Historical accuracy in fiction
Jul. 28th, 2013 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOver 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.
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.
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Date: 2013-07-29 06:52 pm (UTC)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.