Historical FICTION Some More

There's a fascinating thread at the Absolute Write fora right now, considering the question of how icky "historical mindsets" were.  There's a focus at this point on the specifics of women's position(s- because, kids, there have been more than one sets of context women had to live within!) in society, and I thought I'd share my bit.


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I have to say, speaking as a feminist, I don't see how pretending-away the more difficult aspects of life for women (or ANYone) during a difficult period in history does me any favors today.  I find anachronistic female characters jarring and irritating precisely because ignoring the problems of any society (whether gender-based or otherwise) too apologistic and flip.

I'd agree with everyone who has pointed out that history isn't some sort of homogenized place where everyone held exactly the same viewpoints to exactly the same degree, in every station and every place across the board.  Women are enough a part of the population that even the most misogynistic systems were forced to accommodate at least some aspect of their participation in the world.  It's often been speculated, too, that in so-called "lower classes" there was less room for systematized chauvinism, as women had to contribute in order for all the work to be properly done.  I think there are limits to this theory, too, but it *has* given enough room for some authors to have created some excellent historicals based on this "wiggle room".

My own approach to female characters has varied somewhat.  Very early Frankish society was still in some flux, and my main female character happens to be a queen known almost entirely for her influence with her husband - but I depict a relationship between them fraught with its *own* difficulties, some of which do present in the context of a historical woman's actual position.  One woman is banished from society (the worst punishment possible) for sexual indiscretion, and another, as the victim of rape, witnesses her tormenter seriously punished (by the laws of [I]wergeld[/I], a woman in childbearing years was high in the heirarchy of human life value).  The second novel will deal with a woman of even higher noble station, in a much more ritualized society, who infracts against her system pretty spectacularly (she marries a slave at one point) and witnesses the consequences to others, of her actions.  This woman happens to be educated (letters of hers survive) and powerful, but in many ways has a much harder go of things as a woman precisely because of her attainment of power.  The price she'll pay is definitely owing to her gender, too.

In order to explore these things, to get down into their implications, for me as an author to ignore them would leave me writing a fairy tale, not a real story.  I can't and won't do that, and have a very hard time understanding why it would interest anybody to cleave away these things from a work of fiction.  Whatever their reasoning may be, they're asking for compromised storytelling - and fiction is compromised in enough ways just subjectively, I can't fathom good reasons to compromise it knowingly.  I don't understand the attraction to history, if one wants bits of it redacted or edited away.


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