as metaphors which use medical terminology to describe emotional states, and accept that these texts are more concerned with describing emotion than with medical realism, we will have a more satisfactory reading experience. 'Heart-ache', 'Heart-broken', 'Lovesickness', 'Love is blind' are all expressions which do precisely the same thing: they use the language of medicine to describe the experience of falling and being in love.

* According to Jackson:

The term 'melancholia' suggests modern syndromes of depression, and it certainly did designate cases of psychotic depression and probably other severe depressions, but it also referred to a variety of what would come to be called functional psychoses, including schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychoses; and probably some disorders now recognized as organic psychoses were included. (1972: 289)

Medieval doctors also ascribed to the theory of the humours, and melancholia and lovesickness might sometimes be ascribed to an excess of black bile.

**There's more on this topic here (from The New York Times) and here (from the BBC).

• Cox, Maggie, 2006. The Pregnancy Secret (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Darcy, Emma, 2003. The Bedroom Surrender (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Jackson, Stanley W., 1972. 'Unusual Mental States in Medieval Europe I. Medical Syndromes of Mental Disorder: 400–1100 A.D.', Journal of the History of Medicine, 27.3: 262-297.
• Mather, Anne, 2006. Jack Riordan's Baby (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Wack, Mary F., 1984. 'Lovesickness in Troilus', Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 19, No. 1/2: 55-61.
  
• Wack, Mary Frances, 1990. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries, University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania).

Image from the Medieval Woodcuts Clipart Collection. This particular image isn't actually of a doctor diagnosing love sickness. It shows a woman visiting a doctor (he's the one examining a urine flask) and is taken from the Mer des Hystoires, Paris 1488-89. In general medieval medicine considered lovesickness to be an illness which afflicted aristocratic males:'the sufferer was typically thought to be a noble man' (Wack 1990: xi).