The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don’t actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.
The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London’s Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!
Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was. I liked it. It wasn’t a stand out in my brain but that’s not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn’t do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.
This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch’s lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn’t do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.
First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let’s take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione’s SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).
The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character’s throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot. World views need to be presented. Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality. An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.
The second problem is that I don’t believe that anyone actually knows what a rake is, because we don’t have them anymore. They are extinct.
Two years ago in an effort to discover what a rake actually was, I went the Humanities and Social Science branch of the New York Public library. For those of you that do not know what that means, that is the one with the lions out front that they always show in movies. It is a closed stack library, which means you can’t check books out. However, they were the only library that had all six volumes of E. Beresford Chancellor’s Lives of the English Rakes.
What I learned from Chancellor is that a rake is a dead medium. It started with Charles II and had petered out before the end of WWI. Essentially, a rake a is a male slut. However, Charles II was a also a good man for the most part. I base this conclusion on how he treated his wife, his mistresses, and his bastard children. He liked them. He took care of them. He did not throw over the Queen because she was barren despite the fact that his heir was his dipshit brother James who had decided that whilst Paris may have been worth a mass for Henry of Navarre, London was not worth Protestantism for the Stuarts. So much for Scottish practicality. In any case, whatever his faults, Charles II wasn’t a sociopathic criminal like our other example, Colonel Francis Charteris known to everyone and their dog as The Rape Master General. I think the nickname establishes what sort of a fellow he was but for a brief rundown go to the wikipedia. On a complete side-note, that picture looks like the opposite profile of the one they always use for De Sade.
That’s a pretty wide spectrum of sin. So in the story, it has to be established what kind of a rake the hero is. And let’s not confuse rakes with cads. Cads are respectable until the last minute when they do something rakish. Rakes are always rakish. So if the hero is a rake what has he done? What does he continue to do? How are these actions a violation of the norm? What taboos has he crossed that make him unacceptable? Is he unacceptable?
The third problem is that authors are reluctant to make their heroes anything less than heroic. This is because the hero is meant to be attractive to a large audience. You can argue that romance novels are not fan dictated but they certainly are far more than say Cormac McCarthy because the authors interact with the readers in a way authors of literary fiction do not. Thus the problem comes down to the fact that rakes are not a good bet. They are unpredictable. They do despicable things. You telling me that Lord Whatsit is rake and bad to the bone while the actions he takes in the story are so bloody noble does not sale me on the idea that this man is a rake. I need to be shown.
You know who was a rake? Vidal in The Devil’s Cub. Vidal is a selfish, arrogant, manipulative little aristocrat and he was going to rape Mary because he was angry at her because he thought she played a prank on him. The only reason he didn’t was because she shot him. He has morals but they aren’t the sort of morals that your average 21st century American is going to be following. The reason that the book is so emotionally satisfying is because you know that it could have gone in another direction. It could have turned into Clarissa!
So in conclusion, I think there should be a four year moratorium on the word Rake because authors are just abusing it. I want a rake who is actually bad, damnit. And I want a heroine is going to shoot the bastard. Not someone who overwhelms him with her goodness.
That never happens.
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