By Juliet Waldron (Guest Blogger)
Thanks,
Lisabet for having me as guest on your blog. It’s good to be
included among so many talented contributors.
Sex and the Story
The
most interesting thing about the “sexual revolution” of the
sixties, at least for me, was the open admission that women naturally
liked sex, and that there was no good or bad about it. There had
always been pornography for men, but that, we were told, was the
nature of the beast—but not his mate. Then, the old taboos began to
disappear.
An
18th
Century novel, Fanny Hill, was re-released with great fanfare.
For two centuries Fanny
was one of those “under the counter” books, obtainable only in
certain back street shops. Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus,
written in the 1930’s, reappeared, along with the startling BDSM
tale of, The Story of O. Anne Rice contributed The Sleeping
Beauty trilogy. The e-book revolution has continued to add
content and a new business model for genre fiction was born: Erotic
Romance. The sales success that followed this innovation exploded
the traditional romance industry’s staid notion that women didn’t
want to read explicit sex.
With
all this social history in mind, I didn’t worry much about being
put down because I included a generous helping of sex in two of my
books. What goes on in a bedroom can show the reader a great many
things about characters of any gender, and also about the dynamic of
a relationship. Because I write historical novels, part of my task
is to set the manners and morals of yesterday up for the reader’s
inspection, and to demonstrate what the socially approved games of
status and power between men and women of the past were actually
like.
"Mozart,
Ich
liebe dich.
I love you. Love you."
"Come
here, Nanina Nightingale. Come and give your poor old Maestro some of
your ‘specially sugary sugar."
My
mouth on his - the friction produced warmth and sweetness, with a
decided undertone of the expensive brandy he liked, flowing from his
tongue to mine. I slid my arms across the brocade of his jacket, none
too clean these days, and swayed a slender dancer's body against him.
Let
me assure you that my sophistication was assumed. It really doesn't
matter, then, or now. I was young, foolish, and drowning in love. I
was seventeen. He was thirty five… I believed he knew everything,
that he could see right through me with those bright blue eyes. He
probably could. He'd been my music master--and, more--my deity, ever
since I'd met him, in my ninth year.
His
jacket, now spotted and stained, must have been fine enough to wear
in the presence of the Emperor. Bright blue, it perfectly matched his
eyes. I can still feel the fabric sliding under my fingers as my arms
passed over his shoulders and around his neck. I can still see him a
woolly frizz of blonde hair, long, aquiline nose--a ram that had once
been an angel. Sometimes, when he was loving me in some exquisitely
naughty way and joyfully smiling while he did it, I could almost see
horns.
So
you will understand exactly how I loved him, so that you will know
that it was a real passion, I'll tell you that I adored the feel of
him, the smell of him, the taste of him. They've tried to turn him
into a tinkling porcelain angel, but I'm here to tell you, here and
now--he was not.
Mozart's
eyes were big, slightly protuberant, and as I’ve said, so blue.
Alarming, those eyes! Once they'd shone with the pure light of
genius, radiant and blissful as a summer sun. Nowadays, they were
simply wasted. My adored Maestro was mostly either drunk or hung
over.
He'd
fallen from grace. Everyone knew it. Creditors hounded him. There
were too many wild parties, not enough money. His wife had given up
coping, had gone back to the Baden spa where she had an on-going
romance with a big, handsome Major. And who could blame her? Pretty
Constance, in the last ungainly stages of yet another pregnancy,
fleeing Vienna after a winter of freezing and begging for handouts...
Even
a seventeen year old idolater could recognize her defection for
self preservation. I didn't judge her. I didn't judge myself. I was
simply glad to have her out of the way. When she was gone, he was
restless, at loose ends, spending most of his time hanging around our
theater. Of course, nothing could have suited me better…
As I immersed in Nanina’s story, she started to wake me up at night. She told me how it was for her, this brief, searing experience of love. Even the death of Mozart could not bring about the death of her passion. Her sexual memories were hoarded, treasured, exactly like any modern fan-girl’s memories of a single night spent with a rock star idol. Moreover, those memories would be physical—each passage of the hand, taste of tongue and flesh, each kiss—etched into the mind, ecstasy preserved for endless re-runs. Not to tell the story as Nanina told it, to pretend that the last fifty years of freedom to talk about sex--about what it means to us, about what it does to us, about how it lifts us up and casts us down—wouldn’t be true, either for this character or for me.
~~Juliet
Waldron
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