You’re a 1700s teenager, an English noblewoman. You have beauty, education, and your whole life ahead of you. You dream about your future – a future made of luxury and good manners and society. But your father has other ideas and arranges your marriage to a rich, horrid sixty-year-old earl.
And then, you lift up your eyes and you look where you wouldn’t ever have imagined looking; at the groom who looks after the horses in your stables. You observe him. He’s a grown man, ‘though young – and so handsome. He’s also an underling – a servant. He has a secret: you’ve been smart enough to discover it, and you can now use it to your advantage. So, what do you do? Do you marry the sixty-year-old without question, coming to terms with your trophy-wife destiny? Or… Or. The circumstance that brings Jamie Fraser to break his voluntary celibacy for only the second time during the twenty years apart from Claire is called Geneva Dunsany. She looks for him. She wants to force him to spend the night with her, determined not to allow the old Earl of Ellesmere to take her maidenhood. Jamie refuses. He tries to sneak away from the situation. He’s not attracted to that spoiled girl, and he’s not looking for problems. But she blackmails him. The blackmail’s slightly different in the book (where Geneva intercepts a letter from Jenny – it is forbidden to Jamie, given that he’s still a prisoner, to have private correspondence – and she threatens to reveal the contents of it to her father, Lord Dunsany), compared to the TV adaptation, where Geneva extracts the information about Red Jamie from Lord Melton, Lord John’s brother, threatening to reveal who “MacKenzie” really is to her mother, still shocked by her son’s death in the battle of Prestonpans.
But the gist of it is the same: Geneva has a card to play. And she does. And wins the hand. From Jamie’s point of view, both in the TV episode set in Helwater (the fourth of Season 3) and the book (Voyager), which the entire season is based on, the night with Geneva is a complex of conflicting feelings. Is he attracted to Geneva? Not at all. Would he have courted her of his own free will? Of course not. Does he appreciate her? No, he thinks she’s a spoiled brat and a danger to him and everyone at Lallybroch. However… when he enters her room, and he takes off his clothes and he touches her, his senses overcome him. He doesn’t love her, that’s sure. But he wants her, right then. The TV adaptation keeps quite a few of the original back-and-forth comments, which is always good for book-fans. But there’s a change from the novel: Ron Moore and his team have decided to cut out the most divisive passage of the sex scene. The moment when Jamie deflowers Geneva, to be specific. For in the book, at that point, the unthinkable suddenly becomes reality: after having forced him to be there, having blackmailed him to convince him to join her in her room, after having urged him to get naked and to lie in bed with her, after having kissed and touched him, Geneva panics. After the foreplay, when Jamie gets on top of her and starts to enter her – trying to be as gentle as he can manage to be – she tells him that he’s too big. That he’s hurting her. And she tells him to stop. Jamie’s appalled. He tries to calm her down. He slows down, trying to cajole her. But then he closes the matter: when she screams, he puts a hand on her mouth and enters her. He did what she asked for, he’s complied with her request. And he’s a young man, too, touching a woman’s body for the very first time after four years of celibacy. A few thrusts and he reaches a mind-numbing climax.
So, did Jamie rape Geneva? Of course not. Once he’s come to his senses, he asks her – as he does in the series – if he’s hurt her. He cleans her between her thighs, gently. And Geneva makes advances toward him. She wants more sex. And more. She wants the whole night. After the shock, she moves on. There’s actually thousands of readers who, in the quarter of a century between the first publishing of Voyager and today, did condemn Jamie’s character, crying out for rape, for a “no” is a “no” and it has to be obeyed in any case, and any intercourse may switch from consensual to violent at any moment, if one wants to end it and the other carries on. Let’s be serious: no, Jamie doesn’t rape Geneva – Diana Gabaldon even stated in a Facebook post, a few years ago, that if anyone should be considered a rapist in this situation, that would be Geneva, for it is she who is forcing Jamie to have sex against his will. (It is obviously a paradoxical way to explain a complex situation, for of course Geneva doesn't literally rape Jamie, either). But such a scene was impossible to bring to screen. It would only have created a flame of useless controversy. TV-Geneva’s first time is much sweeter, then, in the TV adaptation. Jamie guides her with gestures and words that do not exist in the literary version (the intertwined hands on his chest, to teach her how to touch him; the “now move with me” clue, once inside her…), almost touching.
Even in the book, of course, Jamie treats Geneva with respect, saying kind words to her. But the TV adaptation makes the scene more delicate, providing Geneva’s character with a vulnerability that makes her even likeable – for example, when she breathlessly admits that she doesn’t know what to do, explaining to him that her decision is an act of self-determination. The TV scene is extremely graphic, and sexy. Jamie has sex with Geneva in a passionate way. But make no mistake: the series remains very faithful to the book. What’s happening to Jamie, even if physically overwhelming, is against his will. He’s not comfortable with what he’s doing. And in the TV adaptation there’s a specific detail: Jamie never smiles. Not once. Not even when he lies beside Geneva, just after the orgasm (he does close his eyes in that moment, though). His face is filled with gravity. In addition to this, just two little details more. First, how much time do Jamie and Geneva spend together? In the book he walks into the room in the middle of the night and stays for at least five to six hours; he gets away just before dawn. After the first intercourse they have sex at least two more times: between the second and the third is Geneva’s declaration (“I love you”) and Jamie’s consequent brief dissertation about the difference between love and sex. When he returns to his bed in the stables, Diana Gabaldon writes that he feels “empty of everything”. In the series the matter is left to the audience’s imagination. After the first time, Jamie and Geneva speak a bit, lying on the bed next to each other, then sitting on the bed. The scene ends on Jamie’s close-up: he’s clearly thinking about Claire. What then? Did he possibly get up, get dressed and leave? Or has he been called back to bed by Geneva for a second round? Everyone can think of it as they wish. The other significant detail is about the time available to Jamie and Geneva to build their relationship. In the book she gets infatuated with him immediately after having met him, and for months she asks him to escort her in her riding. Furthermore, between the blackmail and the night together there’s a few days interval, and Jamie actually urges her to choose a safe day, to reduce the chance of pregnancy. In the TV adaptation, conversely, Geneva returns home to Helwater with her family after a vacation in Italy, and immediately she’s informed that she’s going to marry Ellesmere and that the arranged marriage will take place in two weeks. So the blackmail is sudden: “Come to my room tonight,” she says to Jamie, barely a couple of days after having seen him for the very first time. This has an impact on the timing of the night at hand. In the book we are in May, 1757. Wee Willie’s birth happens on a stone-cold night in January, 1758. In the TV adaptation everything’s earlier: the night is set somewhere at the end of the year before, 1756, as stated by the close-caption. So the TV writers have decided to anticipate Jamie and Geneva’s encounter - and Willie’s birthdate - by six months. © insideoutlander [English version proofread by Kath at www.gofoolproof.com] More articles in English? Please press here!
