by Susan Bordo
This Anne is no maiden whose virtue was plundered by a rapacious monarch. But neither is she the temptress/witch incarnate. She’s a young woman whose temperament, for all her flirtatiousness, was more unnervingly “masculine” than was usual for her time: confident, excited by her own potential to effect action in the world, capable of fierce resentments, daring ambitions, bold action—and unwilling to be anyone’s plaything or political tool. As Francis Hackett sums it up: She was the mother of Elizabeth, not “an understudy of Queen Victoria.”60 And she has a sexual life, too, although her erotic temperament and tastes vary wildly from novel to novel, and—especially as historical fiction became a thriving commercial specialty—could be quite extravagant. Elizabeth Louisa Moresby, writing under the pen name of E. Barrington (Anne Boleyn, 1932), while insisting that her story “is as true to history as the consultation of many authorities can make it,” apparently consulted some very odd authorities because her Anne, while sexually frigid with everyone else and thoroughly repulsed by Henry, is smitten with Dionysian Smeaton.
She could fancy him dancing alone in the wild woodlands at Hever—yes, in that haunted spot where the oaks fell back and left an open space for moonlight. There, looking up at the searing moon with wild hair flying back from his forehead, he would caper like a goat and beckon, and the woodland creatures would crowd in a furry ring . . . He smelt of woods and fresh turned earth dewy in the night . . . A faun come to Court who had never changed his ways for Henry or another! All this he seemed to her, perhaps wholly mistakenly, for the man lived his life like others, so they told her. But she dangerously liked his love-making—wild, careless love with drifts of bird-music and no more responsibility than a cuckoo’s.61
Despite appearances, Barrington was not hinting that the charges of adultery with Smeaton might have been true; later in the novel, it’s very clear that her Anne is innocent of adultery. Barrington, a devotee of Buddhism who also wrote fantasy novels, seems to have been motivated more by an aversion to the institution of marriage, which took the spontaneity, freedom, and “natural” flow out of relationships, than she was in painting Anne as a sexual libertine. Elsewhere in the novel, she has Anne reflecting on “the weariness of married companionship with nothing new to say or do together” and “the tedium of a wife who loves calmly, securely.”62 Smeaton is used, I believe, as a symbol of the freedom Anne gives up when she marries Henry. “We are both creatures of fairy blood,” he tells Anne. “We know at bottom that neither Pope, Church, nor King matter a jot, but only the wild hearts of men that carry them into strange places. When you have flung his son into his arms come away with me and let him find another to nurse his leg . . . and bear his humour—some milk-blood bit of curd he cannot break, that will dissolve in whey if he looks at it! Come away, Anne, and we will wander the world singing for our bread and lying in meadows by a running river to eat it.”63
In striking contrast to Barrington, Paul Rival’s 1936 novel, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, has Anne discovering her true womanhood in Henry’s arms. Originally written in French and quickly translated into English by Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, Rival’s novel was reprinted in paperback form in 1970 with the front cover reading: NOW A MAJOR NETWORK TV SERIES, TAKING ITS PLACE BESIDE THE FORSYTE SAGA. The series was the BBC six-part The Six Wives of Henry VIII, with Keith Michell as Henry and Dorothy Tutin as Anne. But the novel bears little resemblance, in style or content, to that subdued, very proper British series. Rival’s language is dizzyingly intense and dramatic, and his interpretation of Anne and Henry’s attraction for each other seems a combination of early French existentialism (which Gabriel Marcel had introduced in the twenties) and Freudian theory (very much in vogue in the thirties). For Rival’s Henry, the thought of a child with Anne is more than a desire to secure the Tudor line, it is a way of making the “ethereal” creature into an earthly—Simone de Beauvoir would say “immanent”—body.
Henry was invaded by a powerful and perverse fascination that dwelt in the thought that this small, dancing creature would be enslaved, would endure long months of a bewildered weakness until she became a mother. The more elusive [Anne] seemed, the more he burned to possess her. She stirred and re-awoke in him bygone mystical dreams, which took upon themselves new significance: “I shall take her in my arms and compel her to materialize, to become mere flesh of this earth. I shall fashion a woman out of this flame; I shall mingle my being with that of this sinuous snake, this Melusine. An essential particle of my body will inhabit her unreality, will slowly come to life, to birth and to the light of day, and the child will be myself and this small elusive Anne.”64
Henry’s desire for Anne is thus premised on what Sartre would later describe as the desire to capture the elusive freedom of another person by “incarnating” it as flesh. But Anne, on her part, is a more Freudian kind of girl, who realizes her own sexuality only when she gives up everything that is “masculine” about her—the “huntress,” with her own plans and ambitions—and submits totally to Henry, as she finally does at Calais.
That night, in the conventional room which had been assigned to her in the castle of Calais, she opened her arms to Henry. She humbled herself and allowed him to possess her. The gentle wash of the waves was audible through the windows, the tapestries waved in the night breeze, and a dying log fire flowed upon the hearth.
They remained more than a week at Calais. Francis had gone and the chill air of November emphasized the silence. They had lived so long in a dream that reality surprised and alarmed them. Anne was at length a woman; Henry had delivered her from her own unbalanced fancies and revealed her to herself, finding her interior rhythm, giving her serene happiness, the pleasure of ceasing to think, of allowing her mind and her nerves to be lulled to sleep, of being no more than a physical vessel, utterly fulfilled and submissive. For her there were now order, peace and repose. The sky was tranquil and colourless, the sea more grey than the sky with faint ripples and reflections and a few drifting sails. The nights unfolded themselves, long and blissful.65
In Francis Hackett’s Queen Anne Boleyn (1939), it’s Wyatt who holds the key to Anne’s libido, possibly because his bold, poetic nature makes for more ecstatic romance than the somewhat weak-kneed Percy of earlier novels.
Anne shuddered as the force of her feeling for Thomas took impetus from the hours they had had together, hours borrowed from another plane of existence, borrowed from eternity. In those hours she had come into something of her own buried self—almost as if she had learned to walk or learned to talk. The proud woman in her, as well as the calculating, gave way to a creature of blinding tenderness, and this sweeping tenderness rolled through her, ran ramparts that advanced as they mounted, one surging on the other, until they broke with the dazzling submission of a wave. It was a succession of rapture she had not been prepared for. She was stunned by it, yet ached to return to him through it.66
Steamy sex aside, Hackett’s novel is extremely well researched, its portrait of Anne complex and subtle, and its skepticism about the received wisdom of the historians who recycled Chapuys (and each other) is refreshing and astute.67 The first Anne novel to become a New York Times best seller, Queen Anne Boleyn was also the first to benefit from the creation, in 1939, of the paperback book format, announced in the New York Times as “the most important literary coming-out party in the memory of New York’s oldest book lover. Today your 25 cent piece leaps to a par with dollar bills. Now for less than the few cents you spend each week for your morning newspaper, you can own one of the great books for which thousands of people have paid from $2 to $4.”68 When the paperback of Queen Anne Boleyn came out that same year, the first page quoted from its many excellent reviews from prestigious papers, but the back cover was clearly designed to sell copies to a broader audience than those who read the Christian Science Monitor, the New Statesman, or the Saturday Review. SHE CONQUERED THE HEART OF A KING—AND LOST HER LIFE FOR HER LOVE, reads the bold headline, and below it ran the following text:
Anne was now a full-fledged heroine of the historical romance, and a major commercial item.
9
Postwar: Domestic Trouble in the House of Tudor
WORLD WAR II interrupted Anne’s fictional career—possibly because people didn’t want to read about the love life of a long-gone tyrant when they were dealing with one who was very much alive, and far more evil. But as soon as the war ended, Anne was back full force and with more “pluck” and independence than before. Passive, dependent heroines were no longer appreciated by middle-class female readers, who during the war had not only their own independence tested, but who also had been treated, at the movies and in women’s magazines, to feisty, spirited female characters. At the same time, there was considerable anxiety about what would happen when the men returned. Most young women longed to reunite with their husbands and boyfriends and start a family, and the machinery of culture—films, magazines, advertisements, how-to books—encouraged them. But was it possible to have it all? While decades later the answer would be (a completely unrealistic) “Hell, yes!,” in the years immediately after the war, culture vacillated back and forth between celebrating and condemning the woman who tried to live as an equal with men.
Consider the contrast between two films, released a mere seven months apart. Adam’s Rib (1949) is one of the last gasps of admiration (for the time being) for the “urban,” egalitarian marriage, in which husband and wife (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) work, play, flirt, and spar together, equally matched in intelligence, humor, and passion (and capable of aiming the occasional whack at each other).1 Father of the Bride (1950) and its 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, are advertisements for the freshly romanticized, newly commercialized “old-fashioned” gendered division of labor, with a kittenish, thoroughly domesticated bride (Elizabeth Taylor) unable to tie her shoelaces without the help of her sturdy provider groom (Don Taylor). In this suburban world, teenage girls could be (mildly) rebellious, and learning to wrap men around their pretty little fingers was part of the fun of “being a girl.” But once married, they were expected to settle down and content themselves with the thrill of new appliances and decorating the baby’s room.
Margaret Campbell Barnes’s Brief Gaudy Hour, published the year before Father of the Bride was released, follows this blueprint. But in Barnes’s novel, unlike the film, it all goes bad. Barnes’s Anne is a flirtatious, ambitious, but very likeable teenager. But over the course of the novel, because she doesn’t know her “place,” she becomes the housewife from hell.
In the first chapter, we find Anne studying her own nude body in the mirror at Hever, contemplating her coming time at the French court. “‘Thank God,’” she thinks to herself, “‘it is exquisite enough for the most exacting lover.’ She was glad that her parents, through some freakish caution or ambition, had omitted to arrange a betrothal for her in infancy. Unlike her sister and her girlfriends, she was still free. Free to choose her own lover . . . [t]he kind of man who wouldn’t stop to write a sonnet to one’s eyes, but who would sweep one into compelling arms and stop all protests with a kiss.”2 She breezes about her bedroom, trying on flirtatious looks and playfully shocking her (invented) stepmother with her boldness. There’s a generation gap between Anne and her elders—a new theme for fictional Annes very much in keeping with the time during which “teen” culture was born. Previous novels had dealt with Anne’s early years. But Barnes’s young Anne is the first to “read” as a teenager. In fact, there are many times that the novel sounds exactly like a story from one of the upbeat teen magazines that began to be published in the midforties. Anne is depicted learning how to dress, how to attract a man, and how to manage her own sexual impulses. And, as the magazines promise, when she meets “the one”—Henry Percy—she knows it immediately.
At that point, romance novel and teen magazine part ways. Where Seventeen would have them “dating” (or Father of the Bride would have her planning a wedding), Brief Gaudy Hour plunges Anne into a passionate, doomed—and fully sexually realized—affair. Anne is the one to urge it (“Take me now while there is yet time”3); Percy the one to caution her to hold back (“But Nan, my dear, my very dear, the shame”4), and it’s Anne whose boldness trumps his scruples. But it is a “brief, rich transport”: “Throwing aside security and favour, she made the reckless surrender which could have kept her sweet.”5 It’s very True Confessions. Barnes’s Anne is feisty, independent, high-spirited, and smart—and Henry adores this about her. (“You have been brought up to think—to have a mind of your own,” he tells her, “so that a man may be richer for your company.”6) But, ruined by memories of her night with Percy, she never develops any love in return for the king. Still, she coldly and skillfully plays Henry, lying to him about her virginity (which has already been lost to Percy) and doling out her kisses and caresses as if they were precious gems. It is she who introduces the idea of marriage to him, then seals the deal with a sinuous dance that turns Henry into a big, sloppy lapdog, ready to roll over at her whim.
Brief Gaudy Hour is a very enjoyable novel; in fact, it’s often still listed by fans of historical fiction as one of their favorites. But without disputing its pleasures, I did find its portrait of Anne very odd—and, in hindsight, a harbinger of things to come. Anne the teenager is charming and “real.” But Anne the queen becomes virtually demonic. Here, for example, Barnes traces the beginnings of Henry’s turning against Anne7 to her response to Katherine’s death. Henry has just returned from Westminster to find Anne celebrating with her maids and courtiers in wild, Dionysian revelry, complete with pagan horns.
And now it was time for her to don her antlers, for the Queen, leaving her bevy of saffron-gowned maidens, was beginning to lure the men dancers within the magic circle Smeaton had chalked upon the floor, turning them, by her lascivious dancing, into beasts. Through the noise they made, the stamping and laughter, they did not hear the commotion of the King’s unexpected arrival . . . From velvet cap to rolled, slashed shoe, he was clad in black velvet, with only a plain silver dagger hanging from his belt . . . Anne noticed that his eyes were puffed and red . . .
“I saw the lights of your orgy,” he said, his blue eyes no longer blinking, but flicking like a whip over everybody present and taking in every frivolous detail . . . “Take off that unseemly dress,” he ordered sharply, “and go pray for some sense of fitness!”8
“Saffron” (as in “saffron-gowned”) here refers to the color yellow, which Chapuys says Henry wore after Katherine’s death. Scholars have reached no firm conclusion as to what it meant. Some claim it was the Spanish color of mourning; others say it was a blatant gesture of celebration. In Barnes’s scene it clearly signifies celebration, and it is Anne and her fellow revelers, not Henry, who are wearing it. As to grief-stricken Henry, his eyes puffed and red, it’s a brand-new fiction. In reality there’s no evidence that he was any less relieved than Anne over Katherine’s death, or that any tender feelings for Katherine remained. Katherine, after all, had fought him tooth and nail for six years, stubbornly refusing all attempts to provide her with a dignified exit, seemingly unconcerned that she was tearing England apart with her resistance. Henry was furious with her, and the equally obstinate Mary, for defying his authority and bringing England to the brink of war with Spain. On the Sunday following Katherine’s death, he appeared in extremely high spirits with Elizabeth in his arms in the middle of a dance at the palace. But Barnes’s Henry is incapable of such callousness, and becomes meaner as the novel goes on only because Anne, “through ye
ars of trickery and sex enslavement,” had “schooled him to shut up his compassion.”9
Norah Lofts’ The Concubine (1963) is another postwar novel that takes a dark view of the relationship between Henry and Anne. Lofts’s Anne, unlike Barnes’s, has no time of childish innocence; the novel begins with Wolsey’s breaking up of the relationship with Percy, so in our first introduction to Anne, she has already become cynical and guarded, and so proud that she doesn’t shed a tear over Percy, even though she is, in fact, heartbroken. She has contempt for her sister and never develops lasting affection for Henry. When he offers marriage, she immediately begins bargaining—“How long would it take?”10—and when it all drags on, calculates that a pregnancy will speed things along, so she sleeps with him. But after their first night together, he is disappointed and depressed. “All that promise, that hint of some peculiar and precious joy in store, was mere illusion,” a “trick”; “[b]etween the sheets, in the dark, she was no different from Katherine, Bessie Blount, Mary Boleyn.”11 Anne, on her part, feels as cold and alone as “in her grave.”12 But she was not disappointed, for she had “expected nothing”; she’d known “ever since her forced parting from Henry Percy, that from this part of life enchantment had gone forever.”13 Thinking of Percy, she stifles an impulse to cry, then decides that dwelling on that is a “waste of time.”14 She had done what she had planned—“every word, every gesture, every smile almost, directed to the one end”—and consoles herself with the thought: “My child will be King of England.” 15
