Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Formative Influences


Looking at the concurrent furores about racism and betrayal of family values and civic virtues in the so-called First World, I’ve been recently seeking solace in a favourite book series in this intensely Women-Empowerment focused week. 


What better title could be possible for my need for some Fempowered escapism than ‘A Woman Of Substance’, I thought? And so I dusted off this classic bestselling 80s paperback by Barbara Taylor Bradford, tracing the epic rise to power of Emma Harte, a female prince of industry, and set in gorgeous country homes and chic apartments and boardrooms in Yorkshire, London, New York, Texas, Paris, The French Riviera, and Sydney. And of course I read its 5 sequels, appreciating the storyline of empowerment which was able to be felt despite the leaden writing style and the colourless and cliched characterization. 


The dedicated focus on appearances in the narrative was strangely hypnotizing: the descriptions of long willowy figures, and beautiful faces, delicate features and lustrous hair. The intense glamour of the men. The business acumen of the women. The obsession with bloodlines, generational perpetuation and the acquisition of property. Location. Location. Location. 


The detailed descriptions of the interior design and the furniture and the colour schemes and the original artwork on the walls. The constant name dropping of the wines, food and favourite dishes favoured by the 1%, and the references to European artists, and musicians were like a 1980s Conduct Book. An exclusively Eurocentric one. 


‘Stepping further along, she stared at a number of art books stacked on a shelf, which featured the work of Renoir, Picasso, Manet, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Turner, Constable, Gainsborough, .. Rodin. Resting on another shelf were books on the music of Massenet, Bizet, Ravel, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini, and the operas of Wagner.’ 


Nothing exceeds like excess. The litany of the greatest hits of Western Civilisation hummed and buzzed me into a state of semi-consciousness. 


I found the designated villain of the saga, a shady and decadent individual who felt unfavoured by his multi-faceted grandmother, crudely drawn and monotonously malevolent because his arc was drawn out too long. This malcontent went to Hong Kong, and became a real estate broker. Probably because in the author’s Anglocentric view the mystic East was the most appropriate place for a blond Englishman with a dark purpose. 


What I noticed while reading this time was not the monochrome of the writing but the total absence of any person of colour in any capacity other than as support staff in the story. No charismatic Indian business tycoons. No brilliant Sri Lankan legal or medical experts. No South Korean billionaires. The staff in the well-located homes in Australia were from the Philippines, the staff in the luxury Hong Kong apartment were Chinese. This writer from Yorkshire actually had the brazenness to describe such people as speaking with ‘accented English’. 


When Tessa, Emma’s granddaughter, visits her French lover for the first time in his home in Paris, she is greeted by his butler, ‘a smiling middle-aged man in a white butler’s jacket. From his olive skin and dark hair she thought that he was probably North African.’ Interestingly, when this lady cooks up a gourmet meal for her cousins, she cooks couscous and veal, a veritable Moroccan feast - full of Eastern spices - turmeric, ginger, saffron, cumin - an exotic and refreshing change, no doubt, from the thinly-sliced smoked salmon, egg mayonnaise nursery tea sandwiches and Morecombe Bay potted shrimps. 


The only ‘black’ person in the 6 novels was the ‘Black Irish’ Shane Desmond Patrick O’Neill, known as ‘Blackie’, because of his dark eyes and hair. To be sure. 


Emma Harte was the most interesting character in the story, and when she departed the series, in a blizzard of build-yourself-up-from-humble-beginnings truisms and empowering slogans, it was clear that her grandchildren and great grandchildren just did not have what it took to hold my interest. I’d outgrown the narrative. Like the human body fails to absorb lactose after a certain age, I no longer unquestioningly absorb racist tropes, even if they are wrapped in quasi feminist packaging. 


I was trying to work out why I now find the storyline so flaccid, when I had overlooked the defects of this series so many years before. And I found the key in a chance, cliched phrase that was a thought ascribed to one of Emma’s great grand-daughters, who, in the book titled ‘Unexpected Blessings’, had recently discovered she was related to Emma and had been accepted by the rest of the family. In a moment of self-revelation, she realizes she is ‘free, white and twenty one’. 


Since when had this become a saying? Why had I never heard it, growing up in Australia? It turns out it is an archaic American expression, popular in the 1930s and 40s, meaning ‘independent and beholden to no one’. And exclusively used by and with reference to white people, usually white women. There was even a film with this phrase as a title, in 1963. Well, don’t it make my brown eyes blue. 


This character’s father, a man who was supposedly knowledgeable about history, explains to this vapid young woman the reason one of their cousins was named ‘India’ - According to him, the name ‘came into popularity because of England’s involvement in India, and its influence over the country, for hundreds of years. During those years, the English loved so many things which were of Indian origin, and of course there were a lot of British troops stationed there, ... all part of the Indian army. Anyway, I suppose one day someone had the bright idea of calling a child after the country, and India became a favourite name for girls in the eighteen hundreds, when Queen Victoria was on the throne and Empress of India as well. And it’s still used today.’ 


The repellant selectivity of this airbrushed, whitewashed version of British colonisation presented as fact is augmented by a description of India’s grandmother, Edwina, the Countess of Dunvale, who ‘sounds like a British general at the head of an army about to quell the natives’ when she calls her granddaughter up on the telephone. Edwina is described as ‘determined, feisty and, in a funny way, rather nice’. What is also crystal clear is that she is oblivious that she is (in an unfunny way) rather racist, and that her estate in Ireland has been resourced by the forced labour of ‘natives’. The quelled variety, no doubt. Kept in their unrightful place by the systemic white supremacist beliefs which fuelled the growth of the British Empire. 


When I was young, I had truly loved the description of Emma Harte’s growing collection of jewellery, and admired the establishment of her business dynasty and the fulfillment of her materialistic and romantic dreams. She revelled in her success, as a self made woman, but had stopped short of buying the Kohinoor Diamond, which Queen Victoria had looted from the so-called subcontinent in 1849. 


As I lined up to buy these books as a girl, I had no idea that years later I would find that they were so profoundly lacking in actual substance. My colourful dreams and the vibrant spectrum of my own life and lineage could not be contained or defined in the pages of its narrow story. This realization is an unexpected blessing. 


Thank you, BTB.


No comments:

Post a Comment