Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What started out as complex as it seemed: a marriage proposal among family ended as quickly as it ought to have seemed. That is to say, the problems of the main characters resolve themselves through feeling — not through any sense of scheming — because this book seems to be nothing more than scheming.
Part of the scheming has to do with what the characters are. They aren’t simply their personal appearance their personality — although they do seem to be as well — but rather their form is their class, their social standing and how they embody that class. So scheming here, with the many subplots of who likes who and who is to be with who, makes it so that these characters, embedded in the complex social tapestry of Victorian England, must continually navigate and negotiate boundaries as to who is who and what is what and how one is to fit in and do what one does.
In the end, all of these schemes take place, within the overarching scheme of marriage, many other lesser marriages, and trying to resolve the plot of the subcharacters to get them to marry. In the process of negotiating successfully other subplots, the main characters find themselves apt and able to dashingly profess their love and acceptance upon the adequacy of the couple as a team, as how they fit in together. One imagines if things went awry and their exciting plots didn’t work out, the feeling may be deferred again, so as to not express itself as the positive love they would otherwise see fit to be the case.
So what seemed to me to be the bulk of these subplots is really the excuse needed to for the other characters to see the good will they have towards others, the genuine personableness. And while that may be confusing from an aesthetic standpoint, it wouldn’t do for the characters to be selfish, for them to only think of themselves.
I’ve not read other Heyer books but this one, seemed highly refined in how it carries out its ambitions… the characters are lively, entertaining, well drawn out, even if they don’t learn anything themselves (only to “learn” about each other) and that’s about it. In this way, though the women act the passion and the men are what they can do for the women. Freddy proves apt and able to anticipate and understand Kitty. He gets her out of fixes, saves her from her harebrained but good-willed schemes… whereas Jack is the dashing figure full of appearance — in that way, much more in the position of a woman, being passion and display but low on fixing things for others. Centered as it is, the novel appears feminist because the chosen man is prosopopeic to Kitty, he speaks her out by completing the inaction in as much as she speaks for him the content of what he misses in his own life — desire and passion — as he is such a dandy and all about appearance rather than doing. In their fitting together, they are then, of course, shown to us demonstrably to each other, through the subplots to be a desirable couple.
I don’t know much about this genre at all, but the appearance of knowing one another well, and the quickness to which these plots carried out in their action rather than in their dialogue makes me feel as if this book went though the motion rather than in exposing for us the revelation. After all, Kitty did much of what she did on her own; and only told Freddy of it later, which he accepted all too quickly. I suppose after this I should read some Austen — take her work as a model — to see that the range of what they mean to each other needs also valleys and disagreements, fights as well as, so they should miss one another. Because part of what makes a love novel so exhilarating is also how the characters learn they cannot do without as much as they can with.
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