Renault almost always collapses into gender essentialism. IT IS SO MADDENING.
This is probably true and it really, really is. The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer are the two novels where it comes least to mind, although I suppose I could be forgetting something.
(The Mask of Apollo is my favorite of Renault's novels and potentially the most important to me, although several others were strongly influential at different points in my life.)
The historicals are not immune, see Funeral Games (or don't, really argh all the way for multiple reasons, it's like she's punishing herself for something and incidentally us with it).
I really did write "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει" because I dreamed its central conceit, but I realized after I had written it that it is also an argument with Funeral Games. That novel I have never re-read and don't plan to. I did not enjoy the experience.
Return to Night, ditto.
I am actually very fond of Return to Night, partly because I can't believe the ending as Renault clearly intends me to: I don't care what Hilary pretends to herself about the Madonna of the Cave, if she and Julian manage not to panic themselves into breaking up in the next six months, I fully believe they will be set for life and thoroughly confuse their author when she checks back in about ten years to make sure that they are separating wretchedly on schedule.
it begins quite interestingly with a woman who has agency and her own life and then these pleasing factors are slammed head-on into a romance that perverts and wrecks them.
It really is like a sudden collision: I expected the romance in Purposes of Love to fall apart for completely different reasons and in The Friendly Young Ladies I didn't see it coming at all. (Jo Walton has claimed that it comes naturally as part of Renault's recurring concern with love as a contest with an inevitable winner and a loser. I agree that it fits the pattern, but I also feel it crashes in too suddenly at the last minute of the novel to make any sense in terms of its characters. The ending of The Charioteer is filled with people behaving like idiots, but at least they are not behaving like idiots who have had personality transplants.)
And yet I don't feel that Renault is angry about this, more that she has a serious contempt for women and feels we can never ever get it right
I know very little about her as a person in some ways—I have still never followed up on the biography I encountered in college and used as an index to the novels I hadn't read—but whether it's contempt or despair, once seen it's impossible to ignore. I read her so very young that for a long time I didn't see it and then it was a shock. She may be angry on her own behalf, but it comes out as Not Being Like Other Girls. ("Equality! I hope I need never sink so low. That poppy syrup!") Otherwise she seems to see no alternative that isn't just throwing the whole woman away. And then her contemporary novels are so chronically skeptical about the survival of queerness in the face of inexorable, however unconvincing heterosexuality, I don't understand how her life worked at all.
I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers.
I have not—it's her one remaining novel I haven't read. The problem is that the previous remaining novel was Purposes of Love and having come to that one off North Face, I just became very gun-shy.
Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same.
I have to tell you, this is not helping the gun-shyness.
"Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended."
That's an amazing sentence and what?
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
I found many important things in her which she may or may not have intended for me to find and I am absolutely fine with confounding her intentions.
This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.
I am sure it means that Renault and I don't mean the same thing by a woman.
no subject
This is probably true and it really, really is. The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer are the two novels where it comes least to mind, although I suppose I could be forgetting something.
(The Mask of Apollo is my favorite of Renault's novels and potentially the most important to me, although several others were strongly influential at different points in my life.)
The historicals are not immune, see Funeral Games (or don't, really argh all the way for multiple reasons, it's like she's punishing herself for something and incidentally us with it).
I really did write "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει" because I dreamed its central conceit, but I realized after I had written it that it is also an argument with Funeral Games. That novel I have never re-read and don't plan to. I did not enjoy the experience.
Return to Night, ditto.
I am actually very fond of Return to Night, partly because I can't believe the ending as Renault clearly intends me to: I don't care what Hilary pretends to herself about the Madonna of the Cave, if she and Julian manage not to panic themselves into breaking up in the next six months, I fully believe they will be set for life and thoroughly confuse their author when she checks back in about ten years to make sure that they are separating wretchedly on schedule.
it begins quite interestingly with a woman who has agency and her own life and then these pleasing factors are slammed head-on into a romance that perverts and wrecks them.
It really is like a sudden collision: I expected the romance in Purposes of Love to fall apart for completely different reasons and in The Friendly Young Ladies I didn't see it coming at all. (Jo Walton has claimed that it comes naturally as part of Renault's recurring concern with love as a contest with an inevitable winner and a loser. I agree that it fits the pattern, but I also feel it crashes in too suddenly at the last minute of the novel to make any sense in terms of its characters. The ending of The Charioteer is filled with people behaving like idiots, but at least they are not behaving like idiots who have had personality transplants.)
And yet I don't feel that Renault is angry about this, more that she has a serious contempt for women and feels we can never ever get it right
I know very little about her as a person in some ways—I have still never followed up on the biography I encountered in college and used as an index to the novels I hadn't read—but whether it's contempt or despair, once seen it's impossible to ignore. I read her so very young that for a long time I didn't see it and then it was a shock. She may be angry on her own behalf, but it comes out as Not Being Like Other Girls. ("Equality! I hope I need never sink so low. That poppy syrup!") Otherwise she seems to see no alternative that isn't just throwing the whole woman away. And then her contemporary novels are so chronically skeptical about the survival of queerness in the face of inexorable, however unconvincing heterosexuality, I don't understand how her life worked at all.
I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers.
I have not—it's her one remaining novel I haven't read. The problem is that the previous remaining novel was Purposes of Love and having come to that one off North Face, I just became very gun-shy.
Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same.
I have to tell you, this is not helping the gun-shyness.
"Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended."
That's an amazing sentence and what?
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
I found many important things in her which she may or may not have intended for me to find and I am absolutely fine with confounding her intentions.
This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.
I am sure it means that Renault and I don't mean the same thing by a woman.