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Tag Archives: obsessive love

All Husbands Are Boring: Daughter of Fortune

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, authorial voice, California gold rush, characterization, Chile, fate, feminism, historical fiction, Isabel Allende, nineteenth century, obsessive love

Review: Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

Harper/Perennial, 2000. 399 pp. $15

“Any man, as miserable a man as he may be, can do whatever he wants with you.” But Eliza Sommers, a vivacious sixteen-year-old, doesn’t believe this dire prediction, which means, of course, that she’ll have to live it out to learn in her own way.

Since this is the late 1840s in Valparaíso, Chile, and Eliza’s a foundling child to English guardians, her stubborn belief in romantic passion pits her against a strict Victorian code. If her adoptive parents have anything to say about it, Eliza will be safely married off to a respectable, established, older man, the most she can hope for, especially given her shameful origins. Not that her foster mother, Rose, has much to say for marriage, having never tried it herself. “All husbands are boring,” she says. “No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.”

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

However, Eliza begins a clandestine affair with Joaquín, a dirt-poor young man of electric presence, who bolts for California when news of the gold strike of 1849 reaches Valparaíso. Be it known that Joaquín isn’t worth two minutes of Eliza’s time. Writer of floridly passionate letters, he’s disappointing in person, lecturing her about revolution and redistribution of wealth–when he bothers to talk, that is. Mostly, he uses her for sex, not bothering to wonder whether she has needs or desires, leaving her more hurt and frustrated than she realizes. But since Eliza’s fated to be trapped, she lets herself get swept up. Or so Allende asks us to believe.

I’m not sure I do, entirely. Eliza has wanted freedom all her life, but that’s not what Joaquín represents, despite his political soapboxing, a wonderful irony that utterly escapes her–and keeps escaping her well past any credible sell-by date.


 

In the Sommers’ home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear.


 

But this is a novel, and the requisite wise woman has said that Eliza is doomed to suffer. So the girl bends her considerable resourcefulness and courage to follow Joaquín to California, managing to stow away through the aid of Tao Ch’ien, a Chinese doctor, who becomes her friend and mentor.

In California, he tries to protect Eliza from herself, with intermittent success. I liked this part of Daughter of Fortune the best, starting with the descriptions of the hard life, frontier justice, and greed, but also what the gold rush offers, the chance to be free and make something of oneself. Eliza embraces it wholeheartedly, thanks in part to the passing parade of larger-than-life characters, who prompt her to live larger herself. Along the way, Allende makes excellent observations about what love means for powerless women, and how pride, male and female, gets in the way of intimacy.

I dislike her habit of explaining motivations at length, however beautifully she writes (as with the quote above). More annoying is how she reveals secrets out of the blue, as if, by clapping her hands, she can avoid having to unfold them in her narrative. Whatever reversals of story or character they imply simply happen–poof. She does this twice, and each feels like a cheap conjuring trick, as if to tell the reader, Fooled you!

Nevertheless, Daughter of Fortune is a wild ride, entertaining, vivid, and colorful. I’m impressed at how Allende renders the gold rush in many, complex facets, and, except for Eliza’s obsession with Joaquín, how the author explores the many layers of love and attraction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Founding Father’s Love Triangle: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, eighteenth century, feminism, historical fiction, illegitimate children, masochism, obsessive love, Philadelphia, Sally Cabot, Somerset Maugham, women

Review: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, by Sally Cabot
Morrow, 2013. 353 pp. $26

Among other things, this first-rate novel shows another, selfish side to the scientist, bon vivant, and wit who helped make the American Revolution. As a printer’s apprentice in 1720s Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin has already been marked as an up-and-coming young man when he seduces Deborah Read, the teenage daughter of the house where he lodges. He heads off to London, promising to be faithful, then fails to answer her letters. Deborah’s mother, who never thought much of Franklin anyway, pushes her into a marriage with another man, who disappears with her small dowry, leaving behind only debts.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin/i>, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

On Franklin’s return, he seduces Anne, a tavern maid, who bears his child. Having taken up with Deborah again–they now live together–he asks Anne to give up her infant son, William, to him, and asks Deborah to accept William as her own. Each woman hesitates, but as they see it, they have no choice. Anne lives in desperate poverty, and she sells herself to make ends meet. Her mother already has more children than she can feed–Anne’s father has died, after a long illness–and William may not even survive childhood, if Anne keeps him. Franklin has promised to educate and protect the boy, and he has the money to make good. As for Deborah, she worries that she has little emotional hold on Franklin, and no legal claim until they’ve lived together seven years. Having William under their roof is her best chance to bind Franklin to her.

Naturally, the arrangement causes as many problems as it solves, and Franklin’s the one who comes out ahead. Cabot makes the most of this deceptively simple premise. The women suffer endless torture, some of it self-inflicted, and there’s the rub: They blame one another rather than the man in the middle. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and as the women try to exert their pull on him (and on William), the tension feels ready to explode at any moment. There’s everything here: blood, reputation, passion, fear of abandonment, loyalty, insane love for a child. These are timeless themes, but Cabot has entered her characters’ heads so deeply that I never questioned for a second that they lived during the eighteenth century. Their poignant, often fruitless, efforts to fight for the justice a woman can’t get in a man’s world needs no gloss to contrast with what men talk of, freedom from British tyranny.

Despite all this brilliance, I wonder about her portrayal of Franklin the seducer. He has a gift for making a woman think he’s entirely present with her, a poisonous trait for Deborah and Anne, who’ve never earned anyone’s attention before. But they’re attracted even before they have the chance to bask in his gaze. Moreover, they stay attracted to the point of obsession, even when they’ve learned how restless and self-absorbed he is. The dynamics make sense–Anne and Deborah crave his emotional warmth and chase it all the harder when he withdraws–but I’m not convinced that he should have hooked them so easily.

This reminds me of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel, The Painted Girls (reviewed February 26), in which the author narrated to chilling perfection how a self-destructive love affair played out but failed to convince me it should ever have started. That kind of attraction is no easy thing to bring off in fiction. I think Somerset Maugham succeeded in Of Human Bondage, because Philip, the infatuated young man, somehow feels more complete with Mildred, though he also knows she’s not for him. It’s that sense of completion the other two novels needed to convey.

I’m also puzzled how, in Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, Anne mellows with the years, given how bitter her life has been. She’s more credible as a young mother, crazed for love of the child whom she can’t keep, and as a prostitute who enjoys her sexual power over men. Cabot’s trying to contrast her later-in-life calm with the more rigid, less tolerant Deborah, but I think it’s a stretch.

My review wouldn’t be complete, I suppose, without mentioning pet peeve numero uno: telling the reader how a character feels. In fairness, Cabot does this rarely, but she’s too subtle and masterful a writer to do it at all, and those instances mar what’s otherwise a superb (and eye-opening) novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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