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  • Misogyny and Melodrama
  • Sarah Brouillette (bio)
Emma Donoghue, Frog Music. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014. 403 pp. $27.00.

While it draws on the conventions of a variety of genres—it is a historical novel and a crime thriller, for example—Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is, perhaps most importantly, a literary version of the 2011 best seller Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by E. L. James famous for depicting women who enjoy being demeaned during sex and who love nothing more than to imagine themselves as men’s toys and possessions. Frog Music is more literary because it is clearly meant to appeal to a more learned audience. Compared to Fifty Shades of Grey, Frog Music features fewer sex scenes, better writing, fuller characterization, and a more elaborated plot based on extensive research about San Francisco in the 1870s and the real-life murder of one Jenny Bonnet, a woman who dressed in men’s clothing and made her living selling frogs to the city’s restaurants. Frog Music is also more literary in that, crucially, it moralizes about its protagonist’s sexual predilections, depicting them as ultimately unsavory and in need of overcoming.

Donoghue has a Ph.D. in English and has written nonfiction about lesbian and queer relationships, including 2010’s Inseparable: Desire between Women in Literature, a kind of pop–academic guide to stories of romance between women, and her first book, based on her Ph.D. research, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (1993). Her early novels, Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995), [End Page 600] feature lesbian couples, and nearly all of her writing—including the story collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Slammerkin (2000), her best-selling novel about how a young prostitute in the 1760s came to murder her mistress—is closely researched historical fiction highlighting unconventional sexual roles. Critics have appreciated Donoghue’s work for its “reparative” approach to histories of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and for its attention to the lives of those “abjected from history,” especially lesbians.1 With its detailed depiction of San Francisco in the 1870s, and its focus on the relationship between a cross-dressing social outlaw and a prostitute who has recently arrived from France, Frog Music fits neatly into Donoghue’s canon.

In its ultimate interest in the dignifying trials of motherhood, however, Frog Music relates most clearly to Room, the 2010 novel for which Donoghue is now best known. Room is the story of an imprisoned mother who attempts to give her rapist’s child a happy life before eventually orchestrating their stunning escape. It explores motherhood as a consuming but often ambivalent act of patience, care, and cunning. Narrated from the child’s point of view, it presents the mother not as a saint but as a woman struggling in extraordinary circumstances to find the will to continue to live and to protect her child from the worst aspects of a hard situation. Frog Music does something similar and shares as well Room’s tendency to titillate the reader. In Room we are voyeuristically privy to the rapacious sexuality of the mother’s captor but see it from the removed point of view of a child who is not supposed to witness it and does not understand it. In Frog Music we are invited to witness the protagonist’s insistence—sometimes in quite lurid moments—that “Whatever’s done to me, … suits me fine” (316).

A trigger warning, then. There is some provocative material in Frog Music. Specifically, the protagonist, Blanche, enjoys being “fucked,” as she says (319), in every imaginable way and mentions on a number of occasions the particular appeal of feeling demeaned and possessed by a man. For Blanche, being fucked always means penetration. Even when late in the game she has sex with Jenny, the [End Page 601] character who ultimately sets her on a more righteous path toward other kinds of longing and satisfaction, there is no allusion to cunnilingus or any other variety of nonpenetrative sex. Jenny, the boyish cross-dresser, simply uses her fist, thereby fulfilling Blanche’s desires as we have come to know them. The absence...

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