The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault
Oct. 10th, 2021 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeThis is not a review so much as a collection of slightly-organised thoughts. Renault defeats my review-writing abilities.
The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) was written after Mary Renault read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, thought it was silly and decided to make the point this way. And, well, there are many things that could be said about this book, and 'it's not The Well of Loneliness' is certainly one of them. (It's been a few years since I read TWoL, so I can't do a detailed comparison—perhaps it would be an interesting thing to do?—anyway...).
The Friendly Young Ladies begins in a remote Cornish village, with Elsie Lane, a naive and oblivious seventeen-year-old who lives with her awful parents who fight all the time. Elsie falls ill and is treated by Dr Peter Bracknell, an impressively horrifying man who has a lot of Psychological Ideas About Women and why it's a terribly good idea for them all to fall in love with him. Elsie falls in love with him and, under his influence, decides to run away from home and her parents and go to find her sister Leo (Leonora), who herself ran away nine years earlier. She finds Leo, who lives on a houseboat on the Thames with her girlfriend Helen (Elsie—very oblivious—never twigs the nature of their relationship; and in general it's very non-explicitly written), and writes Western novels; a writer friend of hers, Joe, lives nearby and writes serious literary novels. Eventually Peter turns up again, causes emotional turmoil for Elsie and decides it would be a good idea if Leo and/or Helen fell in love with him. Things... progress.
So, I'll start with what I thought about the book before the last two chapters. It seemed a bit muddled, really—there's the Elsie and Elsie/Peter plot which takes up quite a lot of time in the beginning, then Leo and Helen, and what with all the time we spend early on following Elsie, and Elsie's ignorance and obliviousness, I felt like there wasn't enough of Leo and Helen to get really invested in them before the important plot stuff towards the ending starts happening, and not as much as I'd like to have had for their own sakes either. Peter is a very well-drawn horrible person (one can hardly call him a villain), but ends up not actually mattering very much (I had thought the awful ending would be about something he does, but no, it's not!). As it was I spent a lot of time feeling horrible for Elsie (who, poor thing, could really have done with a nicer author who liked her better) and being confused and intrigued about Leo without it really going anywhere.
And then there's that comparison with The Well of Loneliness. Renault's basic problem is that TWoL takes itself too seriously and is overly gloomy about the lives and prospects of queer women, which, fair enough. And this is all very well—some of Leo's thoughts on the subject are fairly interesting:
OK, then there's the ending. It is a strange ending. Renault admits in her afterword, in a passage which made me laugh a lot, that it's a silly ending. But what on earth she actually meant by it, I don't know. There's an obvious interpretation which is pretty staggeringly homophobic, and, more to the point, is so in a way that seems far too banal and, well, ordinary for Renault to have meant it like that. But if not that, what and why? I don't know. Um, it is certainly an ironic subversion of the ending of The Well of Loneliness, but an ironic subversion ought to be making some point, and this... I don't know. I am baffled. Baffled and horrified.
I think The Friendly Young Ladies is more like The Charioteer than Return to Night is, RtN's bizarre ending notwithstanding. The treatment of queer characters, of course, but more in the story about conflicting relationships, and most of all in the general impression that the whole thing was written as a cruel joke at the expense of the characters, the reader and the world in general. It did not upset me as much as The Charioteer did—partly because it's just not as good a book, partly because I didn't get seriously attached to any of the characters in time to care so much about what happened to them (if there had been more Helen POV, and more of Helen and Leo interacting, early on in the book, it might have been different. But maybe not! I still don't feel like I really get Helen).
So, um, if it annoys me as much as all this, was it worth reading? I think so, unfortunately. Renault's actual prose is as beautiful as ever, and she has—somewhere in between the above-mentioned tendency to treat the plot as a cruel joke—an amazing way of highlighting significant details in the midst of big emotional scenes (that bit right at the end with the green dress...) which is terribly effective. She uses unreliable narrators in a very entertaining way! The ideas about gender and sexuality are fascinating, at least in the detached, historical sense of 'fascinating' (I haven't got into the whole thing about Leo's relationship to gender, which is... a thing). And, OK, some bits of the book are in fact very funny (I enjoyed the scene where Leo decides to pay Peter back by chatting up his girlfriend). There's a lot here I enjoyed, or at least... no, actually enjoyed, it's just a shame about the All That.
Poor Helen. I want to give her a hug. :(
The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) was written after Mary Renault read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, thought it was silly and decided to make the point this way. And, well, there are many things that could be said about this book, and 'it's not The Well of Loneliness' is certainly one of them. (It's been a few years since I read TWoL, so I can't do a detailed comparison—perhaps it would be an interesting thing to do?—anyway...).
The Friendly Young Ladies begins in a remote Cornish village, with Elsie Lane, a naive and oblivious seventeen-year-old who lives with her awful parents who fight all the time. Elsie falls ill and is treated by Dr Peter Bracknell, an impressively horrifying man who has a lot of Psychological Ideas About Women and why it's a terribly good idea for them all to fall in love with him. Elsie falls in love with him and, under his influence, decides to run away from home and her parents and go to find her sister Leo (Leonora), who herself ran away nine years earlier. She finds Leo, who lives on a houseboat on the Thames with her girlfriend Helen (Elsie—very oblivious—never twigs the nature of their relationship; and in general it's very non-explicitly written), and writes Western novels; a writer friend of hers, Joe, lives nearby and writes serious literary novels. Eventually Peter turns up again, causes emotional turmoil for Elsie and decides it would be a good idea if Leo and/or Helen fell in love with him. Things... progress.
So, I'll start with what I thought about the book before the last two chapters. It seemed a bit muddled, really—there's the Elsie and Elsie/Peter plot which takes up quite a lot of time in the beginning, then Leo and Helen, and what with all the time we spend early on following Elsie, and Elsie's ignorance and obliviousness, I felt like there wasn't enough of Leo and Helen to get really invested in them before the important plot stuff towards the ending starts happening, and not as much as I'd like to have had for their own sakes either. Peter is a very well-drawn horrible person (one can hardly call him a villain), but ends up not actually mattering very much (I had thought the awful ending would be about something he does, but no, it's not!). As it was I spent a lot of time feeling horrible for Elsie (who, poor thing, could really have done with a nicer author who liked her better) and being confused and intrigued about Leo without it really going anywhere.
And then there's that comparison with The Well of Loneliness. Renault's basic problem is that TWoL takes itself too seriously and is overly gloomy about the lives and prospects of queer women, which, fair enough. And this is all very well—some of Leo's thoughts on the subject are fairly interesting:
For the rest, her way of life had always seemed to her natural and uncomplex, an obvious one, since there were too many women, for the more fortunate of the surplus to arrange themselves; to invest it with drama or pathos would have been in her mind a sentimentality and a kind of cowardice. Because of this confidence she had got what she needed from women easily, and without the sacrifice of pride.But already here there's the suggestion of what becomes more obvious later on, that Renault's real problem with Hall's gloomy picture of homophobia is not so much 'come on now, it's not all bad, we can be happy sometimes!' as 'if you're being oppressed by society it's your fault and you need to get over it, stop being ridiculous'. She has to an extreme degree the twentieth-century attitude (Enid Blyton is the author I associate most with it, but it shows up all over the place, of course) that a thick skin is the greatest of all virtues and that anyone who's actually hurt by being mistreated has only themselves to blame—which is especially ugly in this context, of course. I think this is gloomier than anything in The Well of Loneliness, in its way:
'Why should they pamper oddities, anyway? It's they who are in charge of evolution. They think it's better not to be odd, as far as they bother to think at all, and they're quite right. There are shoals of women made up pretty much like me, but a lot haven't noticed and most of the rest prefer to look the other way, and it's probably very sensible of them. If you do happen to have had your attention drawn to it, the thing to do is to like and be liked by as many ordinary people as possible, to make yourself as good a life as you can in your own frame, and to keep your oddities for the few people who are likely to be interested.'(Leo speaking to Peter there—one could question how far Leo believes what she's saying and how far Renault agrees with her; but Renault makes her own attitudes very clear in her afterword, which confirms my impression of her as a thoroughly nasty piece of work in general).
OK, then there's the ending. It is a strange ending. Renault admits in her afterword, in a passage which made me laugh a lot, that it's a silly ending. But what on earth she actually meant by it, I don't know. There's an obvious interpretation which is pretty staggeringly homophobic, and, more to the point, is so in a way that seems far too banal and, well, ordinary for Renault to have meant it like that. But if not that, what and why? I don't know. Um, it is certainly an ironic subversion of the ending of The Well of Loneliness, but an ironic subversion ought to be making some point, and this... I don't know. I am baffled. Baffled and horrified.
I think The Friendly Young Ladies is more like The Charioteer than Return to Night is, RtN's bizarre ending notwithstanding. The treatment of queer characters, of course, but more in the story about conflicting relationships, and most of all in the general impression that the whole thing was written as a cruel joke at the expense of the characters, the reader and the world in general. It did not upset me as much as The Charioteer did—partly because it's just not as good a book, partly because I didn't get seriously attached to any of the characters in time to care so much about what happened to them (if there had been more Helen POV, and more of Helen and Leo interacting, early on in the book, it might have been different. But maybe not! I still don't feel like I really get Helen).
So, um, if it annoys me as much as all this, was it worth reading? I think so, unfortunately. Renault's actual prose is as beautiful as ever, and she has—somewhere in between the above-mentioned tendency to treat the plot as a cruel joke—an amazing way of highlighting significant details in the midst of big emotional scenes (that bit right at the end with the green dress...) which is terribly effective. She uses unreliable narrators in a very entertaining way! The ideas about gender and sexuality are fascinating, at least in the detached, historical sense of 'fascinating' (I haven't got into the whole thing about Leo's relationship to gender, which is... a thing). And, OK, some bits of the book are in fact very funny (I enjoyed the scene where Leo decides to pay Peter back by chatting up his girlfriend). There's a lot here I enjoyed, or at least... no, actually enjoyed, it's just a shame about the All That.
Poor Helen. I want to give her a hug. :(
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Date: Oct. 10th, 2021 07:01 pm (UTC)Thank you for linking to
Most of Renault's contemporaries wrap themselves around telephone poles at the end, but I can usually figure out what caused the crash, and here it might as well be aliens.
XD Oh dear, I think that about sums it up, doesn't it...
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Date: Oct. 10th, 2021 08:03 pm (UTC)Welcome! I recommend
Oh dear, I think that about sums it up, doesn't it...
When I read Purposes of Love (1939), which for the record is a trainwreck, a friend pointed out that it was Renault's first run at her recurring concern of the difficulty of egalitarian relationships, especially when she is most interested in exploring them through a Platonic filter—who is the lover, who is the beloved, whether these roles are fulfilling and whether they can be refused and whether there exists any equal ground on which even to try to meet. These are reasonable questions to ask in a heteronormative society! The problem is that at least in her contemporary novels, Renault seems to be essentially pessimistic about the viability of any such relationships and therefore her narratives tend to warp their initial conditions in order to make someone fall off one side of the balance beam or the other and sometimes they're still well-written enough that I give her characters better odds than the text does and sometimes I think her opinions are just from Mars. Like, I agree with her that heteronormativity is terrible! I don't then feel I should naturally conclude that it's inescapable and a person is just embarrassing themselves and letting down the side by trying to change the world so that it's less bludgeoningly straight as opposed to gritting their teeth and toughing the patriarchy out. It's funny to me, by which I mean I find it sad, that she got so defensively conservative about queer rights when she wrote Alec in The Charioteer (1953), saying firmly and as far as I can tell with the support of his author, "I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality . . . Criminals are blackmailed. I'm not a criminal. I'm prepared to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point." Don't tell me that by the time of decriminalization that man wasn't an elder queer activist.
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Date: Oct. 11th, 2021 12:36 am (UTC)Having said that, Renault definitely supports Alec as a person, and generally presents him as brave and astute. The fact that Alec is the one saying it, instead of Sandy or Bunny, gives the viewpoint a certain amount of weight even if Renault doesn't ultimately embrace it.
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Date: Oct. 11th, 2021 01:39 am (UTC)He almost ventriloquizes one of her letters at an earlier point in the same conversation (about how the treatment of homosexuality as a crime or at best a sickness has forced an artificial society onto people who have nothing in common but their sexuality: an attitude supported by Laurie's horror at the party and Renault's disapproval of gay liberation), so while I agree that he's not the sole voice of the author in the novel, I can't agree that he's not one of them. I have no evidence that she was herself, contra Alec, willing to view her sexual orientation as immoral, although she was certainly ambivalent enough about how to live with it that we end up in discussions like this one. Where she diverges from her character is therefore the rest of the conversation, which flanges off into her not necessarily historical ideas about ancient Greece, but I do think they are in synch for that line. She gives Ralph at least one drunken strawmannish response to it, which argues further that we can't trust him all the time (he doesn't seem able to admit the reality of bisexuality, which Renault for all her faults actually could).
(My copy is packed right now but he says something very similar to Leo's line about "Why should they pamper oddities?")
I believe he literally asks Alec what he wants, a medal for being gay?
I disliked The Bull from the Sea (1962) even more the last time I tried to re-read it, but I am always going to be fascinated that when Theseus and Hippolyta affirm their—m/f but queer-coded—relationship with one another, their repeated love-line is "We are what we are," which, I don't know about you, but it sure gives me the screaming La Cage aux Folles.
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Date: Oct. 12th, 2021 04:11 pm (UTC)Alec! I don't think I paid enough attention to him when I read The Charioteer, but I remember that bit. You're quite right.