Sadie’s trashy reads series and revisiting of the rapey romance novel inspired me to reread a rape-laden book that scandalized me in my adolescence. This one was called The Conqueror, and it had Fabio on the cover.
Why scandalized? First of all, the fact that it’s set during the Norman conquest apparently gives license to use fun Anglo-Saxon words like cock, tits, and fuck. And more to the point, scene upon scene of attempted rape and completed rape, specifically referred to as such but eventually ending in love.
Whereas the romance novels I’d gotten my hands on in long, featureless summers (a shamefaced habit that started somewhere on the road back from Gone With The Wind) tastefully faded to black during the sex scenes — Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs and then nothingness — this one was graphic, with pages and pages of sexual detail. There is the word “impale” used for penetration. And there are the allusive phrases used to indicate a male orgasm, including, “like a ripe plum, he burst within her,” and the significantly less appealing, “he spewed himself into her.” (There are lots of phrases for when they come at the same time all along the lines of “their world shattered brilliantly, as one.”) The preferred word for female genitalia is simply “her femininity.”
There are more blunt, minute-by-minute check-ins with Rolfe de Warenne’s cock, which is obsessively transfixed by one Ceidre, the bastard half sister of Edwin and Morcar, Saxon lords whose fiefdoms are being conquered. The golden-haired Ceidre, of course, is spirited, independent, and unbelievably beautiful, but also a shunned outsider — she has an occasionally lazy eye and an affinity for herbal medicine that gets her called a witch. As part of the land deal, Rolfe is being given Ceidre’s half-sister Alice as a wife. (You know she’s a bitch because she’s a brunette and doesn’t like sex, although eventually she later proves to be a masochist.)
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