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.
I'm not familiar with either show, but props to the first for more-or-less staying in historical character, even though it means having people act in ways that seem strange to present-day viewers.
Regarding modern-mindset historical fiction, I've sometimes thought that, at least for younger readers, part of that may be to run with their desire to have a character who would act as they would, if they were suddenly teleported back to that time. So: not at all what any young person born in the era would do, but lets the young reader enter the story as a kind of Mary Sue, almost.
(myself, now, I prefer things that broaden my own outlook by showing me unusual-to-me attitudes)
The production design of "Mad Men" is as accurate as everybody says, but IMO the show suffers from the "everyone in the past did X" syndrome. Literally everybody in "Mad Men" smokes, while not everybody in the real early 1960s smoked (my parents both come from the "Mad Men" era and never smoked). Every man in the office is having affairs, while not all married men with office jobs in the early 1960s were cheating on their wives
( ... )
Lovecraft's views on race were so poisonous that people of those races -- in the parlance of the times, like, say, French-Canadian -- who had met him in person refused to believe that he had ever written such things.
This is actually one of the many things I like about Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes, two interconnected British cop/time travel shows set in the early 1970s and early 1980s respectively. The characters from the past often have deeply problematic attitudes, but nonetheless they are not bad people. There's also a difference between the casual racism, sexism, homophobia displayed in dialogues and actual interactions. For example, there is a scene where several of the characters say horribly racist things about South African refugees within minutes after mourning a murdered colleague who happened to be black
( ... )
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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Regarding modern-mindset historical fiction, I've sometimes thought that, at least for younger readers, part of that may be to run with their desire to have a character who would act as they would, if they were suddenly teleported back to that time. So: not at all what any young person born in the era would do, but lets the young reader enter the story as a kind of Mary Sue, almost.
(myself, now, I prefer things that broaden my own outlook by showing me unusual-to-me attitudes)
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