That's a really interesting way to think about it! I was a history and literature concentrator in college myself, so I spent undergrad thinking a lot about the intersection of the two. It reminds me of the presentation assignment I give my students at the end of the term, where I ask them to find a non-text primary source from 1945-1989 and talk about how it represents something from its era. Of course a lot of the students want to do a film or a TV show, and I have to stress that they only do movies/tv shows in period, not anything like Happy Days or Mona Lisa Smile because they're too knowing. Within the period a creator always makes assumptions about their audience that they aren't even aware of, but which we can see looking back on them.
Which I think also means that I don't think about novels in-period as being the standard for a historical novel, mostly because in-period novels are full of outdated ideas and Things We Don't Talk About. If someone wrote a regency romance right now that was just like Austen, it would be a very problematic book, because it wouldn't have an awareness of the problems of empire and the gender issues and all of that. So I actually, I think, expect more from really good historical fiction than I expect from an in-period book.
It's interesting what you say about denying the character a right to make their own choices. It's true that many romances are about presenting a character that is resistant to romance with someone to fall in love with. I don't really have a problem with that trope because I've seen it happen more than once in real life, where some confirmed singleton randomly met a person and was like, "oh! You!" and off they went. It's true that most fanfic being romance can sometimes be problematic, but taken on its own terms, romance is what romance is doing, if that makes sense. That is, in the same way that action is what action is doing, or music is what a musical is doing.
Have you read Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith? They're historical novels written by Sarah Waters, set in Victorian England and featuring lesbian romances. I find them to be quite good. To be sure, the women are not particularly respectable—they're usually working-class and sometimes criminals or stage performers—but I think she does a good job of saying, okay, I want a lesbian romance in Victorian England, so what kind of women should they be?
As for not written about, there are all these Douglas Sirk 1950s melodramas—All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession—where it seems like people are freaking out over small things—a middle-aged woman dating a younger man, for example. Todd Haynes made Far From Heaven which is a period piece that looks like a Sirk film, and covers the same kind of ground that a Sirk film would, but instead it's about a woman whose husband leaves her for another man, and she falls in love with her black gardener. Which is the kind of thing people would actually have freaked out about in a Sirk movie, only the irony was that Sirk could never actually make a movie about the things that people freaked out about in the 1950s. So while I find Sirk's movies to have a good deal of self-awareness and cultural critique, I think Haynes's film is a very successful historical fiction because it makes evident what could not be in a 1950s film—it is both recreating the period and commenting on the period, something we really can't do in-period because we can never be that distant from what's around us.
Thanks, what you've said has made me think a lot!!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 07:32 pm (UTC)Which I think also means that I don't think about novels in-period as being the standard for a historical novel, mostly because in-period novels are full of outdated ideas and Things We Don't Talk About. If someone wrote a regency romance right now that was just like Austen, it would be a very problematic book, because it wouldn't have an awareness of the problems of empire and the gender issues and all of that. So I actually, I think, expect more from really good historical fiction than I expect from an in-period book.
It's interesting what you say about denying the character a right to make their own choices. It's true that many romances are about presenting a character that is resistant to romance with someone to fall in love with. I don't really have a problem with that trope because I've seen it happen more than once in real life, where some confirmed singleton randomly met a person and was like, "oh! You!" and off they went. It's true that most fanfic being romance can sometimes be problematic, but taken on its own terms, romance is what romance is doing, if that makes sense. That is, in the same way that action is what action is doing, or music is what a musical is doing.
Have you read Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith? They're historical novels written by Sarah Waters, set in Victorian England and featuring lesbian romances. I find them to be quite good. To be sure, the women are not particularly respectable—they're usually working-class and sometimes criminals or stage performers—but I think she does a good job of saying, okay, I want a lesbian romance in Victorian England, so what kind of women should they be?
As for not written about, there are all these Douglas Sirk 1950s melodramas—All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession—where it seems like people are freaking out over small things—a middle-aged woman dating a younger man, for example. Todd Haynes made Far From Heaven which is a period piece that looks like a Sirk film, and covers the same kind of ground that a Sirk film would, but instead it's about a woman whose husband leaves her for another man, and she falls in love with her black gardener. Which is the kind of thing people would actually have freaked out about in a Sirk movie, only the irony was that Sirk could never actually make a movie about the things that people freaked out about in the 1950s. So while I find Sirk's movies to have a good deal of self-awareness and cultural critique, I think Haynes's film is a very successful historical fiction because it makes evident what could not be in a 1950s film—it is both recreating the period and commenting on the period, something we really can't do in-period because we can never be that distant from what's around us.
Thanks, what you've said has made me think a lot!!