The 70s Gothic Romance Novel: We've Come a Long Way, Baby

 Picture a rather innocent-looking thirteen-year-old girl...sparkling green eyes, light brown hair, medium build, freckly-faced and squeaky-clean.  Imagine that she still loves playing with Barbie dolls and digging in the dirt.  She's almost outgrown childhood and hasn't become angsty yet.  She's not yet preoccupied with boys and fashion.  She still loves Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books but is ready for more adult material.

Not too adult, mind you.  She is, after all, only thirteen.

Still with me?  Well, picture that young lady visiting her grandma who was also a bibliophile.  Grandma had rows of books, lining almost every walls of her house (save the kitchen and bathroom, although they probably also would have been used if needed) and, yes, she had read all of them--her favorites she had read multiple times.

So that young lady (me, if you haven't already guessed it) was visiting her grandma for a couple of week in the summer in the early 80s.  Grandma had lots of mysteries and romances, but she also had plenty of Gothic Romances--you know, the heroine is in danger and finds love.  There's a lot of suspense but not too much horror.  Well, that whole world was new to me (again, think of Misses Drew and Belden)--I'd been exposed to pre-teen mystery stories, but this was a whole new genre. 

I wasn't ready for bed one night and picked up one of Grandma's books after perusing several titles.  I finally settled on one by an author named Willo Davis Roberts (Grandma had half a shelf of books by this author).  I snuggled under the covers and wound up reading that book more quickly than I'd ever read a book before.  I'd read fifty pages by midnight and finally was tired enough for sleep.  But the next day I jumped right back in and finished reading the book rather quickly (in a day or so, if I recall correctly).  I became a Willo Davis Roberts fan and borrowed other copies of Grandma's books.  And Grandma, always wanting to encourage me, would pick up used copies of those same books whenever she could find them at the used book store.

 My cousin introduced me to her "system" of rating books--she would rate books on a scale of 1 to 10, and so if I asked her if she liked a book and she gave it a 9, I would know she really liked it.  Well, I thought that was a pretty cool idea, so I started writing a little number on the inside cover of the last page.  It was so little that you probably wouldn't notice it if you weren't looking for it.  Well, I happened to notice the little "10" written in there when I picked up this book again for the first time in a very long time.

Feeling nostalgic, I just knew I would love this book again.  I remember loving books where I would be transported to a spooky place, usually a large, scary mansion with huge rooms and plenty of places to poke around in, and everyone was a suspect, because the heroine's life was in danger.  I really loved those stories, so I knew I would love them again.

Unfortunately, time has a way of changing everything.

Am I too jaded now?  Too old?  Too much a post-feminist?  All of the above?

I must admit I was disheartened--dare I say disappointed?--in the book.  Perhaps I shouldn't have picked it up at all. 

No.  Reading a book should never be viewed as a bad thing.  So I chose to make this a positive experience.  First of all, it encouraged me to read like crazy as a youngster.  I'm a firm believer in reading (bet you wouldn't have guessed that), and the more a person reads, the better she gets.  So there's that.  And as far as my recent reading of the book?  Well, let's just say I appreciate how far we've come.

Well, the book I am specifically talking about is called Sing a Dark Song and it was published in 1972, the year of the Equal Rights Amendment. For those of you not old enough to remember, women were demanding to be treated equally and fairly, burning bras and holding protests to make their point. Without getting into the whole political atmosphere of the time, simply remember that this was a few years after Woodstock and the birth control pill had been around for over a decade.

The book revolves around a young woman named Dauna. She has been separated from her husband Galen for almost two years, and he has contacted her, wanting to make one last go to save their marriage. The book opens on the two of them inside a fortune teller's tent. True to the Gothic mystery's form, the fortune teller warns Dauna of imminent danger involving a large mansion and two men--one who is gentle and tender and has her best interests at heart; the other is one who, obviously, does not. Well, one thing after another transpires, and she ends up in a mansion (one that belongs to Galen's relatives that she never knew anything about), her life in danger. She does indeed end up wondering which of two men she can trust--Galen or a stranger named Ernie.

First of all, it's a little hard as a modern woman to be able to relate to this pretty young heroine. Dauna recalls her former time spent with Galen--how he tended to be somewhat abusive (physically abusive twice), demanding, and overbearing. Dauna's mother wants Dauna to stay in the relationship at all costs. Dauna, although she's fairly certain she knows what she wants, hasn't filed for divorce or told Galen exactly what she wants if they reunite. She mostly keeps her thoughts to herself. Later in the book she actually speaks up but she is still not as loud and strong as I would have liked her to be.

I have no problems relating to the fact that the mansion is far-removed from the village or that, once the bridge is out, it is next to impossible to get to the village in the middle of a monsoon-like storm. I also don't have a problem with the fact that the family doesn't have a phone (this is the 70s, remember? Cell phones didn't exist, and landlines weren't as important then as they are now--cable TV was rare, home computers were non-existent, so phone lines weren't a necessity). All of these elements combine to place the heroine in danger where she is trapped, alone, and at risk of losing her life. I get that. That's part of this genre.

That said, though, there were other "convenient" happenings that just didn't set well with me. Galen apparently had to present a wife to a lawyer so that he could inherit what was left of the family fortune. He left letters in his luggage to prove it. I understood that he would possibly keep the letter of the lawyer because he had a meeting with him, but he also hung onto another letter that showed how he found out about the fortune in the first place. There was no reason for me to believe that someone would actually do that. But, by doing so, Dauna conveniently found them. Ernie, the stranger, was also there because a young lady named Laurel had been killed at the mansion a year earlier, as Galen's fiancee. This young woman had, at one time, been his lady-friend, but then she fell victim to Galen's charms and had visited the mansion with Galen a year earlier. I found it convenient that Ernie chose to investigate the mansion at the same time Dauna and Galen--trapped by a car that needed repair--wound up there. It was also convenient that Dauna happened to find information showing Galen had gotten a "Nevada divorce" from her, so they were no longer married. Needless to say, there were a few too many convenient happenings for my brain. When I was thirteen, I guess I took it all in stride.

Finally, these people never felt fully real or three-dimensional. When Galen introduces Dauna to his relatives, they comment on her pretty, if unusual, name, saying that they'd known women with the same name before but never with a "U," only with a "W" (for "Dawna"). How could they tell from simply saying the name how it was spelled? And hadn't they ever heard of the name "Donna"?

Dauna also laments that Galen had left her with horrendous debts that she spent the last two years paying off. I can perhaps see that, but then she decides she might want to take him back. Okay, yes, the 70s--have to keep reminding myself of that. The story is told in first person and Dauna is a school teacher. I never get the feeling that she really is a school teacher--we never "see" her in a classroom or have her tell her new beau or relatives anything about it. And her narrative is full of comma splices and sentence fragments, something that pulls me out of a story fast, and also makes it difficult to believe she's a teacher.

Finally, everyone under the age of 60 including Dauna occasionally swears or curses under his or her breath. Yes, this is a Gothic romance and set in an era removed from this one, but would the occasional actual word kill us?

Needless to say, I think I'll leave the rest of my Willo Davis Roberts books back on the shelf where they belong. They hold a nostalgic and beloved place in my mind, but that's where they need to stay. Too many years have passed and too many things have happened. The young teenager who grew up in the 80s just can't swallow a "modern" romance set in the early 70s. It's lost in translation. It was just too difficult to get swept up in the story. Guess I'll have to stick with Stephen King. And I guess I better leave Nancy and Trixie on the shelf as well.

Roberts, Willo Davis. Sing a Dark Song. New York:  Prestige, 1972.