This Is Not A Love Song

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

 

— Public Image Limited 

 

 

Vice Avenged: A Moral Tale by Lolah Burford is not a romance. But it is also not not a romance. It is a curious little book somewhere between fable and fairy tale, romance and picaresque novel. Quite frankly, I am not entirely sure what to make of it.

 

The tale goes like this: The Marquis makes a wager with some of his other rakehell friends to see who can defile a virgin of good breeding first. Someone puts names into a box and each gentleman draws one. The Marquis knows his victim. He was at school with her brothers, he spent a Christmas at her father, the Duke’s home. He tells his fellow sinners that not only will he win the bet but he will be back by dawn the next day, victorious.

 

So he kidnaps the heroine, rapes her . . . or maybe he doesn’t. Now this is where things get confusing. Or rather, here is where begins the confusion that is created by the title itself. Vice Avenged can imply two divergent ideas: first, that a vice, a sin is being avenged in the sense that someone has been wronged and that wrong is being avenged. But it also implies that vice itself is being avenged, that sin is somehow being justified. The second part of the title further confuses the issue. What is the moral of the tale? What morality is being defined here? Whose morality? Are we pro-vice or anti-vice?

 

When the Marquis kidnaps Cressida, as her name ominously is, he tells her that if her honor demands that she be violently raped then he will do that. However, if she would prefer, he could seduce her instead. He will have her either way, but the manner is up to her. She chooses the second and who can really argue with her choice?

 

Which brings me to rape. Here is the legal definition of rape brought to you by FindLaw:

“The crime of rape (or “first-degree sexual assault” in some states) generally refers to non-consensual sexual intercourse that is committed by physical force, threat of injury, or other duress. A lack of consent can include the victim’s inability to say “no” to intercourse, due to the effects of drugs or alcohol. Rape can occur when the offender and victim have a pre-existing relationship (sometimes called “date rape”), or even when the offender is the victim’s spouse.

In the case of this novel, physical force is not used. Threat of injury, however, is. I don’t know what “duress” means . . . that is I know what the word means I just don’t know the legal definition of it so I had to look it up  here .   I checked here at RAINN to see that they had to say about rape. Then I found this which means legally, The Marquis is guilty of rape which we knew.

 

However, despite knowing this even as I am reading it, neither Cressida nor I can quite make up our minds on how we feel about either the event or The Marquis. To complicate these varities of emotional responses to factual evidence even more, the rest of the novel essentially involves two plot arcs: the first is the revenges the Duke takes against the Marquis for the rape of Cressida, including forcing him to marry her to regain her honor, whipping him daily for a month, and eventually acquiring a lettre de cachet, sailing him across the channel and then abandoning him to die in the Bastille.

 

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what all fathers dream of doing to rapists? Only he never asks Cressida, never considers how she feels about the Marquis, the rape, the revenge, the marriage. In a way, the Duke perpetuates the rape into an never-ending event rather than a past incident. He extends it beyond the act and forces Cressida to live it again, again not simply because he forces her to marry the Marquis, her rapist, but because the Duke does not see his daughter as a person but as a possession, a means by which he himself has been dishonored. He does not see her anymore than the Marquis, who saw her as a means to win the bet. In some ways, I would argue, that the Marquis’ act is more forgivable. It is easy to make an object of someone you have no intimacy with, no personal knowledge of, someone who is only a name and a position, a role. In my humble opionion, it is far worse to make into object a person you claim to love, a child, another with whom you have lived and shared food and conversation. For neither is there an excuse, but it seems to me that one is the result of an ignorant blindness and the other the result of a willful blindness. One is a crime and the other is a tyranny.

 

To further my point, the Duke’s tyranny makes both his daughter and the Marquis victims. They are both under his thumb. The book, then, is not a romance, as I said. There is a love story there but it is a love story that is intertwined with a fable about crime, punishment, forgiveness and redemption.

 

It is not the Duke’s place to take revenge on behalf of his daughter, particularly when she did not want it taken. It is only within Cressida’s power to condemen or forgive the Marquis. Taking the power to choose how she proceeds from that first rape makes her again the victim.

 

The Marquis, himself, is not drawn as a total villain (though some would certanly disagree with me). He is, in some respects, no different than the Duke. He does not rape Cressida out of cruelty or perversion or misogyny. He rapes her because he is bored and entitled. He is an aristocrat, the heir to a dukedom himself. In that regard, he is a law unto himself. He is beholden to no one. All are his inferiors. None but himself is a person. While Cressida is an innocent, the Marquis is an ignorant. Both are confined entirely into the position that they were born into. The Duke’s tyranny is not a tyranny to teach but a tyranny similar to the Marquis’ rape; that is, it is born out of an expectation of entitlement. He is angry not because he is a father that loves his daughter (though that it is it in part) but because he is a Duke whose honor has been besmirched. These are not narcissitic characters, rather they are selfish, limited creatures made more of mores than imagination. They cannot imagine any perspective, any life but their own.

 

It is only when the Marquis is thrown into a life all together different that he becomes a changed man. It is only when Cressida nears to giving birth that she matures. Up until these events, both were mentally and emotionally children, living on the expectation that others would do for them, living on what was given rather than thinking.

 

The book is short, it probably constitutes a novella more than a novel. The prose is decadent and yet, sparse. For instance, the color of the Marquis’ hair and eyes is never described. The characters are not caricatures but rather archetypes. This is what I mean by the story being more fairy tale or fable than romance. The specifics of personhood are not present in the prose. Moreover, this seems to be the point. It is only towards the end of the novel when hero and heroine begin to exhibit character. Up until then they seem to both be more pawns in a game someone else (society? patriarchy? family? god?) is playing.

 

The book was published in 1971, a year before The Flame and the Flower. It is dedicated to Georgette Heyer, of all people. I have looked for anything anyone has written on this book but what I find is hardly even worth mentioning in this farce of a blog. But it is a haunting, strange little tale and I will end this blog post the way this book begins:

 

They were sitting in a hell, the Marquis and his special friends . . . 

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