Writing Backward:
Modern Models in Historical Fiction
BY ANNE SCOTT MACLEOD
I expect we can all agree that historical fiction
should be good fiction and good history. If we leap over the first briar patch
by calling good fiction an “interesting narrative with well-developed
characters,” we are still left with the question of what is good history.
Alas, there are nearly as many thorns here as among the briars. The German
historian Leopold von Ranke said that writing history was saying “what really
happened” — but according to whom? Writers of history select, describe, and
explain historical evidence — and thereby interpret. Not only will the
loser’s version of the war never match the winner’s, but historical
interpretations of what happened, and why, are subject to endless revision over
time. A transforming event of the past — say, the American Revolution — can
be understood as a social, economic, or intellectual movement; as avoidable or
inevitable; as a tragedy of misunderstanding or a triumph of liberty.
Historical revisionism makes its way into historical
fiction, of course, including that written for children, usually in response to
changing social climates. Esther Forbes wrote Johnny Tremain, her famous
novel of the American Revolution, in the early 1940s, when the US had recently
entered the maelstrom of World War II. Forbes’s story took the traditional,
Whig view that the Revolution was a struggle for political freedom, fought, as
one of her characters said, so that “a man can stand up.” The parallel
Forbes saw with a contemporary war against political tyranny was implied, but
clear. A generation later, James and Christopher Collier’s My Brother Sam
Is Dead (1974) and Robert Newton Peck’s Hang for Treason (1976) saw
the same history through a different lens. Writing in a time of passionate
division over a modern war, these authors looked back to the American Revolution
and saw, not idealism, but the coercion, hypocrisy, cruelty, and betrayal that
are part of any war, in any country. In the Colliers’ story, the success of
the Revolution had to be weighed against the suffering it inflicted on ordinary
people: “I keep thinking that there might have been another way, beside war,
to achieve the same end.” Peck looked behind the heroic legend of Ethan Allen
and his band of Green Mountain Boys and found more greed for land than hunger
for liberty, and renegade tactics as barbarous as any tyrant’s. In Peck’s
telling, Allen’s brand of irregular warfare was terrorism, not a noble
struggle for liberty.
Revisionist history is still history, subject to normal
standards of demonstrable historical evidence and sound reasoning. While the
novels I’ve named approach the American Revolution from different points of
view, they are firmly grounded in documented evidence. Different as they are in
emphasis and attitude, all three stay within the bounds of eighteenth-century
American social history. None ignores known historical realities to accommodate
political ideology.
A good many recent historical novels for children do.
Children’s literature, historical as well as contemporary, has been
politicized over the past thirty years; new social sensibilities have changed
the way Americans view the past. Feminist re-readings of history and insistence
by minorities on the importance — and the difference — of their experience
have made authors and publishers sensitive to how their books portray people
often overlooked or patronized in earlier literature. The traditional
concentration on boys and men has modified; more minorities are included, and
the experience of ordinary people — as opposed to movers and shakers gets more
attention. American historical literature, including children’s, takes a less
chauvinistic approach to American history than it once did, revising the
traditional chronicle of unbroken upward progress.
However, amid the cheers for this enlightenment are
occasional murmurs of doubt — and there ought to be more. Too much historical
fiction for children is stepping around large slabs of known reality to tell
pleasant but historically doubtful stories. Even highly respected authors snip
away the less attractive pieces of the past to make their narratives meet
current social and political preferences. Many of these novels have been given
high marks: “an authentic story,” “fine historical fiction,” say the
reviews. Many are on recommended lists, and some have won awards. As fiction,
the accolades may be earned; as history, they raise some questions.
Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall
won the Newbery Medal in 1985. It is a simple, warm-hearted tale, as popular
with children as with adults, which cannot be said of every Newbery winner. The
setting is a nineteenth-century farm on the American prairie, though exactly
where and when is unspecified. Since there is no mention of farm machinery, and
since there is a reference to plowing a new field in the prairie, the period
would seem to be the 1870s or 1880s. Sarah, an unmarried young woman, answers a
newspaper ad and travels from Maine to the Midwest to stay with a widowed man
and his two children for a month. The understanding is that if all goes well,
she and the father will marry. If not, she will return to Maine. She comes alone
and stays in the house with no other woman there.
The realities of nineteenth-century social mores are at
odds with practically all of this. It was unusual (though not impossible) for a
woman to travel such distances alone, and much more than unusual for her to stay
with a man not related to her without another woman in the house. Had she done
so, however, it is unlikely that she could return home afterward with her
reputation intact. MacLachlan has said that her story is based on a family
experience a couple of generations ago, and I have no reason to question that.
Even so, the story as told is highly uncharacteristic of its time and place.
Besides bypassing the usual social strictures of the
time, the novel also glides lightly over a basic reality of farm life in the
last century: work. More than work, in fact — toil, a word that has all
but disappeared from modern vocabularies. Hamlin Garland, who grew up on farms
in Wisconsin and Iowa in the 1860s and 1870s, wrote about his experience in A
Son of the Middle Border. Again and again, Garland describes the constant
labor of a farm family’s life. A farm asked a great deal of boys and men, yet
women’s work, Garland thought, was even more relentless. “Being a farmer’s
wife in those days meant laboring outside any regulation of the hours of toil .
. . a slavish round with never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of
escape from the tugging hands of children and the need of mending and washing
clothes . . . from the churn to the stove, from the stove to the bedchamber, and
from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day after day, year after year, rising
at daylight or before, and going to her bed only after the evening dishes were
washed and the stockings and clothing mended for the night.” Even when
machinery began to lighten the men’s work, “the drudgery of the
housewife’s dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen.”
While no one expects a child’s book to be a litany of
toil, work was so central to daily life on a farm that one does expect to see it
treated as more than incidental. As Laura Ingalls Wilder tells her Little House
stories, the work people did are events in a child’s life, as indeed they
were; the cheese-making and the building of a new door were as memorable for
Laura as Pa’s fiddling. In Sarah, Plain and Tall, on the other hand,
work is named but not described; somehow it is manageable enough to give Sarah
leisure to lie in the fields admiring nature or making daisy chains for the
children. And there is an interchange of jobs between Sarah and the
farmer-father that is more New Age than nineteenth century. Papa bakes bread;
Sarah helps to reshingle a roof and learns, under Papa’s tutelage, to plow.
While none of this was impossible, neither was it typical. Division of labor on
a farm was a matter of practicality as well as custom. Papa would not often have
been in the house enough to tend bread, and Sarah would have plenty to do
without taking up plowing. As for farm children, their work was essential and by
no means light. As one woman wrote, “Sometimes I would lie down on my sack and
want to die. . . . [But] it was instilled in us that work was necessary.
Everybody worked; it was a art of life, for there was no life without it.”
Avi’s True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was
a Newbery Honor Book in 1991, praised enthusiastically in many reviews. A
“thrilling tale,” one said, and that’s true — it’s a fine vicarious
adventure story. It is also preposterous. The reader is asked to believe that in
1832, a thirteen-year-old girl boards a sailing ship to go from England to
America, joins the crew of hardbitten sailors (all with hearts more or less of
gold), performs surpassingly difficult feats of physical strength and daring
under the eye of a villainous captain who hates her, and not only survives
(sexually unsullied, of course) but becomes captain of the ship. Home at last,
she tries out conventional life with her parents for a week or so and finds it
restrictive unsurprisingly — so she climbs out of the window and returns to
her old ship as crew.
This is great fun, if you are twelve or thirteen, or if
you read it as fantasy, but I have to wonder about the reviewers. Kirkus
called the book “well researched” — on ships, perhaps, but not, I think,
on probability theory, or even human development. Unless she falls off a mast or
a spar or a bowsprit, Charlotte will be fourteen, then fifteen . . . and then
what?
Catherine, Called Birdie
(a 1995 Newbery Honor Book), by Karen Cushman, is a brave excursion into
medieval social history through the diary of a fourteen-year old who questions
nearly everything that governed the lives of medieval people in general and of
women in particular. Birdie’s world seems real enough — it is rough and
dirty and uncomfortable most of the time, even among the privileged classes. Her
feisty independence is perhaps believable, as is her objection to being “sold
like parcel” in marriage to add to her father’s status or land. However,
those were the usual considerations in marriage among the land-holding classes,
for sons as well as daughters, and Birdie’s repeated resistance might have
drawn much harsher punishment than she got. The fifteenth-century Paston letters
record what happened to a daughter who opposed her mother about a proposed
match: “She has since Easter [three months before this letter] been beaten
once in the week or twice, sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in
two or three places.” As the historian of the Paston papers points out, “The
idea that children . . . had any natural rights was almost impossible to a
medieval mind. Children were just chattels, . . . entirely at the direction and
disposal of their fathers.” If this attitude applied to sons, it applied even
more to daughters.
Cushman sticks to historical reality while Birdie
considers and discards the few alternatives to marriage she can think of —
running away, becoming a goalkeeper, joining a monastery. But once her heroine
agrees (for altruistic reasons) to her father’s final, awful choice for her,
Cushman quickly supplies an exit. The intended husband dies, so Birdie can marry
his son, who, fortunately, is heir to the land and thereby meets her father’s
purposes. The son is, of course, young and educated where his father was old,
ugly, and illiterate. Even granting that life is unpredictable, so fortuitous an
escape strains the framework. In fairness, I think Cushman knew this; she just
flinched at consigning her likable character to her likely fate.
And therein lies the difficulty I find with these —
and many other — historical novels of the last twenty years. They evade the
common realities of the societies they write about. In the case of novels about
girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer choices than their
cultures would in fact have offered. To do that, they set aside the social mores
of the past as though they were minor afflictions, small obstacles, easy — and
painless — for an independent mind to overcome.
To see authors vaulting blithely over the barriers
women lived with for so long brings to mind Anna Karenina. Anna’s is
the story these contemporary writers don’t want to tell. When she left her
husband and child for Vronsky, Anna suffered all the sanctions her society
imposed on women who defied its rules. Whether the reader, or for that matter,
Tolstoy, believed that the rules were unfair or the sanctions too harsh is
irrelevant. Tolstoy was telling the story of a woman who lived when and where
she lived, who made the choices she made and who was destroyed by the
consequences.
It isn’t that contemporary writers of historical
fiction do not research the topics and the times they have chosen. They do, and
they often include information about those facts and about the sources they have
used. Yet many narratives play to modern sensibilities. Their protagonists
experience their own societies as though they were time-travelers, noting
racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and outmoded belief as outsiders, not as
people of and in their cultures. So Birdie, though she approaches her first
experience of Jews with all the outlandish prejudices of her society, overcomes
them instantly. So Sarah insists on wearing overalls when it suits her, and her
future husband accepts not only this, but all her nonconformities, without
question, let alone objection. A ship crew’s acquiescence to a
thirteen-year-old girl’s decision to join them as a working sailor — in 1832
— hardly needs comment.
And so, too, Ann Rinaldi’s novel of the 1692 Salem
witch hysteria (A Break with Charity [1992]), in which all the
significant characters are outsiders, one way or another, and all hold views
closer to twentieth- than to seventeenth-century norms. No sympathetic character
in this novel really believes in witches, though many seventeenth-century people
did. Cotton Mather — who indeed took witchcraft seriously — appears once,
wrapped in a black cloak, an onlooker at one of the hangings and the embodiment
of evil. Puritanism was, and is, an ambiguous, complex, enduring influence on
American culture; to picture it as simply evil or alien is ahistorical.
Didacticism dies hard in children’s literature.
Today’s publishers, authors, and reviewers often approach historical fiction
for children as the early nineteenth century did — as an opportunity to
deliver messages to the young. Bending historical narrative to modern models of
social behavior, however, makes for bad history, and the more specific the
model, the harder it is to avoid distorting historical reality. The current
pressure to change old stereotypes into “positive images” for young readers
is not only insistent, but highly specific about what is the desirable image,
and often untenable. If the only way a female protagonist can be portrayed is as
strong, independent, and outspoken, or, to take a different example, if slaves
must always be shown as resistant to authority, and if these qualities have to
be overt, distortion becomes inevitable. Betty Sue Cummings’s novel about the
American Civil War, Hew against the Grain (1977), establishes her
heroine’s strength as a credible result of wartime conditions. Her picture of
slavery, however, is less easily reconciled with history. How many slaves this
Virginia family owns is not clear, but the four described in any detail are all
free-thinking and outspoken“Elijah neither looked nor acted like a slave”
— and the two younger ones, at least, can read. The odds against such a
situation in Virginia on the eve of the Civil War were considerable. More
important, however politically acceptable it is, this kind of idealization
glosses over the real price slaves paid for slavery.
What is at stake here is truth. It can’t, of course,
be true, and wasn’t, that all or even most slaves and women rebelled openly,
let alone successfully, against the legal and social limitations put upon them.
Moreover, resistance takes a variety of forms, not all of them straightforward,
some of them not even conscious. A literature about the past that makes overt
rebellion seem nearly painless and nearly always successful indicts all those
who didn’t rebel: it implies, subtly but effectively, that they were
responsible for their own oppression.
Strength, too, has more than one face. As Louisa May
Alcott judged it when she wrote Little Women, Mrs. March was a powerful
figure, well in control of herself and what the nineteenth century called the
“woman’s sphere.” Today’s feminism understandably disparages Marmee’s
kind of power, but that doesn’t change the fact that it existed. For writers
to impose twentieth century formula feminism on narratives set in the 1860s only
ensures that their readers will not learn what readers of Little Women
learn about the structures and strategies of nineteenth-century society.
Formulas deny the complexity of human experience and
often the reality of it as well. Most people in most societies are not rebels;
in part because the cost of nonconformity is more than they want to pay, but
also because as members of the society they share its convictions. Most people
are, by definition, not exceptional. Historical fiction writers who want their
protagonists to reflect twentieth-century ideologies, however, end by making
them exceptions to their cultures, so that in many a historical novel the reader
learns nearly nothing — or at least nothing sympathetic — of how the people
of a past society saw their world. Characters are divided into right — those
who believe as we do — and wrong; that is, those who believe something that we
now disavow. Such stories suggest that people of another time either did
understand or should have understood the world as we do now, an outlook that
quickly devolves into the belief that people are the same everywhere and in
every time, draining human history of its nuance and variety.
But people of the past were not just us in odd
clothing. They were people who saw the world differently; approached human
relationships differently; people for whom night and day, heat and cold, seasons
and work and play had meanings lost to an industrialized world. Even if human
nature is much the same over time, human experience, perhaps especially everyday
experience, is not. To wash these differences out of historical fictions is not
only a denial of historical truth, but a failure of imagination and
understanding that is as important to the present as to the past.
