I've shared my rants, talked about presumptions about sexuality and separately but in particular sexual preference. Now I will talk about the issue that encompasses most of the inaccurate criticism of how people in the Middle Ages are portrayed in fiction: classism.Classism is defined as a biased or discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes. I am specifically referring to a preference or assumption of one class over others. This came up recently when someone told me the entire point of the Society for Creative Anachronism was to create a version of the Middle Ages where "everyone is a noble." What?! Forget it then. I'll drag out my old persona, Var the Insurgent. The same is generally true in novels about the era. I remark on how star-struck and classist most historical novelists are. OUt of a score of novels I would guess that at least eighteen are about royalty or nobility. Yes, yes, mine too.. though at least mine are purely fictional and my aim in the crafting of the book is self-admittedly adolescent. In the vast majority of cases, the celebrities are historical as well as fictionalized and decidedly upper crust.
When someone who is an editor on a blog I contribute to complained that too many novels give their medieval females modern sensibilities, the first words out of my mouth after "So what?" are "That's a classist position." I personally believe that every time has individuals of every sort, including tough, independent , sexually liberated women. People who say "women didn't act like that" are forgetting Eleanor of Aquitaine for a start. More than that they are forgetting the vastly different culture of peasant women. Handfastings were commonplace without benefit of clergy for one simple reason.. priests did not grow on local trees.
Authentic or not, realistic or not, it is the job of the novelist to make whatever characters s/he portrays believable. Any character you have read that you simply cannot accept as fitting an era is probably not so much inauthentic as badly written. If the author had believed in the integrity of the character, s/he would have made you believe. That's what we do.
I think the classism in medieval novels is a reflection of our living-vicariously tastes in general: We LOVE stories about celebreties and the rich and famous. (I doubt they would make a TV show called "Lifestyles of the Broke and Obscure.") We like to hear about our betters because we secretly (or not so secretly) want to be them.
ReplyDeleteStill, your point about it is well taken. The whole notion that people in a given era acted or didn't act in a particular way is ridiculous. The props, trappings and general conditions may have been different, but human emotion and thought has, I suspect, always been pretty much the same.
It's an interesting problem. I don't know about the classism, it probably reflects a belief that the rank file aren't interesting in any period.
ReplyDeleteBut I do think people in the past were different in many ways. "Emotion" and "thought" are always contingent on a variety of social cultural and linguistic possibilities. I think the further back you go into the early Medieval period, certainly in England then the way people understood their roles in society and the way they were allowed to act (while differing wildly within the same time frame in their attitudes towards those restraints)is very different from what we assume today.
Put Japanese poetry up against Anglo-Saxon poetry from the same period to see how different the world could look. Try imagining Beowulf in the Tale of Genji or Prince Genji in Heorot.
(Now there's a plot for you.)