Jill Ker Conway, in her book, When Memory Speaks, describes the romantic heroine, the nineteenth century “archetypal female” (40) literary creation. She is the woman fairytales are made of, the possessor of natural beauty, little known intelligence, and extreme passivity. Her story revolves around her internal desires for romantic love and to become “the complement of the male romantic sensibility”(41).
And as in Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, the romantic heroine’s story ends when her one true love sweeps her away into the happily ever after of domesticity (42).
In contrast, the modern day plot of Bone, the heroine in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, does not end so happily. She is a girl confronted with unimaginable external pain and conflict, being abused and raped by her stepfather and, in the end, abandoned by her mother. Yet, Bone’s internal yearnings for beauty and love parallel those of the nineteenth century heroine. The origin of these romantic desires resides with Bone’s mother, Anney. As mother, she is one of her daughter’s prime examples of how a woman should act, think, and feel. Thus, Anney’s romantic yearnings and subsequent actions play a major role in the shaping of her daughter’s personal identity, as well as, her understanding of beauty and love.
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One of Bone’s internal longings is to have the aesthetic beauty the nineteenth century romantic heroine possesses. She wants “to be more like the girls in storybooks, princesses with pale skin and tender hearts” (Bastard 206) instead of the “[g]awky, strong, ugly” girl she views herself as. She “hate[s] being nothing like the pretty girls with their delicate features, and slender, trembling frames.” She relates herself and her unappealing body to the women she reads about in books, the ones who are “almost never the heroine.” In other words, Bone does not regard herself as being an integral part of life because she is not physically beautiful and, therefore, not the heroine. She is only a minor character with minor contributions to a story’s (or a life’s) plot.
In a way, she is also longing to be her mother. Anney is a “pretty little white-headed thing” (11) with a full smile and clear eyes (43).
So, with these physical attributes, Anney is likened to the romantic heroine, the one with the happily ever after, and Bone is the one who “was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away” (206).
Bone’s feelings of inadequacy and unimportance engender her cravings for love, the salvation for her pain. She believes “[l]ove [will] make [her] beautiful…[and] turn [her] bitter soul sweet (209).
This abstract romantic notion of what love will fulfill reflects her mother’s own desires: “more than anything else in the world [Anney] want[s] someone strong to love her like she love[s] her girls” (10).
The notion of a strong lover stems from the life plot of the romantic heroine. A romantic heroine’s “sexuality exist[s] to be subsumed within that of her male partner” (Memory 40).
Lacking agency herself, the romantic heroine needs a romantic male figure who has the ability to act as her agent, and save her from her present suffering. Thus, an essential goal of “a woman’s life is her meeting and potential union with the appropriate male romantic partner”(42).
Anney achieves that goal by marrying Glen, who is “so muscular and strong that [it is] hard to see the delicacy in him” (Bastard 34).
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The romantic love Glen gives Anney turns her “from a harried, worried mother into a giggling, hopeful girl” (35).
Glen with his male strength is, in effect the romantic hero, saving Anney from her current hardship of being the single mother of two young girls. He will be able to put some of that burden on his strong shoulders by helping Anney raise her daughters while bestowing on Anney the love she seeks.
Bone seems to understand these reasons behind Anney’s actions, and in the beginning she makes sure she does not interfere with her mother’s quest for romantic love by reassuring Anney that she really does like Glen (33).
Even when Glen begins his abuse, Bone hides her own personal agony from her mother and family, in order to protect Anney from losing her hopefulness of a romantic future.
But a happily ever after for a romantic heroine has its price, as Conway describes, there are “forces of destiny, [trying] to keep the true lovers apart” (Memory 42).
For Anney and Glen the conflict arises when Bone is subject to Glen’s final devastating act of physical abuse and subsequent rape (Bastard 282-6).
It appears to the reader that Anney has no choice but to leave Glen, and with that, her dreams of a fairytale future in order to save her daughter from the nightmare Anney has placed her in. Instead, Anney abandons her daughter, and runs away with Glen. Hence, Anney plays the romantic plot of the nineteenth century heroine by running away with her true love to fulfill her romantic destiny. Bone, “used up and thrown away”, functions as the minor female character in her mother’s allegory.
But Anney is not without regret. Her initial romantic yearning for the “simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together” (307) as a family has been destroyed, but with choosing to runaway with Glen, she is still holding on to her fundamental quest for romantic happiness by rerouting her dreams. Unfortunately, because Bone remains on this abandoned path she does not get to be apart of Anney’s future. This is symbolically represented with Bone’s, given her nickname, internal urge “to beat [her] fists together until [the] bones splinter” (302); she is literally being “splintered”, or broken away from, her immediate family. It is also a good metaphor to describe the current conflicting feelings of love and hate she feels towards her mother; what once was a homogenized union of love and devotion, is now fragmented into pieces, pieces Bone is left to put back together on her own.
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Her mother’s actions, because of romantic love and her desire for a happy ending, also leaves Bone questioning her own identity and future:”[Will she] be as strong as [her mother], as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed?”(309) Bone’s answer is yes: “[she is] who [she is] going to be…a Boatright woman”, a woman yearning to live the life of a nineteenth century romantic heroine, searching for love, happiness, and a fairytale ending in an otherwise all too-real existence.
Works Cited
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York:
Penguin, 1993.
Conway, Jill Ker. “The Romantic Heroine.” When Memory Speaks. Toronto: Random House, 1998. 40-43.
