The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), Taylor Jenkins Reid
LGBTQIA+
Summary: One of Hollywood’s greatest legends summons a struggling writer for a final tell-all to set the record straight about who amongst her many lovers was her one true love.
Review Link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4981011136
Full review: Roughly 2,408 years ago, Plato wrote of a Symposium (a drinking party for artists and philosophers in Ancient Greece). This particular Symposium produced a series of texts that are studied across different courses in schools and universities worldwide today.
A poignant text from that evening is the Myth of Aristophanes, a farcical creation myth detailing the origins of man. According to the playwright Aristophanes, humans began as an intersex species with multiple sets of limbs. They aggrieved the gods in a display of great pride by attempting to climb Mt. Olympus. As punishment, Zeus cast them down and cleaved them in two, birthing our current anatomical state (fewer arms, legs, and eyes) and the two sexes. In addition to this, humanity became cursed, doomed eternally to forever search for their other half, their “soulmate”. This union the soul could only be found through Eros, in love or lust.
Aristophanes meant this tale as a drunken joke, yet today we cling fervently to the notion of the soulmate. In cultures where we have the freedom to choose relationships, the majority of people believe in the existence of romantic soulmates.
There are the other forms soulmates can take, especially for those who de-prioritize romantic love as a driving force in their lives, or who may practice non-hierarchical forms of nonmonogamy, like relationship anarchy. As the Washington Post states: “Biologically speaking, close friendships are a type of soul mate too…This ability we have to make someone special — our brains can do it again and again. That’s why we can have more than one soul mate in our lives. (Lervine, 2022).
In offices above us all, companies from dating apps to food companies capitalize heavily on this same notion to sell products. “What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons,” says Donald Draper in the very first episode of Mad Men.
No matter our personal stances on the soulmate, it is the latter that has the biggest influence, all stemming from that drunken farcical speech Aristophanes made. The billion dollar industry of love powers media, social mores, and consumer markets. Its mark on literature is poignant, and for authors like Taylor Jenkins Reid is how they have found success.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo epitomizes this obsession with love, in an Americana-laced tale about an Old Hollywood star who reveals the secret she’s been hiding most of her life: her true love hasn’t been any of her seven spouses, but a woman.
The titular character is an amalgamation of our world’s legendary screen sirens - Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth. She’s beautiful, unscrupulous, and has a rags to riches story that takes her to Hollywood where she skyrockets to success.
At the beginning of book we’re introduced to Evelyn post-career, as an elderly woman who reaches out to a little known reporter named Monique and offers her an interview. Her words suggest a tone of finality that indicate terminal illness, and a desire to get some things off her chest. From there, she begins to recount her life, experiences, her seven husbands, and the woman she hid beneath it all: Celia St. James.
Two connections are made clear in Evelyn’s contacting Monique, who is a talented but unknown quantity. The first, is that the two share similarities as women of color, with Evelyn being Cuban and white passing and having hidden her identity during her career to attain stardom. Monique on the other hand is Caucasian and Black, and proud of her biracial heritage. This pride in the seeming duality of her race is something Evelyn assumes wille make Monique an inherently open-minded person when she reveals the truth about her relationship with Celia.
Monique does not inherently understand. She instinctively assumes Evelyn is a lesbian, much to Evelyn’s chagrin despite her own numerous passages stating that she is “biracial, not black”.
As Evelyn recounts the history of her career and husbands, readers are interestingly treated to descriptions of men she loved, and men she abhorred alike. She meets men who use her, abuse her, love her, and idolize her all alike. Out of the seven, the general point of the book is that Celia is her one true love.
Celia is a fellow actress and co-star of Evelyn’s and a lesbian. While far from unscrupulus as Evelyn, she does not possess a careless attitude about social norms of the time. That said, Celia possesses a seemingly naive attitude about what will happen if they are exposed and their lives subject to ruin.
The result is a tumultuous relationship that is depicted as romantic. Both maintain beard relationships at various points, and Celia explodes into emotionally abusive tirades. Neither defines solid boundaries about what they’re willing to do or not do for their relationship, nor do they simply walk away when they feel disrespected. As with many Classic Hollywood movies, Celia is portrayed as the passionate lover who just cannot stand to see her femme fatale behaving badly. Her cruelty is justified as romantic, while Evelyn’s actions can be justified as simply doing what she has to for their relationship, or reviled for doing Celia wrong.
While poorly studied, data shows intimate partner violence among LGBTQ partnerships is staggering. “Life-time prevalence of IPV in LGB couples appeared to be similar to or higher than in heterosexual ones: 61.1% of bisexual women, 43.8% of lesbian women, 37.3% of bisexual men, and 26.0% of homosexual men experienced IPV during their life, while 35.0% of heterosexual women and 29.0% of heterosexual men experienced IPV. (Rollè, Giardina, Caldarera et al.)
For the majority of readers of the book this relationship is viewed as simply passionate. Celia’s insults, degradation, name-calling, and devaluement is something that can be forgiven in the name of love, or simply doesn’t count because Celia and Evelyn are both women.
On the Multiamory podcast, guest speaker and OkCupid Dating Coach Damona Hoffman joined the shows hosts to promote her upcoming book F the Fairy Tale: Rewrite the Dating Myths and Live Your Own Love Story. Among those myths she detailed the soulmate narrative, which she believes prevents people from pursuing relationships as they do not expect meeting people to mirror the feelings Don Draper and advertising executives have described in movies, advertising campaigns, and books. Show host Jase Lindgren also echoed the concerns growing numbers of relationships therapists and psychologists have stated with this idea today, which is that many people adhering to this idea are inclined to stay in relationships that are emotionally or physically abusive because they believe they have found their soulmate and won’t find another. As Jenkins Reid writes shows us, that’s all that matters.
For the rest of the tale the two continue to part and come back to the each other, with Evelyn flying between men. She does find love in a way that is troublesome. Evelyn marries one of her best friends, gives birth to a child, and has perhaps one of the most stable relationships in the book–but its completely discounted as meaningless because he’s not Celia. He is a bisexual man who has been with her from the beginning, has been the only one who did not judge her, and has been the only character to treat her with respect throughout the entire book. Their love is one that is real, whole, and for those of us that believe in multiple soulmates, fulfills the criteria.
While the book has been well received, it doesn’t always sit well in its representation of queer or BIPOC individuals. Evelyn’s character is the walking embodiment of harmful stereotypes about bisexual women. She is portrayed as hypersexual, narcissistic, manipulative, persistently unhappy, and unable to maintain a monogamous relationship. She is consistently questioned about whether she is really bisexual, attached to mostly men, and seemingly only finds the resolution to some of these things through Celia. Add to this her description of being Cuban contains frequent reference to her body type, which is at odds with beauty standards of Latino culture (or even white beauty standards of the 50s) and the characterization becomes a fetishization of these aspects of her character.
These instances are seen again whenever characters who are not white or straight are present. Monique has cringeworthy passages alluding to her status as biracial. These reflections are indicative of an author who does not spend significant time engaging with the culture or communities they are writing about, and is producing work that is not intended to be consumed by them.
You can find The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo here via its publisher Simon & Schuster, likely at your local library, or perhaps your local bookstore.
Citations:
2/5: Re-writing this review after a monumental simmer as I finally get around to adding it to my blog https://thevisibilityarchives.tumblr.c
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