Agreed about the good vs. bad guys' attitudes, but it's not a problem unique to contemporary narrative. A friend just read "Ivanhoe" for the first time, and we were noticing that very technique--though "postmodern wisdom" meant the enlightened attitudes of 1815, not 2010.
Speaking of Isaac the Jew in Ivanhoe, we inevitably moved to The Merchant of Venice. But there we see a more subtle version of the technique: The most loathsome anti-Semitic attitudes are held and expressed by the more loathsome characters, while the better characters (such as Portia) attempt to maintain an open mind. But this isn't a good parallel, because anti-Semitism was the "contemporary wisdom"--where Shakespeare got the radical idea that Shylock might actually be human, we'll never know. I guess that's what it means to transcend one's own time and circumstances of composition.
Very true. It's interesting to see that in the medieval tales of all the nineteenth century writers--Romola, Bulwer-Lytton's Tales, etc.
The visual version are the historical films made during various periods. My daughter used to make a game of IDing the era the film was made after I'd tell her when it was supposed to be set. (Like the heroines having blood red lipstick and triangle hairdos in something supposedly set in 1756)
Costuming in historical films is a whole 'nother subject. In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander has a chapter on Hollywood's habit of giving extras and secondary characters more authentic hair and make-up and clothes than the principals, whose appearance cleaves more strictly to the prevailing standards of beauty when the film was made.
Yeah--the daughter studied that aspect in film school.
It's interesting how some seem more dated than others. Like Doctor Zhivago, it seems like a 1963 typical heroine walking through a fantasy Russia without touching the sides.
I'm not sure I follow the distinction above between historical novels and novels set in a time past. Do you mean by the former novels that are historical in the sense of being written a long time ago?
Oh, he and I have argued about this one for years--it's called FREEDOM AND NECESSITY, written by Emma Bull and Steven Brust. He hates it and I like it (for me it's such an AU that the shifts from history seem deliberate)
I loved her example of the people smoking and drinking in the 1940s -- I read a lot of mysteries written then and in the 1930s, and it's shocking to see how many people always have a martini or cigarette in hand, just as a matter of course. (And we won't even get into the radio commercials from the old time radio shows that talk about the health benefits of Camels, etc.) And the casual racism.... wow. Just a totally different world than we're used to, and it's the one my parents grew up in
( ... )
I got interested in it after Orson Scott Card recommended it. Amazing for a first novel, and while the mystery can be considered slight, the people's attitudes and the characters MAKE the story for me.
If you watch the wonderful "Thin Man" films from the 40s, you see that everyone (particularly Nick Charles) is always drinking. Always. And I remember parties my parents went to or threw, where all the adults were drinking pretty constantly; it's not that we don't drink now, but someone who didn't drink they stood out like a sore thumb.
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.
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Speaking of Isaac the Jew in Ivanhoe, we inevitably moved to The Merchant of Venice. But there we see a more subtle version of the technique: The most loathsome anti-Semitic attitudes are held and expressed by the more loathsome characters, while the better characters (such as Portia) attempt to maintain an open mind. But this isn't a good parallel, because anti-Semitism was the "contemporary wisdom"--where Shakespeare got the radical idea that Shylock might actually be human, we'll never know. I guess that's what it means to transcend one's own time and circumstances of composition.
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The visual version are the historical films made during various periods. My daughter used to make a game of IDing the era the film was made after I'd tell her when it was supposed to be set. (Like the heroines having blood red lipstick and triangle hairdos in something supposedly set in 1756)
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It's interesting how some seem more dated than others. Like Doctor Zhivago, it seems like a 1963 typical heroine walking through a fantasy Russia without touching the sides.
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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.
Reply
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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