Purposes of Love by Mary Renault
Oct. 21st, 2025 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI am not going to read another one of the historicals next, said I; I'm going to read this one, even if it's absolutely terrible. Well, it's not absolutely terrible; I don't know that I'd call it good, exactly, or bad, exactly, but it's certainly an experience of a book. Was I expecting anything else at this point? No, not really. Have some thoughts.
Purposes of Love (1939) was Renault's first novel, and I had vaguely osmosed that it was another kind of weird het romance along the lines of Return to Night; it is that—a very basic summary would say that it's about the developing relationship between Vivian and Mic, respectively a nurse and a pathologist working at the same hospital—but it surprised me by being a good deal more explicitly queer than RtN is. One of the side characters, Colonna Kimball (what a name) is a lesbian; early in the book Vivian has a rather half-hearted but definitely textual affair with her, and after that's over Colonna gets together with another of the nurses and goes through her own side romantic drama. Meanwhile Vivian has moved on to her main love interest, Mic; they meet through Vivian's brother Jan, and it is not only absolutely textual but fairly majorly important to their relationship and Mic's character throughout the book that Mic a) has been pretty much exclusively attracted to men until Vivian and b) falls in love with her largely because of her resemblance to Jan. So that was fun!
(I spent some time during the early part of the book wavering over whether Mic should be pronounced like Mick or like Mike; went with the former, on the grounds that the latter really only makes sense if you're thinking of mic as in microphone; then wondered why 'Mic and Vivian' sounded vaguely phonetically familiar as a paired set of names, and realised I was thinking of Rick and Vyvyan from The Young Ones, who would surely make a more sensible and stable couple than most people in a Renault novel; so there's an irrelevant digression for you.)
The developing romance is... well, it's all very beautifully written, at once vivid and elliptical in the way Renault is (I surely missed things, though there were a few points where I think I managed to infer more than she actually meant—I had some confusion over whether the phrase 'making love' has its modern meaning yet in 1939, and concluded that it doesn't, though it does seem to have become stronger than its nineteenth-century sense). It's perhaps not enough to sustain the three hundred pages that the book gets through before the ending starts going, and I found it got rather tedious and overwrought after a while. I thought both main characters were not always very sympathetic, not to say rather silly, in how they treat each other and in the decisions they make. There is throughout a sense of desperation, high-stakes urgency and overwhelming tiredness which I get the sense Renault likes as context for her characters and relationships, and which is perhaps better sustained by a wartime or classical Greek setting—though the all-consuming exhaustion of Vivian's work as a nurse certainly does something for it.
Which gives me a nice segue into what was possibly my favourite aspect of the book, the hospital setting and the nurses' work and world. As with the less central hospital in Return to Night Renault is writing about things she knows well, and I found all the detail—the strict regime of rules the nurses live under, their uniforms, how scheduling and shifts work, services in the hospital chapel, the terribly important hierarchy, the gossip, etc. etc., not to mention the actual medical aspects—fascinating. At one point Vivian realises she is (probably—there is just some plausible deniability, which I suppose may have made it more publishable) pregnant, and that's how I learnt that ergot, the fungal parasite of rye that caused so many problems for medieval peasants, is also an abortifacient. That was fascinating too, and I was slightly surprised that the subject could be written about so openly.
Well, and then there's the ending. The ending takes up the last eighty pages or so and I really don't know what to say about it; it is at least a total disastrous swerve in a rather different way from the endings of the other three Renault contemporaries I've read. There is certainly some powerful writing in there, and I'm afraid parts of it will stay with me. Does it work, though?
The final page or so, once all the plot is wrapped up, is essentially a manifesto from Vivian's POV of Renault's view of relationships. Mic and Vivian end the book together but it's not at all a happy thing; love is a battle to be lost, an all-consuming force in which one loses one's self, and in which there is no equality or real understanding; and—having now read seven of her books over ten years and feeling far less young and naive a reader than I was when I started—all I can say about it is: yeah, Mary, I think I'd kind of got that by now.
Colonna, by the way, does not get a happy ending; her new nurse girlfriend leaves her for a man, just like Vivian did and just like she's now convinced everyone will always and she'll inevitably end up alone. It is terribly 'publishable 1930s lesbian', without even the sheer bizarreness of The Friendly Young Ladies to recommend it, and I want to give her a hug and some happiness.
Purposes of Love (1939) was Renault's first novel, and I had vaguely osmosed that it was another kind of weird het romance along the lines of Return to Night; it is that—a very basic summary would say that it's about the developing relationship between Vivian and Mic, respectively a nurse and a pathologist working at the same hospital—but it surprised me by being a good deal more explicitly queer than RtN is. One of the side characters, Colonna Kimball (what a name) is a lesbian; early in the book Vivian has a rather half-hearted but definitely textual affair with her, and after that's over Colonna gets together with another of the nurses and goes through her own side romantic drama. Meanwhile Vivian has moved on to her main love interest, Mic; they meet through Vivian's brother Jan, and it is not only absolutely textual but fairly majorly important to their relationship and Mic's character throughout the book that Mic a) has been pretty much exclusively attracted to men until Vivian and b) falls in love with her largely because of her resemblance to Jan. So that was fun!
(I spent some time during the early part of the book wavering over whether Mic should be pronounced like Mick or like Mike; went with the former, on the grounds that the latter really only makes sense if you're thinking of mic as in microphone; then wondered why 'Mic and Vivian' sounded vaguely phonetically familiar as a paired set of names, and realised I was thinking of Rick and Vyvyan from The Young Ones, who would surely make a more sensible and stable couple than most people in a Renault novel; so there's an irrelevant digression for you.)
The developing romance is... well, it's all very beautifully written, at once vivid and elliptical in the way Renault is (I surely missed things, though there were a few points where I think I managed to infer more than she actually meant—I had some confusion over whether the phrase 'making love' has its modern meaning yet in 1939, and concluded that it doesn't, though it does seem to have become stronger than its nineteenth-century sense). It's perhaps not enough to sustain the three hundred pages that the book gets through before the ending starts going, and I found it got rather tedious and overwrought after a while. I thought both main characters were not always very sympathetic, not to say rather silly, in how they treat each other and in the decisions they make. There is throughout a sense of desperation, high-stakes urgency and overwhelming tiredness which I get the sense Renault likes as context for her characters and relationships, and which is perhaps better sustained by a wartime or classical Greek setting—though the all-consuming exhaustion of Vivian's work as a nurse certainly does something for it.
Which gives me a nice segue into what was possibly my favourite aspect of the book, the hospital setting and the nurses' work and world. As with the less central hospital in Return to Night Renault is writing about things she knows well, and I found all the detail—the strict regime of rules the nurses live under, their uniforms, how scheduling and shifts work, services in the hospital chapel, the terribly important hierarchy, the gossip, etc. etc., not to mention the actual medical aspects—fascinating. At one point Vivian realises she is (probably—there is just some plausible deniability, which I suppose may have made it more publishable) pregnant, and that's how I learnt that ergot, the fungal parasite of rye that caused so many problems for medieval peasants, is also an abortifacient. That was fascinating too, and I was slightly surprised that the subject could be written about so openly.
Well, and then there's the ending. The ending takes up the last eighty pages or so and I really don't know what to say about it; it is at least a total disastrous swerve in a rather different way from the endings of the other three Renault contemporaries I've read. There is certainly some powerful writing in there, and I'm afraid parts of it will stay with me. Does it work, though?
The final page or so, once all the plot is wrapped up, is essentially a manifesto from Vivian's POV of Renault's view of relationships. Mic and Vivian end the book together but it's not at all a happy thing; love is a battle to be lost, an all-consuming force in which one loses one's self, and in which there is no equality or real understanding; and—having now read seven of her books over ten years and feeling far less young and naive a reader than I was when I started—all I can say about it is: yeah, Mary, I think I'd kind of got that by now.
Colonna, by the way, does not get a happy ending; her new nurse girlfriend leaves her for a man, just like Vivian did and just like she's now convinced everyone will always and she'll inevitably end up alone. It is terribly 'publishable 1930s lesbian', without even the sheer bizarreness of The Friendly Young Ladies to recommend it, and I want to give her a hug and some happiness.
no subject
Date: Oct. 21st, 2025 06:18 pm (UTC)I didn't think the last eighty pages worked, really, especially not Jan's death, which comes out of nowhere and sort of wraps up the problems for Mic and Vivian which they really needed to sort out themselves. And the end! Vivian has lost the game of Relationship Chicken by needing Mic more than he needs her, and now she's the loser, forever and ever, because that's just how relationships are.
Mary Renault appears to have been very happy with her own partner Julie Maynard, so I really wonder why she clung so tenaciously to this viewpoint and also how that view worked out between the two of them
no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:31 pm (UTC)I got to that bit and went, well, at least there's some self-awareness...!
I didn't think the last eighty pages worked, really, especially not Jan's death, which comes out of nowhere and sort of wraps up the problems for Mic and Vivian which they really needed to sort out themselves.
I can kind of see why she thought it worked, thematically—Jan is where it all started, he's a major presence in both their lives, his reappearance and death is what needs to happen to bring them and their relationship through everything else. But no, on an 'actually a good way to sort out these problems' level it did not work at all.
Mary Renault appears to have been very happy with her own partner Julie Maynard, so I really wonder why she clung so tenaciously to this viewpoint and also how that view worked out between the two of them
So do I!
no subject
Date: Oct. 21st, 2025 06:50 pm (UTC)By this time ergot would have been available in pharmaceutical form for various legit medical uses but most of these have been superseded by Modern Medicine. Derivatives still in use - I used to take ergotamine for migraine but this was discontinued.
no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 21st, 2025 07:31 pm (UTC)I keep thinking about this novel because its ending annoys me so much and because I do not believe in it. (I could take the same components and construct an unhappy ending I believe in, but it wouldn't look like Renault's.) Its one silver lining is the indispensable phrase "standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres," which I have used on and off these last dozen years because it's concise, funny, and useful.
no subject
Date: Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 07:37 pm (UTC)I didn't know there were different endings in the literal sense! I read a first edition. Now I will have to check out the reissue and almost certainly still dislike it.
no subject
Date: Oct. 24th, 2025 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 24th, 2025 07:37 pm (UTC)It turns out I did know there were different endings in the literal sense to Purposes of Love because an LJ-friend sent me the variorum in 2013, I had just blanked completely on it. Here is someone who ran the comparisons online for the benefit of posterity and other people who do not want to re-read the entire novel themselves.
no subject
Date: Oct. 25th, 2025 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:43 pm (UTC)"standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres,"
That is an excellent phrase.
no subject
Date: Oct. 24th, 2025 07:20 pm (UTC)I agree that Renault can be seen trying not allege the inevitability of heteronormativity as opposed to her own binary template of relationships. I'm just not convinced she succeeds and the results are stupid either way! There are all sorts of textual reasons that the relationship between Mic and Vivian could have blown up. The mechanisms that Renault chose to kill it threw me right out of the book a dozen years ago and I seem never to have gotten over being that annoyed about it.
[edit] It is interesting to me that Renault is so bald about the loving-losing terms of the relationship in the final chapters, but probably because it was her first novel and if she didn't get her thesis out there to begin with, she might not get another chance.
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Date: Oct. 22nd, 2025 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 25th, 2025 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Oct. 25th, 2025 04:56 pm (UTC)