In the comments on last week’s Imperial Scandal teaser with Raoul, Jeanne had some interesting comments about how Raoul feels about Mélanie/Suzanne.
“I want to like Raoul even though he is ruthless. It’s his ruthlessness that gives Melanie her independence and her freedom to be “feral”, “fierce” and “reckless.” He never tries to protect her by restraining her actions. He uses her for those qualities seemingly without hesitation.
“But the common trope in a romance is that, if a good man loves a woman, then he wants to keep her from endangering herself. He may not act on those feelings, he may even recognize the inconsistency between loving her for her strength and wanting to protect her from harm but those protective instincts always seem to arise. So when we are seeing from the good man’s POV, we will eventually hear those thoughts.”
I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms before, but it’s true that Raoul and Mel/Suzette’s whole relationship is built on shared danger. In fact, there’s a scene in Secrets of a Lady where Charles asks why Raoul didn’t protect her, send her somewhere safe, and Mel says something along the lines of “I didn’t want to safe, I wanted to fight.” I think Mel is inclined to see Raoul as a bit more ruthless than he actually is. It’s Charles in Secrets who sees that Raoul is obviously still in love with her, while Mel’s never been sure Raoul loved her.
Jeanne went on to say, “I don’t want to hear Raoul having those thoughts and I was glad to he doesn’t in this scene. I want him to be so ruthless that it never even occurs to him that he should protect her as it doesn’t seem to here. And yet, I want to know that he loves her as we also hear in this scene.
“I don’t think most readers will like Raoul for this, most of them probably won’t even believe he really does love her. But I do. And, at the end of The Mask of Night when Charles asks Raoul to stay because his presence makes Melanie happier, I realized that Charles thinks so too.
“I can think of one other male “romance” character who understood that love doesn’t give a man the right to restrain a woman’s actions in order to protect her. It’s Lord Peter Wimsey in “Gaudy Night”. Somewhere in that book, he and Harriet discuss this and that male protectiveness leads women to deceive men in order to be free of it. I think Melanie and Charles get close to having a similar discussion in The Mask of Night.”
I think the Peter & Harriet parallel is very apt. Peter certainly has times when clearly wants to protect Harriet, yet in Gaudy Night he understands the importance of her being able to run her own risks. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes struggle with this as well in Laurie King’s books. They have an extraordinarily egalitarian relationship. Yet the scene that ends with them becoming betrothed begins with Holmes hitting Russell over the head and knocking her out so she can’t go with him after the villain. Granted Russell is still recover from being abducted and exposed to heroin at the time. But it becomes part of their marriage negotiations (“I’ll not marry a man I can’t trust at my back.”).
Charles/Malcolm is more definitely inclined to try to protect Mel/Suzette than Raoul is, which she rebels against. Not that he’s overprotective–-she runs a lot of risks at his side from even before they get married. But he slides into what she calls his “Brutus/Hotspur” moments where he tries to protect her or feels guilty because she’s been hurt or put in danger. As she says in Vienna Waltz, “Darling, I knew what you did when I married you. I knew I’d never be able to bear being your wife if it meant sitting on the sidelines or waiting like Penelope to see if you came back alive. If you wanted that sort of wife you shouldn’t have married me, however strong your chivalrous impulses.”
Not that there aren’t moments when Mel/Suzette wants to protect Charles/Malcolm as well. I also think it’s interesting that one of the results of Mel/Suzette marrying Charles/Malcolm is that it puts her in a much safer situation than she’d been in running about Spain. Which I don’t think she considered, but I suspect Raoul did…
Do you equate protectiveness with love? Do you think Raoul loved Mélanie/Suzanne? And does his not trying to protect her make you more or less likely to believe he loves her? What are other literary couples you can think of who struggle with this issue?
I’ve just posed a new Fraser Correspondence letter in which Aline tells Gisèle about her engagement to Geoffrey Blackwell.
Tracy Grant - Novelist 
September 5, 2011 at 12:42 am
Well, Mel/Suzanne had lost everything by the time Raoul found her. Once she’d gotten past the point of simply trying to stay ALIVE, she needed something to fight for. And Raoul is ruthless. And practical. She was better off learning to fight and spy than stuck in a brothel. She could defend herself in his world.
September 5, 2011 at 4:16 am
Absolutely, JMM. Mel/Suzette was much better off learning how to fight than stuck in the brothel. What Charles asks in Secrets is “If he cared a scrap for you, why the hell didn’t he–”
And Mel replies, “Send me off somewhere safe? I’d have gone mad, darling. I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to fight.”
Raoul did use Mel/Suzette, but he also saw she needed an outlet for her anger. If he’d tried to protect her, she’d probably never have been able to get past what happened to her family. And as you point out, she wouldn’t have been able to defend herself.
September 6, 2011 at 3:32 am
I’m very interested in learning about other literary couples who struggle with male protectiveness and egalitarianism! Thanks for the reference to Laurie King’s Marry Russell/Sherlock Holmes books (although I think the website link should be to http://www.laurieRking.com.)
I did think of another and that’s Tasha Alexander’s mysteries with Lady Emily Ashton and Colin Hargreaves who also struggle with this issue.
I put up the full quotation from LPW in Gaudy Night about the issue of protectiveness on my very infrequently updated blog. I would love to know of another male literary character who understands this as well as “dear Peter.”
September 6, 2011 at 3:43 am
I got the link to my own blog wrong! It should be:
jeannesbookreviews.blogspot.com
Tracy – I can’t figure out how to fix it in my login info.
September 6, 2011 at 3:47 am
Thanks for the link to your blog, Jeanne–I’m off to look at it. And thanks for the correction on Laurie King’s website url. If you haven’t read the Russell & Holmes books they’re wonderful. King talks about how Sayers influenced her. A Monstrous Regiment of Women, in particular, has a lot of great Gaudy Night references.
I too thought of Tasha’s books after I wrote the post. And Julia and Brisbane struggle with issue of running risks and being independent in Deanna Raybourn’s series.
September 6, 2011 at 2:23 pm
I thought about Deanna Raybourn’s series as well. As I recall though, Brisbane is constantly trying to keep Julia from getting involved in anything he thinks is dangerous and she is constantly sneaking around him to stay involved. I don’t have the impression that he ever considers including her as an equal.
I want to see the bar set higher to the level that LPW (and Raoul!) set it – where the hero sees his desire to protect as a negative to both the heroine, to himself and to whatever goal they are trying to achieve.
I should give Charles his due – he does get it and he does try to restrain his protective impulses and he never really tries to stop Melanie. It’s just that occasionally he just can’t help himself. For example, when in Beneath a Silent Moon, he snaps at Melanie that he wishes she would remember at times that she is a mother before she goes off doing something dangerous. I loved her reply that he should remember, at those same times, that he’s a father.
September 6, 2011 at 5:07 pm
I was thinking about this with Charles/Malcolm last night. I can’t imagine him ever telling Mélanie/Suzanne not to do something, though as you say he does have stronger protective impulses than Raoul (or perhaps it’s more that he doesn’t fight against them as much). I think the time he “slips” the most into protective mode is that scene in Beneath, because she’s been hurt. And he’s angry in Vienna Waltz (with himself not her) because she gets shot in his investigation.
September 6, 2011 at 2:58 pm
I agree with Jeanne.
I loved the first Raybourn books, but they’ve become repetitive. “You can’t get involved in this!” redux.
Every time I thought that Brisbane had come to accept Julia as she was… the next book comes along and he’s back to the Neanderthal, and she’s back to sneaking around. I’m glad the next book isn’t a Julia Grey.
September 6, 2011 at 5:11 pm
I haven’t read the latest Julia Grey, but as I remember in “The Dark Road to Darjeeling” Julia and Brisbane come to an agreement about her helping him, which he then backs out of when she’s in too much danger. It’s an ongoing struggle between them, but it does seem to be moving forward from his complete refusal to have her involved at all. And I certainly feel he appreciates her abilities.
September 8, 2011 at 9:01 am
I stopped reading Deanna Raybourn’s novels after ‘Moor’, but the one element of her Julia Grey stories I did admire was how in keeping her characters were with the Victorian era in which the books are set. So Brisbane should want to protect Julia, but that doesn’t mean she has to obey – the fun comes when Julia solves the case herself, by doing exactly what Brisbane forbade her to do! Imposing modern ideals of sexual equality on historical characters doesn’t always fit.
September 8, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Yes, I do think Brisbane’s protectiveness of Julia fits with the historical context and also with the fact that he’s an enquiry agent and she’s an amateur (similarly, on the show Castle, Beckett, a police detective, is inclined to try to keep Castle, a novelist, out of danger). But relationships evolve. As the series progresses, Brisbane accepts Julia as a partner, then has some second thoughts when Julia is in danger.