2019 read #5: Dunleary by Monica Heath.

Dunleary by Monica Heath
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5

The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.

This was a mistake.

Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way. 

As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.

Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.