Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- Fate

Please have a little sympathy for people who don’t like Regency romances – or romances of any kind, including fairy tales. They probably also don’t like Greek myth, and it all comes down to one thing.

They can’t get interested in a story where they can see it coming.

Oh, sure, Greek myth has been around for millennia and we all know how they come out. But it partly comes down to why you can’t sanewash evil characters in fairy tales or do more than poke fun at the bad guys in romances.

In fact, even the Greeks might have felt the same way by the time of Alexander, leading to the decline of Greek theater which, after all, acted out the lessons of Greek oral tradition on stage.

Fate. To this, Greeks ascribed the Oedipus cycle. Let’s look at it as if it was an oral tradition, its likely basis.

A king and queen get a prophecy that their newborn son will kill his father and marry his mother. If it hadn’t been Pytho, the seeress at Apollo’s shrine of Delphi, they might have blown it off as did Croesus when told that starting a war on Persia would ruin a great nation. Turned out his own nation was the one ruined.

At any rate, they had the option of killing the child outright, but they opted for a cultural feature, exposing the child where wild beasts could eat it. To make sure the prophecy came true, the gods sent a shepherd who rescued and raised the child.

Oedipus goes to the same oracle, which tells him the same prophecy. Fearing that it refers to his foster parents, he leaves. At a crossroads he disputes the right of passage with his birth father, whom he kills. He then proceeds to his birth town, which now has no king and, in a male-dominated culture, no lawful heir, a situation ripe for trouble.

Here he outwits an enemy which has closed the city off from foreign travel. Oedipus guesses the Sphinx’s riddle and she either commits suicide or he kills her. Hospitality to foreigners was a noted feature of ancient cultures; Jewish Aggadah says that Lot’s wife means hospitality when she says that he has brought a bad custom to S’dom.

Oedipus becomes king as a reward for restoring the city’s foreign trade and diplomacy, and marries the queen to provide an heir for peaceful transition to the next generation of rulers. However, once she has birthed their four children, a plague of infertility strikes the city, reminiscent of the plague that strikes Grar when Avimelekh takes Sarah from Avraham. It doesn’t mean the narratives have a relationship. It shows the importance to ancient cultures of having a clear line of inheritance. When the Bible calls Noach tamim, it points to his descent in the direct line from Shet, something that Qain’s “descendants” don't have.

Once again, Delphi comes into the picture (note that this is the third time), saying that the murderer of the old king must be brought to justice. Some other things happen, and Oedipus realizes that it’s him. His mother commits suicide and Oedipus takes a brooch off her gown and blinds himself. He could have used a knife – he probably had one hanging from his girdle that he would have used for eating, paring his nails and so on – so once there must have been a ritual significance to that brooch. I’d like to think she used it like a crystal ball, but Sophocles does not tell us.

Two of Oedipus’ children were boys, and they agreed to share the throne but one of them refused to give it up after his turn and they killed each other in the ensuing war. Jocasta’s brother, who was involved in all of this, then takes the throne. This brings up two issues. To initial appearances, Oedipus is a tyrant in the definition of Thucydides, not part of the old ruling clan but taking over the government. Returning the rule to Creon shows that even a tyrant whom the population accepts, or who benefits the polis, is not as good as the old ruling clan.

Which is a dangerous lesson to teach. It suggests that the Olympians were at fault for taking over from their parents, the Titans. And in fact the lesson of both the Olympians and the Titans is that it’s OK to marry your sister – indeed a play by Achilles Tattius states that in Greek law marrying your father’s daughter is fine but not your mother’s daughter. Avraham tells Avimelekh (chapter 20) the same thing about Sarah. This is a sign that real kinship was counted through the mother in ancient cultures.

It also suggests something the Greeks would never have admitted, that the right to rule runs through the queen, not the king. The story of the Sphinx may have been added somewhere along the way to justify Oedipus being chosen as king, instead of taking the right to rule from  marrying the queen. Once she died, Creon took over because he was her brother.

Now let’s get back to the fate thing. In a sense, Oedipus is thrust into this story as the embodiment of why you shouldn’t ask strangers to rule your polis. Thucydides says that when a polis ran into political difficulties, it would ask a stranger to resolve them. The Oedipus story is the ancient culture telling its people not to do that. Oedipus was fated to commit two horrible crimes to justify that teaching.

Once again, oral narratives have to come out the way they do in order to teach the lesson they are intended to teach. Get far enough from the oral roots of your culture, and you have to change your narratives to supply a new justification for how things turn out. You can involve the Erinyes, who do come into the Oedipus story and stemmed from the castration of Uranus, or Nemesis who punishes hubris, but no matter how the later culture disguises it, the old lesson is still there.

Until the culture changes. Fairy tales often portray a prince finding a bride, so as to have a legitimate heir. As Europe evolved into constitutional monarchies, fairy tales became nursery tales, not lessons about how the culture worked.

Regency romances have had a similar fate. The culture that turned over protection of young girls from father to an older man of reformed morals and reliable income, fell out of favor as women inherited fortunes and tied them up in settlements if they married, or kept control of the purse-strings themselves if they didn’t. Once England had a reigning queen, Parliament enacted things like the Married Women’s Property Act (1870 and 1882) which allowed women to own and dispose of property. It continued in the 20^th century with enabling women to get credit and loans without a masculine co-signer.

In the meantime, what do the Four Mothers of the English Novel teach their readers? Well, Maria Edgeworth had a close and continuing relationship with her father, and critics see his hand in much of the didactic material in her works. The same is true of Fanny Burney, who knew Dr. Johnson and partly wrote to earn his praise. When Edgeworth writes of an orphan, she consigns the girl to high society foster parents. Burney’s orphans are heiresses, but her last character lives a version of Burney’s own life.

Anne Radcliffe’s father was a haberdasher, not a scholar, and so was her husband. She places her girls in mortal peril but the villains are such as you will never see in England, “where roads and newspapers lay everything bare.”

Jane Austen is subversive. When her fathers die, they leave things in a mess, such as the Dashwoods. When they live, their foolishness – however momentary – affects their daughters for the worse. She does not teach that girls should set up their own desires in opposition to wise counsel, but Ann Elliott does not have uniformly wise counsel to draw on.

In between the opening and closing of your Regency novels, while your heroine is learning the lesson that qualifies her to marry her hero, think about the role of fate. You need to show one of at least two things. Either her lessons learned enable her to leap over the obstacles fate throws in her way, or the obstacles teach her that life doesn’t always turn out the way we want. But the obstacles of fate have to involve the lessons that Regency culture wanted girls to learn, like how to not fall for fortune-hunters or a slip on the shoulder. And remember, the girls of the Regency were the mothers of the Victorians. Any lesson your heroine learns that foreshadows Victorianism is all to the good of realism.