The Irresistible Girl

She has been a staple of our literature from the beginning.

The girl no man can resist. She has been a feature of Western literature since the beginning. Literally the beginning, since we often date Western literature from Homer’s Iliad, and there she is, causing trouble like she always does. In this case, her name is Helen. Helen of Troy to be specific, though of course she was not Helen of Troy. She was more properly Helen of Sparta, and thereby came all the trouble when she was kidnapped by, or eloped with, Paris, a prince of Troy, thus launching a thousand Greek ships to get her back.

My own incarnation of the irresistible girl, Elswyth of Twyford, first introduced in The Wistful and the Good, recognizes the connection in the fourth volume of the series, The Wanderer and the Way (coming sometime this fall, hopefully), though she comments that her face has launched only two ships and burned one.

In Welsh Mythology, the irresistible girl is Blodeuwedd, a woman made by magicians out of flowers. Like Helen, she is the cause of war and death between her husband and her lover. She echoes down into Alan Garner’s novel The Owl Service, which I recommend highly. Elswyth knows this story too, which comes from the mythology of her own people, and she cites it in The Wistful and the Good.

Every man loves the irresistible girl, but it is often the outsider, the interloper, who wins her, as in the song Eileen Og, performed best by The Irish Descendants. “But her beauty made us all so shy. Not a man could look her in the eye.”

She is not always a flirt, though. In fairytales, her beauty is often a mark of virtue, and the prince, the fairytale paragon of virtue, is her proper spouse, from whom villains of various stripes will try to keep her, as in Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White.

Sometimes, as in Max Beerbome’s marvelous comic novel Zuelica Dobson, she is an agent of chaos, leaving broken hearts in her wake wherever she goes. By the end of that novel (spoilers!), every undergraduate in Oxford has committed suicide because of his unrequited love for her, at which point she boards a train bound for Cambridge.

Sometimes, she must hide her beauty, either to protect herself or to be near the man she loves. She frequently goes to sea disguised as a cabin boy or into the army disguised as a drummer boy, in every case making the captain doubt his manhood, so taken is he with the lad’s beauty. In the Famous Flower of Serving Men, her husband and child having been murdered by her powerful stepmother, she disguises herself as a serving man in the court of the King, who also doubts his manhood because of his desire for her before discovering that she is indeed a maid, and, of course, marrying her and making an end of the wicked stepmother.

Sometimes, too, great beauty, peerless beauty in particular, is a mark of deceit, which is why in Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, Isabel becomes a peerlessly beautiful version of herself as she falls under the elf knight’s curse.

Her beauty can also lead her to a tragic ending. As Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the irresistible girl thinks her beauty entitles her to both love and money but can find only one or the other, and ultimately claims neither.

Her beauty sets her apart and gives her, in the eyes of many, a status above other women. Thus, as Lily Bart’s admirer, Laurence Seldon, observes her:

It was one of the days when she was so handsome that to be handsome was enough, and all the rest—her grace, her quickness, her social felicities—seemed the overflow of a bounteous nature. But what especially struck him was the way in which she detached herself, by a hundred undefinable shades, from the persons who most abounded in her own style. It was in just such company, the fine flower and complete expression of the state she aspired to, that the differences came out with special poignancy, her grace cheapening the other women’s smartness as her finely-discriminated silences made their chatter dull.

And yet, this special status is ephemeral and not to be relied upon, as Lily discovers when she tries and fails to hurry along the payment of a legacy:

Bewildered and indignant, Lily resolved to try the effect of a personal appeal; but she returned from her expedition with a sense of the powerlessness of beauty and charm against the unfeeling processes of the law.

Discovering the limits of her beauty’s power can be devastating:

Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal efficiency.

Even if she acknowledges that this status is undeserved and unreliable, however, others remain convinced of it, including one of her several unwelcome suitors.

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. “I don’t know why I should regard myself as an exception——” she began.

“Because you ARE; that’s why; and your being in a place like this is a damnable outrage. I can’t talk of it calmly.”

Why does the irresistible girl wind herself in so many forms through so much of our literature? She is the epitome of a particular moral and dramatic problem, which has to do with responsibilities that flow from unmerited gifts.

Other human gifts, such as strength and intellect, can be directed and used discretely, but beauty broadcasts itself willy-nilly and without control. Cupid has his arrows, but Psyche’s beauty is a hand grenade with the pin already pulled. The irresistible girl has enormous power in her beauty, and yet that very power makes her hugely vulnerable. Her face may be able to launch a thousand ships, but she cannot captain them nor send them back to port. She needs a protector, and yet, while she has many suitors, she brings trouble down on the head of any man who claims her.

Her beauty cannot be deployed subtly or directionally. It can only be displayed or veiled. If displayed, it attracts the odious suitor as well as the desirable one, and if veiled, it isolates her from society. Beauty is thus at once a source of great power and of great vulnerability, and the irresistible girl treads a perilous course both physically for her own safety and morally for the effects her beauty has on others.

Is the irresistible girl responsible for the effects her beauty has on others? In our egalitarian age, we instinctively rebel against the notion that beauty places any kind of moral responsibility on the beautiful person. We may talk sneeringly about “pretty privilege,” as if the irresistible girl’s beauty was not only undeserved but reprehensible, but the notion that it places any kind of responsibility on her is not to be entertained. If men kill each other dueling for her affections, we maintain, that is entirely their own fault. And yet, can the irresistible girl really look with equanimity on the corpse of a suitor and feel not a twinge of responsibility or regret for his demise? This is not a question in the abstract, but one that speaks to the moral weight of action that attends everything she does and that is done because of her.

Beauty is power, and few human beings possessed of power, be it strength or speed or intellect or, yes, beauty, can resist using it to their advantage. When Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker that with great power comes great responsibility, most of us would seem to agree, but then, should we not also agree that someone should tell Helen of Troy that with great beauty comes great responsibility? True, she did not choose to be beautiful, nor to have Paris fall in love with her. But does that absolve her of all responsibility for the thousand ships launched by her face? More particularly, does it prevent her from feeling that responsibility when she looks down from the walls of Troy upon the bodies of the dead?

Are any of us responsible for the gifts we were born with? The strong man did no deed to merit the strength he inherited, nor the rewards that he can win with it (including, often, the successful courtship of the irresistible girl). Nor has he committed any sin that causes his captain to put him in the van where the battle is hotter and the danger is greater. This is not where he deserves to be but where his strength makes him most valuable to others. These advantages and these perils, and the moral weight of action that comes with them, accrue to him randomly and without merit just as the advantages and perils of the irresistible girl’s beauty come to her. And yet her case is the more poignant and the more dramatic, if only because her power is greater, but harder to control, and her peril greater also.

Worse, while her beauty brings her much attention, she gets small thanks for it. The gift of beauty is different from such gifts as strength or intelligence in that it is not serviceable in the way that they are. Human beauty is a marker of fertility, but while fertility is certainly serviceable — we would not exist without it — beauty, as a thing distinct from the fertility it signals, and which other less beautiful girls possess also, is not serviceable in itself. The community may gather to thank the strong man for his deeds or the clever man for his wisdom, but no one will thank the irresistible girl for her beauty. They may, indeed, scold her for the trouble it causes.

Beauty is, of course, exploitable for gain. But it is not directly serviceable to the community in the way that strength or intelligence are. You can’t grow crops or invent cell phones with it. But this does not mean it is without effect. In many ways, it has every bit as much influence on the course of the world as strength or intelligence. And yet she who possesses this power has little control over it. What, therefore, is her responsibility for it? Is it to her a gift or a curse, or both in equal proportion?

A novelist, thankfully, is not called upon to give a general answer to these questions but rather to examine how the moral weight of beauty is felt and acted upon by a particular irresistible girl. In other words, the novelist's question is, what is the moral weight of beauty?

Does beauty actually have moral weight? How can we not say that the beauty of Helen of Troy had moral weight, considering the terrible moral weight of action that it engendered in the launching of 1000 ships and years of war? Whether we choose to hold her responsible or not, Helen of Troy is surely aware of the effect she has, and surely that must weigh upon her shoulders as she considers her actions. We are born into the moral world as we are born into the physical world, and the particularities of our moral endowments may differ as much as the particularities of our physical endowments may differ, but they are ours to bear and to use in life, and we are responsible for the use we make of them.

In Anglo-Saxon society, married women would wear a wimple, covering their hair and their neck. In The Wistful and the Good, as Elswyth’s beauty begins to attract male attention, her mother urges her to start wearing a wimple. Elswyth refuses to do so until she is married. Is this a wonton act? The limits of modesty and the obligation to dress modestly are matters for philosophers and theologians. Stories are concerned not with the generalities but with the felt moral weight, rather than the abstract morality, of individual decisions. So whether you think that Elswyth should have put on a wimple like her mother asked or if she should have been free to ride naked through the village like Lady Godiva if she wanted to, the point is that the decision itself has moral weight for Elswyth.

Sometimes, the effects of her beauty delight her, and she uses it to her advantage. Sometimes, the attention it brings wearies her, and she complains of it. Either way, it is an instrument of power in her hands, and there is, therefore, a moral weight to her decision to use it or not, to hide it or reveal it. And she naturally feels this moral weight on her shoulders, whether she ultimately bears that weight or lets it fall.

I did not set out to write a novel about the irresistible girl, let alone a series. The Wistful and the Good, for a long time called The Rules of Trade, was supposed to be Leif’s story. It was inspired by 9-11 and the way that perfectly innocent and law-abiding Arabs, and people who were thought to look Arab, were suddenly treated following the 9-11 attacks. I’m a big believer in establishing distance from a subject to disconnect it from contemporary passions, so I imagined a Norse trader landing on the shore of Northumbria shortly after the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and the kind of reception he would receive. This was Leif, and I introduced Elswyth as a distraction and complication for him. And I made her irresistible simply because that made her more of a distraction.

But slowly Elswyth took over the story, as the irresistible girl is wont to do. Leif was stolid and dutiful and a little bit dull, as he needed to be to play the role assigned to him by the theme, while Elswyth was, as the irresistible girl usually is, vivacious, erratic, and full of every social grace. And so it became her story. And it became her indiscretion, her sin, that broke the fragile peace that it was her job to keep — she let fall the moral weight that, however unbidden, or even unjustly, lay upon her shoulders. And that became the story.

But it very soon became clear that the story of the irresistible girl had many facets affecting different people in different ways, and so I wrote St. Agnes and the Selkie, in which Elswyth bears the moral weight of her beauty and of her past indiscretion, out into a wider world and must make still more weighty decisions.

In book marketing terms, the books in a series are supposed to be similar to each other. They should keep the same cast and the same narrative style. But what led me on to the third book was a different aspect of the irresistible girl’s influence, that being the impact of her life on her plainer and less socially gifted sister, the girl who is not only resistible but is barely noticed. And so the third book, The Needle of Avocation, was devoted to Hilda’s story. But though Elswyth does not appear, she hangs over the tale as a constant presence. The irresistible girl casts her spell — or is it her pall — even when she is far away.

But there was still something left to explore, for up to this point, Elswyth had only brought her special brand of chaos to good men, to men who loved her, even if their rivalry over her set them at each other’s throats. What remained was to put her into the orbit of bad men, or, to be more precise, an irredeemably bad man and a man balanced between the possibilities of good and bad, who must fall under her spell, and becoming so, must prove either her salvation or her doom.

And thus The Wanderer and the Way was born, which has a very different character from the books that have gone before, including being told exclusively from the point of view of a male protagonist. Its different and darker tone has caused some consternation among its earliest readers, which may slow its progress into print, though it will not stop it. It is the next part of the puzzle of the irresistible girl, and it must be told.

There will, I think, be one more book in the series after The Wanderer and the Way, at which point I think I will have explored every facet of the irresistible girl or, at least, every facet that my poor wit can perceive. And then I shall have to find someone else to write about. Or maybe, as she did, someone else will find me.

In an important sense, the irresistible girl represents the human condition. She does not choose to be beautiful, nor can she choose or exercise much control over how people respond to her beauty. It brings her perils that she does not deserve and advantages she has not earned, and there is little she can do about either. And so it is with human life. We are heir to perils and advantages that we do not merit and can do little to change, but which, nonetheless, place a profound moral weight on our decisions and actions. Desire her or resent her as we may, the irresistible girl is as much an everyman as she is a queen or an angel or a succubus in that, like everyman, she must play the hand she is dealt and bear the weight of it on her shoulders, whether or not this seems just to her or to those who gaze on her with approbation, with envy, or with love.

The irresistible girl is a good dramatic proxy, then, for all the questions around the issue of the moral weight that rests upon all of our gifts and the moral weight of action that rests upon every choice we make, every act that we do or elect not to do. In other words, she stands for the great moral quandary of unmerited moral weight, of the responsibilities that lie upon our shoulders not because we ever agreed to shoulder them but as a result of all the aspects of our lives, both our inheritances and our circumstances, over which we had no control or influence and yet which we must live with and make decisions about.

We are born, in other words, with not only a head on our shoulders but the moral weight of all our gifts and all our circumstances and all the things that happen around us upon those shoulders as well. We do not choose the moral weight we are born with, but it is ours to bear. Even if we try to run away from it, the very act of flight bears with it the moral weight of action. And for the storyteller, the irresistible girl, blessed or cursed with a power over which she has little control and which brings her as much peril as it does opportunity, encapsulates this dilemma in a way we might call irresistible.