The Glass Slipper

Susan Ostrov Weisser

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813561776
• eBook ISBN: 9780813569871
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our “postfeminist” age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women’s nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today’s media, with profound implications for women.

More than a book about romance in fiction and media, The Glass Slipper illustrates how traditional stories about women’s sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives—historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres—discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women’s beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser’s goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

1

The Odd Couple

Mating Jane Austen with D. H. Lawrence

It is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation, or the re-adjustment of the old one, between men and women.

—D. H. Lawrence, letter of May 2, 1913

On the surface, you’d be hard-pressed to find two major British authors at further poles than Regency-era girl-favorite novelist Jane Austen and metaphorically muscular twentieth-century writer D. H. Lawrence. The first is popularly associated with clichés of prim convention and the cozy comforts of traditional moral convictions, the second with outrageous (some would say obscene or pornographic) sexual rebellion. Surely imagining them as a matched pair in literary history is only an occasion of absurdity; it seems preposterous at first to compare them in any way other than as authors at odds in what they do with a love story.

Their differences are not only notorious but supposed to be obvious: first, Austen is quaint, while Lawrence is (or was at the time, or at least thought he was) daringly modern; second, where she was (arguably) conservative and concerned with convention, he was (arguably) radical in his views of social life. Furthermore, Austen’s writing is both brilliantly humorous and decorous, while Lawrence manages to be serious, preachy, and bawdy all at once. We may sum all this up by saying that she seems to belong wholly to a genteel drawing room, while fans of Laurentian love tend to think of . . . Nature.

Surely the admirers of Austen and Lawrence treasure what is distinctive about their styles, which feature Lawrence’s hypnotic repetition, gloomy pronouncements, and undulating passionate prose, resembling mutterings during lovemaking, versus Austen’s precise and elegantly turned sentences. Put them against one another, and who wins? Austenites would point out that her way with language is graceful, polite, sane, and exacting, while Lawrence has always struck some readers as cranky, rude, wordy, and often downright nutty. Whereas he is schematic and didactic, they would insist, she is light and bright and charming. Austen’s style, combining sharply honed observations of character and social mores with finely calibrated wit, has been much imitated. Yet detractors see Austen as often rigid and didactic in her prissy way, while Lawrence’s prose can be quite beautiful and poetic, something rarely said of Austen. I will confess that I adore them both, different as they are, faults and all.

But let’s face it, the difference in their reputations so often comes down to sex: the much-repeated eternal opposition of restrained manners and desiring body. It’s all too easy to pit the pop image of Austen, eternal virgin and respectable maiden aunt (“Jane Austen, chaste and clear,” said the critic Rachel Brownstein), against Lawrence, the sexy bohemian guy with his intense love affairs and quirky marriage. We think of her restraint and his passion, she as the bonneted and he as the unclothed. All that brings them together, seemingly, is the extremity of reactions they provoke: worshipped by fans and reviled by those whose cup of tea they most definitely are not. Famous among Austen-haters was Mark Twain, who made a classic jab (“Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”), as did the feminist Kate Millett a hundred years later while taking down D. H. Lawrence (“the transformation of masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion”).1

But for intellectual fun, I’m going to make a shotgun wedding between the two, metaphorically speaking, on the usual matchmaking grounds that though the reluctant couple may not like each other much—or even know each other at all—they are more compatible than may first appear. I am confident that love will emerge in the end . . . or at least their mutual interest in love. And I hope to show that, for all that they may seem to be polar opposites (which in popular wisdom attract), extremes of their super-feminine and weirdly phallic reputations, they are oddly alike in telling and sometimes ironic ways.

One improbable resemblance is that each author developed a reputation concerning love quite contrary to the real themes of his or her writing. Austen attracts those who are nostalgic for life in a supposedly simpler time, when romance seemed opposite to sex, and when being a lady protected women from what the author Ariel Levy calls the “raunch culture” of modern society. Yet where so-called Jane-ites value Austen for her reputed moral certainties and fine gentility, a deeper understanding of her work reveals a layer of radical ambivalence about the values underlying romantic decisions, connected to her critically ironic view of modern society. More about that later.

As for Lawrence, no one ever accused him of gentility, fine or otherwise, much less prissiness. Rather, he has been viewed by many as liberating and revolutionary, on one hand, and by others as conservative, even fascistic, on the other. In general, Lawrence seems to be a writer whom readers either love passionately for the splendor of his best prose and the honesty of his provocative ideas or find overblown, absurd, and annoying because of his tendency to preach his eccentric opinions when we want the character and plot development so beautifully rendered in an Austen novel. It is safe to say that few readers find him bland. But where Lawrence was condemned by detractors (and celebrated by admirers) for his out-of-bounds view of sexuality, I will try to make the case that his critique of love in modern society turns out to be something close to an updated version of Austen’s.

What joins the two in our admittedly odd coupling is that both attempted to resolve the contradictions of their literary imaginations through their own narrative versions of the ideal romantic couple. While he is more interested in love than you might know, she is less of an enthusiast of romance than you might think. We might say that while they are very different, they are similarly misunderstood. Many a marital coupling has been formed on more foolish grounds.

Though not far apart geographically (she born in an eighteenth-century English village, he from a coal-mining town in the Midlands, about three hours away from Austen’s birthplace . . . by car), our two authors came from different classes in society, middle-class for Austen and working-class for Lawrence. This can be problematic in matchmaking, it’s true, even putting aside the difference in ages (I am referring, of course, to the one hundred years that separate the authors). We need to know more about their backgrounds before we assess their chances for marital harmony.

Jane Austen: The Bride

The real Austen, who left little in the way of biographical material (no diary has ever been found, and most of her letters were destroyed), is not quite the Austen of the contemporary imagination. It’s the latter version that is the basis of cultish fan enthusiasm, which constitutes what the critic Margaret Doody calls “Aunt Jane-ism.” My students often call Austen by her first name in a way they wouldn’t think of doing with other authors: they feel they “know” Austen rather personally. Yet for a novelist so identified with romantic love, courtship, and marriage as literary subjects, Austen’s life is notoriously bare of actual evidence that she experienced love or romance (there is no lack of copious speculation, of course, including a film about this very topic). In fact, her life was probably quite different than that imagined in the popular mind.

Austen has such enduring appeal that it is fair to ask why the writing of an unfashionable woman who rarely traveled and wrote mainly about local domestic and village life at the turn of the nineteenth century has remained so beloved. Some readers are clearly attracted by the difference between her world and ours, the depiction of a society that is not yet fully modern. It seems important that the Austenian world operates by the ground rules of traditional conventions, including those accorded by gender, though characters do break these rules from time to time (as when Elizabeth Bennett’s sister Lydia runs away with her lover in Pride and Prejudice).

For many the novels have come to satisfy the yearning for an imaginary pre–Industrial Revolution England, an idyll of country houses, gentrified manners, and old-fashioned values. Clear moral standards signify an Old World apart from the chaos of our urban, electronic living and the struggle for modern capital. In today’s confusing buzz of technological life, dominated by uncertainty, mass-market values, and the uneven breakdown of traditional gender roles, Austen’s fictional cosmos seems to have the pull of sentiment for a life we think we would have liked, safe and comforting but also charming rather than tedious compared to our own. Many fans think of an Austen novel as one where nothing very bad ever happens, that is, nothing worse than the anxiety that a woman will not marry a man she loves; this is, to be sure, the very element that turns off her detractors.2

It is easy to see why Austen’s novels have become a kind of cinematic fetish: film adaptations selectively focus on the clear trajectory of the courtship plot, the fine detail of a tightly enclosed, knowable, historical but seemingly apolitical world in which everyone seems to know his place. So solidified has this mythos become that there is a popular series of mystery novels by Stephanie Barron featuring Jane Austen as the amateur detective, patterned on Agatha Christie’s spinster figure Miss Marple, solving fictional mysteries with pert wit and ingenuity in her quaint village, and in a 2011 novel by the esteemed mystery writer P. D. James, Elizabeth Bennet solves a murder at Pemberley. It is, frankly, a mystery to me why so many want Austen or her heroine-avatar to solve mysteries. More recently, Austen zombie novels became a publishing phenomenon, popular among my students, a kind of backlash to the hyping of Austen’s propriety.3

Into this delightfully picturesque vision of genteel ways and village days, the imagined life of Austen was molded to perfection from the first published biographical sketch by her brother Henry Austen, emphasizing Austen’s modesty, sweetness, and simple piety. Though concrete evidence for what Jane Austen was really like may be slim, the publication in the twentieth century of her early fiction and the letters that survived has revealed surprising layers that do not fit comfortably with the proper image that stubbornly persists. The short early pieces she wrote, dedicated to various family members and probably read aloud, are absurd, extravagant, and flippant in tone, rather than modest and moral. Just as the Brontës’ juvenilia were melodramatic and hyper-romantic, Austen’s earliest efforts at fiction surprise with the antisocial liberties taken.

Austen’s letters, sharp-tongued and acerbic like the early fiction, shocked and even offended some readers when they were first published. Her nephew, writing before the publication of his memoir, cautioned that their “materials may be thought inferior” because they “treat only the details of domestic life. They resemble the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand.” But actually they are filled with harsh, pointed, and dark wit: she calls someone a “queer animal with a white neck”; she writes that she “had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me” (letter of November 20, 1800).

Rather than Fanny Price’s or Anne Elliot’s “gentle manner” and “elegant mind” here, or the prissy, quaint, modest, humble Aunt Jane of the myth, the letters reveal a voice that does not shy away from the harsh realities of sexual and social life: “Another stupid party last night,” comments Austen to her only sister and beloved confidante, Cassandra. And while at the “stupid party,” she observes: “I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for tho’ repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the She, I fixed upon the right one from the first. . . . She is not so pretty as I expected; her face has the same defect of baldness as her sister’s . . . ;—she was highly rouged, & looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else” (letter of May 12, 1801).

This is hardly the Jane who would rather put on a servant’s uniform than describe an actual kiss. Actually, she’d do very well as the smart-mouthed but good-at-heart best friend in a modern romantic comedy.

D. H. Lawrence: The Groom

By contrast, D. H. Lawrence, about a hundred years later, had an active, though not altogether satisfying, love life from an early age. You might assume, in light of his reputation for rebellious (if not obscene) fiction, that Lawrence was probably a merry sexual prankster, but in 1912 he encountered the woman he was to love and with whom he was to remain in marriage, however stormy, for life. Frieda von Richthofen, a distant cousin of the famous German World War I flying ace Baron von Richthofen, came from an aristocratic German family and was married with children when she and Lawrence began a passionate affair. In a startlingly short time, they eloped at Lawrence’s insistence. In a way he was very like a romantic hero, ready to be transformed by love.

Lawrence really did begin a new life with Frieda, finally leaving England for Europe and other places abroad until his death. With Frieda at his side, Lawrence felt that he loved and was loved for the first time. Of Frieda, he wrote, “At any rate, and whatever happens, I do love and I am loved—I have given and I have taken—and that is eternal” (letter of August 19, 1912). His life with Frieda was the start of an extremely prolific period for Lawrence, who had found his subject: “The work is of me, and her, and it is beautiful,” he wrote (letter of April 3, 1914). His marriage to Frieda was a dramatic one, filled with sometimes violent arguments, occasional separations, and a few infidelities, but it was also his emotional core and anchor. Though she often threatened to leave him, they never remained apart for long. “If I die, nothing has mattered but you, nothing at all,” he said to Frieda near the end of his restless life.4

Lawrence’s marriage to Frieda coincided with his developing the fictions that would eventually become The Rainbow and Women in Love, two of his masterpieces. However, his new confidence and radical experimentation with the subject of sex got him in trouble with censors and resulted in denunciations that shadowed him the rest of his life. The Rainbow, published in 1915, was almost immediately banned in Britain, and the publisher was prosecuted under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. Though D. H. Lawrence was always held in high critical esteem by some, popular reviewers were as hostile as the law was: “There is no form of viciousness . . . that is not reflected in these pages,” wrote the respected critic Clement Shorter of The Rainbow. “This whole book is an orgie of sexiness.”5

Persuasion and Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Test

Sometimes a prospective pair comes to a matchmaking attempt with children of their own. Taking a close look at a potential mate’s child can tell you a great deal about the values and true nature of the intended fiancé. And if you arrange a playdate, you can see how well the children will mesh together, and that can be a crucial trial before concluding the union. To see the important similarities and differences between Austen and Lawrence, we have only to compare their last novels, Austen’s Persuasion and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as love stories. Both works were created near the end of the author’s life: Austen completed Persuasion but died before it could be published (it came out a year later, in 1818), while Lawrence saw the publication of Lady Chatterley in 1928, only two years before his death in 1930.

Just as Austen is the favorite author of many discerning readers, Persuasion is the most highly respected novel of many Austenites. Persuasion is a type of novel we are very familiar with in the modern age: that is, it is a book about a young, unmarried woman, following the ups and downs of a courtship (here a courtship for the second time by a previously rejected suitor) and ending with the heroine’s happy marriage. But unusually, Persuasion begins with loss, both emotional and financial, and slowly reverses the trajectory toward a renewal of romantic spirit.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the other hand, traces the evolution of a married heroine through her affair with a working-class hero. To be sure, the novel is a particularly vibrant example of what is both valuable and grating in reading Lawrence. He certainly can sound cranky and peevish when we contemplate the long list of what he indicts in the novel: movies, children singing, militarism, masturbation, promiscuity, public schools, motorbikes, very sociable people, and modern art, among much else. He can be ridiculous in his fulminations about orgasmic surrender for females and the exaltation of the phallus, and very odd indeed with ideas like his scheme for workingmen to wear scarlet trousers so they will attract women and think less of money. Yet as a serious work of fiction, the novel is in some ways astonishing. Lady Chatterley’s Lover memorably embodies its large theme of regeneration in an unconventional (for its time) story of sexual love that reflects the way real men and women behave, in contrast to ideal depictions of romance in the Victorian novels that preceded it in the hundred years after Austen’s Persuasion.

Yes, the difference is startling: Lawrence’s novel centers on an adulterous affair, a situation that rarely rears its head anywhere in Austen’s fiction (in spite of her interest in finding adulteresses at parties, as we have seen). And sexuality is described in some detail in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whereas even chaste embraces are not on Austen’s textual radar. But isn’t this just another way of saying that Lawrence is modern and Austen is not? Though sex is an obvious distinction, it is not just as a contrast in presence or absence. On the contrary, though Austen and Lawrence came to quite opposite conclusions about the relation between sex and love, their imaginative attempts to redefine love unite them.

The Ancestral Home

Where the bride’s and groom’s families reside tells us much about who they are and what they bring to the match. A great house is prominent in both Austen’s Persuasion and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, marking their heroines’ class status and the telling problems accompanying it. Both novels trace the hero...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Odd Couple: Mating Jane Austen with D. H. Lawrence
• 2. Why Charlotte Brontë Despised Jane Austen (and What That Tells Us about the Modern Meaning of Love)
• 3. The True and Real Thing: Victorian and Modern Magazine Cultures of Romance
• 4. Victorian Desires and Modern Romances: Pocahontas on a Bridge in Madison County
• 5. For the Love of Mermaids, Beasts, and Vampires (and Ghosts, Robots, Monsters, Witches, and Aliens): Romancing the Other
• 6. Women Who Love Too Much . . . or Not Enough . . . or the Wrong Way: The Tragedy and Comedy of Romantic Love in Modern Movies
• 7. Feminism and Harlequin Romance: The Problem of the Love Story
• 8. A Genre of One’s Own: African American Romance Imprints and the “Universality” of Love
• 9. Is Female to Romance as Male Is to Porn?
• 10. Modern Romance: Two Versions of Love in Reality/“Reality”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author