Historical accuracy in fiction

[osprey_archer]

Over on Ex Urbe, there's an excellent article about The Borgias vs. Borgia: Faith and Fear (Accuracy in historical fiction) - comparing the two shows and also discussing the importance or lack thereof of historical accuracy in historical fiction.

The whole article is good, but I found particularly interesting her comments about the fact that historical accuracy can interfere with communicating the story - because, for instance, period appropriate dress can look so hideous or simply so bizarre to modern eyes. Or because historical people can be so awful, and their awfulness so alienating. As she puts it:

"Why would sex-&-violence Showtime tone things down? I think because they were afraid of alienating their audience with the sheer implausibility of what the Renaissance was actually like. Rome in 1492 was so corrupt, and so violent, that I think they don’t believe the audience will believe them if they go full-on."

Which I think is probably true. I study American history around 1900. I wouldn't want to watch, for instance, a TV show with set in the American South with period-appropriate lynchings, with a carnival atmosphere in the center of town - one of my classmates mentioned a story an old woman told, about being summoned out of a movie theater when she was a little girl in the twenties, to come see a lynching because "they wouldn't want to miss this." And people selling postcards afterward featuring photos of the mutilated body.

I think Americans tend to think of lynchings as something that happened in the dark of night, like the averted lynching in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's not totally inaccurate: sometimes lynchings did happen at night.

But night lynchings are also an easier image to digest, I think, because it suggests at least that the perpetrators had the conscience to feel ashamed of themselves and try to hide their iniquities under cover of darkness. Except often they didn't: often they did what they did in broad daylight, to the applause of all the respectable world, which thought it was more fun than the movie theater.

I read about this in the history books. And sometimes it seems the most fictional thing about fiction is not dragon or spaceships, but that it tells us we are much better than we are.

Comments

[ladyherenya]

It's fascinating to think - perhaps particularly if you value historical accuracy - that sometimes something less accurate is more convincing.

I've only been aware of this in small ways - the BBC's The Hour, set in the 1950s, was apparently criticised for some (minor?) anachronisms in its dialogue. The writer responded that it was important to be accurate in visual details but dialogue was more about communicating with the audience than capturing the times (either because she didn't trust everyone to be familiar with 50s slang or else because our ideas of formality have shifted and she was worried historically-accurate dialogue would seem too stilted). But that's more about translating what the characters say so it is understandable, rather than changing the characters so they themselves are more palatable.

I suspect that being accessible (and not alienating people) can be more important than being historically accurate because of the reasons people engage with fiction. Often people are looking to be entertained, or to escape. We often turn to stories wanting to see hope. There's a quote I can't remember exactly about stories being important, not because they pretend the darkness isn't there, but because they tell us that the darkness can be overcome.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've heard a lot of variations of that quote, and I love them all. I think my favorite is that stories don't tell children that there are dragons; they tell children that dragons can be defeated. (Sadly I can't remember who said any of these quotes.)

And I think your point about dialogue is an excellent and interesting one, because I think often our perceptions of how old a word is are completely off - either it's much older than we think, or surprisingly new.

For instance, Americans in the 19th century used the word refrigerator for what we would call an ice box. I know it's historically accurate because Louisa May Alcott used it - but whenever I run across it in one of her books, there's always a moment of "Whoa, refrigerator? But they don't even have electricity yet!"

So it's accurate, but if I wrote a novel set in the 19th century I would never in a million years use the word "refrigerator", because it feels anachronistic. Or computer, to refer to a person who adds up numbers.

I think for cosmetic changes of that sort, complaining about historical accuracy is often a sort of one-upsmanship. But your point about the possibility of changing characters to make them more palatable is a good one, because that seems much more problematic to me. I'm not sure there's a good answer about what to do with it.

[island-of-reil.livejournal.com]

I suspect that being accessible (and not alienating people) can be more important than being historically accurate because of the reasons people engage with fiction. Often people are looking to be entertained, or to escape. We often turn to stories wanting to see hope.

I think it's important not to sacrifice the flow of the story for details that are not that important in the long run, just as it's more important when bringing a story from the page to the screen to respect how visual story-telling differs from the textual sort than to uphold literal devotion to the text above all.

On the other hand, people approach fiction for many things other than a happy ending. Some want emotional catharsis, for example. Also, some cultures have more tolerance for sad or ambiguous endings than others.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't think "wanting to see hope" implies that the story must have a happy ending. Emotional catharsis can provide home - hope that one can get past something - as can sad or ambiguous endings. Hope and happy are far from synonymous.

[island-of-reil.livejournal.com]

This is true. Although sometimes a totally hopeless story serves an emotional need as well...

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Well, of course. That's why ladyherenya said we often turn to stories wanting to see hope, rather than we always turn to stories for that reason.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I'm...pretty ambivalent about that article. For one thing, it makes a bunch of assertions about detail accuracy that are just wrong (the pink dresses = poor people, uh, any historians who think THAT have not looked at much Renaissance art--while it's true deep colors were more expensive on the whole, fashion was not necessarily dictated solely by expense of the material, and pink was damned trendy in many countries in the 15th and 16th century judging by portraits of the wealthy), but more importantly, I think she falls into the OTHER trap and my biggest peeve about how people look at history--

The Borgias thrills and entertains, but Borgia: Faith and Fear also succeeds in showing the audience how terrible things were in the Renaissance, and how much progress we’ve made. It de-romanticizes. It feels period. It has guts. It has things the audience is not comfortable with. It has people being nasty to animals. It has disfigurement. It has male rape.

This idea that history was SO TERRIBLE, that we've made so much PROGRESS and that things the audience are not comfortable with in history are things that no longer happen today is just...wrong. People in the past did horrible things, some of which are no longer acceptable to--but people horribly abuse animals (and other humans) today, and you could argue that modern factory farming, for example, is worse for animals than historical farming. Men rape each other (and women) today. We do horrible things now that they wouldn't have been comfortable with back then and vice versa. Even for your lynching example, while that may horrify most people in the modern US, I guarantee the equivalent of public daylight lynchings is commonplace somewhere in the world right now.

BUT at the same time, people historically also did good things, and cared for each other. The Laudatio Turiae is just as real and valid as accounts of gruesome arena executions. The "the past was so terrible and grimdark all the time" mindset is how you ended up with actualfax historians claiming, all evidence to the contrary, that the capacity to love children and pets is a modern one. To say "given a choice between grimdark and less grimdark, the grimdark is always the more 'historically accurate' mindset' is just as inaccurate as turning Giuliano della Rovere into someone who argues against graft.

I mean, I do think there's a delicate balance between historical accuracy (both the material and the mindsets, insofar as we can understand either) and story and characters a modern audience can sympathize with, but--I just don't agree with the REAL HISTORY IS GRIMDARK school of thought, at all. I think it lets us off the hook too much, like all the people reading Les Misérables and going "thank god people no longer get 20 years' hard labor for petty theft," when so many modern criminal justice systems are not nearly so far from the 19th century as one would hope for a 150 years of "progress." And I think it paints an unfairly grim picture of the past, suggesting that it was 100% populated by terrible people doing terrible things to each other, and overlooking the joy and human and compassion that are also a fundamental part of human nature. I mean, hell, the contemporary Renaissance fiction I've read isn't half as dark as the picture that essayist paints, and if everything was in fact so casually awful at all times that it was normalized, shouldn't that show up more in their fiction? There's no need to clean things up if they're normalized and people don't think they're bad, after all.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

She addresses the pink issue in a response to a comment below the article - the problem is not pink qua pink, but the very pale pink that they use for Lucrezia's early dresses. Given that she's a professional historian who specializes in the Renaissance and in art history, I think she probably knows what she's talking about.

And I don't think "the past was terrible" necessarily means that it was devoid of goodness or that the present is so shiny and wonderful, although clearly I picked the quote that is most easily interpreted that way. It perfectly possible for both past and present to be terrible, in their own special and different ways - the fact that the awfulness of the past is often a different kind of awfulness than we are used to is what makes it alienating.

Whether or not humanity has made progress as a whole, people no longer relieve themselves as a matter of course on the floors of important government buildings, and modern viewers would find it alarming and gross if characters suddenly did. It's accurate, but it gets in the way of telling the story.

And it wouldn't surprise me at all if Renaissance writers toned down the nastiness of society in their fiction. Plenty of later writers did (and do): Jane Austen springs to mind as one who often gets skewered for it. How many books published in contemporary America are really sensitive to issues of class and race and gender? Is there any reason to believe Renaissance authors were, on the whole, any different on that score?

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Given that she's a professional historian who specializes in the Renaissance and in art history, I think she probably knows what she's talking about.

Well, then there must be something wrong with my eyes when I look at period portraits (and that Lucrezia screenshot--she's not wearing baby pink, she's wearing salmon pink and the bodice is a close match for a popular Renaissance color, the skirt and sleeves a bit pale but not that far off some of the portraits I've seen; I may not be a professional historian but I am capable of looking at portraits and oil paintings tend to darken rather than fade), then.

Professional historians are frequently wrong (as are the amateur kind), so I'm not particularly willing to take things on authority simply because a professional asserts that they are so. Hell, I had a professional entomologist recently lecture me about basic classification in a way that was ludicrously ludicrously wrong, and easily provable by referring to a basic textbook, or a dictionary, or any reliable ento website--should I have taken his incorrect assertions on faith because he had a degree?

These portraits range into the 16th century and it's possible some are faded, but even so:

http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/florence/PuligoPortraitLady.jpg
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/CarpaccioBetrothed3.JPG
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/VeronicaFranco.jpg (is that a pale pink dress with pearls and applied bobbin lace? I think so!)
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/RelicOfTheCross.jpg
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/florence/birthstjohndet.jpg
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/florence/marriagemarydet.jpg
http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/wardrobe/florence/WomanBasketSpindles.jpg (this might be more orange than salmon, but still pretty pale)

And yes, there are definitely things I do agree with that both you and the writer said--but overall, the entire tone of the article and a lot of her assertions just rub me intensely the wrong way. To me, it reads very much like the usual justification for grimdark as intrinsically more realistic, and I think there are some pretty huge problems with the argument (although I don't disagree that all 'historical' fiction is filtered through the sensibilities of the time it's written in, something which wasn't even viewed as a questionable artistic choice until recently).

I just don't think the awfulness of the past is categorically different from the awfulness of the present. In some ways, yes, in other ways no--we want it to be different (see: the prison example I mentioned), but that doesn't mean it actually is. (And the awfulness of any period is not a monolith, of course.)

Whether or not humanity has made progress as a whole, people no longer relieve themselves as a matter of course on the floors of important government buildings, and modern viewers would find it alarming and gross if characters suddenly did. It's accurate, but it gets in the way of telling the story.

Wasn't arguing against that type of change--or necessarily any other type of change for modern sensibilities. I think the question of how much and what to change is a complicated question that every writer and reader or viewer has to approach individually, no argument there. It's the "we've made so much progress, the dark sides of society now are so intrinsically different" that I don't really buy; nor do I entirely buy the "the past is intrinsically alienating" thing--I read a lot of primary sources, both fiction and nonfiction, and sure, sometimes I find the mores alienating, and sometimes I don't, but I feel exactly the same way about contemporary society.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

And it wouldn't surprise me at all if Renaissance writers toned down the nastiness of society in their fiction. Plenty of later writers did (and do): Jane Austen springs to mind as one who often gets skewered for it. How many books published in contemporary America are really sensitive to issues of class and race and gender? Is there any reason to believe Renaissance authors were, on the whole, any different on that score?

No, of course they probably cleaned stuff up--but things that are so normalized no one thinks they're a big deal are not things I would expect to get cleaned up or ignored, but things I'd expect to show up in the background as a matter of course. Antebellum southern fiction doesn't pretend slavery didn't exist because it has no reason to do so.

But clearly we read the article very differently.

[island-of-reil.livejournal.com]

This idea that history was SO TERRIBLE, that we've made so much PROGRESS and that things the audience are not comfortable with in history are things that no longer happen today is just...wrong.

Agreed so hard. I have a strong aversion to the "arc of progress" mythos. So many of the evils committed by industrialized societies are done beneath the radar of more-privileged citizens, whether it's prison abuses, labor abuses, torture, or environmental destruction.

BUT at the same time, people historically also did good things, and cared for each other.

I wish this were more widely understood, because those stories are every bit as moving as the "heartwarmers" that appear in newspapers. More so, really, because by reading them you're reaching across time to empathize with another human being, which is humbling.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I agree that what makes for good storytelling isn't necessarily accuracy - after all, the best dialogue is not 'how people actually speak' but 'how people would ideally speak, or how we imagine that they do when we think of them speaking'. I admit, though, that if there are significant departures from historical accuracy, I want there to be an author's note or something, assuring me that e.g. he knows the Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, but for purposes of his novel he delayed the surrender until the beginning of April, because then I know it was done deliberately, rather than out of ignorance.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes - I think there are definitely some historical facts that storytellers have more leeway with than others. For everyday life details like what people wore or ate, there's often a lot of room to maneuver (within broad guidelines like "So the ancient Romans shouldn't be eating potatoes, as those are a New World plant...")

But with dates and the like, I often feel like the author is cheating if they change it. Unless of course it's meant to be an alternate history, and then that's half the fun.

Alternate history! Another topic for a post.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What a sad thought, that fiction tells us we're much better than we are. I'll need to think about it. I mean, maybe when it comes to the worst things, fiction tones them down for us, but when we're not at our worst, we can be pretty okay, I think.

Hideous clothes and hair: In Japan during the Edo period, it was the fashion for men to shave the top of their heads and just leave the hair around the sides, which they grew long and then fastened up. It's a totally alien look, today, especially for young men, since it duplicates the look of a bald head. In many, many Japanese period dramas, they'll find some excuse for the hero to maintain a full head of hair, though all the secondary characters will have appropriately shaved heads. (This isn't universally true: some films and dramas are good about having the hero have a shaved head too.) Similarly, my mother said that you could always tell who the leads in a historical movie were by which ones had hairstyles that were less authentic and more like the hairstyles of the era in which the film was made.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this more. Fiction can tell us that we're better than we are, but maybe that's part of the point - that it models how we can become better? Maybe the problem is perspective: a novel can portray its protagonists as models of virtue to aspire to, but it depends on the readers to have the self-awareness to know whether they measure up to that or not.

And yes about the hairstyles! In the most recent BBC version of Emma, Emma's hair is done beautifully and wouldn't attract attention on the street today - except maybe in a "What beautiful hair she has" sort of way. Meanwhile her poor friend Harriet has her hair done up so it sticks out of the sides of her head in cones. I don't know if it's period or not; it must be, because otherwise what possible excuse do they have?

[island-of-reil.livejournal.com]

Fiction can tell us that we're better than we are, but maybe that's part of the point - that it models how we can become better?

I think you're ascribing didactic purposes to all fiction that are not the case and should not be the case. Admittedly I'd rather read a fantasy novel in which the good guys win than, say, Irvine Welsh, but I think there's a place in fiction for unpunished villainy, for grotesqueries, and so forth.

BTW I saw the first ep of Borgia: Faith and Fear and … I just couldn't. It's not that it was violent or that it had a lot of sex. It was the acting, it was the dialogue, it was Rodrigo's Midwestern U.S. accent. "I need La Bella!" Um... you sound like Johnny Freakin' Carson, not an Italian Renaissance pope.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

How on earth did you get from "fiction can tell us" - that is, this is one of the many things that fiction is capable of doing, not a thing that all fiction does or should do - to the assumption that I ascribed didactic purposes to all fiction? Those two things are not even slightly similar.

[island-of-reil.livejournal.com]

You're right, I misread "Fiction can tell us" to imply you were speaking of all fiction.