Forgetting Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
Jul. 17th, 2012 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI am so glad that I'm not married to a Sutcliff hero. They all seem to subscribe to the same romantic philosophy: love is forgetting about the object of your affections for months on end.
In The Eagle of the Ninth, Marcus forgets about Cottia whenever something more interesting comes along (the titular search for the eagle, but also boar-hunting), and spends more time thinking about his pet wolf than her. Randal from Knight's Fee, clearly no adherent of the newfangled ideals of courtly love, meets his ladylove Gisella like twice over the course of the book and otherwise forgets her for years at a time.
Gisella is like Cottia 2.0 - red hair, fierce temper - except that unlike Cottia, who plays an important part in developing the theme of Marcus's Growing Love of Britain for all that he often forgets her, Gisella seems absolutely extraneous to the story. Her chapters feel like they were forcibly removed from another book and plopped down in Knight's Fee so Randal could contemplate marriage at the end as a sort of consolation prize.
Thomas in Blood and Sand is a doting lover by Sutcliffian standards - he actually buys Anoud presents! Meaning he thinks about her when she's not there! - which reflects his early 19th century Scottish background; he's from a period and a place that prized companionate marital love. But even he goes out of his way to point out that he sometimes forgets about her very existence. Just in case we were worried that he might be getting a little too heterosexual here.
The only hero I can think of off the top of my head who never forgets his wife (unless I'm misremembering) is The Lantern Bearers' Aquila, and as he and Ness have a terrible relationship for most of the book, because neither of them wanted to marry in the first place, that's hardly encouraging.
(Aquila is also unusual in that he doesn't have a bestest best male friend, either, possibly because his period of Saxon slavery calcified his soul. This is what makes The Lantern Bearers so hard to read: it's far from Sutcliff's most "rocks fall, everybody (no really, everybody dies" book, but it doesn't have the warm friendships that softens her other grim books.)
One of the things I appreciate about Sutcliff's work - even if it does sometimes drive me crazy - is that she strives to capture the feel of the period, without the narrative ever winking at the readers to reaffirm modern values (and in doing so break the illusion). Most of Sutcliff's heroes come from societies that don't value much women, so - aside from Thomas - they don't imbue their relationships with women with the kind of sentimentality they lavish on their male friends.
I admire the commitment to verisimilitude; I despise historical fiction that uses history to hammer ham-handed didactic points (or even just overlays a too-thick film of modern values). But it makes most of Sutcliff's heterosexual romantic subplots really unsatisfying.
In The Eagle of the Ninth, Marcus forgets about Cottia whenever something more interesting comes along (the titular search for the eagle, but also boar-hunting), and spends more time thinking about his pet wolf than her. Randal from Knight's Fee, clearly no adherent of the newfangled ideals of courtly love, meets his ladylove Gisella like twice over the course of the book and otherwise forgets her for years at a time.
Gisella is like Cottia 2.0 - red hair, fierce temper - except that unlike Cottia, who plays an important part in developing the theme of Marcus's Growing Love of Britain for all that he often forgets her, Gisella seems absolutely extraneous to the story. Her chapters feel like they were forcibly removed from another book and plopped down in Knight's Fee so Randal could contemplate marriage at the end as a sort of consolation prize.
Thomas in Blood and Sand is a doting lover by Sutcliffian standards - he actually buys Anoud presents! Meaning he thinks about her when she's not there! - which reflects his early 19th century Scottish background; he's from a period and a place that prized companionate marital love. But even he goes out of his way to point out that he sometimes forgets about her very existence. Just in case we were worried that he might be getting a little too heterosexual here.
The only hero I can think of off the top of my head who never forgets his wife (unless I'm misremembering) is The Lantern Bearers' Aquila, and as he and Ness have a terrible relationship for most of the book, because neither of them wanted to marry in the first place, that's hardly encouraging.
(Aquila is also unusual in that he doesn't have a bestest best male friend, either, possibly because his period of Saxon slavery calcified his soul. This is what makes The Lantern Bearers so hard to read: it's far from Sutcliff's most "rocks fall, everybody (no really, everybody dies" book, but it doesn't have the warm friendships that softens her other grim books.)
One of the things I appreciate about Sutcliff's work - even if it does sometimes drive me crazy - is that she strives to capture the feel of the period, without the narrative ever winking at the readers to reaffirm modern values (and in doing so break the illusion). Most of Sutcliff's heroes come from societies that don't value much women, so - aside from Thomas - they don't imbue their relationships with women with the kind of sentimentality they lavish on their male friends.
I admire the commitment to verisimilitude; I despise historical fiction that uses history to hammer ham-handed didactic points (or even just overlays a too-thick film of modern values). But it makes most of Sutcliff's heterosexual romantic subplots really unsatisfying.
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-18 05:16 am (UTC)Jestyn and Alexia in Blood Feud and Phaedrus and Murna in Mark of the Horse Lord are both pretty convincing, IMO, although the latter don't start off so well. (Aquila and Ness still gut me, oh god. I'm not sure they ever manage better than cordiality and in Ness's case contentment. Aquila is just too...calcified, as you say.)
Jestyn and Alexia are my favorite, though. She teaches him to read Greek, and believes in him to be a better person when he's not sure about himself!
no subject
Date: 2012-07-19 02:45 pm (UTC)It's kind of like The Godfather. Insofar as Michael loves anybody, he loves his wife Kay, but most of his life takes place away from her and he just assumes she'll always be there for him.
And I think the whole thing is reflective of Sutcliff's attitudes towards women as well as history, and possibly I'm more willing to forgive it than you are because I read so many books as a child which involved girls having not-really-historically-plausible adventures, which are fun on their own but vexing in the aggregate.
I do like the fact that Luned gets to see the white hart with Conn and Prosper in The Shining Company. She felt much better integrated into their trio than Sutcliff heroines often do.
I have not read Blood Feud or Mark of the Horse Lord, and the library doesn't have them. Maybe the local tiny used bookstore of bending bookshelves will do better?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-23 10:55 am (UTC)In Lantern Bearers, I have recently been wondering what happened to Flavia and Aquila's mother and why she is not mentioned AT ALL. There's a nice cosy domestic setting at the start, she *could* have a beloved mother in there, but she doesn't.
Sutcliff's mother does sound like a bit of a monster from her autobiog: one wonders if she just felt more comfortable writing father-son-daughter domesticity than the nuclear family.
Am also wondering how Flavian Snr was blinded!
no subject
Date: 2012-07-23 05:02 pm (UTC)I think you're right about Sutcliff being more comfortable writing family scenes without mothers. She's pretty tactful about it in her autobiography, but it definitely sounds like her family life got a thousand times calmer after her mother died.
As for an in-canon reason why Flavia and Aquila's mother isn't there - lots of possibilities: maybe she died in childbirth (and that's why there's only the two of them), or illness, or fell off a horse and broke her neck...
Aquila's father is old enough that his blindness could just come from cataracts or age, I think, although it's clearly more exciting if he got blinded by somebody.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-23 05:42 pm (UTC)I think it would have felt natural for their mother to have been acknowledged, if only in passing. Actually, now I think of it, that little domestic scene before the Saxons arrive does have four people in it: Flavia, Aquila, Flavian, and the freed slave-tutor Demetrius who reads to them, almost as a second father-figure. And one wonders if the vanished mother has anything to do with Aquila's rather appalling marriage...
Flavian's blindness though - I'm fairly sure that we are told that it is the result of a Saxon arrow wound - which I suppose could have happened during his own military service, but I suppose might also be related to his vanished wife...
no subject
Date: 2012-07-23 06:08 pm (UTC)I've always wondered if Flavia's son was really as dyed-in-the-wool Saxon as he acted when Aquila met him. Clearly he was playing up his Saxonness because of his pride; it's hard to imagine Flavia didn't at least tell him stories about Rome (or recount the Odyssey, or whatever).