Page 264 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 253

If these exchanges seem more suggestive of the classroom than the bedroom,
it may serve to remind us not only that in every case the experienced male is
instructing the inarticulate female in the grammar of domesticated rapture, but
also that Cartland’s texts assume, for their readers, an important educational
function. The climactic enunciation of the marital sentence is only the
culminating lesson—a literal ‘matriculation’—in an extensive and purposeful
sentimental education whose nodal emphasis is not sex but motherhood and
domesticity. For the male hero the romantic epiphany coincides with his
realization of the potential maternity of the heroine and so serves to resolve the
narrative dilemma typical of female romance, the problem of the ‘other woman’.
‘How could you possibly have loved anyone who looked as I did?’ Romara
asked. ‘But I did fall in love with you,’ he said. ‘when I came into the salon
and saw you holding the baby in your arms at the window.’ 76
Somehow he had never thought of children in connection with Lynette…
with Moida it was an aching need—it was a desire almost as great as his
desire to possess her and make her his—their children who would be part of
him and part of her. 77
Housekeeping and domesticity are closely related. Marriage, children and home
form the thematic unity towards which all the narrative codes and functions
converge (‘“I want a wife,” he said simply. “I want a home and children.”’) 78
The hero of Blue Heather recognizes in the heroine the future mother of
‘children who would grow up here at Skaig and belong, even as he had always
known, from the time he could think at all, that he belonged….’, and the
79
recognition enables him to discard the fiancée whose unsuitability has already
been registered in terms less of love than of real estate.
‘I want you to love Skaig, darling,’ Ian had said to Lynette before he left.
‘I’m sure I shall love it, if you do,’ she answered, but he felt her reply was said
too lightly
‘I’ll make you love it,’ Ian said fiercely. 80
Hence the central importance of houses: notionally aristocratic country
houses, actually, in their domestic atmosphere and distinctive family form, petit
bourgeois suburban. Houses tend to be introduced with the breathless reverence
of the property pages of Country Life:

With its huge porticoed front and elegant winged sides…its background of
green trees and a lake in front…exactly, she thought, the sort of country
house she had always dreamt about. 81
A perfect Queen Anne red-brick house, standing on the summit of a small
hill, with lawns and terraces sloping away to a great lake of silver water. 82
The castle had been joined neatly onto the ruins…the new castle was in
its own way almost as romantic…it was imposing, and, as Ian well