History fail?
One of the questions that steepholm and I are looking at in The History Book is a potential problem for all writers of historical fiction which may be especially acute for writers of children's historical fiction - how to handle the depiction of beliefs widely held in the past and now considered unacceptable. Two ways of dealing with this problem are to present a 'sanitized past', with at least the main characters (or the sympathetic subset of those main characters) displaying an 'ahistorically liberal breadth of sensibility' and at the other extreme, 'seeming to encourage divisiveness today by perpetuating in fiction the past’s bitter divisions'. (Quotes from our proposal - elegance of expression steepholm's doing.)
Although there isn't really any way to fail fail in this -- I write with slightly gritted teeth -- I suspect most lovers of historical fiction will have their limits for how far ahistoricity can go before they want to start throwing things, and also suspect most people couldn't enjoy a long, painful discourse displaying racial or religious hatred in dialogue or narrative, no matter how accurate. But one sees that latter 'fail' quite rarely, while the former 'fail' is relatively common - especially when romance sneaks in and the all-too-regularly feisty heroine convinces traditional but loving father to let her marry the one her heart has chosen and not the one his pocket/pride has picked out for her. There are many books that avoid either fail, for example by creating a link between reader and protagonist in one or other way, which lets reader feel comfortable with relatively likely (historically) outcomes. (Thinking specifically but not exclusively of Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack and Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy with respect to the question of parentally-arranged marriage.)
It had never even occurred to me that one could fail in both directions simultaneously. Until I read a YA fantasy lent to me recently - I won't name the book, both because I enjoyed much of it and wouldn't feel right throwing around the f-word without lots of tedious disclaiming, and also because the author protested my use of 'historical fiction' in my review on Goodreads but remained very pleasant in doing so. (For the record, we're including historical fantasy and SFnal time-travel, and this book had a map of Europe and an historic character, so was historical enough for our purposes. But not set in Britain so won't be discussed in The History Book.)
Anyway, we're talking an invented kingdom around Lyon roughly in the 1500s. (I think - possibly late 1400s). The King had a long-standing relationship with a woman from 'the Moroccos' and had a son by her, before marrying a Christian woman and having another son - his heir. But no tension between illegitimate and legitimate sons, Muslim and Christian, dark-skinned and lighter - because there's apparently perfect tolerance of all races and religions in this little kingdom. Go them. But also historical Fail of the first sort. Except that King has recently gone a bit off the rails in many ways and declared first son his heir, former heir has gone into hiding, and is there ever protest. So we have protag's horror and shock at the courtiers (as nasty a group of courtiers as they generally are and then some) and others saying Bad, Bad Things about black, Muslim prince (Fail #1) AND have to listen to the Bad, Bad Things (Fail #2). At some length and first-hand. A reported B.B.T. kind of tickled me, because protag protested to her father that people had 'called him a pagan! They were talking about decent Christian women. I ... I couldn't believe it.' Or her father's rebuke of some apprentices: 'Let that be the very last time you malign a man on the grounds of his race, his creed, or the circumstances of his birth, boy.' But the dialogue is far from funny, and I really don't want to quote a lot of the 'black, pagan bastard' stuff in full. Even though we're seeing it through the perspective of the strangely unbigoted protagonist, we're still seeing it, and it's as repulsive as a stream of racial or religious hatred always is.
So, two Fails - one more than expected. But wait - I've found another one! There's a friendship depicted in the book between the prince and his -- companion -- which seems designed to invite shipping, so intense is it. I'd have thought that was the way things were going to go except that Friend is obviously intended for Protag. So anyway, at one point Prince comes in furious and horrified and can barely stand to tell Friend, Protag and her father that people are calling Friend his 'catamite'. Major shock and outrage, except in Friend, who laughs it off easily. But Prince, who up till now has been the model of all virtue and tolerance, gets outraged at Friend and yells at him, 'The rest of the world doesn't share your people's dubious tolerances for such men, and I for one, will not be associated with their practices.' And, although protag is more measured in her expression of her upset, when Friend pushes her to agree that she wouldn't 'think any less' of Prince if it were true, she's hugely relieved to find out it isn't, and 'had to acknowledge to herself that it would make a difference.' So by setting up our main character as ridiculously open-minded about race and religion for her time, it makes her inability to accept homosexuality at all that much more offensive. (She might be enlightened in later books in the trilogy, but haven't read them, and don't think an author can count on readers carrying on.)
Perfect trifecta of Fail. Of course it isn't really, but I do think it's a fascinating example of how most people would choose NOT to handle the beliefs of the past in fiction today. Or do other readers set their Fail boundaries completely differently? Or have other people encountered children's/YA historical fiction with other types or - perish the thought! - more varieties of Fail?
Although there isn't really any way to fail fail in this -- I write with slightly gritted teeth -- I suspect most lovers of historical fiction will have their limits for how far ahistoricity can go before they want to start throwing things, and also suspect most people couldn't enjoy a long, painful discourse displaying racial or religious hatred in dialogue or narrative, no matter how accurate. But one sees that latter 'fail' quite rarely, while the former 'fail' is relatively common - especially when romance sneaks in and the all-too-regularly feisty heroine convinces traditional but loving father to let her marry the one her heart has chosen and not the one his pocket/pride has picked out for her. There are many books that avoid either fail, for example by creating a link between reader and protagonist in one or other way, which lets reader feel comfortable with relatively likely (historically) outcomes. (Thinking specifically but not exclusively of Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack and Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy with respect to the question of parentally-arranged marriage.)
It had never even occurred to me that one could fail in both directions simultaneously. Until I read a YA fantasy lent to me recently - I won't name the book, both because I enjoyed much of it and wouldn't feel right throwing around the f-word without lots of tedious disclaiming, and also because the author protested my use of 'historical fiction' in my review on Goodreads but remained very pleasant in doing so. (For the record, we're including historical fantasy and SFnal time-travel, and this book had a map of Europe and an historic character, so was historical enough for our purposes. But not set in Britain so won't be discussed in The History Book.)
Anyway, we're talking an invented kingdom around Lyon roughly in the 1500s. (I think - possibly late 1400s). The King had a long-standing relationship with a woman from 'the Moroccos' and had a son by her, before marrying a Christian woman and having another son - his heir. But no tension between illegitimate and legitimate sons, Muslim and Christian, dark-skinned and lighter - because there's apparently perfect tolerance of all races and religions in this little kingdom. Go them. But also historical Fail of the first sort. Except that King has recently gone a bit off the rails in many ways and declared first son his heir, former heir has gone into hiding, and is there ever protest. So we have protag's horror and shock at the courtiers (as nasty a group of courtiers as they generally are and then some) and others saying Bad, Bad Things about black, Muslim prince (Fail #1) AND have to listen to the Bad, Bad Things (Fail #2). At some length and first-hand. A reported B.B.T. kind of tickled me, because protag protested to her father that people had 'called him a pagan! They were talking about decent Christian women. I ... I couldn't believe it.' Or her father's rebuke of some apprentices: 'Let that be the very last time you malign a man on the grounds of his race, his creed, or the circumstances of his birth, boy.' But the dialogue is far from funny, and I really don't want to quote a lot of the 'black, pagan bastard' stuff in full. Even though we're seeing it through the perspective of the strangely unbigoted protagonist, we're still seeing it, and it's as repulsive as a stream of racial or religious hatred always is.
So, two Fails - one more than expected. But wait - I've found another one! There's a friendship depicted in the book between the prince and his -- companion -- which seems designed to invite shipping, so intense is it. I'd have thought that was the way things were going to go except that Friend is obviously intended for Protag. So anyway, at one point Prince comes in furious and horrified and can barely stand to tell Friend, Protag and her father that people are calling Friend his 'catamite'. Major shock and outrage, except in Friend, who laughs it off easily. But Prince, who up till now has been the model of all virtue and tolerance, gets outraged at Friend and yells at him, 'The rest of the world doesn't share your people's dubious tolerances for such men, and I for one, will not be associated with their practices.' And, although protag is more measured in her expression of her upset, when Friend pushes her to agree that she wouldn't 'think any less' of Prince if it were true, she's hugely relieved to find out it isn't, and 'had to acknowledge to herself that it would make a difference.' So by setting up our main character as ridiculously open-minded about race and religion for her time, it makes her inability to accept homosexuality at all that much more offensive. (She might be enlightened in later books in the trilogy, but haven't read them, and don't think an author can count on readers carrying on.)
Perfect trifecta of Fail. Of course it isn't really, but I do think it's a fascinating example of how most people would choose NOT to handle the beliefs of the past in fiction today. Or do other readers set their Fail boundaries completely differently? Or have other people encountered children's/YA historical fiction with other types or - perish the thought! - more varieties of Fail?