literary diet pt. 3: forever a snob
This Week in Reading
The Duchess by Danielle Steele
A few things that ended up in my grocery basket last week: hummus, coffee beans, cilantro, olive oil, and The Duchess by Danielle Steele.
The basic plot is as follows: Angelique (tiny, perfect, deeply boring) is the daughter of a duke. When her father dies, British law decrees that the estate, fortune and title is passed only onto the male heirs, and Angelique is left with nothing. Her brothers, who hate her, exile from her life of privilege and she becomes a nanny for a wealthy family. After working for a year, a lecherous guest attempts to force himself on her, and when she bites him in self-defense, he tells her employers that she tried to seduce him. Fired with no reference, she is unable to find a respectable job in either England or France and instead opens the most elite brothel in all of Paris. After one of her clients gets murdered in the brothel she flees to New York. On the boat, she falls in love with an American man, who she agrees to marry. But when she meets his family she discovers that his father is actually one of her former clients, and had in fact proposed to her multiple times in Paris. She is forced to reveal her scandalous past to her fiancé who decides that he loves her anyways. They get married, have a baby, her husband dies, and she goes back to England and uses her brothel money to buy her father’s estate out from under her brother and evict him from the property just as he did to her all those years earlier. Sorry for spoiling it, but let’s be real, none of you are ever going to read this book.
The premise is more progressive than I would have imagined for a book stocked in the same aisle as Peeps. It could be argued that the novel explores the inherent power disparity between men and women in society, and that this is a story of a woman overcoming systematic oppression in order to find power and build a fortune. Danielle Steele also advocates for sex worker rights. Angelique is horrified by the exploitation prostitutes face, and vows to set up a radical brothel that protects the women working there, and pays them generously for their work. The book argues that sex work gives women opportunities for independence and financial freedom that the class system otherwise prevents them from having.
However, despite being pretty sex-posi in concept, The Duchess is a strangely prudish book. For a novel about a literal brothel, there is surprisingly little sex in it. And though Angelique is the madam of a house of sin, Steele is very adamant that our protagonist herself never goes upstairs with the clients. Angelique is too refined, too sophisticated, to sell her sexuality, or even indulge in such base pleasures for her own enjoyment. Even though we are meant to respect the prostitutes in the book, it is clear that we are meant to see Angelique, with her high-class upbringing and virginal purity, as a cut above the girls she manages. The Duchess by Danielle Steele is not a manifesto for third wave feminism, but if you thought it was going to be, god help you.
Even though she has been stripped of her estate and place in society, Angelique is forever marked by her upbringing. Everyone who encounters her notes that she speaks with an aristocratic inflection; her refined education is apparent no matter if she is a lowly nanny, or the madam of a brothel. Angelique is different from the prostitutes and servants she is surrounded by because she was raised to be different from those people. At several points in the book, Angelique reflects that she doesn’t see herself ever marrying, because she has been cast out of high society, but also can’t fathom marrying a servant. Though she is now technically equal to the working class, she is, at her core, still a snob. Even when she becomes the madam of a brothel, she takes on the attitude of a patron or a philanthropist, helping disadvantaged girls. She may not have the trappings of a duchess, but she still has the airs of one.
Maybe we can never escape our upbringing. No matter what income bracket I am currently in, I will never not move through the world as an upper middle class coastal elite. Having taste and having money is not the same thing (I have installed art in enough rich people’s homes to be sure of that) but taste and class are undeniably enmeshed. There are different aesthetics that come hand in hand with different classes, and the way we think about high-brow and low-brow culture is absolutely tied to the ways we think about money, race, and educational opportunity. Though it is easy to say that we see everyone as equal, judgments of taste are inherently judgments of background.
In a way, this grocery store project was an attempt for me to try to break out of my own background. Can I learn to be less of an asshole? Can I escape my elite education and high-brow literary tastes to genuinely connect with the trade paperbacks available at my local Vons? And while conceptually, yes, I am all in on my mission to participate in the mainstream, in actuality I found this book to be poorly written and pretty boring. Like Angelique, I too, remain a snob, no matter how much I try not to be.
March is over, but I am going to squeeze one more book in to finish off this series. Stay tuned.
Further Reading:
I realized I don’t really read historical fiction in general (perhaps a gap I should work on) but throughout this book I found myself wishing that Angelique’s brothel was more like Cathy’s in East of Eden, which is a far superior book in every way. Ugh, sorry, that was one of the snobbiest recommendations I could have given in response to a book I bought at the grocery store. Oh well.