“Girl Alone”: It’s amnesia time, baby! Also, shitty gender politics time!

“You mustn’t be frightened,” said the nurse with a professionally cheerful smile.  “You’re quite all right.  You’ve hurt your shoulder and wrenched your back a bit, but there are no internal injuries, and all you have to do is lie very quietly for a few weeks.”

The girl whose midnight-black hair flowed over the pillows, framing a beautiful oval face that was almost as white as the pillow itself, lighted by two great dark eyes and the soft loveliness of a beautifully shaped mouth, looked up at the nurse, a piteous expression in her eyes.  “But—I don’t seem to know where I am, or even—who I am!”

I’m back!  While the rate at which I post obviously waxes and wanes, I’ve (tentatively) made it a personal goal to try to write a review at least once a month, so nothing like getting something in practically right under the wire, eh?

So, without further ado, “Girl Alone” is a short story/novelette by Peggy Gaddis, published in the December 1938 issue of Complete Love Magazine.  (Again, as the issue in question hasn’t been formally digitized, you can find the story in PDF form here.)  Gaddis was an extremely popular and prolific romance author of the era, beginning her career (as far as I can tell) in the pulps in the early 1920s, and then continuing with them until their demise in the 1950s.  In that time she also published a great many novels (some of which were originally serialized), including a number of racy pulp paperbacks.  The ’50s and ’60s saw her move into nurse romances, and she finally passed away in 1966 at the age of 71.  Thegoodbadbook actually just recently reviewed her second novel, 1929’s The House of Yesterday.  It has some good info and links, and I’d highly recommend the post!

For my own part, Gaddis is a name (in fact one of her many pseudonyms) I’ve come across a lot in my pulp adventures, but this is the first story of hers I’d legitimately read.  I don’t actively go out of my way to be some contrarian hipster or anything (honestly, I don’t), but I have noticed a trend of sorts emerge, in that the more popular a pulp author was, the less I tend to enjoy their work (though there are some exceptions, obviously).  For that reason, I went into “Girl Alone” with a little trepidation, but ultimately did my best to give it a fair shake.  And it’s…fine?  A decent representation of pulp romances of the time, but that’s about it?

To its credit, the story starts out with a bang, almost literally, as we open with the aftermath of a train crash.  Our currently-unnamed heroine comes to as emergency crews tend to the survivors, but before she (and we) can figure out what exactly is going on, she passes out again.  When she next wakes, she’s in a hospital, and realizes to her horror that she’s not only forgotten what happened leading up to the crash, but she’s (dun dun dun) forgotten who she is entirely.  That’s right, baby—as referenced in the post title, we’ve got the tried and true trope of amnesia!  And while “Girl Alone” is not nearly as bonkers (in neither title nor plot) as, say, Pregnesia (amnesic and pregnant, natch), it’s still fairly bonkers.

Back with our heroine, the attending nurse is a little surprised to hear this, but tells her not to worry—her memory should return once the shock wears off.  In the meantime, her name is Zaida Ramsay, and her fiancé, Loren Stephens, is on his way with his mother.  Presently the two arrive, and to Zaida’s delight, Loren is a total babe (who’s hilariously described as being “about twenty-eight” nothing like being specific immediately after you use a word to indicate vagueness, amirite?).  However, it soon becomes apparent that there’s trouble in paradise—Mrs. Stephens is very awkward in her politeness, and Loren himself can just barely manage to be civil to her, clearly believing her amnesia to be an act and nothing more.  Still, despite his blatant dislike of her, he dutifully keeps visiting, and after a few days, Zaida manages to pry from him the reason behind his antipathy:  It turns out that pre-crash Zaida had been having an affair with Loren’s brother-in-law, Bob (his sister Ellen’s husband), but that ended when Bob died a hero’s death, nobly saving a couple kids from drowning.  Having heard from Bob that the Stephens family was rich, and tired of being the “other woman,” Zaida effectively blackmailed Loren, demanding he marry her (thus giving her the societal clout she craved), or else she’d air Bob’s dirty laundry, posthumously ruining his reputation and breaking Ellen’s heart.  Determined not to see his beloved sister hurt even more (as she’s already dealing with the death of her husband, in addition to having an infant son to now raise on her own), Loren agreed.  Zaida was on her way to formally meet him and his mother for the first time when her train derailed, et voilà.

Upon learning all this, Zaida’s like, “Holy shit, pre-crash me was an asshole!”  She frees Loren from their engagement, but Loren insists on marrying her anyway—she’s a textbook femme fatale as far as he’s concerned, and he isn’t about to risk letting her go, just so she can turn around and screw him and/or his sister over later.  Keep your friends close and your enemies closer and all that.  Zaida pleads with him, insisting she’s changed, and while Loren would very much like to believe that (“I could—almost like you as you are now,” he grudgingly admits at one point), her past actions keep casting a pall over things.  It’s actually a pretty neat set-up to a romance, one that’s rife with internal conflict and questions about the nature of identity—are we just a collection of our memories, or is personality more intrinsic and hard-wired?

Well, Zaida angsts, as she’s since fallen in love with Loren.  (As an aside:  Gurl, how???  Why???  Like, sure he’s good-looking and I guess it’s admirable that he cares about his sister more on this later, but he’s also been consistently cold and dickish to you.)  No matter; Zaida insists she’s in love with him, so oh, oh!—how ever will her heart survive, being married to a man who hates her???  She soon has bigger problems to worry about, though, as two detectives show up right after the wedding ceremony, to arrest her and take her back to New York.  It turns out that in addition to being a homewrecker and a blackmailer, pre-crash Zaida was also a child murderer; she killed a kid in a hit-and-run accident, and—now that the law has finally caught up with her—is going to be charged with manslaughter.  Will nu-Zaida manage to get out of this predicament?  Will her memory ever return?  Furthermore, will she and Loren ever find their way to a happy and healthy relationship?

Of course (spoiler alert), it turns out that Zaida should more accurately be called “Zaida.”  As has previously been telegraphed via deus ex machina dreams, the real Zaida switched clothes and luggage with our heroine—supposedly to experience the world and find love as a commoner, but more likely as a ploy to get away from this hit-and-run business.  The two women coincidentally bear a pretty strong resemblance to each other, but when one of Zaida’s former paramours shows up, he’s quickly able to identify our heroine as not-Zaida.  Not-Zaida is in fact Linda Gordon, a working girl who was on her way to a new job a friend had set up for her.  As for the real Zaida, it’s revealed she died in the train crash.  So yay, our heroine’s memory has returned, the charges get dropped, and she and Loren get to live happily ever after, conveniently not needing to work through any pesky emotional complications, after all.  The end.

 

Despite the neat set-up and the use of the always-entertaining amnesia trope, I nevertheless take a number of issues with “Girl Alone,” and those issues are big enough that they ultimately prevent me from genuinely enjoying the story, even as some sort of guilty pleasure.  First and foremost is how “Zaida” is SO.  DAMN.  PASSIVE.  (And heads up that as “Zaida” is what she’s called for the majority of the story, “Zaida” is how I’m going to refer to her.)  The only truly proactive thing she ever does is at the very end, when she takes it upon herself to call the aforementioned friend, so that she can come over and confirm that “Zaida” is really Linda Gordon.  There are token attempts to give her some semblance of a spine when, multiple times, she tells Loren she can’t marry him, but he’s inevitably like, “You’re going to! >:(” and “Zaida” basically just…shrugs and accepts this?  Ostensibly she goes through with the marriage because she feels guilty about her pre-crash behavior, but still—aside from that one tiny exception at the end there, she never actually does anything; things simply happen to her, and more often than not with her piteously crying and/or pleading all the while.  Like, yes, it’s a tragedy she lost her memory and all that, but at the end of the day it’s hard for me to sympathize with—let alone root for—a heroine who’s such an egregiously wet dishrag.  And sure, it was 1938, different standards, blah blah blah, but one look at my previous pulp romance reviews will tell you that there were plenty of proactive heroines populating the pulps at the time (even if contemporary mores meant their Happily Ever Afters had to be on the conservative, traditional side which is to say, within the confines of a white, heteropatriarchal marriage), so this excuse doesn’t really wash with me.

Second, Loren and his mom are determined to keep Bob’s infidelity secret from his widow, and I’m of the firm opinion that Ellen deserves to know the truth about her late, cheating husband.  (As is, she’s almost worryingly devoted to his memory, stating that she wants her son “to be Bob all over again.”  Yikes.)  Like, sure, give her some time to let the shock of his death wear off, and probably still keep it from going public (society is cruel and misogynistic, after all, and was even more so back then), but she at least deserves to know—if only so she can emotionally move on and (if she so desires) find another man to marry, one who will hopefully remain loyal this time around.  The whole attitude surrounding Ellen is very patronizing and infantilizing, which is especially offensive considering how she’s already given birth to a child of her own; she ain’t exactly some virginal ingenue.  So boo, Peggy Gaddis, boo.

Lastly, I’m not too keen on the multiple times Loren suggests violence towards “Zaida.”  The first instance is when he admits he “think[s] [he] would have killed [her],” had her initial letter about Bob somehow gone to Ellen instead of him.  Then later, he threatens to “wring [her] lily-white neck” when Ellen comes to visit, should “Zaida” even hint that she previously knew Bob.  There’s also this incident, when Loren kisses her in a moment of horniness weakness, only for “Zaida” to slap him, as she’s insulted by the fact that he would kiss her while simultaneously professing to despise her:

He caught her wrists and held her when she would have fled.  His eyes blazed down at her and he said harshly, “I’ll let you get away with that just this once.  But I warn you that if you ever behave like a fishwife again, you must expect to be treated like one!”

(For the record, he lets her go after this, at which point “Zaida” runs away crying, as is her wont.)

Again, you could maybe argue this is simply a case of the story being a product of its time, but (much like racism) just because domestic violence might have been more socially acceptable back in 1938, that still doesn’t make it any more right, nor does it mean I have to like reading about it.

So would I recommend the story?  Ehh…not really.  Maybe if you have a particular interest in Peggy Gaddis’ work, or else have a hard-on for the amnesia trope, but that’s about it.  Even if you can overlook all of the above criticisms, it’s still not all that successful as a romance in my opinion—much like I’m not sure why “Zaida” falls in love with Loren, I’m similarly not sure why Loren falls in love with “Zaida.”  The relationship, such as it is, seems to mostly be based on physical attraction, and sorry, but I need more from my fictional romances, no matter what era they were written in.

 

Random end thoughts:

• The magazine cover (by artist Alex Redmond) wasn’t relevant enough to include in the post proper, but here’s a link to it all the same.  The story in question is advertised on it, so that’s at least kind of neat?
• It might qualify as a pet peeve, but another criticism is how Loren is damn near constantly saying things “grimly” (though “sharply” is a runner up).  I can certainly forgive a repeated word here or there when reading something, but “grimly” in particular stands out, and not in a good way.  I honestly found its frequency kind of distracting.
• Zaida’s former paramour (one Jim Lucas) casually admits to hiding the car in which she committed her hit-and-run, so as to buy her time to disappear—which probably qualifies as obstruction of justice?  Despite that, Jim thinks nothing of blurting this out to two effective strangers, and the text never addresses this action of his as wrong/illegal.  (And Loren is supposedly a lawyer!  Though idk, maybe he’s a patent lawyer or something.  We get zero details about his job, aside from the fact that he apparently has one.)
• In other Jim news, at one point, in reference to Loren, he says he’ll “never know why she decided to marry a man she didn’t even know, unless it was because she felt she had the whip hand.”  He then goes on to add (wistfully?), “Zaida was always a great one for the whip hand”—which frankly makes me wonder about the nature of their relationship.  👀  (In all honesty, Jim does kind of give off the vibe that he could be into femdom, pfft.  So sorry it didn’t work out for you, dude; better luck next time, I guess.)
• Loren tells “Zaida” that they’re going on a (minimum!) two-year honeymoon down to South America, which—in hindsight—makes the six-month honeymoon mentioned in “Love For the Asking” look like amateur hour.  Were obscenely long honeymoons just more of a thing with the upper class back then?  (For that matter, are they still a thing with the upper class now?)  Truly, reading it today, that might be even more fantastical to me than the amnesia.
• Mrs. Stephens takes “Zaida” out to shop for a wedding dress, and pointedly suggests a color other than white (the implication being that she isn’t “pure” enough to wear it).  “Zaida” ends up with a pale pink gown, which—slut-shaming aside—actually sounds pretty cool.  I always like it when someone does something different from the standard white, partly because the so-called “traditional” white wedding isn’t really that traditional at all.  Traditionally, brides wore blue (due to its association with the Virgin Mary); it was only after Queen Victoria got married in white in 1840 that that color really took off as a trend.
• Despite my issues with this story, I’ll still probably give Peggy Gaddis another try, if only in the interest of fairness.  I suspect I have another story of hers within my (steadily-growing) collection, or else something is available through the various digitized archives out there.  I’ll have to check to be sure, though.
• EDIT:  It turns out that in addition to Thegoodbadbook reviewing Gaddis’ second novel, Vintage Nurse Romance Novels has reviewed a number of her later—you guessed it—nurse romances.  On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only one bothered by the (apparently long-standing) issues within her stories, but on the other hand, this makes me significantly less eager to give her another try.  :/

 

Anyway, I’ll now end with this lovely, two-page title illustration by Clinton Spooner (coincidentally the same artist who illustrated the previously-linked-to “Love For the Asking”):

While I’m not a fan of the story, I admittedly am envious of how comfy the heroine looks, and I also like the hero’s shoes.  <3

Tagged: 1930s, AMNESIA, girl alone, peggy gaddis, pulp, romance, short stories