Title: Breathless Author: Laura Lee Guhrke
Published: July 1, 1999
Genre(s): Romance: Historical
Page Count: 416
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Lily Morgan may be Shivaree, Georgia's most talked-about lady. Everyone in town knows about the bitter break-up of her marriage five years before, when Daniel Walker, her husband's tough, uncompromising lawyer, tore her reputation to shreds and left her with nothing but a wish to get even. But now something about Daniel makes her blood boil and her pulse quicken...not with righteous fury, but with passion.
Daniel has returned to Shivaree to once again match wits with Lily Morgan. The thought of a rematch with Lily delights him, for he has never forgotten her hot temper—or her lovely looks. But when a shocking murder shakes the town, Daniel joins Lily to find a killer, and their unexpected partnership sparks something between them that they never expected—desire. Now Daniel, the strong-willed lawyer for whom winning is everything, realizes he must win the one reward he can't live without: Lily's forgiveness—and her love.
Breathless (by the author of one of my favorite romances of all time, Conor’s Way) is a book that really highlights how only some women are permitted to find Happily Ever After. While nobody is doubting that a heroine galvanizing the morally upright ladies of her small Southern town to crusade against brothels and “sinful women” is historically accurate, I’m hardly likely to enjoy a book with such rampant slut-shaming.
And at the end of the day, I would ask: what is the difference between the prostitutes who sleep with men for money outside of wedlock, and the heroine of this book, who becomes the hero’s mistress and lets him flaunt her before all of high-class Atlanta society? (I should also point out that the heroine in this book, Lily, is a divorced librarian who engages in all sorts of scandalous behaviors.) There is no difference. And yet the way the author frames it, it seems as if there is something acceptable about this heroine’s “sinful” behavior, but not about the sex workers, who are just trying to earn some money in a patriarchal society that won’t give them an ounce of forgiveness or latitude to make mistakes.
For me, Breathless is the epitome of White Feminism. Lily is outraged about how she’s been unfairly ostracized by society on account of her divorce, while her husband was not. She’s upset about not being allowed to vote—this book takes place in 1905. Yet where does all that outrage go when faced with sex workers, who are treated like trash? Gone.
My favorite part of this entire novel is when one of the girls at the brothel is murdered. Suddenly Lily goes from “that sinful woman must be punished” to “oh, that poor girl” in one second. So…what? Prostitutes are only worth protecting when they’re already dead? Not to mention that Lily taking up the cause of a dead sex worker is actually entirely self-serving: after the murder, she is easily able to shut down the brothel.
Again, this is classic White Feminism. Lily’s oppression is the only pain that’s valid, until it becomes evident highlighting another, more marginalized, woman’s struggle is in her own interest. But once the brothel was closed, where did all of Lily’s concern about that “poor girl” go? Gone, again, because she was back on her crusade to close all brothels in the state. For a brief, gleaming moment, Laura Lee Guhrke allows her readers to consider that sex workers are people who maybe deserve some happiness just like the rest of us, but then she snaps that door quickly shut before Breathless can get too radical.
