January Meme: No Time Like the Present
Thoughts and feelings on historical fiction that projects modern opinions onto characters in the past.
To be fair: to a degree, everyone does this. No matter whether they research well enough to write a thesis or just have read the wiki entries. Simply because every writer is a product of their time, influenced by everything that happened to them. It's just a matter of degree. There is such a thing as subtle projecting, by, for example, what you leave out. Not just terms of cast - reality always provides far, far more characters with repetitive agendas and functions than any fiction would. But also in what you emphasize. For example: depressingly, chances are that if you pick any given historical character who isn't Jewish themselves (and sometimes even then, hello, Karl Marx!), they have said something antisemitic at some point in their lives, and more than once, are really, really high. Now, when you leave that bias out in a story that focuses on these characters in a context where it wouldn't have come up, I'd say fair enough. But it is of course due to you, the author, living in a post Holocaust (and currently resurgence of vile -isms, including this one) world. (And hopefully are horrified by by it.)
(I also would differentiate between writing about, say, Richard Wagner, who wasn't just antisemitic but prone to verbalize said antisemitism at any given opportunity, or writing about, say, Theodor Fontane, who sadly does have a few antisemitic remarks in his letters but wasn't obsessed with the topic the way Wagner was. If a novelist wrote a novel about Wagner which utterly ignores his hatred, no matter whether it's a novel focusing on just a brief period of Wagner's life or a novel covering him from birth to death, I'd cry foul (and whitewashing). If, by contrast, someone wrote a novel about, say, young Fontane in the 1848 revolution and doesn't show any scenes indicating he shared this prejudice, fair enough.)
But what the question really aims at isn't the subtle kind of projecting, by leaving out or focusing more on aspects about a historical character which are more in tune with the author's beliefs and sympathies. No, it's the kind of historical fiction where miraculously, all sympathetic characters have an attitude straight out of the author's present, any kind of bias is only shown by the villains, and that goes double for anything connected to romance and sexuality. (Just to clarify, because I've also seen "but history!" used as an excuse by people who seem to think same sex relationships of any kind didn't happen between the end of Perecleian Athens and the Weimar Republic: that is assuredly not what I mean, au contraire.) In recent years, one of the most irritating examples that I've consumed as been Minette Walter's novel "The Last Hours", more about why I disliked it so much here.
On the tv side of things, due to a certain refocusing of my interests, last year I watched part 1 & 2 of a recent Czech-Austrian tv series about Maria Theresia; this Christmas we got part 3 & 4 (taking the tale up to the end of the second Silesian War). The first two episodes, covering our heroine from her teenage days up to the end of the first Silesian War, were not exactly historically accurate, but they were soap opera kind of fun. Part 3 and 4 had to deal with a part of her that troubled even contemporary admirers, i.e. attempting to regulate extramarital sex via the police. The tv creators tried to sell this to a 21st century audience by a) partially blaming an evil Jesuit (tm) influencing her, but more importantly by b) giving her an arc where she's humbled (in more ways than one, but this is one of them) by having a one night stand herself, and thus seeing the light about live and let live in terms of extramarital sex. This, again, was just one way in which the tv series, even in terms of a frothy soap, lost all connection to its historical origin, but it was certainly the most blatant one owing its existence on the law of projecting modern opinions on characters of the past, no matter how utterly unsuited for such opinions the character in question is.
(Footnote here re: Maria Theresia and sexuality; just as wrong would be to present her as "repressed", which is the other thing often done by historical fiction with historical characters with decidedly unmodern attitudes towards sexuality, btw. She had no problem discussing it, enjoyed having it, and being a product of the 18th century, talked about bodily functions in general in a way that made the 19th century editors heavily censor her letters to her daughters. She still was strictly against extramarital sex.)
What it all comes down to, I think, for me, is this: it's lazy, if you do your projecting on such a massive degree. It's making a short cut because you don't believe you'll get your readers/viewers to get into the historical characters you present otherwise, when to me part of what makes these people full of rich complexities is that in some ways, they really were different from us, and the products of their times, no matter how many parallel traits to the present they also show.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1386099.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
To be fair: to a degree, everyone does this. No matter whether they research well enough to write a thesis or just have read the wiki entries. Simply because every writer is a product of their time, influenced by everything that happened to them. It's just a matter of degree. There is such a thing as subtle projecting, by, for example, what you leave out. Not just terms of cast - reality always provides far, far more characters with repetitive agendas and functions than any fiction would. But also in what you emphasize. For example: depressingly, chances are that if you pick any given historical character who isn't Jewish themselves (and sometimes even then, hello, Karl Marx!), they have said something antisemitic at some point in their lives, and more than once, are really, really high. Now, when you leave that bias out in a story that focuses on these characters in a context where it wouldn't have come up, I'd say fair enough. But it is of course due to you, the author, living in a post Holocaust (and currently resurgence of vile -isms, including this one) world. (And hopefully are horrified by by it.)
(I also would differentiate between writing about, say, Richard Wagner, who wasn't just antisemitic but prone to verbalize said antisemitism at any given opportunity, or writing about, say, Theodor Fontane, who sadly does have a few antisemitic remarks in his letters but wasn't obsessed with the topic the way Wagner was. If a novelist wrote a novel about Wagner which utterly ignores his hatred, no matter whether it's a novel focusing on just a brief period of Wagner's life or a novel covering him from birth to death, I'd cry foul (and whitewashing). If, by contrast, someone wrote a novel about, say, young Fontane in the 1848 revolution and doesn't show any scenes indicating he shared this prejudice, fair enough.)
But what the question really aims at isn't the subtle kind of projecting, by leaving out or focusing more on aspects about a historical character which are more in tune with the author's beliefs and sympathies. No, it's the kind of historical fiction where miraculously, all sympathetic characters have an attitude straight out of the author's present, any kind of bias is only shown by the villains, and that goes double for anything connected to romance and sexuality. (Just to clarify, because I've also seen "but history!" used as an excuse by people who seem to think same sex relationships of any kind didn't happen between the end of Perecleian Athens and the Weimar Republic: that is assuredly not what I mean, au contraire.) In recent years, one of the most irritating examples that I've consumed as been Minette Walter's novel "The Last Hours", more about why I disliked it so much here.
On the tv side of things, due to a certain refocusing of my interests, last year I watched part 1 & 2 of a recent Czech-Austrian tv series about Maria Theresia; this Christmas we got part 3 & 4 (taking the tale up to the end of the second Silesian War). The first two episodes, covering our heroine from her teenage days up to the end of the first Silesian War, were not exactly historically accurate, but they were soap opera kind of fun. Part 3 and 4 had to deal with a part of her that troubled even contemporary admirers, i.e. attempting to regulate extramarital sex via the police. The tv creators tried to sell this to a 21st century audience by a) partially blaming an evil Jesuit (tm) influencing her, but more importantly by b) giving her an arc where she's humbled (in more ways than one, but this is one of them) by having a one night stand herself, and thus seeing the light about live and let live in terms of extramarital sex. This, again, was just one way in which the tv series, even in terms of a frothy soap, lost all connection to its historical origin, but it was certainly the most blatant one owing its existence on the law of projecting modern opinions on characters of the past, no matter how utterly unsuited for such opinions the character in question is.
(Footnote here re: Maria Theresia and sexuality; just as wrong would be to present her as "repressed", which is the other thing often done by historical fiction with historical characters with decidedly unmodern attitudes towards sexuality, btw. She had no problem discussing it, enjoyed having it, and being a product of the 18th century, talked about bodily functions in general in a way that made the 19th century editors heavily censor her letters to her daughters. She still was strictly against extramarital sex.)
What it all comes down to, I think, for me, is this: it's lazy, if you do your projecting on such a massive degree. It's making a short cut because you don't believe you'll get your readers/viewers to get into the historical characters you present otherwise, when to me part of what makes these people full of rich complexities is that in some ways, they really were different from us, and the products of their times, no matter how many parallel traits to the present they also show.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1386099.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.