Your last paragraph gets me thinking about a challenge: to create a positive character who nontheless has the bad attitudes of the period in question. Maybe not ALL of them in a card-carrying sort of way, but more or less.
Thinking about it, I get the feeling that some past attitudes are more tolerable than others, even while being ones we no longer hold. For example, most people are less insulted and horrified by the notion of the divine right of kings, I'm going to bet, than they would be by certain racial attitudes.
Then *that* gets me thinking about how, whatever a person's unexamined beliefs are (e.g., people of X race are inferior to me, women are like children and can't reason well, etc.), when it comes to actual human interactions, they may behave better than their beliefs. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: people with praiseworthy attitudes don't always live up to their own beliefs.
Yeah. My dad was very conservative, and wow, did he hold to conservative suppositions about race, religion, etc. Yet when he encountered individuals from those groups, he'd take them on their own terms.
If you read a Marxist fiction, divine right of kings will be the Eeeeevil! Actually, there is a lot of fictional pillory of rank privilege, beginning with Jane Austen. Except for Mr Darcy (who is the nephew of an earl, not an earl himself) and his cousin Col. Fitzwilliam (who at least is apologetic for looking for a rich wife), every one of her high ranking people is a snob, a bore, and most of them fools as well.
Now of course I scrabble for a counter-example! I wonder about Sir Thomas Bertram, but can't recall off hand whether he's a baronet or merely a knight. Of course, he's an interesting case in point for the wider discussion: his plantations in the West Indies went unremarked for 150 years in terms of their moral dubiety, but now they seem to be centre-stage in discussions and even adaptations of Mansfield Park, with critics who wish to recruit Austen to the anti-slavery movement necessarily having to view Sir Thomas as a less admirable figure than I think Austen's text presents him as.
Yes--Austen doesn't comment on that as much as she does his defeat as a parent, which meant the world to him. He realizes at the end that he paid lip service to superficials, and as a result, three of his children suffered for it.
Yes, he's certainly not an ideal parent, but not quite in the snob/bore/fool category either. Maybe on a par with Mr Bennett, though considerably less fun of course.
And there are differances between nobles -- I've read works where the author wants to have a shocking disparity of birth and so resorts to a peasant/noble couple. And the noble was not a low-ranking one.
On Television, I think "Mad Men" is the best current example of a historical done right as the writers seem very, very careful to not let anyone step outside the attitudes of the time. Witness the varying mindset of women of the time period. Peggy, who wants to get ahead, Joan, who think manipulating men are the key to getting ahead, and the various women who think marriage is the ultimate prize. They're all different but even Peggy is not all "women power!" as might be the temptation
( ... )
Man Men makes some errors--like in the very first episode, Peggy, a sheltered Catholic girl, making that pass at Peter? I almost stopped watching. The show did get better, but here and there some modern stuff creeps in, including ignorant grammar. (Well educated people in 1960 who depended on using English would never have said "I was laying around," for example.
Aside from that, it's a terrific show, and I am impatient to see Season Four as soon as the arc is done.
And yes about Regency romances, but they are pretty much at this point second generation Georgette Heyer with sex added.
My thought on Peggy with that pass is that's what Peggy thought was the way she had to act to keep her job. (Though, I admit, I can't ever figure out why she slept with Pete in that episode.)
Sometimes, the historical attitudes are jarring and a good reminder that we don't want things that way. Like Mrs. Blankenship's comment about the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight.
Oh yes. Also, that bit where Don's wife has a cigarette hanging out of her mouth as she tries to shoot down her neighbor's birds. I bought that she was angry, and could almost buy her knowing how to use a rifle (though absolutely nothing in the rest of the series supports it) but a cigarette hanging out of her mouth? That was NOT ladylike, it was considered unspeakably trashy, and she's always about the lady.
The bits they get in really are horrifying. Like the smoking during pregnancies, but I remember that! Ditto the drinking.
Thinking about it, I get the feeling that some past attitudes are more tolerable than others, even while being ones we no longer hold. For example, most people are less insulted and horrified by the notion of the divine right of kings, I'm going to bet, than they would be by certain racial attitudes.
Then *that* gets me thinking about how, whatever a person's unexamined beliefs are (e.g., people of X race are inferior to me, women are like children and can't reason well, etc.), when it comes to actual human interactions, they may behave better than their beliefs. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: people with praiseworthy attitudes don't always live up to their own beliefs.
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If you read a Marxist fiction, divine right of kings will be the Eeeeevil! Actually, there is a lot of fictional pillory of rank privilege, beginning with Jane Austen. Except for Mr Darcy (who is the nephew of an earl, not an earl himself) and his cousin Col. Fitzwilliam (who at least is apologetic for looking for a rich wife), every one of her high ranking people is a snob, a bore, and most of them fools as well.
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Mr Bennet is also gentry, not nobility (which a baronet just barely is)
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I guess the only thing to do is to stick to the storyverse, however flimsy it seems from the outside.
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Aside from that, it's a terrific show, and I am impatient to see Season Four as soon as the arc is done.
And yes about Regency romances, but they are pretty much at this point second generation Georgette Heyer with sex added.
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Sometimes, the historical attitudes are jarring and a good reminder that we don't want things that way. Like Mrs. Blankenship's comment about the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight.
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The bits they get in really are horrifying. Like the smoking during pregnancies, but I remember that! Ditto the drinking.
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