How Can Historical Fiction Be Feminist?

Essays
July 21, 2017 | 9 5 min read

Hilary Mantel, twice awarded the Booker Prize for her detailed fictional explorations of the court of Henry VIII, recently remarked that “women writers…can’t resist retrospectively empowering” women of the past in historical fiction. She presents us with a false choice: “If we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? Or shall we rework history so victims are the winners?”

Historical fiction poses unique challenges and opportunities. Writing a historical novel requires all the same things writing a contemporary novel does—intelligence, dedication, research, and a whiff of heedless optimism—as well as a fine-tuned commitment to not betraying the “historical” elements for those better fit by the label “fiction.”

Writing feminist historical fiction adds another layer of complexity. Any historical novel worth its salt has to address society’s expectations of women at the time it’s set. Some authors focus on ordinary women, some on extraordinary ones; both options offer countless possibilities for advancing or contradicting feminist viewpoints. But knowing one’s time period is essential, no matter what. A historical novel in which women play key roles doesn’t resonate unless the author can faithfully and honestly depict ordinary women, and ordinary men, of the time.

Reducing the possibilities of historical fiction to two options, as Mantel does, represents a failure of imagination. The good news is that the imaginations of many writers, women and men alike, are up to the task of telling stories set in the past that are both faithful and feminist.

covercovercoverDid Amy Stewart have to “retrospectively empower” Constance Kopp to make her a law enforcement pioneer, appointed the first female undersheriff of Bergen County, N.J., in 1915? Not a bit. Kopp’s cases were well-documented in the newspapers of the day, and Stewart has woven her stories into three novels so far: Girl Waits with Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and the upcoming Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. Kopp was quoted by a reporter as saying “Some women prefer to stay at home and take care of the house. Let them. There are plenty who like that kind of work enough to do it. Others want something to do that will take them out among people and affairs. A woman should have the right to do any sort of work she wants to, provided she can do it.” Ahead of her time, yes, but still someone who made her way within it.

coverStewart was a non-fiction writer before she was a novelist, and sticks close to the known facts with her novels, but that’s far from the only approach. On the more fictional end of the spectrum is Kate Quinn’s new novel The Alice Network. Its historical kernel is a real-life World War I spy ring run by and consisting of women, named for its leader, whose code name was Alice Dubois. Quinn interlaces the war story with a second timeline, this one centered on a fictional, pregnant protagonist searching for a lost cousin. Quinn’s book offers an unusually entertaining way to examine how women, both ordinary and extraordinary, are called upon to act in the world during wartime.

covercovercoverNaturally, the historical novels it’s easiest to recognize as feminist are those written about women who explicitly fought for women’s rights and women’s issues, like Terrible Virtue, written by Ellen Feldman about reproductive rights pioneer Margaret Sanger. Similarly, novels that center on women adjacent to more famous men—Rodin’s Lover by Heather Webb (artist Camille Claudel) or The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict (physicist Mileva Maric)—argue without stating outright that in a fairer world, these lesser-known female subjects would be as famous and renowned as their better-known partners. Biographies can make these arguments too, but fiction puts us there in the moment, breathing and crying and cheering with these women. Paula McLain, whose biographical historical novels The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun are some of the best-known in the genre, was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying “We love to learn about history, but don’t we love to get close to it?”

coverReturning to Mantel for a moment, she takes issue with “women writers who want to write about women in the past,” implying that male writers are in some other category, possibly exempt from the “persistent difficulty” of wanting to write female characters of action and agency. But it’s hard to think of a book that takes its heroine’s part more wholeheartedly than Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night, which is by turns rip-roaring, tragic, giddy, dramatic, and delightful, but never loses its keen awareness that its extraordinary heroine, soprano Lilliet Berne, operates within the constraints of a man’s world. Her fate is changed at every turn by men’s decisions, men’s gifts, men’s egos, men’s wars. And her journey is all the more riveting because of it. Chee’s heroine was inspired by real-life opera singer Jenny Lind, known as “The Swedish Nightingale”; Lilliet Berne is fictional. But this is what the best historical novels do—blend fact and fiction in a way that sweeps us into the world of the past and informs our experience of the present.

The characters above could be considered extraordinary women of their time—historical novels can also focus on ordinary women without, as Mantel suggests, reducing them to “victims.” The very act of centering a novel on a woman’s story, of giving her the same respect and attention men’s stories have traditionally received, can be feminist. The women of the distant past may only appear in sepia-toned photographs today, but when they lived, they lived in full color. Historical fiction and feminism can work hand in hand, and novels may in fact be the best delivery mechanism for certain stories. The question then becomes not whether or how historical fiction can be feminist, but which feminist historical novel you’ll choose to read and recommend next.

Image Credit: Pixabay.

is a poet, short story writer, playwright, and novelist who earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her debut novel, The Magician's Lie, was a USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a Target Book Club selection. It has been optioned for film by Jessica Chastain's Freckle Films. Her new novel, Girl in Disguise, also an Indie Next pick, was inspired by the real-life first woman detective in the U.S., Kate Warne, who was hired by Allan Pinkerton in 1856 Chicago to solve cases and fight crime. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it "Loaded with suspense and action" and "a well-told, superb story."

Essays

Blink vs. Think: When a Movie Bewitches A Writer

Essays
February 21, 2012 | 9 13 min read
Overture For more than a century, filmmakers have been plundering world literature for source material. Countless works by ancient, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, Elizabethan, Victorian, modern, post-modern, and futuristic writers, working in every imaginable form and genre, have been transported from page to screen. Every once in a long while an ingenious writer upends this time-tested formula and uses a movie as a springboard for a book. Recently I came upon instances of three very different writers drawing on three very different movies to produce three odd and wondrous little books. The writers are Geoff Dyer, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Lethem, who, for all their differences, have one thing in common. Each became bewitched by a movie that spoke so forcefully to him that he watched it again and again until it revealed all of its secrets and meanings, until he grasped what might be called the movie's deep tissues. Here are three case studies of the fruits of their obsessions: Case Study #1: Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky Last summer I got to interview one of my favorite writers, the English novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer. The occasion was the American publication of The Missing of the Somme, Dyer's intricate meditation on the ways the dead of the First World War are memorialized and remembered. As our conversation was winding down, I asked Dyer the obligatory parting question: "Do you have a new book in the works?" "I have a book coming out in January or February," he replied. "It's a very detailed study of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, which is the film that I've seen more than any other. It has really stayed with me for the thirty years since I first saw it. This book is an unbelievably detailed study of that film...(and) hopefully people will buy it because it's by me, irrespective of the fact that they've not seen the film, or perhaps not even heard of it." Well, my ignorance of Russian cinema is so immaculate that I had not heard of Stalker and, yes, I'm one of those people who will read a book simply because it was written by Geoff Dyer. So I took Dyer at his word and read his new book before I watched the movie that inspired it. The book is called Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and from its very first line we're inside Tarkovksy's 1979 film, seeing what the camera sees and listening to what Dyer was thinking as he watched the movie, again and again, over the course of three decades. Dyer describes the book as "an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection." Fair enough, and yet the book does take the movie apart, all 142 shots of it, with some sharp instruments. As always, Dyer brings ferocious curiosity and intelligence to the job, guiding us through Tarkovsky's strange world by bouncing his own thoughts off writers of literature and criticism, cinema and psychology, including Flaubert, Wordsworth, Camus, Barthes, Bresson, DeLillo, Tony Judt, Stanislaw Lem, Rilke, Heidegger, Jung, Slavoj Zizek, and, of course, Tarkovsky himself. If you like your movies with a plot synopsis, here goes: A guide (Stalker) takes two men (Writer and Professor) into a forbidden and mysterious area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. Period. How, you might ask, can anyone spin a 228-page book out of remembering and misremembering that? The simple answer is that Dyer, much like Tarkovsky, recalibrates our sense of time. He doesn't merely slow things down, he sometimes freezes them, the better to examine them under his microscope. Instructively, Dyer quotes Tarkovsky here: "If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention." "This," Dyer writes, "is Tarkovsky's aesthetiic in a nutshell. At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no one can concentrate on anything – for more than about two seconds.... Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: Forget about previous ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches." Dyer makes the case that every work of art – like life itself? – is best appreciated by those who have the patience to look, look again, and keep looking: "The Zone is a place – a state – of heightened alertness to everything." The film's script was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, adapted from their short science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic. (So, yet another movie that sprang from a work of literature.) It was shot in Estonia, in and around an abandoned hydroelectric power station that possesses an ethereal beauty similar to what you witness while passing through the petrochemical badlands on the New Jersey Turnpike, those same toxic fogs, sludgy waters, and dripping pipes, minus the methane spurts. An early caption informs us that the Zone might (or might not) be the result of some kind of meteorite or alien invasion, and Dyer duly notes that the setting foreshadows the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in the Ukraine in 1986 (he calls Tarkovsky "a prophet"), and that the Zone also echoes Stalin's gulags. Citing Wordsworth, he addresses the importance of such man-made landscapes: "It is when there is some kind of human interaction with landscape, when the landscape, having been manufactured or altered, is in the process of being reclaimed by nature – a source of abiding fascination for Tarkovsky – that its 'inward meaning' is most powerfully felt." By the end of their journey, Stalker, Writer, and Professor have learned that the Zone "is not a place of hope so much as a place where hope turns in on itself, resigns itself to the way things are." Not exactly a heart-warming takeaway, but as soon as I finished Dyer's book, I watched the movie for the first time. I suppose only two questions remain: 1.) Is Stalker, as Dyer contends, "the reason cinema was invented"? And, 2.) How did Dyer's book affect my experience of watching Tarkovsky's movie? My answers are, 1.) No, I would go with the much more conventional view that the reason cinema was invented is Citizen Kane. Beyond that, I'll man up and admit that Tarkovsky-time got a little boring in spots. Even Dyer confesses that "it was not a case of love at first sight: the first time I saw Stalker I was slightly bored and unmoved." Which might just mean that I need to see the movie a few dozen more times. And, 2.) Dyer's book enriched the experience of watching the movie in ways I can't count, but most basically because it reminded me that we will always be repaid for a heightened alertness to everything – the sounds of birdsong, the changing of light, the smoky nature of our hopes, the riches that are spread out before our eyes if only we have the patience to see. Cormac McCarthy once said, "The ugly fact is, books are made out of books." Well, no and yes, you'll conclude after reading this astonishing book about a film about a book about a journey to a room. Case Study #2: Don DeLillo on Douglas Gordon on Alfred Hitchcock In 2010 Don DeLillo published Point Omega, a novel that begins with a short overture and ends with a short coda, titled, respectively, "Anonymity" and "Anonymity 2."  Both tell the story of an unnamed man who has come to New York's Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 2006 to watch a video by the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. It's called 24 Hour Psycho and that's precisely what it is – Alfred Hitchcock's classic slowed down from its original 109 minutes and turned into a crawling, day-long taffy pull. Like many people who visited MoMA to see Gordon's movie, I came away thinking that a little bit of this sort of thing goes a long way. (Ditto Andy Warhol's 1964 movie, Empire, which consists of a fixed camera gazing out a window at the Empire State Building for eight unblinking hours.) Indeed, most of the museum-goers in Point Omega watch Gordon's slowed-down movie for a few minutes and then flee, looking at the museum guard on their way out the door hoping for eye contact that will validate their "bafflement." DeLillo's nameless moviegoer is no such impatient dilettante. He spends countless hours on six successive days absorbed by the movie, going deeper and deeper in search of its meanings. What he discovers would resonate with Dyer and Tarkovsky: The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion... It takes close attention to see what's happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. This, it seems to me, is the mission of all true art – to enrich our lives by making us alive to what is happening as it is happening to us. We're back to Tarkovsky's "special intensity of attention" and Dyer's "heightened alertness to everything." Between DeLillo's cinematic overture and coda lies a thin novel about an encounter between two men at a remote house "somewhere south of nowhere" in the Sonoran desert. These two men, we'll learn, were among the people who came to see 24 Hour Psycho in New York but fled after a few minutes. One is Richard Elster, an academic, a "defense intellectual" (perfect DeLillo job title!), who was involved in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq. He has come to the desert to detox from the experience. With him is the novel's narrator, Jim Finley, a filmmaker who is trying to persuade Elster to be the subject of a documentary. (So, a novel that springs from a movie about a movie and wants to produce yet another movie.) Finley's documentary will consist of one unblinking shot (think of Empire, or the single-take Russian Ark): Elster standing in front of a blank wall talking about what he did inside the Pentagon. Finley wants Elster to reveal "what you know that no one knows." Elster has already confided, vaguely, that his job was "to conceptualize...to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as deployment and counter-insurgency." This, he admits without shame, involved a certain amount of lying. "Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability...I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines." Presumably he came up with this lethal lie: W. M. D. We are deep in DeLillo country here, the land of smoky operators who work the barely visible levers that control the two great engines driving contemporary American life: anxiety and dread. Geoff Dyer summed up DeLillo's achievement in his superb collection of essays and reviews from 2011, Otherwise Known As the Human Condition. DeLillo, Dyer wrote, "has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves... Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality..." True, but the thing that stuck with me about this slight novel – slight, at least, compared to such meatier DeLillo masterworks as White Noise, Libra, and Underworld – was not Richard Elster's contribution to the lies that brought on our nation's longest war. What stuck with me was that nameless man in the museum watching the slowed-down movie and reminding me of the pious effort that's required to see, to truly see, what's happening in front of us every minute of our lives. Case Study #3: Jonathan Lethem on John Carpenter In 2010 Jonathan Lethem published a monograph, They Live, about a most unlikely subject. Or maybe it wasn't so unlikely, given the yin-yang mashup of Lethem's influences, high and low, including DeLillo and Philip K. Dick, Mailer and J.G. Ballard, comics, the movies of John Cassavetes. So in a way it makes perfect sense that Lethem devoted a whole book to a close analysis of John Carpenter's They Live, a low-budget genre movie by a director the Hollywood establishment barely gives a B rating. Like Dyer and DeLillo, Lethem brings a sharp intellect and vast tool kit to his chosen movie. And, like them, he argues persuasively that what we see is far less important than how we see it. Taking this a step further, everything can be interesting, including the marginal, especially the marginal, if we're willing to make a pious effort and bring to bear a frame of reference, informed tastes, education (preferably self-education, in the view of this autodidact), and imagination. And so, like Dyer, Lethem calls on an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and the works of diverse thinkers, including the artists Jenny Holzer and Robert Smithson, the writers and philosophers H.F. Saint, David Thomson, G.K. Chesterton, Poe, Lovecraft, Bret Easton Ellis, George W.S. Trow, Greil Marcus, Darko Suvin, Barthes, Slavoj Zizek, and Stanislaw Lem. Note the overlaps with Dyer's reading list. Might as well get the plot summary out of the way: A down-on-his-luck construction worker named Nada (the pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper) wanders into a Los Angeles homeless encampment called Justiceville. After the cops raze the camp, Nada discovers a cache of magic sunglasses that enable him to see that many "normal" people are actually hideous alien ghouls who have mounted a sophisticated mind-control campaign to keep humans complicit and subdued. This includes subliminal billboards and televised commands to OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, WATCH TV, BUY, STAY ASLEEP. Nada realizes he needs to set this shit straight. And so, strolling into a bank wearing shades and armed with an automatic rifle, he states his mission: "I've come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." Lethem leads us on a delirious tour of this "self-conscious B movie," with time codes serving as mile markers. It's a close, highly informed reading that never feels precious or claustrophobic because Lethem admits that the movie is "howlingly blatant on many levels," and yet "it grows marvelously slippery and paradoxical at its depths. Watch something enough times and all you see are the holes, much like a word whose meaning dissolves because you've said it aloud too many times in a row... Out of holes, a whole." Carpenter comes in for high praise from Lethem for shunning Hollywood's compromising cash and going the noble low-budget route. "They Live," Lethem writes approvingly, "ignores the presence of the film industry" and instead mounts a critique of television and consumerism as brain-killing propaganda tools. Carpenter has even less use for the local dream factory than it has for him. He's proud of the fact that his budget requires him to cut every corner he comes to. This ranges from the movie's blue-collar leading man, with his acne scars, mullet hairdo, and oak-tree neck, to the cheapo props, droning musical score, and skeezy (Lethem's word) ghoul make-up and wigs. A friend watching the movie with Lethem was delighted to see that a garbage truck was filled with confetti: "They couldn't afford real garbage!" Even the magic sunglasses, Lethem notes with approval, look like $2 Ray Ban knockoffs. When the movie flirts with porn scenarios (something Carpenter did more than flirt with earlier in his screenwriting career), there are no winks and nods. Carpenter has moved way beyond post-modern irony, all the way to unapologetic self-awareness. He knows that his film is, on one level, a protracted joke, but he doesn't bother to acknowledge that he's in on it. "Carpenter really doesn't care whether or not you get that he gets it," Lethem writes. "He'd far sooner be mistaken for an audience-laughing-at-you-not-with-you artist than slow the pace of his film, or wreck its tone, by underlining the jokes." They Live was based on a short story called "Eight o'clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson, a minor science fiction writer who had the distinction of being one of just two authors ever to collaborate with Lethem's hero, Philip K. Dick. (So, this time we have a book about a movie about a short story.) The movie was released in November 1988, just as Ronald Reagan was passing the decade's greed-is-good baton to George H.W. Bush. The previous summer, Tompkins Square Park in New York's East Village had erupted in riots when police forcibly removed homeless squatters, a la Justiceville, a dustup that gave birth to the invective Die, Yuppie Scum! It's not hard to see the link between "Yuppie Scum" and the wealthiest "1 percent" reviled by Occupy Wall Street protesters who were recently cleared from their campsite in lower Manhattan, a la Tompkins Square Park. But Lethem, to his credit, points out a crucial difference between Tompkins Square (and, by extension, Zuccotti Park) on the one hand, and Justiceville on the other: the squatters in Tompkins Square included defiant drug users, anti-gentrification protesters, and "interested witnesses from the ranks of the middle-bohemian class" (including Allen Ginsberg), while the homeless in Justiceville are for the most part "sheepish, demoralized, obedient" losers content to "zone out and ponder television." In other words, feel free to read They Live as an indictment of Reaganomics, as many have done, but be careful about turning it into an endorsement of Tompkins Square or a prophecy of Occupy Wall Street. I had seen They Live years ago, and I watched it a second time after finishing Lethem's book. The second viewing was definitely better, richer, thanks to the way Lethem opened my eyes to the liberation that comes with doing things on the cheap – and not apologizing for it. They Live, both the movie and the book, are examples of what Manny Farber called "termite" art, as opposed to overblown, ostentatious "white elephant" art. "A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art," Farber wrote, "is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." And that kind of activity, as Carpenter and his great advocate Lethem have proven, is everything a tuned-in moviegoer or book lover can ask for. Coda It wasn't until I'd finished digesting these three books that I was able to see what ties them together. It is, for lack of a better word, their anti-Kaelishness. In his new biography of the celebrated New Yorker movie critic, Brian Kellow notes that Pauline Kael watched a movie just once before reviewing it because "she felt the need to write in the flush of her initial, immediate response.... If she waited too long, and pondered the film over repeated viewings, she felt she might be in danger of coming up with something that wouldn't be her truest response." Lethem, who seems to be aware of everything, is aware of his own anti-Kaelishness: "I'm Pauline Kael's ultimate opposite here: I've watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once)." It could be argued that a weekly magazine deadline robbed Kael of the luxury of watching a movie a dozen times before writing about it, but she made a conscious choice to see each movie just once. She trusted her instincts over her intellect. Her gut over her brain. And she bragged about it. Kael, to borrow a Malcolm Gladwell-ism, went with blink. Dyer, DeLillo, and Lethem, to their credit and their readers' unending benefit, go the opposite route: they look closely, they keep looking, and then they think, think, think.
Essays
| 9 13 min read
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Essays

Willa Cather, the Greatest American Novelist?

Essays
January 26, 2009 | 6 2 min read
I've sampled Willa Cather recently after a knowledgeable friend suggested she might be a sleeper candidate for the greatest American novelist. Well, after reading My Antonia and The Professor's House I have to say, I don't see it. There are particular things about both books that did not grab me, but to sum up my reaction, I'll borrow a concept from Harold Bloom, who wrote in his introduction to The Western Canon that one quality shared by all canonical texts is their fundamental strangeness, their unlikeness to anything that came before them. I just did not find there to be much at all strange about either Cather novel.I did, though, find her writing to be affecting and original when depicting the landscapes of her stories - the American southwest in The Professor's House and the Nebraska plains in My Antonia. She has a talent for melding her characters with their surroundings, so that their lives appear as consequential, and as fleeting, as a summer's growth of corn. From My Antonia:The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modeling of human faces.
Essays
| 6 2 min read
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9 comments:

  1. Good points made.There are plenty of women from the past who did all sorts of things on which to base stories.Many have been forgotten and need to be rediscovered and written about.Feminist treasure trove of subject matter!

  2. Philipa Gregory has written many wonderful epics of British history from the woman’s POV. I highly recommend them.

  3. It is true in history some women have been autonomous and brave, but when one considers that women in the West have only had the vote for a mere century, Mantel’s comment is put in context. I think a lot of the essay’s examples to refute Mantel’s statements are (to me) “cosy” fiction. When you look at the big picture of women in history, it would be difficult to find any political period where women had voices. I think Mantel’s statement is correct.

  5. I think there’s a fairly substantive problem here. It’s not only feminism. The problem is with almost all historical fiction – people in the past did not think like we do. The way they did think is in many ways fundamentally opposed to us at basic levels. When you’re trying to use a historical character to try to make them dance to our tunes, it so often rings false – not only in the historic sense, but also fictional sense.

    What we tend to do is assume that people in the past were just stupid, for lack of better words. But – not only is that false – it’s often true that many historic persons or eras had as good or even better understandings of themselves than we do of ourselves. Examples: how many people write stuff set in the late Middle Ages (basically portraying them as effectively barbarians) when they themselves are not smart enough to understand the extremely sophisticated philosophy, writing, symbolism and religion of the time? How many current writers are simply too dumb to understand even basic textbooks of that time (people forget that things like Aquinas’ Summa or Peter Lombard’s Sentences were introductory textbooks for beginners, not advanced texts at all.)

  6. Kind of like “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. L.P. Hartley, author of the outstanding novel “The Go Between”.

  7. I listened to Hilary Mantel’s comments, quoted in this piece, as part of her Reith Lecture talks. I was rooting for Hilary, whom I admire, while also feeling she was in the awkward position of defending her trade in a way that writers of contemporary fiction generally aren’t required to do. In Britain, there is a divide between literary fiction (respectable) and populist fiction (not respectable). Historical fiction, even that of a literary tone, slides by default into the ‘not-respectable’ category. Ms Mantel vigorously defended her right to write historical fiction without being questioned, or downgraded. She gave brisk shrift to a professional historian (respectable) who tried to imply that her historical perspective was inevitably second-rate for being fictional. If I understood her response, she believes that her work delivers reality and truth to readers, by another means.

    Can historical novelists be feminist? I am one, and when I’m asked if I’m a feminist reply ‘Of course I am. All women who think are feminists.’ (I developed this response to checkmate the men who liked to say ‘My wife isn’t a feminist, she doesn’t feel the need to be.’) But I digress. My personal brief when writing my commercial historical novels (not respectable, sadly) is that the era in which they are set dictates the moral atmosphere. Victorian females did not generally kick people’s backsides and demand careers. Yet many of them were pioneers, travellers and business women. Their struggle to be so IS the story. My own female forebears raised families through war and grinding poverty. It’s unlikely they’d have thought of themselves as feminists as the concept was a rarefied one at the time. I think of them as sisters, and their lives worthy of scrutiny. We living in the second millenium can learn much from them and if our learning is through fiction, then more power to the genre. In a hundred years time, someone might look at my life, or yours, and use it as the inspiration of a novel.

  8. Natalie Meg Evans – excellent comment. When I think of women who kicked ass, I think of Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley and Florence Nightingale, for example, and other explorers who were not afraid to satisfy and induldge their curiosity with the intent to help society and not to colonize it. These are women I aspire to emulate, if only I were brave enough. Regarding Mantel, 8 months on Gaza Street and A Place of Greater Safety, show how women can write historical fiction with empathy, yet without sentimentality. Rose Tremain does a great job with historical fiction as well. Highly literary and without “pandering” to women readers. Pandering is in quotations because I despise that word, used by some male writers regarding fiction that interests women, in the most obnoxious and condescending way.

  9. Historical fiction can certainly be feminist and there are many ways to make it so. However, one of the most effective ways is to allow your female lead to tell the story. I like first person narratives because they allow you into an internal world and to make the voice female gives the narrative a distinctly female point of view.
    With historical fiction the external details may be historically accurate, however what fiction enables you to do is to present the constants in new ways and challenge accepted interpretations – particularly useful in giving women of history back their voices so that women of today and tomorrow won’t risk losing them in the first place.

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Essays

The Hipsterati

Essays
May 14, 2010 | 15 6 min read
Many people love to hate them, and pundits have repeatedly exaggerated their demise.  But two things are certain about hipsters.  They're still very much with us, and they've become the unlikely subject of a mini feeding frenzy among mainstream book publishers. Say hello to a new breed of literary animal: the hipsterati, writers who are turning satirical blogs about hipsters into satirical books about hipsters. The first hipsterati was sighted way back in 2003, when Robert Lanham, founder of a website called Free Williamsburg, published The Hipster Handbook, a clever spin-off on the best-selling 1980 spoof, The Preppy Handbook.  Lanham laid out the hipster style, lingo, fashion and cultural ethos so deftly that the book is still in print and has sold a robust 70,000 copies. The latest hipsterati production is Look at This F*cking Hipster, a book that grew out of a Tumblr blog of the same name (with a "u" in place of the "*") by a professional comedian named Joe Mande.  Following the blog's template, the book is a series of outrageous photographs of hipsters with witty essays and captions written by Mande, who has won the New Yorker magazine's caption-writing contest three times.  The book is very much in the let's-laugh-at-the-Clampetts vein. Mande's metamorphosis from anonymous blogger to published author happened so fast that he still can't quite believe it. "The blog started out, literally, as a joke for my dad and a few friends," Mande said recently as he sipped an iced coffee on a bench outside Atlas cafe, where he wrote the blog posts that launched his career as an author.  The Atlas is located a few blocks from Mande's apartment in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, a world-famous hipster hot spot.  All but one of the Atlas's 13 patrons on this spring afternoon were gazing at the screens of Mac laptops.  The place was as quiet as a church.  You expected to see signs outside the door: Quiet, please!  Artistic types at work! And: Don't even THINK about coming in here with a Dell! "My mom and dad were visiting from suburban Philadelphia," Mande continued.  "It was my dad's 60th birthday.  We went out to dinner in Brooklyn and he looked around and said, 'Who are these people?'  I told him they were hipsters.  He asked if that was like hippies.  No, I told him, the short answer is that they're grown-up babies." The longer answer is that the word "hipster," like so much of today's youth culture, is an appropriation.  Jazz-loving hepcats in the '30s begat bebop-loving hipsters in the '40s, and the term was dusted off when hordes of twentysomethings flooded Williamsburg in the late '90s, seeking relief from insane Manhattan rents.  Soon the neighborhood was clogged with people wearing the uniform of non-conformity --- sprayed-on jeans and weird eyeglasses and Yasser Arafat scarves, asymmetrical haircuts and regrettable tattoos, guys with ironic facial hair, girls in American Apparel leggings. "So one day I was sitting in my apartment and I decided to set up a Tumblr blog," Mande went on, "and I posted a photo of a hipster guy in a grocery store staring at an avocado.  Within two weeks I started getting submissions, and within a month it blew up.  People sent pictures of themselves posing.  It got less and less secretive." The pictures poured in from the world's hipster havens--Williamsburg, of course; Silver Lake in Los Angeles; Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon and Melbourne, Australia.  And soon literary agents and publishers were trying to make contact with Mande, who ignored their overtures, preferring to remain anonymous.  But when a friend alerted him that someone else was approaching publishers and claiming to be the creator of the "Look at This Fucking Hipster" blog, Mande decided he had to act.  He contacted his comedy manager, who helped him find a literary agent, who sold the book to St. Martin's Press in a pre-empt for an advance Mande declines to disclose. Mande, who is 27 years old, dresses aggressively un-hipsterishly --- dishwater-gray hoodie, loose bluejeans and running shoes.  His hair is cropped short and symmetrical.  As he patted his half-pit bull, half-Lab puppy Blanche, he pondered the question that won't go away: Why do so many people harbor foam-at-the-mouth hatred for hipsters? "I honestly don't know," Mande said.  "But it's hard not to laugh at people who dress like clowns and take themselves so seriously.  It's all about people trying so hard to look like they're not trying hard.  That's what I make fun of.  I keep the blog good-natured and light-hearted.  I don't hate them.  But there are people who hate me because they think I hate hipsters.  I've been called a neo-conservative, the leader of a vast hate movement, even a homophobe."  He shrugged.  "Every generation has its idiotic phase." So does Mande have any regrettable tattoos? "Nah.  I'm Jewish.  My mom would kill herself." If Mande's mission is to gently mock hipsters, Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich are on a crusade to mockingly celebrate them by pointing out the things that get under their thin, tattooed skin.  According to their Tumblr blog, "Stuff Hipsters Hate," these things include, but are not limited to, camouflage clothing, bras, blondes, sports bars, SUVs, athletic clubs, Bob Dylan, religion, the winter Olympics and enormous flat-screen TVs.  The blog also trumpets some of the things hipsters love, including, but not limited to, iPhones, Moleskin notebooks, fixed-gear bicycles, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Nathanael West novels.  The blog has honed its own brand of wicked mockery, such as a recent post of "vomitacious" hipster tattoos, including a woman who had a shark's gaping mouth inked into her left armpit. The co-authors, who met at journalism grad school and now work office jobs in New York, are putting the finishing touches on a blog-inspired book, also titled Stuff Hipsters Hate, due out in the fall.  The book will include "anthropological" takes on such things as overheard hipster conversations, pages ripped from hipster notebooks, and annotated illustrations of magazine racks and hipster apartments. "The Tumblr blog is a great opportunity to get your writing out there," says Ehrlich, 25.  "It can be an avenue for people to break into the writing business.  It's a unique way to communicate, almost like performance art." "It's a dialog," adds Bartz, 24.  "A conversation between the character of the blog and the readers of the blog." The duo's literary agent, Jason Allen Ashlock of Movable Type Literary Group, says indie publisher Ulysses Press paid a "respectable" advance in the low five figures.  "What drew me to them at the beginning was their voice," Ashlock says.  "The pictures they use are stock photos.  For me, it's not about the images, it's about their voice.  Unfortunately, a lot of books born of blogs have not had a high level of writing.  A lot of it is gimmicky --- gags, joke telling.  To me, that's not interesting as a book." Understandably, two young women who work full-time jobs by day and blog by night take a dim view of the legendary hipster work ethic.  They know that hipsters are usually unemployed (that is, living off a trust fund and/or a stack of credit cards with a parent's name on them), or they're interning at some indie music magazine.  "To a hipster," they write, "a job folding clothes or frothing cappuccinos is merely a pit stop, a romantic interlude on the way to indie rock stardom / a Pulitzer / a tragically hip death in a Williamsburg loft that occurs amidst a sea of coke and avant-garde artwork." The co-authors also know how every self-respecting hipster would answer the question: Are you a hipster?  "We maintain that is not a question anyone would ever answer in the affirmative." So back to the burning question: Why all this hatred for hipsters? "People hated hippies," Ehrlich says.  "They hated the Beats, the Lost Generation, punks, the grunge kids.  Hipsters are driving tastes in music, fashion.  The bigger you are, the harder you fall.  Hipsters hate mainstream society, and mainstream society hates hipsters." "It's a Mobius strip of mockery," Bartz adds.  "Hipsters are purposely making their life out to be so hard.  That's what we're mocking, and that's what people hate." "This group was ripe for satirization," says Lanham, the Hipster Handbook author who, at 39, is easily the granddaddy of the hipsterati.  "When my book came out, hipsters shopped at the Salvation Army for trucker hats so they could look the part of someone without much money.  But it's upper middle class kids living in expensive apartments with all these expensive accouterments.  They're defined by what they wear, what they listen to, how they decorate their apartments.  There's nothing hip or bohemian about owning things.  I think it's this insincerity and irony --- that's where a lot of the venom comes from." Ehrlich thinks that she and her fellow hipsterati, like so many spawn of our digital age, may be in for a very short run. "I think this peaked maybe back in July," she says of the blogs-to-books mania that has been raging in the publishing industry for several years.  "There's only so long a trend can sustain itself." Don't be so sure.  A Tumblr blogger named Christopher Weingarten has just landed a book deal from NAL/Penguin based on his blog, "Hipster Puppies."  The book, like the blog, will show cute pictures of puppies wearing --- you guessed it --- wild eyeglasses, mustaches and Yasser Arafat scarves. [Image credits: Bill Morris]
Essays
| 15 6 min read
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