08-04-2010, 01:39 AM
(08-03-2010, 08:27 AM)Charybdis Wrote: I actually like a plain Jane as heroine. She's sensible and just average looking. In Holt's books more often than not her hair is her one good quality. I want to think people like our heroine because of her character and not of her looks.
That's interesting. So often in Gothics I can't help a little smile for the false modesty of the narrator when she describes herself in first person. You know the sort of thing I mean: "I regarded the person in the looking-glass before me. She was perhaps a trifle too thin . . . " or "My mouth was perhaps a shade too full and generous to be considered classically beautiful. To my eternal annoyance it bespoke, to the stronger sex, of a sensual nature that did not exist." Hard not to read between such disingenuous lines. I always think, "Oh you poor thing."
Perhaps I'm way off? Maybe when the narrator says, "I felt a plain brown partridge beside Lady Peahen's polychromatic splendour," she could be really telling the truth. Yet often the heroine's "plainness" seems to have more to do with the quality of her clothing than her bone structure.
But don't get me wrong -- this is the charm of the genre. I wouldn't have it any other way. (I've read some Gothics in which the heroine describes her own gorgeousness in no uncertain terms, and it's offputting. We don't like conceited protagonists; modesty, even false, is a much more charming trait.)
(08-03-2010, 03:32 PM)AliceChell Wrote: It is hard to sustain interest in a gothic heroine who is unbelievably illogical and unreasonable. I have encountered my fair share of these. We all have our off moments, but really!
Victoria Holt and the hair . . . . Yes, this consoled me as a teen reader, as I had this same opinion about myself.
Ugh! TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) is my pet peeve. Obviously, the reader will catch on sooner than the heroine when the attempts start on her life. But when she still hasn't figured it out, after four heavy objects have mysteriously almost fallen on her, and she's feeling strangely drowsy after being served that cup of tea, and after everybody's convinced her that it wasn't a human hand that had tried to strangle her in her sleep but simply that she'd gotten tangled up in the bell-cord . . . if she still shrugs and says to herself, "Oh, I suppose it is all just a terrible coincidence," then my response is: Please, please let the next "accident" succeed!
Some authors handle this problem well -- that of keeping the protagonist in the dark convincingly, and long enough for the suspense to escalate.
I guess I don't mind the tradition (cliché?) of the hero showing up at the last moment and saving the heroine, but there has to be a really convincing reason why she can't save herself. If she tries to shoot the villain and manages to miss at point-blank range, well, she's TSTL.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my long-winded way of saying what's already been said.