The enduring allure of a rake

ROMANTIC HEROES:The classics are full of cads and bounders who have romantic heroines swooning at their feet. Why do we find them magnetically attractive in print?, asks GEMMA TIPTON

HAVE YOU EVER had somebody who thought they were better than everyone else sneer at you? I have. It's very unpleasant, particularly in public, and not something I'd be inclined to forget too easily – much less wish to marry the sneerer. I don't think too many people would, unless, like Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, you happened to succumb to the size of his house (it is a truth universally acknowledged that property is one of the most exciting things a single girl with no earning power could dream of).

It’s an anomaly that sneering in stories makes female readers swoon, while experiencing the real thing is a devastating turn-off. So, as the debate about what violent movies and X-rated video games do to “our youth” rumbles on, I started to wonder, given the season that’s in it, what does reading romantic literature do to “our women”?

It's extremely difficult to square the behaviour of so many of our fictional romantic heroes with the lusting reverence in which they are held. Take Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights– brooding and fascinatingly satanic. But most people tend to forget the moment where he is found to have hung his new wife Isabella's dog from a bridle hook.

“Kind of hard to come back from that one,” a friend remarks when I mention it. And yet, come back he does, again and again, to dominate polls of Top 10 Romantic Heroes.

Then there's Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, another slightly satanic hero (also well endowed in the property department). He's a good catch – if you can get over the fact that he keeps his mad wife locked in the attic.

What about Max de Winter in Rebecca? He's a rather charmless individual who doesn't exactly help his new wife settle in to Manderley. The happy ending for our heroine lies in discovering that Max is not in love with his former wife – rather that he shot her and sank her body at sea.

If ever anyone should teach you not to fall in love with fictional romance, it’s Emma Bovary. Gustav Flaubert has his heroine yearning for the life she has read about in novels, the quest of which leads her into seduction, debt and, finally, agonising death.

Death is pretty common for romantic heroines. In what must be one of the most boring novels ever committed to print, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa dies, but not before being abducted and ravished by "the vile Lovelace". Richardson, put out to discover that female readers of Clarissawere attracted to his evil anti-hero, then wrote The History of Sir Charles Grandison"to show those mischievous young admirers of Lovelace once and for all that the rake should be avoided". With these two books, Richardson manages to prove that infamous rakes and paragons of virtue can be equally boring in print.

One of the key lessons from the kind of romantic fiction that doesn’t aspire to the realms of “literature” is never to marry a nice guy early on – he’s sure to die tragically. If you want to steer clear of tragic death (your own, your loved one’s or both), you’d better hope it doesn’t go too well too soon, or maybe ever at all. This isn’t just confined to inch-thick holiday blockbusters, either.

The most famous romantic literature is littered with the corpses of its lovers: from Anthony and Cleopatra to Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde to Orpheus and Eurydice; loving someone more than life itself often means exactly, and tear-jerkingly, that. Add in Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago and his Lara, and even Gone with the Wind's Scarlett and Rhett, and you begin to wonder: why is a happy-ever-after in romantic literature as rare as a relatively pleasant hero?

I think it’s because what follows the happy-ever-after is about as exciting as the idea of a “relatively pleasant” lover. The gentle contentment of a life lived steadily together, without the need for violent fights, fits and faints, sneering and misunderstanding, jealousy, passionate or suicidal gestures, is hardly the stuff of gripping fiction. And yet, as I get older, I’m starting to realise that, love of literature notwithstanding, that doesn’t sound half bad.