Locker Talk: A Knight in Shining Armor, by Jude Deveraux ©1989
Part 1: A time travelling romance in which beauty, thinness, and an empty head lead to... love?
Locker Talk reviews romance novels from the late 1980s and ‘90s in the context of purity culture, sex education, healthy relationships, and consent.
Content warning: In today’s essay, fatphobia, the BMI, male aggression, and a horrendous quote about suicide enter the chat.
Read—or skip, I’m not offended—to the end for a crowdsourcing request. Let’s read kinder romance!
Accurate or not, I remember A Knight in Shining Armor pulling my underdeveloped brain into the world of mass market romance novels, a little like Dougless Montgomery’s tears call Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck living in 1564 C.E., into the twentieth century.
A Knight in Shining Armor doesn’t quite fit the theme of this essay series, since it wasn’t my Pentecostal friend, Liv,1 who slipped the tattered blue and gold book into my backpack from her locker. Instead, my older sister dug it from a closet where she and her new husband kept their books.
“Don’t let Mom find it,” Kate warned with a secretive smile.
“What kind of stupid name is this?” I said to J as I re-read the back cover of A Knight in Shining Armor, the 1989 printing fresh from my Thriftbooks package. “Dougless? L-e-s-s? She is out of Doug?”
“Formerly Ofdoug,” J quipped, and I laughed.
Our heroine’s name is the most benign aspect of A Knight in Shining Armor. The most bizarre, including the plot itself, might be that Dougless, in third-person limited point-of-view, fat shames her boyfriend’s 13-year-old daughter in Chapter 1, sentence 1.
Dougless Montgomery sat in the back seat of the car, Robert and his pudgy thirteen-year-old daughter, Gloria, in the front.
I immediately dislike the MFC. What 26-year-old adult woman who expects a marriage proposal calls her boyfriend’s 13-year-old daughter pudgy?
Sentences 2 and 3 continue this trend, juxtaposing Gloria’s reported pudginess with her opposite, Dougless:
As usual, Gloria was eating.
Gloria is thirteen. Teens are hungry, Dougless.
Dougless shifted her slim legs to try to make herself more comfortable around Gloria’s luggage.
Dougless’s fat shaming, disgruntled attitude, and misdirected anger continue. If you’ve read the book, you know that Robert has taken terrible advantage of Dougless financially. As you read, you might have begged her to smack Robert’s smug face, call her rich father, and return to the United States to mature a little more before trying romance again.
It isn’t Gloria’s fault that Robert is a dick. It isn’t Gloria’s fault that Robert makes Dougless—a schoolteacher—pay for an insanely expensive trip. It isn’t Gloria’s fault that Dougless has as much spine as Patrick Star.
By paragraph twelve, Dougless reveals Gloria’s height and weight:
Sometimes Dougless thought it was working because she and Gloria were cordial, even friendly to each other when they were alone. But the minute Robert appeared, Gloria changed into a whining, lying brat. She sat in Robert’s lap, all five foot two inches, one hundred and forty pounds of her, and wailed that She was mean.
Gloria’s parents are divorced. She is getting to know her dad. Wanting his attention is normal. Besides, even by the standards of the colonialist, racist BMI,2 Gloria barely hovers over the divide between “healthy” and “overweight.”
I don’t think any pediatrician in their right mind would have told Robert to watch Gloria’s intake. She’s thirteen, and her body is changing, as bodies do at that age. A doctor might have encouraged fun movement. Maybe dear old Dad teaching her to ride a bike? Tossing a baseball in the backyard?
Dougless would have fed Gloria lettuce all day and handcuffed her to a treadmill.
Gloria dodged a fucking bullet.
I turned fourteen the summer Kate was married, and I likely read A Knight in Shining Armor before Kate’s first anniversary. A scant 3 inches taller than Gloria, I may have been about 140 pounds. The previous school year, Mom sent me to school with Slim Fast shakes for lunch for a month. I lost 13 pounds that I didn’t need to lose, a feat that exposed me to the overwhelming praise a woman receives for weight loss.
More than education. More than a career. More than creating a human.
When I revisit pictures of myself at that age, I struggle to understand. I realize that it wasn’t me who had body dysmorphia, not yet. It was Mom.
My dietician ran a body composition analysis at my first appointment this summer. Her fancy scale determined that I was “solidly built.”
“It’s rare to see this much muscle mass on someone your size!” she said.
Mom was also “solidly built.” She was pure muscle, and she’d had six kids, but society told her that her body shouldn’t show it.
Mom didn’t see her body type in the books she read, either.
If Jude Deveraux’s goal was to write a book that would make every reader feel shame about their looks, she succeeded.
Only a few pages in, I checked the Googles to question if the author had ever issued an apology for such blatant fatphobia. After all, I might have given her a little grace if A Knight in Shining Armor was her first published work.
It was number thirteen.
My search for an apology turned up nothing.
That was before I came to the most offensive line yet, in Chapter 3, on page 51 of this edition.
[Dougless] looked into the mirror and thought that if all women had to face the world with the face God gave them, there would be a great increase in female suicides.
What an astonishingly careless line to include in a romance novel reportedly “hailed worldwide as one of the most romantic novels of all time.”3
To date, I have yet to finish the book. I am struggling, friends, and this is more than brain fog. Other reviews critique dialogue, the writing itself, the empty slate that is Dougless, the odd ending. And, of course, the book and its author retain many loyal fans to this day.
When I’ve read a little more, I’ll write about toxic romantic tropes prevalent in the book, the ones that portray problematic male behavior as strength, leadership, and sexiness.
Every woman has had a man trap her against a wall, a corner, in her chair, with nothing but his height, his size, and an arm blocking her path, right?
But for now, I’m thinking about the ways books like this one contribute to the culture that has tortured us and ruined our health for decades.
In the past week, The Biggest Loser has been a hot topic on social media, thanks to Netflix’s new documentary, Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser. I’ve been a little extra active on Threads myself, reading survivor stories and sharing comments.
The Biggest Loser didn’t create fatphobia; racism did that.4 The show brought fatphobia to the public consciousness as entertainment. We were already laughing at fat celebrities, but never had a show offered so many strangers as fodder for public consumption and shaming, and it was able to do so thanks to the foundation laid by decades of blatant and insidious messaging that:
Fat is a personal failure.
Fat is to be avoided at all costs.
All you need to know about a person is communicated by the space their body takes up.
Fuck that bullshit.
One of our many contemporary societal ills is the continuous targeting of insecure and vulnerable teens to sell diet and beauty products. And why are our teens so susceptible?
Because we were. Our parents were. Our grandparents were.
Because the messages have been everywhere for our entire lives.
Even slipped into our beloved romance novels.
Thank you for reading this installment of Locker Talk! That first sentence of Chapter 1 knocked all thoughts of romance out of my head. Soon, I’ll get back on track with the theme of this series—re-reading romance novels of my youth through the lens of sex education and purity culture.
I would love to crowdsource healthy alternatives to books like A Knight in Shining Armor. I’ve encountered a handful of queer romance authors on Threads who include size diversity in their books! I haven’t read romance in a long, long time, but I now have a handful of newer reads by queer authors in my TBR.
I’ve yet to read the ones I’ve purchased, so I have no personal experience with their content.
Therefore, please share in the comments:
Who are your favorite less-problematic, contemporary romance authors who create diverse characters?
Names of personal acquaintances and family members have been changed.
According to Jude Deveraux’s website.
“Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings, NYU Press, 2019 – Book Review by Hannah Carlan. Find the book at Bookshop.org.