One Last Note on The Friendly Young Ladies

[osprey_archer]

I’ve just discovered that the copy of The Friendly Young Ladies which I recently acquired has a second afterword (after Mary Renault’s first afterword), written by Lillian Faderman (author of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America), from which I learned that horrible doctor Peter Bracknell who “cures” women by pretending to fall in love with them was in fact based on Mary Renault’s lover Dr. Robbie Wilson.

DEEPLY horrified to learn that this man was based on a real person, of whom Renault was presumably rather fond. I would love to believe that Mary Renault wrote Peter Bracknell in the spirit of “I bet you think this song is about you,” but in fact, knowing about Dr. Wilson furthers my suspicion that we’re meant to take Leo seriously when she muses of Peter, “Fundamentally he’s a far better human being than I am.”

In what possible sense? It’s not just that I disagree with this assessment (though I very much do!); I don’t understand what fundamental virtue we’re meant to believe he possesses. He’s vain, self-satisfied, and dishonest, not only to his patients but in his assessment of himself. Or are we supposed to believe that he attempts his “cures” out of genuine (if deeply misguided!) care for his patients, rather than to flatter his own vanity?

Faderman is also quite annoyed that till the end of their lives, Renault and her lover Julie Mullard “continued to conceive of themselves as ‘bisexual’ despite the fact that for the last thirty-five years of Mary’s life and of their domestic partnership, neither woman had erotic relations with men.” Really? Really? Voluntarily enduring a romantic relationship with the man who served as a model for Peter Bracknell didn’t establish Mary Renault’s bisexual bona fides for all time?

More seriously: I think Faderman thinks that if Renault had embraced the word lesbian she might have also embraced the gay liberation movement, but as that might have required a personality transplant, I feel... perhaps not? Renault is not radical in the way we, as later readers, perhaps WANT her to be radical, but on the other hand perhaps the mark of true radicalism is that decades after your death people are still reading your work and going "This is bonkers."

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

HUH. That's.................... a lot.

[aurumcalendula]

I was so irritated with both of those afterwords!

[skygiants]

It would absolutely have required a personality transplant. One can say many things of Mary Renault but among those things is certainly the fact that she's always deeply, stubbornly, and absolutely incomprehensibly herself.

[tei]

...um. FASCINATING. (I have Sweetman's biography on my shelf waiting to be read, and now want to do so right now just to learn who this guy was and what might have been going on.)

[asakiyume]

I don’t understand what fundamental virtue we’re meant to believe he possesses. He’s vain, self-satisfied, and dishonest, not only to his patients but in his assessment of himself. --He just seems breathtakingly awful, so ... yeah! I wonder!

[copperfyre]

…wow. On many levels! All of this somehow serves to make everything more baffling.

[regshoe]

o____O

...I think that's about all I have to say about that. Hmm, and Faderman's opinion of bisexual identity seems disappointingly-but-not-surprisingly in tune with some of the more questionably political things she says about lesbians in Surpassing the Love of Men, the one book of hers I've read.

perhaps the mark of true radicalism is that decades after your death people are still reading your work and going "This is bonkers."

It's certainly the mark of something!

[sovay]

Or are we supposed to believe that he attempts his “cures” out of genuine (if deeply misguided!) care for his patients, rather than to flatter his own vanity?

That at least would absolve him of the Renaultian sin of self-deception, although personally I think it's reading against the text.

Faderman is also quite annoyed that till the end of their lives, Renault and her lover Julie Mullard “continued to conceive of themselves as ‘bisexual’ despite the fact that for the last thirty-five years of Mary’s life and of their domestic partnership, neither woman had erotic relations with men.”

Oh, good, policing the sexual self-identification of the dead didn't start with Tumblr after all!

if Renault had embraced the word lesbian she might have also embraced the gay liberation movement

As far as I can tell, if Renault had embraced the word "lesbian," she would have been Not Like Those Other Lesbians and we would still be screaming at her forty years after her death.

[kore]

DEEPLY horrified to learn that this man was based on a real person, of whom Renault was presumably rather fond. I would love to believe that Mary Renault wrote Peter Bracknell in the spirit of “I bet you think this song is about you,” but in fact, knowing about Dr. Wilson furthers my suspicion that we’re meant to take Leo seriously when she muses of Peter, “Fundamentally he’s a far better human being than I am.”

Also DEEPLY horrified, WTF??

I have never read Renault's "present-day" novels other than the Charioteer but I have experienced so much vicarious horror via friends reading them. y i k e s.

[ethelmay]

I think people did use to sometimes label themselves or others by behavior rather than orientation. I remember in one of Norma Klein's books a woman says of her ex-boyfriend "Also, he's homosexual, or was when he was younger." But in modern terms it's certainly bonkers to say that renewing your Bisexuality Card means you mustn't be monogamous, at least not for thirty-five years. (What's the necessary frequency of street-crossing, I wonder?)