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emma_in_dreamI’ve just read my first, and only, Dorothy Wentworth. She wrote murder mysteries, all well and good, in the tradition of Agatha Christie, etc.
But the romance! My goodness, it’s like watching a train wreck. At the beginning the heroine, Stacy, is divorced from her utterly foul alpha male ex. She goes out for a meal with him and he demands that she accept alimony although she initiated the divorce (on the grounds of mistakenly thinking he was a kleptomaniac).
Their romantic tete a tete includes this interlude:
He released his knees and with a sudden movement reached forward and took her by the wrists.
‘Now just you listen to me!’
‘I can listen quite well without you holding. Charles - that hurts!’
‘It was meant to. That money will be paid into your bank every quarter. You can go on the razzle-dazzle with it, or chuck it over Waterloo Bridge, or squander it on the undeserving poor, or you can leave it lying in the bank - I don’t care a damn. But you can’t stop me paying it in.’
Clearly nothing says romance better than physically coercing someone and meddling in their finances. Does this read domestic abuser, if I can’t have you, no one can, or what?
Naturally, within the conventions of this genre they reunite. It turns out his sister was the kleptomaniac all along! Wacky hijinks! And the murderer was someone else as well - his cousin’s fiancee and her boyfriend. All is clear for the inevitable reunion.
So in the last paragraphs of the book Charles and Stacy reunite, as he simultaneously reinforces his position as a man who is obsessed with controlling his woman and physical violence.
‘Charles -’
‘Yes, I’m Charles, and you’re Stacy. But the question is, are you Stacy Mainwaring, or Stacey Forrest? Every time I’ve heard someone call you Miss Mainwaring I’ve wanted to hit them over the head.’
Obviously I’m a humourless feminist blah blah blah, because this genre of literary lovemaking - so prevalent in the 1950s and still written today - utterly repellant.
But the romance! My goodness, it’s like watching a train wreck. At the beginning the heroine, Stacy, is divorced from her utterly foul alpha male ex. She goes out for a meal with him and he demands that she accept alimony although she initiated the divorce (on the grounds of mistakenly thinking he was a kleptomaniac).
Their romantic tete a tete includes this interlude:
He released his knees and with a sudden movement reached forward and took her by the wrists.
‘Now just you listen to me!’
‘I can listen quite well without you holding. Charles - that hurts!’
‘It was meant to. That money will be paid into your bank every quarter. You can go on the razzle-dazzle with it, or chuck it over Waterloo Bridge, or squander it on the undeserving poor, or you can leave it lying in the bank - I don’t care a damn. But you can’t stop me paying it in.’
Clearly nothing says romance better than physically coercing someone and meddling in their finances. Does this read domestic abuser, if I can’t have you, no one can, or what?
Naturally, within the conventions of this genre they reunite. It turns out his sister was the kleptomaniac all along! Wacky hijinks! And the murderer was someone else as well - his cousin’s fiancee and her boyfriend. All is clear for the inevitable reunion.
So in the last paragraphs of the book Charles and Stacy reunite, as he simultaneously reinforces his position as a man who is obsessed with controlling his woman and physical violence.
‘Charles -’
‘Yes, I’m Charles, and you’re Stacy. But the question is, are you Stacy Mainwaring, or Stacey Forrest? Every time I’ve heard someone call you Miss Mainwaring I’ve wanted to hit them over the head.’
Obviously I’m a humourless feminist blah blah blah, because this genre of literary lovemaking - so prevalent in the 1950s and still written today - utterly repellant.
