It’s a problem that any historical author faces–or should do if they are doing their job and their research.
We all know that life wasn’t terribly political correct in times other than ours. I shall skirt around the fact that political correctness can be a) rather subjective and b) still a problem today.
But go back, even a very short time and you have to deal with all sorts of problems.
Mad Men, that wonderful American TV series, handles this perfectly in my opinion. It’s not that far back – set in the early 1960’s in the cut-and-thrust world of New York Advertising. The discrimination is intense: blacks, gays, Jews, women, the poor – the list is almost endless. In a way, it’s similar to the English aristocracy – there are the elite ad men, and then there is “everyone else” who are some kind of sub-set of humans.
Mad Men does it by handling it head on, and then letting the viewer deal with these very real people in their own way, letting them decide for themselves whether they are going to emphasize with the characters or not.
Take Don, the lead male character: He’s actually from a dirt-poor background. Son of a whore, raised by a succession of “fathers” and escaped to the army as soon as he could get away. He hides this background and in fact isn’t “Don Draper” at all – he swapped his identity with the real Draper, an officer he was working with and was blown to smithereens. Being an invalided ex-officer his world opened up, and he was able to better himself, and now he’s the brightest star on Madison Avenue. But his bosses, his friends, and even his wife think he’s someone he’s not.
There’s a lot to make Don unattractive as a main character. He – like many others on the show – are serial womanisers. The creators of the show however, blur this infidelity by having him “faithfully unfaithful” if you see what I mean – he’s searching for a soul-mate and gets very involved with his mistresses. He has many many issues, and he can often only unburden his secrets on someone who’s on the outside of his “real” (but yet unreal) life.
So what does he have that makes him an attractive character?
He’s a little more liberal than many of his co-workers. It’s not that he’s a rainbow flag-waving, feminist supporting character–far from it–he’s every bit as bigoted in many ways, and in a crowd of people spouting bigoted comments he’ll not be arguing–but he won’t be joining in. He appreciates talent over other “obstacles” in that business. He encourages Peggy (his assistant) when she shows talent in copy writing and puts her on the path to being the first woman copy writer in his firm. He knows that Sal, a closeted, married homosexual is what he is, and despite catching him in a compromising position with another man says nothing because Sal is a damned good head of Art.
Yes, he has many many problems, but the writers heap so many problems and give him so many past problems and issues that you have the choice to root for him or to yell “and well deserved!” I’m sure there are many viewers who dislike Dan as much as I like him, but it’s so cleverly done that love him or loathe him, you can’t stop watching.
And I think there’s much to be learned. What I do see in some historical romance is the writer is determined that their characters have to be likeable at all costs. And if they are wealthy (which most characters are, I find!) or if they are in a profession such as the navy–most authors will skim over the more…unpleasant aspects that this entails.
Many of the super rich in the 17th and 18th centuries did it by their “estates in America” which meant using slaves. Many were actual slavers, despite the fact that slavery didn’t exist in England itself. Naval officers might have had to accompany slave ships from A to B. Women were second class citizens with no rights to own property or vote. Jews were not considered “one of us” no matter how high they might rise in society, and as for the Europeans? Best not to ask what an English man thought of the Irish, the French, the Spanish…
Make your hero too liberal, too good, too accepting, and you’ll be accused of blatant anachronism which is just as bad as having a big fat Gary Stu. There are too many heroines in heterosexual romance who are cheeking their fathers, refusing to marry for convenience, treating the servants/slaves like equals, getting an education, forging their own path through life and being generally unbelievable that the last thing I’d like to see is a similar trope appearing in gay historicals.
So how do you create that balance? It’s not easy.
I’ll start, if I may, with one of my own characters. Rafe Goshawk from “Standish”.
The man has issues. He’s hugely rich, and his money comes from many dodgy sources. Slavery? Probably. Gun running? So he says. War profiteering? Most certainly. When we meet him, he’s an arrogant arse who takes what he wants and finds that everything can be bought. Even Ambrose comes to work for him, despite loathing the very idea of him, because enough money is waved under his nose. There’s not a lot to like. But hopefully, as his story unfolds, we find that there are explanations from much of his behaviour and hopefully the reader warms to him eventually. I’m gratified actually that many readers weren’t won over by him, and about 25% of readers (who expressed a preference, to use an advertising term!) wish that Rafe had faded away or died and that Ambrose had ended up with Fleury.
What’s interesting is that Fleury is also a truly awful person. (I think Ambrose has some kind of problem with the men he picks!) Fleury’s a murderer, a highwayman, a rogue with a lash-out brutality that terrifies the entire population of Newgate prison–I didn’t hide Fleury’s true nature and yet readers loved him and want more. Go figure.
To pick another character–take Jacob Cullen from Maria McAnn’s superb English Civil War novel “As Meat Loves Salt.” A man who has — as I say in the review — no redeeming qualities at all save that for his love for another man, and yet for me, and I’m sure many readers, he’s a character that I was hoping and praying would find his happy ending, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Charlie Cochrane’s Cambridge Fellows: Orlando and Jonty in her mystery series. Both men are “jolly good eggs” – they are affectionate, have varying degrees of filial love and loyalty, believe in Blighty and the College, are almost unfailingly polite to women and lessers and all round Nice Chaps. In another writer’s hands, perhaps, they would be just to saccharine to stand, but to balance their niceness, Charlie gives them very human foibles and hidden layers: jealousy, temptation, lust, anger, back-histories, and back boyfriends which affect their present, uncertainty, insecurity–just to name a few. They aren’t Gary Stus, despite their charm and talent for solving mysteries, they are real men, struggling with real problems.
Chris Smith’s protagonist–Edgar Vaughn–in her upcoming novella “The White Empire” is frankly awful at first sight. He’s pompous, vain, rude, arrogant and a huge hypocrite. But he’s true to the time, and to his class. He considers the Chinese as a lesser race than the English, he’s rude to women and to people he considers “trade.” But he sees injustice, and the exploitation of a way of life, and takes the British Empire on head on. No matter how he strikes the reader to start with, they’ve got to be impressed with the man’s sheer courage to take on the might of Britain single handed.
Another good example that comes to mind is Pieter Van Leyden from “Cane” by Stevie Woods. Yes, he’s veering towards “too good” – he falls in love with a slave, and he does good work for his own slaves, but he still benefits from his inherited wealth and he recognises his limitations fighting the system.
So don’t shy from the issues of the day. Don’t be cowed by criticisms that “if your characters think this way, it means you must think this way” because that’s errant bilge. Don’t make your hero too good no matter how tempting it is. He can still appreciate the injustice of the world around him without becoming a campaigner. (make him a campaigner if you must, but don’t make it easy for him.) Give him as many flaws as well as he has virtues and beliefs and if you balance it right you’ll find the reader will love him, no matter how many awful things he does.
The Macaronis 
March 29, 2010 at 5:14 pm
[…] Do pop along and add your opinion! March 29th, 2010 in Uncategorized […]
March 29, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Aside from all the other good reasons why characters should be true to their time, there’s the fact that a lot of people read historical fiction in order to learn about the past… not everyone enjoys reading non-fiction!
On the other hand, this post is giving the characters in my short story reasons to demand a longer tale… bother!
March 29, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Heh – yes, Tigg – that’s very true. Although it also has to be said that characters of their day- whatever that is – are more likely to be “blind” to the big issues, in the same way they don’t notice how dirty things are or how badly they smell!
March 29, 2010 at 5:34 pm
This is a real crackerjack of a topic and one on which I am only too glad to weigh in – right now I’m working on three manuscripts simultaneously (I alternate days on them, so I don’t get bogged down) and one of these happens to be a cops-and-robbers caper based in the 1930s. One of the two main characters is originally from the state of Mississippi (he in fact graduated from Ole Miss) and can never go home because as a younger man he fell in love with – and pursued a physical relationship with – a black man, Tommy Phipps. Tommy paid for his “crime” in a manner similar to what you might expect, while Benedict, his white lover, escaped to Chicago, earned a law degree and became a police detective with an arm of the federal government. Throughout, there are flashbacks to Benedict’s past, most notably his love affair with Tommy and I had to face the difficult decision of whether or not to use the “N-word.”
Ultimately I decided – not without some trepidation – to use it, but only within the context of Benedict Fouts’ flashbacks, and only coming from his execrable old father, Big Daddy. Fouts never uses the word, nor do any of his colleagues or contemporaries. The other main character, William Henry Gerber, is a man of principles and (ironically, considering he is a career criminal) high moral standards who considers racial discrimination beneath him.
It’s a thorny subject, to be sure. I think if an author chooses to delve into that particular lexicon – the lexicon of hate, of discrimination, of marginalisation – that it’s important to establish a standard of usage. Your “Mad Men” example illustrates this perfectly.
Great topic, as usual! 🙂
March 29, 2010 at 7:35 pm
i know people will disagree with me, but I think you HAVE to use the language of the time, to do so would be disrespectful of the struggle and to candy coat the experience would be wrong. In exactly the same way that to make the danger that gay men had would be to soft focus the past. People, not everyone, obviously, but some (as I’ve discovered in chats before) believe what they read, and if all books have gay men having an easy time in historicals they’ll start to believe it.
So, yes, I think you were right. I’m quite sure that the people who would never have used the N word however still said words that are uncomfortable to us today, like darky and coloured and thought they were perfectly acceptable. Words have power and they change with the times, but we should never forget how they were once used, imo.
March 30, 2010 at 3:16 pm
To my way of thinking, it’s like the Big Lie. If you say something often enough, people will start to believe it. The Holocaust deniers do this. They expunge history and make it as though it never happened. If we add to that by not showing the climate our stories are born in, then we deny the past too.
In my experience it’s guilt ridden whites that drive the political correctness view. Many of the ones who drive it the hardest are closet bigots, who, like closeted gay people, won’t/can’t admit even to themselves what they are. So they candy coat everything and make the past some vanilla experience where everybody understood each other and got along. Talk to some old time Southerners and they’ll tell you they had no trouble with ‘coloreds’ until the northern people came down and interfered with the natural order of things. And I have talked to people who have said exactly that.
March 29, 2010 at 11:24 pm
I went around with a publisher about the use of that particular slur. And in the end, I blinked first, changed it to “coloreds” and actually had the book come out.
Some publishers won’t let you use any of that language, even when appropriate or reclaimed. (I swear, some day I’m going to send a story with ACT-UP chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” and watch them try to edit it.)
March 29, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Good Lord. I know that “people of colour” is being used these days, but I equate coloureds as being every bit as bad as other words, more so really because people thought they were being more accepting by using it. I roll my eyes at publishers who find it difficult to publish sensitive subjects. They should stick to rainbows and unicorns and not play in the real world.
March 30, 2010 at 10:00 am
The difference between “people of color” and “coloreds” is vast. One is people first language that challenges the idea of a white default. The other is using an adjective as a noun and reducing people to nothing more than pigmentation, while reinforcing white hegemony.
But apparently, my editors didn’t get the nuances.
March 30, 2010 at 10:06 am
Except we do call Caucasions white. So what’s that? A black hegemony? Maybe a brown hegemony?
It’s human nature to label things. For purposes of dialog we use easy terms for humans — black, white, brown, red, yellow. None are accurate in the least, we’re all essentially shades of brown but that doesn’t work for our innate need to have categories. And I don’t think it’s inherently racist to do so.
March 29, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Edgar would like to know what a commoner like you is doing — daring to talk about him! Fie!
Excellent post.
March 29, 2010 at 7:31 pm
thanks dear!
March 29, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Edgar has just had the apoplexy at the thought of a woman calling him “dear”.
I’m hiding the sal volatile until he starts to be less of an arse.
xxx
March 29, 2010 at 11:32 pm
yes, but i wasn’t talking to him – as it wasn’t him that addressed me!
March 29, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Hi Erastes –
Would you mind if I take highlights from this interesting essay as a post on my webzine, linking back to The Macaronis site?
I won’t do so without your OK.
George
March 29, 2010 at 11:32 pm
I should have replied here – go for it , George, and thanks!
March 29, 2010 at 7:29 pm
I think there’s a balance to be struck between what the real person of your character would have been like in the real historical period, and what a real reader of today can tolerate.
Thus, Don Draper is stretched to be that one-in-ten-thousand bosses who did, at least, value talent above categories (so it’s conceivable if unlikely that he’d promote Peggy). I think it’s important to tread that line–to find some point of reference for the contemporary reader that at the same time is at least conceivable for the historical period.
That said, it’s no stretch at all to make, say, a wealthy, privileged man of an earlier era decent to his servants; or to have a woman who operates entirely under the strictures of her time and place show some independence of thought or action.
A contemporary reader, I think, can appreciate the relative independence, or liberality, of a historical character as long as the context is clear, and by the same token, can probably forgive the historically-accurate classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., of a well-drawn character.
April 2, 2010 at 12:09 pm
I can’t agree, I’m afraid. I don’t think that you should whitewash the part – and if people can’t tolerate reading about the past *as it was–*then.. i’d have no worries about them never reading my books. In fact it’s entirely wrong to water down the unpleasant aspects of the past (if you mention them, obviously its not mandatory to mention these matters – I don’t expect every gay historical to have huge treatise on the danger to gay men, simply expect the gay men to be aware of the danger they are in and to act accordingly)
Someone must have promoted women to copy writing, mustn’t they? Don is simply representative of that.
Obviously there were thousands of people who were decent to their servants, but “decent to the servants” probably means an entirely different thing in today’s concept than it did in previous times. Servants were made to be invisible, you only need to watch Upstairs Downstairs to see that servants didn’t knock, for example, because they weren’t there. One didn’t necessarily acknowledge a servant for a job done, such as passing your something, laying your fire, blacking your boots (you’d never see these staff anyway). Rochester for example, is a good example. When he is going to arrive with a contingent of guests he lets his housekeeper know -but it’s not because he has any consideration for the housekeeper, it’s because he wants the house right for the guests and therefore looks good himself – but when he arrives the first time we see him, he arrives out of the blue, cold, wet hungry with no notice at all – and *expects that the house will be in a fit state for him to take charge of*.
Some cultures find this difficult to accept, specially if they are raised to tip everyone in a service employment and to thank everyone as a matter of course, but it’s sort of ingrained in me.
I think that to give your historical character freedoms that did not exist is treading a tricky A.U. line. Granted there were liberals, like Wilberforce – but god! the man didn’t have it easy!
April 2, 2010 at 12:19 pm
That’s the way I see it. Look at slavery. A slave was property, essentially a domestic animal like a man’s horse or dog. Some people treated their domestics animals very well, knowing that to do so paid off in a healthier more productive piece of property. Some people would never dream of beating an animal.
But in the case of servants, they had few more rights than a slave. Technically they could quit, but it’s not like they had any social benefits to fall back on. So they stayed and put up with what they had to. If they were lucky they got a master who treated them fairly, fed them and gave them a warm place to live. But none of them had any ‘rights’.
And to pretend that never happened is not right. The old saw about ‘those who forget history are doomed to repeat it’ is well grounded in fact. If we whitewash the past in our books, aren’t we doing just that? Letting people forget about the reality of those times?
If people don’t like gritty realism then my books probably aren’t for them. Either the contemporary ones or the ones I will write set in the past.
April 2, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Here, here!
March 29, 2010 at 7:30 pm
go for it, George!
March 29, 2010 at 8:31 pm
I guess after all the kerfuffles about privilege that have made their way around the interwebs, many writers have swung too far towards being PC, even in historical writing. Patrician Romans angsting over slave rights will always make me laugh.
Funnily enough I just read a pretty good m/f book (‘Gold Mountain’ by Sharon Cullars) where the couple are a Cantonese and a black woman, and as it’s set in the Californian Gold Rush there’s a lot of racism involved. I was impressed by the way the author didn’t gloss over the racism but neither did she use it in a crowbar way to advance the plot – she simply presented it ‘as was’ and it worked. Also, none of the races were demonised or blamed or bigged up. It was so refreshing to read a historical that focused on people at the lowest end of the social scale and that didn’t sugar-coat their lives. We need more books of this type.
March 29, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Great post, Erastes. I got sooooooo cross at the end part of the new Alice on Wonderland because it just wouldn’t have happened like that. Not in that era!
Kate – I totally agree about representing the reality without glorifying it. O’Brian does it well in his books; he has the light touch.
Charlie
March 29, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Thanks Charlie! Hope your boys aren’t too rumpled and I put them back in the box correctly. 🙂
March 29, 2010 at 11:47 pm
Absolutely – and perhaps its one of the reasons why people stay in the relative safety of the regency–which in itself has become a bit of a fairy land no pun intended with no blacks, no jews or races other than those demned frogs and its ok to be rude about them. It’s easy to be superior about other races when you are already being superior to women, tradesmen and the great unwashed!
As i said in my recent post on Wave’s blog – about class – this kind of bigotry and racism is ingrained into people (remembering the South Pacific song “you’ve got to be taught” if you start writing about common people you are going to encounter more prejudice even to white neighbours who seem just the same – than you can shake a stick at.
March 29, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Kate –
Yes, the whole privilege debate, for sure, and I agree completely: as writers we owe a debt to history. Those who don’t learn from &tc., &tc., and it’s important that we strike back at ignorance by presenting the past in as realistic a light as we can…
March 29, 2010 at 10:54 pm
As someone who is writing her first ever historical I met this challenge head on. I’m writing a very noir historical set in 1929 Los Angeles, billed at the time as ‘the last best white spot’ and was anti everything. And my main protag is an LAPD cop who’s a misogynist, intensely anti-gay, catholic, black, Irish, union, Jewish… you name it. He’s also a bagman and hitman for his boss, the Chief of Police (who in reality was crooked, along with most of the city council and mayor of the day) In the course of the story he uses every racial epithet in existence, from the n word to the k word. He routinely calls women bitches and sluts, and treats them that way. I’m writing him in the vein of James Ellroy and if you’ve ever read his L.A. Confidential or White Jazz, he pulls no punches with his language. I have no idea if the book will be published, but I think it’s damn good. And very true to the time. The only politically correct thing I had to do was not have the man have sex with any underage girls, though that was also common in those days. Otherwise there isn’t a PC bone in the whole novel.
March 30, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Pat
It always comes down to perspective.
It doesn’t matter how much (intellectually) I try to tell myself that historical accuracy is important, I always cringe when I read the “n” word or any other racial epithet in a book. I do understand the concept that if we don’t learn from the past we are apt to repeat it, but like other minorities I have a difficult time reading terms that I have long decried.
However, having said that, authors have to be true to the period they are writing about, and to whitewash 🙂 the past for political correctness would beg the question, why bother writing historicals. What I do object to is when authors seem to derive pleasure using these terms unnecessarily over and over in their books, within the context of the story, because they know that they can get away with it in a historical novel when they would not be allowed to use these same terms in a contemporary.
The old saying “walk a mile in my shoes” is very appropriate at times.
March 29, 2010 at 11:35 pm
This is hugely exciting news, Pat and I hope you will join us Macs when you get it published! I was so impressed with the way you handled the ingrained homophobia in LA Heat and the way people dealt with it.
I agree, why should we sanitise the past just because people find the past offensive?
March 29, 2010 at 11:55 pm
I say if they can’t stand reality then stick to fantasy novels. This is the way the world was. Prettying it up is phony and I won’t be part of it. My worlds are real, dirt and all. Don’t like it, then don’t read it. But don’t read it and tell me you can’t use those words. Those are the words used then.
A year or so ago I left an online crit group because the owner of the group objected to me posting a link to an article in the Washington Post about blacks in the White House before Obama and how they were servants. The writer of the article talked about some Senator decades ago who basically said n****** had no place in the White House, only he didn’t censor the word, he quoted the guy exactly. The group owner basically called ME a racist because I posted the link. And she did this publicly, so the whole list saw her email. I quit. Talk about shooting the messenger. I didn’t use the word, neither did the reporter who wrote the piece. He was just quoting a bigot who said it decades ago. Talk about someoen who wanted to cleanse the past of reality.
The funny thing was, I quit as publicly as she chastised me and that made her mad. LOL.
March 29, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Yeah. Bumped my nose on this with a review just today.
I have a hero who regards a wife as a convenience rather than a person. He wants to get married because he’s tired of cooking for himself. And the reviewer found him a rounder and a cad, as one young lady’s father did.
When I was rewriting the pirate novel, I had to make the choice about the language again. I decided against it. We already show the man is prejudiced to the point he doesn’t even love his Morrocan bed-warmer. None of the men have any use for women and the white men look down on the black ones.
Thing is, the characters of a period can express their period’s bigotry without it being pegged as your own…sometimes. As mentione, it helps if you have one who isn’t quite as accepting of the mores. Like one of my Robin Hoods, who doesn’t make bold speeches or gestures for Ireland (doesn’t give a tinker’s damn), but he doesn’t mind tumbling a little Fenian explosives expert.
March 30, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I recall reading a fictional work, (not M/M) set in Australia during the 19th century where the author kept referring to “Aboriginal trackers” and each time, it threw me out of the book.
People of the time called them “Black trackers.” That’s pretty common knowledge and never hedged at, if you’re watching an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) period piece.
Aboriginal trackers is the more PC term of our times–it’s not what would have been used, even as recently as the 1970s when I still commonly heard such terms as “black fella” “Abbo” etc.
I also think it does a disservice to the time setting to water down the language.
April 2, 2010 at 7:38 am
Absolutely. Seen it referred to as even later than that, I think! If you make everyone PC in the past, then what’s the point of writing about it?
March 31, 2010 at 11:25 pm
I think it’s important for a story to be honest and true to itself, and that includes non pc behavior a lot of the time. I’d be bored silly wth flawless perfect characters. I much prefer characters that have true depths, including parts that can be unattractive.
Unfortunately, prejudice of all sorts still exist in modern day too even in our supposedly more enlightened times.
Excluding prejudices in historical fiction would ring incredibly false to me.
The same goes for age of conset issues. I’d be uncomfortable with a lot of pedophilia being glamorised, but it’s pretty weak to pretend that people were all virgins before they turned 18.
April 2, 2010 at 7:41 am
Absolutely, and I couldn’t agree more – and of course paedophilia is subjective depending on which country you are in!!! If I was 18 going out with a 16 year old in the UK I’d be arrested in the States. Headdesk.
God knows how one is supposed to write about the queens who married at 12 or so!! “Here you are, sire, here’s your new bride, but you can’t have sex with her for six years…”