Another country
A couple of weeks ago I complained in my review of The Last Hours about the all too popular tendency in many a historical fiction (books, tv, film) to provide all the sympathetic characters with values and attitudes deemed agreeable to a current day reader, and leave anything else (i.e. values, beliefs etc. sharply divergent from the present day) to the antagonists. Now, one objection people sometimes raise is that if you present a historical character sympathetic who endorses absolutism/gender hierarchy/persecution of people not sharing the same faith/insert historical attitude here/, it could come across as endorsement. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I’d like to share some historical short stories illustrating you can, in fact, write a character sympathetic (and not in a „sympathetic villain to heroic antagonist“ way) while getting across that some of her beliefs (and later acts) were horrendously harmful to a great many people. The writer who does this in a cycle of short stories, though each can be read on its own, picked Mary (I.) Tudor to do this, and I have to say, Mary is ideal for the purpose. Her youth was extremely traumatic through no fault of her own, her courage through her years of powerlessness is undeniable…and her attempt to turn England back into a Catholic realm by any means once she was crowned doomed from the start, turning her from a beloved-by-her-people figure into one loathed in a very short time. I like all the stories, but here are some special favourites:
Dare not call you father: „May-June 1536. Mary's journey from high hopes to fear to abject humiliation“ is how the author sums it up. Until Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary had the psychological out of blaming solely Anne, not her father, for all the abuse she’d undergone in the preceding years. After Anne’s death, Henry VIII. rabidly disabused Mary of that notion, as he kept insisting that his oldest daughter recognized him as head of the English church, that she recognized her own bastardy and the invalidity of her parents‘ marriage, and even stepped up the pressure, until Mary finally caved, something she never forgave herself for. The story does a great job of covering this key period in Mary’s life.
Was it God’s will?: focuses on Mary going from starting her reign full of hope and with much of the population cheering her to signing the death warrant of her cousin Jane Grey, the Nine-Day-Queen, while protests and conspiracies abound. What I find most striking in this story is Mary realising that Jane is in many ways her younger self’s mirror image: „Now she is the tyrant, holding her pen above a young woman’s death warrant, ready to condemn her for obeying her parents and clinging to the beliefs that, all her life, she has been taught to uphold.“
Hands: this one covers the entirety of Mary’s life, from birth to death, in short, poignant vignettes.
Lastly, a story from another writer and of a Yuletide past, which to my mind is a fantastic depiction of Philip II. of Spain, married to Mary for a brief while, which did her no favours, and then in a life long cold and hot war with her sister Elizabeth, which, however, may or may not have started on a very different note, if the legend of Philip confessing on his death bed that during his short time in England, he fell for Elizabeth has any veracity to it:
Todos los bienes del mundo (1598)
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1302664.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Dare not call you father: „May-June 1536. Mary's journey from high hopes to fear to abject humiliation“ is how the author sums it up. Until Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary had the psychological out of blaming solely Anne, not her father, for all the abuse she’d undergone in the preceding years. After Anne’s death, Henry VIII. rabidly disabused Mary of that notion, as he kept insisting that his oldest daughter recognized him as head of the English church, that she recognized her own bastardy and the invalidity of her parents‘ marriage, and even stepped up the pressure, until Mary finally caved, something she never forgave herself for. The story does a great job of covering this key period in Mary’s life.
Was it God’s will?: focuses on Mary going from starting her reign full of hope and with much of the population cheering her to signing the death warrant of her cousin Jane Grey, the Nine-Day-Queen, while protests and conspiracies abound. What I find most striking in this story is Mary realising that Jane is in many ways her younger self’s mirror image: „Now she is the tyrant, holding her pen above a young woman’s death warrant, ready to condemn her for obeying her parents and clinging to the beliefs that, all her life, she has been taught to uphold.“
Hands: this one covers the entirety of Mary’s life, from birth to death, in short, poignant vignettes.
Lastly, a story from another writer and of a Yuletide past, which to my mind is a fantastic depiction of Philip II. of Spain, married to Mary for a brief while, which did her no favours, and then in a life long cold and hot war with her sister Elizabeth, which, however, may or may not have started on a very different note, if the legend of Philip confessing on his death bed that during his short time in England, he fell for Elizabeth has any veracity to it:
Todos los bienes del mundo (1598)
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1302664.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.