BY MERILYN OBLAD
Accuracy in Historical Fiction, Part Two: Shifting Mental Gears
In my last post , I wrote about how to do proper research for in-depth historical novels. But what do you do for backdrop historical novels, ones that take place in the past but the story itself is not bound to that time? Well, to be blunt, you do more research, and you learn to think differently about your time setting than you do right now.
The past is like a foreign country, and the farther back in time you go, the more foreign it becomes, even if it’s your home nation. Like any foreign country, the past has a different language, different customs, different ways of thinking, a different sociopolitical landscape, and a different economy. The very things we most take for granted in our lives today can be poles apart from what people experienced, say, 150 years ago.
The degree of research you need to do depends on your story. Some people really have to spend significant amounts of time researching a specific period before they start writing. Others may only need to run a few fact checks as they go along, pulling the odd colloquialism that pops up and inserting slang from the right time and not the present.
True story: there’s an author I’m a fan of who writes Regency romance but tends to include the phrase “cut to the chase” in her books. “Cut to the chase” hails from the 20th century movie-making industry, particularly westerns, where the director would decide that too much dialogue was happening and instruct the editor to cut off the dialogue and move straight into the chase scenes, which were more popular with audiences. So “cutting to the chase” has no business showing up in 1805 England. Makes my inner historian moan in despair every time I see it.
And now, because I’m feeling indulgent towards that same inner historian, I’m going to share with you some of the foreignness of the past, just so you can see how very much you need to question your own assumptions once you’ve written your story out. Please note that I’m not telling you interrupt your writing. If you’re in the middle of your plot and events are flying thick and fast, for pete’s sake don’t stop! Editing comes later.
Every age of every country, no matter how golden, has a seamy underbelly of distasteful behavior. I know how many of you steampunk fans love the Victorian Age, but the prim propriety of that time was just a front for rampant pornography, opium use, and sexual escapades. Incidentally, condoms, though invented much earlier than the Victorian Era, were manufactured in greater numbers than ever before by the Victorians. They were called French letters and packaged in tins stamped with the picture of Queen Victoria herself or one of her Prime Ministers. Which, to me, sounds like more of a deterrent to sex than an encouragement of safe intercourse, but whatever.
Chinese blacksmiths used a double-action piston-bellows, starting in the 5th century B.C., which enabled them to create hotter fires and stronger steel because it gave a continuous stream of air. Unlike the western pump-bellows which alternately delivered a stream of air, then sucked it back in again, depriving the fire of the necessary oxygen to burn hotter, if for just a moment. The technology spread throughout Asia and eventually reached Europe by the 15th century A.D. The Asian bellows did twice the work with half the effort, saving both time and energy, but allowed for the creation of far superior metal works than their European counterparts.
The terms pagan and heathen are originally geographical rather than religious. Pagan comes from the Latin word pagus, which is a teeny tiny village situated far from the main Roman roads. Because the roads of the Roman Empire functioned as communication networks, any villages not close to said road were among the last in the empire to receive news. Such as the switch to Christianity, for instance. Thus, the people of those villages, or pagans, continued their polytheistic religious practices and nature-worship long after the people of Rome started worshiping Jesus Christ. Heathens were people who lived out on the heath, again, far from the main roads and news of any changes. So, calling a person a pagan or a heathen was more or less saying that they were redneck hicks and lived out in the boonies.
Even as late as the 1960s, when my mom was in nursing school, there was a belief among doctors that women could not and did not have heart attacks. No joke. I’ve seen medical books where it says that a woman had palpitations but not a heart attack.
And speaking of doctors . . . When Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that medical personnel who washed their hands before and after treating obstetric patients reduced the amount of deaths due to childbed fever, he was soundly ridiculed. He directly challenged the belief and claim that doctors were gentlemen and a gentleman’s hands were clean and therefore not in need of extra washing. In fact, the backlash from his insistence on hand washing was so bad that it later broke Semmelweis. He died in 1865 after being committed to an asylum for severe depression and shot nerves. He only lasted two weeks in the asylum and was a mere 47 years old at the time of his passing. Germ theory and hand washing would take decades more to be firmly established in the medical profession as standard practice and belief.
In colonial America, a woman’s legal right to her children was through her marriage to her husband. She “owned” her children because she was her husband’s wife and not because she was the children’s mother. So if her husband died while the children were still young and if he left a will dictating guardianship to another man, then the mother had no legal right to keep her children because her husband’s death ended their marriage and her legal motherhood. Morally, I suspect this was of little consequence in situations where the mother tended and provided for her children competently, but if the morals of the mother were in question for any reason, then there was legal recourse to remove them from her care. I don’t know how often this happened, but a named male guardian could claim a dead man’s children and win custody fairly easily. Oh, I almost forgot—children without fathers were considered orphans even if their mothers were alive.
The “Dark” Ages (yes, the quotes are necessary), which started when the first Roman Empire collapsed and ended around 1000 A.D., were not as dark as most people assume. The beginnings of the modern university system started then. Fair laws, the beginnings of scientific discovery, the development of some astounding architecture, and the unity of religion among Christians are all signs of a thinking and at least somewhat progressive people. Furthermore, Charlemagne, King of the Franks and later Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from 768 to 814 A.D., was the force behind an early renaissance. Admittedly, it didn’t last as long as THE Renaissance, but Charlemagne’s still saw the flowering of art and literature and thinking that are all hallmarks of the later version we all know and love. Not so dark after all, huh?
Now that I’ve inundated you with random historical facts, let me give you some practical advice on how avoid anachronisms. If you find yourself writing present day phrases and ideas in settings where they don’t belong and you can’t or haven’t yet found an appropriate replacement phrase, then try writing out the description. For my Regency romance author, I’d tell her to write the meaning of cut to the chase, get to the point, if she couldn’t find the early 1800s equivalent. Actually, “come to the point” is more likely than “get,” showing how much patterns of speech shift over time.
And, as I mentioned last time, read up on the literature of your time setting. It’ll give you a good sense of the idioms, euphemisms, and other colloquialisms that were used, as well as the word choice and social niceties that define your era.
So, keep an eye out for the assumptions you make the next time you write anything in a historical setting. You may find yourself cutting to the chase when you should be coming to the point.
MeriLyn Oblad lays down the grammar and content law from her home in Southern Utah, with an MA in History from Brigham Young University. (Don’t be fudging the facts with this girl!) Her latest project, The Toll of Another Bell: A Fantasy Anthology, will be released January 31, 2015, at a tremendous launch party, which you can attend here.