I started reading romance novels back in the late 1980’s when I fell in with the wrong crowd in college. We were rebels. We read romances instead of watching soap operas. And we smoked. Rebels, I tell you. The late 1980’s was a tough time for the Romance genre. The bodice rippers of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rodgers were becoming dated, but the genre (or publishers of the genre) still weren’t comfortable with a woman having independent sexual desires. Date rape and marital rape were still new-ish concepts in general, and stalking and jealous tantrums were still mostly acceptable ways to demonstrate romantic commitment in real life. The cover pictured is the original cover art. Behold the ’80’s.
The Windflower, originally published in 1984, was one of my favorite romances. The author, Laura London is the husband and wife writing team Tom and Sharon Curtis. I was excited to re-read The Windflower. I knew it would be dated and some stuff would make me cringe, but I wasn’t anticipating the mental confusion that I experienced. Me, contemplating writing a review. ->
On the one hand, it was much clearer to me as an older reader that the writers were having a lot of fun with romance tropes in the story. It is a crazy bananapants fun read. On the other hand, dear godtopus, the misogyny, the rape threats, the heroine too stupid to live. GAH!!!!! I am probably over thinking this, but the more I read and the more I thought about the book, the more Poe’s Law started creeping in to my brain.
Poe’s law is an internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, parodies of extremism are indistinguishable from sincere expressions of extremism. Poe’s Law implies that parody will often be mistaken for sincere belief, and sincere beliefs for parody.*
Friends, I do not know if The Windflower is a satire of the genre, or just the writers having a little fun with the standard bodice ripper tropes. The standard bodice ripper tropes are, the heroine is young, extraordinarily beautiful, virtuous, and most importantly, either virginal or a virgin until raped by the hero. The hero is older, more worldly, an asshole and either rapes, coerces, or attempts to rape the heroine. That’s right, my formative romance reading experience made it seem normal to fall in love with the guy who rapes you, coerces you into having sex, or just threatens to rape you a lot. The bodice ripper is why so many people are embarrassed to admit they read romance and is still the default image for a lot of non-romance readers. Even so, bodice rippers are an important step on the way to the feminist romances we love now. Without Kathleen Woodiwiss, there would be no Courtney Milan. Bodice rippers allowed writers to show their protagonists getting sexual outside of marriage while also propping up the patriarchy.
So what’s my textual justification for thinking The Windflower might be one long satire? For one thing, The Windflower has an omniscient third person narrator who makes constant double entendres and goes “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” at the reader for the entire book. The language is florid, but not quite purple.** The opening sentence is, “Merry Patricia Wilding was sitting on a cobblestone wall, sketching three rutabagas and daydreaming about the unicorn.” There are frequent references to a unicorn, “… its muscles white and glistening beneath its creamy hide, its chest broad and heaving, its horn poised and thick.” (Please see eye patch wearing man). The rutabagas are also a sexual metaphor. EVERYTHING is a sexual metaphor. There is so much metaphor and double meaning that it feels like a joke. And the name of the pirate ship is – THE BLACK JOKE. The whole book might be a joke.
The plot has more than just a standard amount of romance novel ridiculous, and yet, it still makes more sense than most. Almost every random character is somehow related and in all of the world there might just be like 50 people and they all know each other. I can’t really get into it too much because of spoilers, but this is a good place to talk about Rand Morgan, pirate king and deus ex machina made flesh. He is a compelling character, ambiguous in his morality and sexuality, and calls a lot of people “babe.” Rand Morgan was unlike anything I’d seen in a romance novel. He was more like an Ann Rice character who happened to pop into the romance genre to stir the pot. The other characters who are not the hero, are similarly compelling and complex. Two of the young pirates, Cat and Raven, would be right at home as modern romance heroes, or complex YA characters. One of the reasons The Windflower is so beloved is the secondary characters. Maybe Tom and Sharon (aka Laura London) just wanted to write about teen pirates adventuring with an ambiguous and sexy pirate captain, but the YA genre wasn’t a thing yet, so they threw in a romance.
What else? The narrator tells us that later in life the heroine will be an interesting woman, but at the moment, she’s just pretty. This right here is when I started thinking the whole thing might be a deliberate send up. It was kind of revolutionary to suggest that a woman might get better with age, that being young, beautiful, and virginal might not be the pinnacle of a woman’s worth. Over the course of The Windflower, for all that Merry is frequently too stupid to live, she does grow as a character and might possibly have something to offer other than great hair and breasts later in life. We do hear a lot about her breasts and hair. It got to the point where I was starting to feel uncomfortable, and it takes a lot to make me uncomfortable. 
Merry actually grew on me more this read. I had remembered her as being silly, and she is. She is also, as she puts it “an inexperienced, awkward teenager, endowed with more imagination than poise.” Outside of her inexplicable longing for Devon, she is kind of delightful. She tries to learn and adapt. She becomes spunkier and more poised. And she sticks up for herself, saying something that no woman should ever have to say, “I don’t think I deserve to be raped.” No one does, Merry, no one.
So where does my satire theory start to fray? That would be Devon, the hero. Devon is an insufferable asshole. He treats Merry very badly, and doesn’t understand why she keeps trying to run away. He threatens to rape her, and calls other characters in to take her away because he just can’t trust himself not to rape her. And the more I write about him, the more I wonder if maybe he is a satire, too. Like Merry, he is described as extraordinarily beautiful – “peerless face of an angel,” “renaissance archangel,” and so on. We are told he is super smart, well respected by the British government, a spy, and irresistible to women. Mostly though, we see him being an asshole and/or sexing up Merry. At no point does he do anything particularly intelligent. We are told, when we first meet Devon, that he disdains women because “every woman he had ever desired had been his for the asking…”. I almost stopped reading the book right there. Disdaining women eliminates him from the pool of people I would ever hope to see in a romance. And yet, this was also a common trope of the genre in the 1970’s and 80’s. Part of his excuse for his treatment of her was that he loved her. Hi, formerly common romance trope that I hated even at the time. Devon is redeemed if you read this as a romance of the time. His redemption is less clear if you view it as a satire of the romance novels of the time.
So here we are. Poe’s Law. Is it a satire? I don’t know. Should you read it? Yes. Yes, you should. For one thing, other than the her inexplicable love for Devon, Merry is pretty entertaining. In fact, other than Devon and all of the rape talk, the whole book is entertaining. So read it and tell me what you think. I am not going to give this a star rating, because I just can’t. As much as I enjoyed it, it made me glad for the growth and changes in the genre. I’m happy to be in this time. My next book needs to be a romance with a heroine who owns her sexuality. I welcome suggestions.
*Just to round things out, Godwin’s Law – liklihood that a comparison to Hitler or the Nazi’s will arise, thus ending the rational part of an internet discussion; Lewis’ Law – the comments on an internet discussion on feminism justify feminism.
**To really back up this statement I should re-read some Kathleen Woodiwiss and do a compare and contrast, but I’m not willing to do that, so you are welcome to accept it or not, or even tell me I’m full of it.
Ha! Malin told me she hadn’t reviewed it, but she did, back in 2011. http://kingmagu.blogspot.com/2011/12/97-windflower-by-sharon-and-tom-curtis.html
