The Duchess Redux: Reviewing for Politics or Pleasure

When I posted my review recently of Victoria Janssen’s The Duchess, Her Maid, the Groom, and Their Lover, I thought it was mixed. After describing the book as lots of sex without as much character development or plot as I would prefer, I wrote that:

I would cut about 80% of the sex and rewrite this as an erotic romance with a strong focus on Camille and Henri’s relationship.

I thought that was a pretty cheeky comment, kind of like ending a review of an Agatha Christie by saying “remove 80% of the mystery and focus on the butler’s battle with cancer and that would be a great book!”. To my surprise, several people responded with “sounds great!”, and my review was mentioned by a few people as a positive one.

[Please note: the rest of this post contains material inappropriate for children.]

I actually didn’t enjoy The Duchess that much, if by “enjoy” is meant “couldn’t wait to read the next page”, “totally absorbed”, “responded sexually, emotionally”, etc. But I chalked that up to it being erotica, which I generally don’t enjoy, and tried not to let my bias influence my review.

That said, the book totally engaged me on an intellectual level. As someone who is interested in the extent to which romance or erotica push boundaries, challenging assumptions about gender or sex, I really appreciated this book. I’m amazed it got published, actually, on the Spice line. Here’s why:

Sex role reversals:

1. The hero is the victim of forced seduction. The initial scene in which the Duchess and Henri have sex is not exactly consensual. He trembles, he can’t look at her, he’s numb with fear, he consents because, “what else was he to do?”. I found myself wondering how I would have felt about this scene if it had been a 19 year old maid called in to service the 40 year old Duke.

2. It’s unusual enough to have a heroine a few years older than the hero (as many remark about Outlander). It’s unusual, too, to have heroines who are in their thirties and forties (as many remark about Jenny Crusie’s books). But to have a 20 year age gap, when the “hero” is 19 and the heroine is a gray haired 40?

3. Camille is not only older than Henri, she is his superior in social and political power. And we don’t find out in the end that Henri was not really a stable boy, but in fact the heir to a kingdom twice the size of the Duchy.

4. Camille’s personality is also more decisive, more interested in politics, and more emotionally closed off, while Henri’s is tentative, focused on relationships, and he wears his heart in his sleeve. I recently posted on the phrase “Come for me, Baby”, which is always used by men in romance novels. I laughed out loud when, during one of their early sexual encounters, Camille, dressed as a man, she tells Henri, “I want you to come for me.” We are used to the trope of the pure female virgin washing away the sins of the rake, but in this book it is Henri who is, while not virginal, clean and innocent, and Camille who is world weary.

5. While the book begins and ends with two dominant males, throughout most of the story, women dominate men, sexually and otherwise. The fact that the book includes eunuchs — castrated men, which in many cultures were gendered “not male” (either female, or a third gender) — is just the most obvious sign of unusual portrayal of gender which permeates the book. Henri, for example, is ordered around not just by Camille, but by the other women in the book, such as a bathhouse attendant, who should be his social equals or inferiors.

Sex:

1. The naturalistic depiction of sex. Something that surprises me when I read erotica, is that the sex is mind blowingly transcendent and meaningful even when it is between strangers, never mind between people in relationship. Not this book. Consider this late-novel oral sex climax:

Henri’s hips bucked, and then his cock was jerking in her mouth, fighting against her grip. She swallowed, coughed, and spat, then returned to him, stroking him throughout his climax and licking him clean.

Compare to this oral sex scene in Gena Showalter’s The Darkest Kiss:

“Ashlyn, Ashlyn” With a roar, he spilled his hot seed into her mouth.

She swallowed every bit of it. When his last shudder subsided, she pushed to shaky feet. His eyelids were at half mast, his bottom lip swollen as if he’d chewed on it to keep from shouting in pleasure, in agony.

How realistic is this scene given that Ashlyn has never given oral sex before? Is Janssen’s writing too clinical, or is she trying not to resort to the usual words and phrases, trying to avoid the silliness of many erotic scenes?

2. The fantasy sexual morality. A lot of authors create fantasy worlds which replicate the conservative sexual morality of the US. My own view is that many of the fantastical elements in paranormal romance serve to shore up quite traditional, even retrograde, gender norms. For example, in Gena Showalter’s The Darkest Kiss, a contemporary paranormal, the heroine, a virgin, has only seen penises on the internet at a “website she shouldn’t have been visiting” (and no, she’s not an Evangelical Christian).

Many people reject the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation within the context of heterosexual marriage, but they retain a moral analysis of sex which holds that sex ought to be for SOMETHING outside of pleasure, whether it’s for the expression of love or affection, communication, respect for the other, conduciveness to other moral emotions (like empathy or caring), etc.

This is called a “means-end analysis” of the morality of sex. Essentially, sex is the means to some morally good end other than pleasure. It follows that any sex which fails to fulfill that end is morally problematic.

It contrast, Janssen’s fantasy world is one in which sex is like any other activity (say, eating, or walking) and should be morally evaluated the way you would evaluate any other activity: does it harm someone? Does it involve coercion or deceit? And not on the basis of a perceived internal moral structure.

The Relationship of Sex and Gender

I said in my review that the people in the world of The Duchess have all kinds of sex all the time. This includes non-heterosexual sex. The Duchess has sex with Sylvie, the eunuchs have sex with each other, and nobody bats an eye.

Feminist theorists have long argued that gender norms and sexual morality are closely connected, that the definition of “feminine” includes “heterosexual”, and, additionally, specific norms such as passivity and submission to a man. This is why lesbians are stereotyped as “butch” and gay men are stereotyped as effeminate (although much less so today than even 10 years ago).

Reading The Duchess suggests, to me at least, that in order to introduce a truly novel sexual morality, traditional gender norms have to go.