Winter Love: Han Suyin

"The private world of bliss, frustrations, lies, and substitutes involved in a love outside the canon of western mores is bitterly and movingly told"

The subtitled quotes from a Times Literary Supplement review of Han Suyin’s Winter Love (1962), the story of a doomed lesbian love affair. Red (Bettina Jones) looks back to the “shiver-making, viscous, yellow-grey” winter of 1944, the dreary last days of WWII. She first spots beautiful Mara Daniels on the first day of class. Mara’s married, wearing make up, heels, drenched in perfume and little gold earrings, while everyone else, the whole city, wears rational clothes and survives on dull rationed foodstuff, the other students unkempt and crude, with their pettiness and jealousies, the classrooms and Red’s boarding house are shabby and smell rank. Red instantly goes to Mara, whose dressed in blue-green, gleaming, rich, feeds herself with expensive little snacks, unexpectedly excels at exams, disarms and wins over people who dislike or are jealous with her charm and impractical childlike naivete. She’s an otherworldly enigma that we only see through Red. They grow closer, then inseparable, eventually wearing a bed sit together and living there when Mara’s controlling and cruel husband is away working. It’s like being married, Red tells us, as Mara pulls Red into her elegant world, offering her love and domestic bliss.

Immediately, you see the small cracks as Suyin turns lesbian tropes of its era on their head. The only characters who are well-developed and/or complex in this novel are women who love women, the villains and cardboard cut-outs are everyone else. As for the central couple’s gendered roles, Red’s masculinity and Mara’s femininity, are subverted throughout. They struggle sexually, and there is only a single time in which feminine Mara takes on the dominant giver role, making Red feel “a woman and desirable then”. Mara’s lack of domesticity or managing a household means she doesn’t embody the feminine outside of appearance. It’s Mara who’s wiling taking the risk of being publicly in a lesbian relationship, as Mara doesn’t mind standing out while Red deeply wants to fit in. Red, the more masculine and experienced person, cannot bring herself to fully consummate their relationship because of memories of a predatory statutory rape in her teenage years. She’s been hurt and damaged by her mostly repressed of her unstable childhood, her parents deaths, and the older woman who preyed upon her desire for a mother and then used her sexually. “The capacity to love had been wrung out of me quite early” (P93). “Some of us are brought up to disfigure love in obscenity. Many of us are twisted to ugliness in thought and deed because we have been made afraid. We do not trust to tenderness any more, and without tenderness toward the other human being little is left but a sad and vicious performance of emotions or contact.” (P.94). “At Mara’s return I tried to hurt her as much as her absence had hurt me. When people suffer they take it out on the object of their love, because the object of their is in their possession. They cannot stop themselves….There was no security with her, only the constant fear of losing her, and the bright satin heart of love gets frayed perhaps sooner, shows wear more quickly, than the hempen ropes of marriage.” (P.90). Red makes Mara cry once, then weekly, then she withdraws. She longs for Mara to reach through her pushing Mara away, for someone to stop her self-sabotage. Add to this Red’s fear and internalized homophobia, which undoubtedly it in part stems from the trauma of her abusive introduction to homosexuality, in part to the world around her, and in part because of a desire for the normalcy and security she’s never had, which would be near-impossible in a lesbian relationship in the 1940s.

I wouldn’t say this is a perfect novel. It is of its era, subverting tropes that have changed, and the dated slang and references make it at times difficult. It’s also surprisingly psychological, sometimes a little too much so, especially as we get into understanding Red and her history. Today, we’d probably say that Red has an avoidant attachment style. It’s at times a little too on point. And even though it only clocks in at 153 pages, it can be repetitive, with frequent descriptions of Mara’s beauty, style, and class, and Red frequently describing her psychological flaws and reiterating her cruelly manipulative behavior. There are an unrealistic number of lesbians is this book (there are literally everywhere) in this otherwise realistic story. The tone of the ending feels off-kilter. There are also two different stories of lesbians who end their lives with sleeping pills after failed affairs, these could hint at a very dark end, or are those stories added to only point out the trope of the lesbian pulp-era novel?

You might have noticed that I reviewed this book immediately after Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall (1982, reissued 2024 by Semiotext(e)). This was very intentional, because In Thrall is about an “illicit affair” between a teenager and her older teacher, and Winter Love is, in part, about the long-term damage that such an affair causes to someone just out of her teens. Both speak to the harm of systemic homophobia, and how an unsure teenager is made more vulnerable than she would be in a society that tolerated and accepted lesbians.