Scenes from Literature

Love and seduction stories were the staple of the nineteenth-century novel in America, Britain, and Europe. Either among the best authors or the nearly forgotten popular novelists, the plot lines generally involved a romance that does not go smoothly for a while and then ends happily, or a moral exemplum of a wicked man or woman who tries to trick an innocent, only to get what he or she deserves in the ending. Often novels combined these narrative lines, with one conventional romantic couple played against a transgressive couple. Even panoramic historical epics such as Tolstoy's War and Peace or George Eliot's Middlemarch built substantial plot lines on romances, engagements, and infidelities. There were few nineteenth-century novels such as Moby Dick or Les Miserables that contained negligible elements of romance. The truth was that love stories sold, and whaling adventures did not.

The audience for novels greatly expanded in the nineteenth century, and middle-class women were important new clients in the reading public. Two factors were important in making novels more accessible to a wider range of readers: one was the creation of lending libraries, and the other was the advances in printing that made it possible to mass-produce affordable magazines and books. In a society in which marriage was still fundamental to the structure of social and economic life, tales of love and marriage, and its many pitfalls, were a compelling subject for readers. The possibility that one could change one's class status through a good marriage added to the attraction of stories of pure but poor young women who lifted up by a wealthy, virtuous hero.

In the hands of fine writers such as George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope, love stories could achieve a powerful and complex moral status. Flaubert's Madame Bovary tells the story of a wife who loses everything in her uncontrollable search for extramarital romance. Eliot's Adam Bede gives us two sets of lovers whose actions illustrate a wide range of human strengths and weaknesses. The prolific Trollope wrote of lovers of every variety and class in portraits that are rarely bound entirely by stereotypes.

The preoccupation with love stories led to an increasing representation in literature of the erotic side of romance. Many nineteenth-century novels that seem tame to modern readers in their lack of explicitness. However, these narratives actually contain, in coded and sublimated form, an intense awareness of the eroticism of love.Blushing, rapid heartbeats, weak knees, "warm" kisses, even tears, convey the sexual excitement in the lover's embrace.In the United States, Hawthorne's novels, especially The Blithedale Romance, are often saturated with sublimated sexual desire. The portrait of Zenobia is memorable in its evocation of a voluptuous beauty who inspires in the queasy Coverdale "feverish fantasies."Preoccupied with Zenobia's sexuality, he concludes that "'Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!'" Such language should remind us that the nineteenth century was not without erotic desire, and that the physical body of the nineteenth century was not wired differently than it is today.

Popular novels, such as those from the pen of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth or Percy St. John were often built on protracted seductions that maintained the sexual tension throughout the length of the novel. The moment of Black Donald's attempted rape of the heroine is preceded by verbal sparring and a little supper of cheese and brandy. He is plotting her rape, but she is plotting his murder; when she drops him through the trap door to the "horrible pit," she claims she dares not "rejoice" in her "awful" but "complete victory!" Another attempted rape figures in Elizabeth Helme's The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, where the villain's brutal attack on Anna goes through many phases, including drugging her, striking her servant, and dragging Anna down the stairs to a waiting carriage where he plans to rape her. As one might expect, however, the heroine and her faithful servant are saved from the dastardly act! Given publishing conventions and public taste, a woman novelist could only take a scene like this so far without losing her respectability–and respectable readers.

Largely left out of the literature of love and seduction, whether in the canonical or the nearly forgotten novels, were lovers from the working class. Writers tend to write about the society they know, and most of the authors were from the educated classes. But it is also true that the stories of working-class courtship and seduction were less interesting to most readers. Given the weight of marriage in terms of money and class status, the courtship and marriage of a working-class couple was out of the field of interest. Working-class women could lose their reputations, but not their fortune or their "place" in society. A notable exception to the rule was the story of Mary and Jem in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel of Manchester life, Mary Barton .The Bronte sisters portrayed more than one working governess, but these were educated women who were not from the working classes. Women who worked in mills and factories did not go to balls or wear beautiful clothes, and they did not have class mobility. Lovers in small towns and the rural scene were often the subject of fiction, however, as the class barriers among small farmers, village shop owners, and local clergy were more permeable than in the city. If a young woman from a modest home was educated and did not work outside the house, she might dream of marrying into a family of higher standing. Yet even here, the lines were drawn sharply as soon as the romance led a farm girl to dream of marrying into the local gentry, as happens with Ruby Ruggles in Trollope's The Way We Live Now .

Readers today might ask themselves what changes they can see from the dominant themes of nineteenth-century fiction and those in contemporary fiction. If there are more novels today about something other than romance, how may we account for them? Class in the United States and in Europe was organized differently, and it may reward critical examination to explore how differing social structures affected the stories of romance in different cultures. The nature of the technology of printing and the audience profile influenced the form and content of nineteenth-century literary production. The vast changes in the technology and the audience profile in our contemporary world have brought changes in form and content, too. Changes in law have dramatically altered the status of women, and they have also opened the door to subjects of romance that were taboo in the nineteenth century. Gay romances certainly occurred in the nineteenth century, but same-sex relationships were illegal and subject to severe sentences, as the case of Oscar Wilde in the 1890's should remind us. Mixed-race marriages were illegal in most places, and the few stories of interracial romance were, like Quadroona and Carmen, typically tales of exotic and sensual seductresses whose lives could only end in shame. To what degree have stories of love and seduction registered these powerful changes in law, culture, and society?