Swooning is a Thing of the Past

[Note from Frolic: This post is brought to you by our friends at Kensington. Looking for your next strong romance heroine? Look no further than Heiress for Hire by Madeline Hunter, out now!]

Take a walk with me to my DMs.

Me to one of my besties: Omggggggggggg

You’ll never guess.

Bestie: [With great equanimity considering I had not given her any valid clues, as people who open chats with things like ‘you’ll never guess’ are wont to do] What?​ 

Me: I’m going to write another Frolic piece! It’s about how swooning is a thing of the past. 

Bestie: [typing bubble]

Then it went away. 

Then it came back.

And went away again.

This pattern, as you know, is 2020 thumbscrew torture.

Eventually, Bestie sent her reply. I was expecting something Tolkein length after all the fanfare, and I was marinating in anxiety sweat, but what she said was:

How are you going to explain what swooning is?

I blustered about this for a long time. How was I going to explain swooning!? How could she ask such a thing! Everyone knows what a swoon is! It’s obvious, it’s a —

It’s a —

Well, it’s when —

It’s obvious what a swoon IS, but Bestie was right, it’s hard to explain. I’d never found myself in the position of explaining a swoon before, and I was a bit stumped. I floundered uselessly in our chat, typing things like, ‘…. I’ll say it’s kind of a faint, but also it’s a “maidenly” thing when you get caught unawares by a flash of nip nip or ankle or something? But also it’s when you lose your shit because something is sexy…?’

Clearly, this wasn’t going to work.

I don’t want to be that writer who quotes the dictionary at you, but I had to go and look this up. 

Enter Oxford Dictionaries Online:

1. [intransitive] swoon (over somebody) to feel very excited, emotional, etc. about somebody that you think is sexually attractive
2. ​[intransitive] swoon (old-fashioned) to become unconscious 

(There’s something incredibly funny to me about this second one being written in the passive. It makes it sound less like a physiological reaction or condition, and more like a wizard did it).

So swooning either means fainting or sploshing your undergarments with enthusiasm. Seems there’s quite a chasm between those two things. 

For me, the two usages of swoon are very clearly delineated by time and by feminism.

I can imagine one swooning at the way Richard Madden says “ma’am” in Bodyguard; or the way Dolores thunders across the field on horseback in Season 2 of Westworld; or how Chris Pine (the one true Chris, come at me) splashes around that waterfall in Into the Woods. Or how Glenn Close says “puppies!?” in 101 Dalmations, although that one might be a bit niche. Anyway, in all these instances, I would understand ‘swoon’ to mean that spike of attraction edging towards that good ol’ toe curling, spine clenching, ‘good times’ feeling.

That kind of swooning I am down with.

But swoon as in faint in reaction to something unpleasant or daunting? I wouldn’t. If I saw something unpleasant, okay maybe, but I’m definitely more of a spewer a fainter. That’s gross, but it’s the truth.

Yet whenever I read Old-School historical romance (which I don’t often, I’ll admit. Old-School is not to my personal taste, although I have the utmost respect for its role in genre history — this is something I talked about with Isabeau & Morgan from Whoa!mance a few months ago). In older romance, it was much more common for women to swoon-faint, especially women who weren’t central characters who could be used to establish how different and not-like-other-girls the female protagonist was.

If old-fashioned historical romance was to be believed, real ladies swooned a lot in the olden days. Some near constantly. Picture hordes of women rocking around Hyde Park dropping like fainting goats whenever someone let slip a ‘bother’ or ‘damnation’. Or god forbid, slipped a stray ankle.

Perhaps this was because ladies spewing everywhere wasn’t a great visual to write? Fainting is much less chunky.

Perhaps it was because as a readership, we weren’t as cognisant of how markers of hysteria (like “swooning”/fainting “shrieking” or “sobbing”) were weaponized to control and gaslight women, in particular Women of Color; and keep them from deserved positions of authority or equal pay. 

Or perhaps it was just that in the Victorian, Edwardian or Regency eras, women really were doing the fainting goat thing a lot. Maybe because their stays/gowns were too tight, or because they didn’t want to go to their Aunt’s for dinner, or because society valued delicacy in women above all else and you were up shit creek if you couldn’t land a half-decent lad, so you had to play the game and drop a faint every now and then. 

Who knows.

What I do know is that the changes we can track in romance and in real life aren’t really to do with individual women becoming stronger. It’s about the collective.

Because we talk now.

And we have romance novels to back us up.

Back in the day, those who opposed votes for women used to isolate bothersome suffrage figures from their fellow campaigners because it was easier to keep a person under your boot in isolation than it was when they were bolstered by the power of a collective; able to talk and share and galvanise. (Sidebar: did you know New Zealand was the first country in the world where women got the vote? In 1893, after multiple campaigns led by Kate Sheppard). Another key tactic was to ‘poison the well’ and see if you could get women to turn on each other — it’s like how some dark corners of the Internet try to separate women based on who was Assigned Female At Birth and who wasn’t; which is some very dangerous nonsense because trans women are women. End of.

Nowadays, we’re able to say things to our friends like, ‘don’t you think it’s BS that Cheryl thinks I should flub a loose pickle jar so that my partner can open it and claim some fake “man points”?’ Or ‘how come if someone talks about female orgasms as a need-to-have not just a nice-to-have, Twitter dudes looooose their minds, and yet in cis hetero sexual interactions it’s not considered intercourse unless he comes?’ 

Romance is this same thing, but on a bigger scale. It’s mass communication of shared experiences.

Seeing hundreds of strong female protagonists line the pages of our favourite romance novels reminds us that we’re not alone. And there’s no longer a need for women to feign delicacy as a survival tactic. I love that today’s romance, heroines are more inclined to swashbuckle than swoon, and the proof is in the pudding with the historicals I’ve been reading recently: