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: 2012-07-23 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).