Spent most of the evening reading particularly horrifying passages of Ethel M. Dell's The Bars of Iron (a huge 1916 romantic bestseller) out loud to Mr. Mousie
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I will never understand rape in romance novels. Catherine Coulter's books almost always feature a horrific wedding night where the groom forces himself on the bride and it's painful and awful and enough to put a 15-year-old off sex for life, and then he never apologizes or anything. It's always justified as, "Well, the first time is always bad for the woman so there was no way I could have made it better. But let's do it again, because it won't hurt this time."
At least in one book the heroine beat the hero around the head with a bridle or her riding crop or something, but that was only because he forced himself on her for the fifth or sixth time and she was disgusted that she'd liked it.
It's not as if Husband n.2 didn't give fair warning to all and sundry as to how awesome he was going to be - Wifey meeting him was when in a temper he was beating his dog to death and to stop him she had to throw a jug of cold water over him.
I don't know, but she isn't anywhere near as bad as The Sheik by EM Hull which was a huge psycho bestseller and featured wall-to-wall rape (haughty British heroine Diana who dominates men gets abducted by a Sheik and raped till she likes it. But it's OK, he's secretly a European aristocrat). That was one of the rare books I didn't finish because I was too disgusted (and I managed to get through The Klansman, the book Birth of a Nation was based on, so that's saying something
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It really does have a number of remarkable similarities - she is a tough child of the streets running from an abusive home, he is older and with a bad reputation and was in love with this beautiful 'pure' woman who instead married this 'good' man - and the couple takes the heroine under their wings. She believes she'll wreck his life/he still loves his old love and runs away and he has to go find her; he kneels to her at the end and she is horrified etc
Hmmm....
TOS is way better though.
The ending is very purple-prosey cute:
That was the first thing that occurred to her--that he should kneel
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I consider self taken in - this is the fourth novel of hers I read (I love trashy old books) and this is the first with rape. I thought I lucked out and found a trashy teen-twenties novelist who didn't have that, but no luck.
This sort of thing makes me think that, not sooooo long ago, rape required a lot of reconciling.
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I have no idea what went on in her head.
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At least in one book the heroine beat the hero around the head with a bridle or her riding crop or something, but that was only because he forced himself on her for the fifth or sixth time and she was disgusted that she'd liked it.
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At least in this one, they don't go into graphic details.
*thank God for small mercies*
Ugh.
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It's not as if Husband n.2 didn't give fair warning to all and sundry as to how awesome he was going to be - Wifey meeting him was when in a temper he was beating his dog to death and to stop him she had to throw a jug of cold water over him.
Quite the romantic ideal...
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It was a brutal thrashing and wholly undeserved. Caesar, awaking to the ( ... )
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That does sound just like These Old Shades.
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Hmmm....
TOS is way better though.
The ending is very purple-prosey cute:
That was the first thing that occurred to her--that he should kneel ( ... )
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This sort of thing makes me think that, not sooooo long ago, rape required a lot of reconciling.
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