Books: Dark Side of Love

LOVE IS A WOUND (467 pp.)—Worth Tuttle Hedden—Crown ($3.75).

If Ora Fanning hadn’t been so passionate deep down, it would hardly have mattered that she was so prim & proper on the outside. In the North Carolina of the 1880’s, where a lady wore her skirts to the ground and refused a suitor twice before deigning to accept him, Ora bounced solemnly after the Methodist minister, pretending to be engrossed in good works, but caring mainly about his looks. Preacher David Humiston found Ora’s trim figure as attractive as her piety but, as he sententiously declared, he could not take a wife until God had prompted his hand. When he met Ora’s pretty, light-tongued sister Ellen, he forgot about God’s prompting. Ellen got the wedding ring, Ora a gold thimble for consolation.

An ordinary woman would have sulked a bit and then set out for new conquests. But not Ora. She clung to brother David and sister Ellen with parasitic humility. When they had babies, she came for long visits to help around the house. Soon she was there to stay, slavishly waiting upon and subtly corrupting her brother-in-law. Still prim & proper, she cast her body before him, and while David did not succumb, he was vain enough to enjoy her worship. By hints he urged her not to marry, and she was delighted to obey.

The later years were a nightmare. David and Ellen lived in the mistaken belief that they were responsible for Ora’s misery. Old and haggard, Ora degenerated into a hysterical creature whose violent “attacks” could be eased only when David let her nestle against his shoulder. In the end, Ora survived them both; as David, at 76, prepared to die. she whispered her love and her loyalty: ”Till death do us part.”

Love Is a Wound is too talky, though much of the talk is real and lilts with soft Southern music. If it had been trimmed and tightened it would have been a very fine novel indeed. But even as it is, the book is an honest and sometimes dramatic picture of love turning in upon itself. Novelist Hedden, herself a Southerner, writes with authority of the post-Reconstruction South. More important, she writes with authority of Ora, David and Ellen, demonstrating through their troubles that the tyranny of the weak can be as oppressive as that of the strong.