Tag Archives: Laura Kinsale

How Do You Say “Love” in Alien, or Vice Versa?

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In her short story “Speech Sounds”, from the Bloodchild collection, Octavia Butler imagines a world in which a mysterious plague has robbed most people of language — both speech and written. The story opens as the protagonist, a former freelance writer who can still speak but not read, sees a dispute on a bus.

People screamed or squawked in fear. Those nearby scrambled to get out of the way. Three more young men roared in excitement and gestured wildly. Then, somehow, a second dispute broke out between two of these three — probably because one inadvertently touched or hit the other.

The first time you read this, it’s not especially clear that the combatants can’t talk to each other; their screams and squawks, gestures and roars, seem figurative — a description of chaos, in which communication becomes irrelevant because of anger and fear and violence. It’s only as you go along that you realize the description is literal; people are really screaming and squawking inarticulately, because no one can speak. A scene that seems familiar is actually strange. The people who we think we recognize as ourselves, under stress, are actually separated from us by an insurmountable barrier; we think we understand them, but we don’t; we think they are speaking to us but they aren’t. Through a trick of language, a realist anecdote becomes science fiction, and the world, and those in it, become more alien than we thought.

In her historical romance, Flowers From the Storm Laura Kinsale’s hero, Christian, the wealthy powerful rakish Duke of Jervaulx, suffers a brain hemorrhage which robs him of the power of speech. He ends up in an insane asylum, where he is cared for by Maddy, a Quaker and coincidentally the daughter of a friend. Jervaulx’s loss of speech seems like it should put him beyond communication, or shut down his ability to communicate with Maddy. But instead, somewhat miraculously, it makes it possible for them to love each other, both because his illness is the cause of bringing them together and by making her understand him better.

She lifted her head. He wasn’t a two-year-old. He had not lost his reason.

He isn’t mad; he is maddened.

The thought came so clearly that she had the sensation someone had spoken it aloud….

Jervaulx had not lost his reason. His words had been taken away. He coulcn’t speak,and he couldn’t understand what was said to him.

Christian’s silence enables Maddy to hear something which Kinsale strongly suggests is the voice of God. And what the voice tells her is that the stranger she thinks she sees is not actually a stranger. Through a trick of language, the other, beyond reach, becomes an intimate, and tragedy moves towards romance.

For both Butler and Kinsale, then, genre is built around language and the loss of language. And if both depend for genre on who understands what, it seems like you could understand them both as part of the same genre, depending on how you listen to them.

It’s not too difficult to see “Speech Sounds” as a thwarted romance; the main plot of the story involves the protagonist, Rye, tentatively falling in love with a man she calls Obsidian; they have sex, decide to stay together, and he is then suddenly killed. If the story starts by making you perceive the everday as alien sci-fi, it moves on to contact between stranger’s, a quick flowering of love from the storm.

By the same token, Flowers From the Storm can be read as science-fiction. It’s set in the Regency period, with rules and customs which are certainly as alien to the contemporary reader as Butler’s familiar post-apocalypse. A good bit of the story is told from Christian’s perspective, and so you see the alien world speak to him in an alien language. “Weebwell,” she whispered. “Vreethin wilvee well.” The Quaker woman, with her rituals and strange taboos (no lying, using “thee” and “thou”) is seen by Christian, too, as other and distant; he becomes the readers’ point of identification, a stranger in a strange land.

Both Butler and Kinsale are writing in a genre of difference — a genre that can broadly encompass both sci-fi and romance. This focus on difference is also, as Lysa Rivera says of Butler’s work, a focus on marginalization. Those who are seen as different are also marginal. When everyone else loses language, Rye, who retains it, becomes a potential target of jealousy and violence. Christian is rich and powerful, but when he loses language he becomes a madman, marginalized and subject to arbitrary imprisonment and punishment.

It’s significant that these differences and marginalizations are, literally and figuratively, a byproduct of language. This is true on multiple levels. Both Rye and Christian are marginal, or marginalized, because of their relationship to speech, or words. But they’re also marginalized because of their positions within an arbitrary fiction. Butler has created a future world, and placed Rye on the margins within it; Kinsale has created a past world and placed Christian on the margins within it. The characters’ struggles with language could be seen then as a kind of awareness of their own status as subjects to, and objects of, language. Their speech is wrong because they’ve been spoken wrong.

If the characters are positioned through language, the same can be said of the authors. As Rivera pointed, out, Butler’s work can be seen as marginal in many ways — it’s by an African-American woman, which is a marginal identity within science-fiction; and it’s science-fiction, which is a marginal genre in terms of literary credibility and academic interest. In comparison to Laura Kinsale, though, Butler is certainly more centrally positioned in numerous ways; sci-fi has more credibility than romance, and Butler is fairly well-established as an object of academic inquiry in a way Kinsale certainly isn’t (there’s a lengthy entry for “Speech Sounds” on Wikipedia; none for “Flowers From the Storm”). Marginalization and difference, for both authors, isn’t an absolute, but a function of their relative position to genre and to speech. Who is different, and from what, depends on what, or how, you’re talking about, or to.

So who is the person talked to? Arguably it’s you, the reader. In both Butler and Kinsale, language positions you as other, trying to understand, and as intimate, comprehending and empathizing. Language alienates and seduces; it conveys the terror of difference and the joy of bridging it — or, alternately, the joy of difference and the terror of bridging it. Language, that intimate betrayer, makes you each book’s monstrous invader, and each book’s lover.

The Romance of Dystopia

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The Hunger Games and Divergent may have romance elements but they’re not romance novels. Katniss and Tris don’t, for the most part, have time to focus on boyfriends; they’re too busy trying to stay alive and fighting their oppressors. Romance is about love; the most popular YA dystopias are about freedom. That’s a fundamental difference.

Or is it? When you actually read romance novels, it’s not so clear. Especially in historical romances, the parallels with YA dystopias can be startling. For example, Laura Kinsale’s 1993 classic For My Lady’s Heart is set in Medieval Europe — a setting as alien, and in many ways as authoritarian, as Tris’ future Chicago or Katniss’s District. The Princess Melanthe, like her peers in YA, is hemmed in by rules and proscriptions, her every move monitored and enmeshed in plot and counterplot. Born in England, Melanthe married into an Italian house, and her husband’s death set off a cascade of political intrigue as various suitors vie for her lands and power. One of her husbands’ Italian rivals has forced her to travel with his son, a castrated assassin who sleeps in her bed to make sure she doesn’t betray his father even in her sleep. Her entire life is devoted to concealing her real feelings under an icy veneer of calculation. Her husband “had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone.” That’s how you live under totalitarianism. Katniss pretending to love Peta;  Tris concealing that she’s divergent; Melanthe pretending to marry a man when she has no intention of doing so — they’ve all learned to dissemble in the face of power.

Rose Lerner’s recently published Regency romance Sweet Disorder is less grim — no one is threatened with death — but there are still parallels. Phoebe Sparks is a poor widow whose sister has become pregnant out of wedlock, and faces exile and shame As a woman without much money, Phoebe’s options are constrained by rules which are both arbitrary and cruel. There’s a local election, and both sides are willing to provide her with much needed cash since her vote is needed — except that it’s not her vote, but her husband’s. should she remarry. Because of the elaborate mores of a strange society, she has to sacrifice herself to save her sister…which is exactly the dilemma which faces Katniss in the Hunger Games.

All of these books, then, are devoted to dystopias, past or present — they all involve women trying to live their lives in the shadow of repressive power. Or, to look at it another way, they all concern women trying to negotiate between patriarchy and love.

It’s true that the exact nature of that negotitation is somewhat different in Hunger Games and Divergent than it is in For My Lady’s Heart and A Sweet Disorder. Most obviously, the YA novels involve significantly more guns. Katniss and Tris protect their loved ones, or try to, through violent political action; the response to exploitive power structures (which, significantly, aren’t always run by men in either book) is revolution. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to look for non-violent, personal solutions to political problems. Pam Rosenthal’s Regency The Slightest Provocation, for example, concludes with the protagonists, an estranged husband and wife, reconciling and declaring their love as they work together to prevent agent provacateurs from goading laborers into a demonstration that the government can bloodily quash. Injustice is undermined by peace and love, both personal and political. YA responds to patriarchal dystopia with violent political resistance; Romance with nonviolence abetted by personal affection .

Again, though, the binary is less clear than it appears. The Hunger Games, for instance, is acutely aware of the limitations of violence as a response to violence. Katniss’ embrace of revolution ultimately destroys the sister who she was fighting for in the first place. The rebellion in The Hunger Games, led by a woman, doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. It just replaces one boss with another, cosmetically different, but every bit as vicious. And for its part, For My Lady’s Heart doesn’t exactly forswear violence; Ruck, the hero, fights for Melanthe on a number of occasions, and while the tourneys aren’t to the death, the novel still unequivocally glories in his prowess, and in might asserted on behalf of right.

Rather than seeing YA dystopias and historical romances as opposed, then, it makes more sense to see them as thinking through related questions in complementary or overlapping ways. Can you use the tools of patriarchy, such as violence and paranoia, against patriarchy? Does forswearing those tools leave you defenseless? Is love a weakness, which gives patriarchy a hold on you, sending you to the Hunger Games (like Katniss), or into an arranged marriage (like Phoebe, in A Sweet Disorder)? Or is love a strength,  which gives you the heart to resist oppression?

Despite the similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily insist that YA dystopias should be shelved with, Romances. Genre markers are fairly arbitrary. But as in YA and historicals, that arbitrariness is itself indicative of lines of power. YA isn’t generally seen in the context of Romance novels because Romance novels simply aren’t seen; mainstream conversations about genre fiction include sci-fi and mystery and children’s lit and YA, but the genre with the largest sales and readership is almost entirely ignored.  Seeing Hunger Games and Divergent as future historicals is a way to see them as not just about the dystopia to come, but about the dystopias we’ve already (and continue) to have. And it’s also a way, perhaps, to grant Katniss and Tris their love along with their violence, and to see that they aren’t the first to wrestle with those options. They have many sisters who came before them.

Real Romance

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802147In Laura Kinsale’s medieval romance novel “For My Lady’s Heart,” there’s one scene where the heroic knight Ruck is guiding the noble lady Melanthe through the north of England, an area, he explains, which he has visited before while hunting dragons. Melanthe is doubtful that dragons exist in that part of the world, but Ruck insists he has killed one. Melanthe still demures…perhaps, she suggests, he merely encountered a large basilisk. He assures her that it must have been a dragon,and after a rousing tale of his battle, he offers to show her its bones, which are located in a church close by. And sure enough he does:

She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby talble.

“It is a dragon.” Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent over the skull.

And, bending over, she discovers that the skull is not a real skull; it’s made of stone. The dragon isn’t a dragon after all, and Ruck certainly didn’t kill it. He was lying…or, as he says, simply telling “A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure.”

The twist here is that the reader doesn’t necessarily know that it’s just a tale any more than Melanthe does. It’s true that up to this point in the novel, there haven’t been any fantasy elements — Kinsale’s medieval milieu includes a lot of talk of witchcraft and enchantment, but (at least until we reach the dragon) it’s all explained naturalistically. But this is a novel, not a history, and Ruck is a very honest, straightforward character — certainly as I read, I felt, with Melanthe, that maybe, possibly, he really had killed a dragon. Maybe there were more things, not necessarily in heaven and earth, but in this book than I’d initially thought. It would be fun to suddenly have a fantasy dragon make a walk-on in the middle of a romance novel. It could happen, couldn’t it?

That tease — the delighted possibility that the fantastic might be real, and the concomitant delight/reversal/disappointment that is isn’t — is a kind of magical, virtuoso acknowledgement, or demonstration, of the links and disjunctions between the genres of fantasy and romance. Romance is often sneered at for its lack of realism; for the way that, when “My lady wished a firedrake,” as Ruck says, a firedrake, and/or a perfectly noble man, is provided. Yet, if romances are about wish fulfillment, historicals like this one are also about period detail — the machinations of the Italian court, the intricacies of Ruck’s armor, even the lapse into a readable but still well-researched form of Middle English. Reality in fiction (and perhaps elsewhere?) is a negotiation; a matter of tropes and trust. Which is why Melanthe is not, in fact, delighted with Ruck’s tale. Instead, she becomes enraged, telling him coldly, “If I find thee in a lie to me again, knight, thou will rue it to thy early death.”

Melanthe’s freak out seems like caprice. But it’s actually part of the romance plot. “There is but one person on the earth that I trust, and that is thee,” she tells Ruck, by way of explaining why his dragon fiction upset her. Melanthie herself, having married into an important Italian house, with all the backstabbing and intrigue that that (stereotypically) implies, has been trained to lie constantly, to stifle all her natural impulses and do the opposite of what she feels. “I have some talents in common with base liars and cowards,” she tells Ruck bitterly.

The lying, at least, is something she has in common with Kinsale, the author of the story, as well. At one point Melanthe tells Ruck that she is always lying, and that’s the truth — everything she says is fiction. For that matter, even Ruck’s honesty is a fiction — except, perhaps, when he makes up that story about the dragon. The fiction really is a fiction; dragons, in the book and outside the book, aren’t real.

Kinsale’s narrative, for the most part, is organized to demonstrate the virtue of Ruck’s straightforward honesty in opposition to the treachery and deceit of the manipulative dusky southerners. But that binary of good-truth/evil-lies has many caveats and winks. Ruck passes Melanthe off as his “wench” at one point in order to protect her from kidnapping — or is it instead, extra-diegetically, so that she can play at being his to do with as he will, just as, through much of the rest of the novel, she is his lady, and he must do her bidding? It’s the pretense of being his lover that precipitates their first actual intercourse, immediately preceded by their private commitment of marriage before God and each other in the darkened bed-chamber. True love comes through a lie…or, if you want to take it back a step, the fiction of true love is delivered through the play-acting characters realizing that the fiction they are acting is the truth.

The declaration and marriage come somewhat early on in the book; there are many contrivances, most of them unlikely, before you get to the also-not-especially-likely happy-ever-after. But to complain about the improbability seems as churlish as Melanthe getting upset that her knight has told her a story. For that matter, even Melanthe has to admit that the Ruck’s fiction “was somewhat agreeable.” What romance writers and romance readers know, perhaps, is that it’s not so much whether the dragon’s tale is true, as whether it is told with love.