clew's reviews: a book log

Greatheart, Mary Ethel Dell

Somewhere in Dorothy Sayers, I think, reference is made to virtuous spinsters secretly devouring Ethel M. Dell novels; Sayers' character would have been speaking in the twenties or thirties, and this novel was published in 1918, so it was a fairly current taste.

In content, a romance without other plot; and worse, the drama of the romance mostly comes from the extreme ignorance and innocence of the heroine, and the timidity of the hero and heroine to admit to each other that they love each other until it is Almost Too Late. (It's obvious to everyone else.)

On the other hand, Dell writes with the straightforwardness that makes a story good anyway, rather as Edgar Rice Burroughs does but with opposite failings as to plot and character.

One of the pleasures is in the use of Apollo and Daphne as a structural trope -- the false 'good marriage' that the heroine almost makes, for glamour rather than love, is to a big tall good-at-everything man nicknamed for the god of the lyre. His brother, the true good marriage, is a little lame man; but not Hephaestus, as he would be if the literary metaphor were mechanically applied; rather, Great-heart, a Paul Bunyan figure of courage and protection.

Dell's Apollo is, like the original, frightening. For much of the novel we are not at all sure he isn't going to rape the heroine (in the belief that she will enjoy it eventually); he certainly holds her against her will; I wasn't even sure that Dell was not conflating sexual passion with the desire to be overmastered. None of this is heavyhanded allegory--rather, the metaphors are alive to the characters, they think with them and therefore act by them.

Greatheart, standing for Christianity, may be seen to conquer Apollo; but because these are characters, not allegories, it's more complicated than that. (I started reading Pilgrim's Progress again, because really I suppose one ought, but oh, it's dull.) Apollo is somewhat chastened, but not overthrown; by the end he is engaged to a woman who, in the first place, is called Aphrodite; and in the second, is clearly not afraid of him. Nor is passion abandoned; but it is rather a point that it's not healthy until Daphne initiates it herself.

There is a poem Great-Heart by Rudyard Kipling, also; written in memory of Theodore Roosevelt; not very memorable.

Project Gutenberg e-text #13497, Greatheart.

So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).