Historical novelists have many unique challenges. Besides the need to be both accurate and convincing in how we evoke the past, we have to deal with the fact that earlier times, just as other cultures, had mores with which we may not be comfortable. Not the least of these is child sexual abuse.The woman in the illustration here is Katherine Howard, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII. At the time of their marriage, Katherine, his "Rose Without a Thorn", was only around fifteen or sixteen years of age. Nor did she come to his bed a virgin, if the testimony at her adultery trial can be believed. From the age of about five she was exposed to public sexual behavior in the Maids Chamber at the homes of her grandmother, theDowager Duchess of Norfolk and had already taken a lover before she married.
Our concept of adulthood is a reasonably recent development. By what we consider the age of consent now, many young women in the Middle Ages had been married and borne children, for example. Life was short. A woman in her early 20s was considered an older bride.
It is meet to remember that the "abuse" in the expression "child sexual abuse" refers quite specifically to two things, lack of consent or ability to consent and the breach of trust that is at its root. In the cases many novelists depict, consent is not the woman's option at any age. The issue of breach of trust is more difficult to judge. What we feel about a twelve year old bride is based on our own concept of what it means to be twwelve. In the past the child may have been completely unready for sexual activity, but those who married her off were doing what they thought was their responsibility. Were they wrong? Probably, almost definitely, but that is "mistaken" not "ill-intentioned". That is to say, it was not an abbrogation of trust.
As I have observed in the past, novels tend to be about nobility. These novels perforce are replete with adult men marrying teenage girls. Isabella the Fair of France was twelve when she was married off to Edward II of England. King John's second wife was even younger. The custom was for actual sexual consummation of the marriage to wait until a girl reached menarche. That can be as young as eleven!
No historical novelist would assert that this practice was good or right. We right about the people who lived in another time, and we cannot choose between accuracy and what readers may consider decency. Author Brandy Purdy reports that she has received feedback on this issue for both her novels, The Confession of Piers Gaveston and Vengeance Is Mine. In the first, Piers is forced as a child into prostitution in order to survive to adulthood. In the second, Katherine Howard is expposed to and involved in sexual practices from a young age. In both cases the facts of their childhood experiences influenced who they were as adults, and Purdy has chosen to portray this fact to enlighten her characters and their motivation. A few readers have erroneously characterized her choices as a novelist as condoning the sexual abuse of children. It makes no more sense to do this than for a reader to claim that a novelist who writes about slaves is condoning slavery or an execution is necessarily an advocate of capital punishment.
The upshot of this is that historical novelists today may feel the need to tiptoe around topics and make choices based on today's mores rather than yesterday's way of life. It is the novelist's responsibility to communicate the world he or she writes about recognizing both how things really were and how the author can best communicate that time and the characters so modern readers can relate to them. Readers who cannot get past their own modern sensibilities or get the difference between portrayal and acceptance make this task impossible.
Fortunately the vast majority of readers of historical novels are more sophisticated and knowledgeable. But the ones who are not are often the more vocal. It behooves the historical novelist not to sacrifice the realities of the past when trying to mollify the unreasonable or ignorant reader.
Do you agree? See "Comments" below to voice your opinion.
3 comments:
This is definitely a thought-provoking post. You are entirely right to say historical novelists should not engage in historical revisionism to "clean up" the now distasteful behaviors of our ancestors. People did what they did, whether we like it or not. I personally think it's interesting to see how human mores have developed and changed, and how those changes have made us who we are today.
Yet, as you point out, there are consequences for dogged faithfulness to historical accuracy. People like Purdy who write about real historical figures have a more difficult task than someone who writes about fictional characters. In my own book, for example, the 15-year-old heroine is being married off by her father. I know that, realistically, a 15-year-old girl would have already been married for a couple of years and have at least one child. But the thought of making my heroine be 13 instead of 15 was just so...icky, ha ha...I chose to have her be older. After all, maybe her parents wanted to keep her around to work for them! As someone writing a fictional character, I can make that choice. If I'm writing about Judith of France, I can't "pretend" she was 15 instead of 12 when she married the king of England. To do so would make me lose any credibility as a writer of history.
So, did I sell out to 21st-century morality? Probably so. In my defense, though, I hope I've stayed faithful to the historical concept -- that a girl was the "property" of her father until she married, at which time she became the "property" of her husband. Whether she was 13 or 15 when it happened doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
As Nan rightfully says I frequently get raked over the coals by readers who choose to characterize my work as pornographic or condoning the abuse of children because of the ages of my characters when they are initiated into sexual activity. I am wholeheartedly against abuse in any form, but I try to be true to the time period my novels are set in, and also the personalities of the characters as I have chosen to portray them. My depiction of Katherine Howard's childhood has provoked particularly hostile comments. I can only say that these scenes are rooted firmly in fact, they were taken from testimony given against Katherine when she was accused of adultery. The actual accounts I sometimes find can be a little dry to modern readers because of the style of the language in which they are written, so as a novelist I try to breathe some life into them and bring them alive and make them more real for my readers. What happened to Katherine Howard was terrible, no child should be made witness or party to such goings on, but it happened, so, as many other novelists have done before me, I included it in my book, and I will not apologize for that.
Besides.. there is a world of difference between writing shocking scenes and pornography. Further I just think people who get all hot under the collar about these things are taking on more authority than they have coming to them... I may do or say or write many things that would outrage some.. but you know what? It's none of their damn business.. and if you don't like reading about them.. then don't.
Censor the reading, not the writing, is my rule.
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