By Sarah Tarabey

 

Reading historical fiction is, in many ways, like reading action and adventure novels, sci-fi thrillers, or romance series: we read them to take us just far away enough from where we are that we can explore what we know in ways we haven’t yet encountered. But historical fiction also provides us with experiences that other genres cannot.

While actual texts from the past are rich and alive, they can also prove difficult to parse. Have you picked up a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales lately? If you had, you would soon notice that the Middle English needs more than a little effort to get into. If they haven’t already been translated, most editions gloss several words, which is to say they provide marginal notations of their meaning, and include lengthy contextual explanations for nearly every tale. Ancient and medieval texts remind us that the past is a world unto itself. It’s doubtful that we’ll ever be able to enter such a milieu completely.

But that’s where historical fiction comes in. While we might not know everything that there is to know about a certain time period, writing historical fiction allows us to create worlds which, at least, resemble our understanding of the past. And that’s the key: historical fiction tends to reveal more about what we have taken from times long gone. And a nice Elizabethan backdrop doesn’t hurt, either.

So why else do we tend to gravitate toward this expansive, yet familiar, genre?

 

Social Commentary

Sometimes, all we need is to look at someone else doing the same thing we’re doing in order to gain a deeper understanding of who we are. Framing narratives in history creates an illusion of distance from our current reality. This separation becomes a useful tool for authors. It gives them freer rein to create worlds that closely parallel our own; to get into the psyches of characters who resemble parts of ourselves, or our collective identity; and to comment on or critique actions, ideologies, and events that we struggle with as a society. When reading historical fiction, we aren’t focused on preserving our own egos. Time separates “us” from “them.” For the same reasons, authors of these works feel less pressure to hold back their opinions. They can get away with making striking statements, and in this context, we may be more inclined to agree with them.

 

Rose-Colored Glasses

We tend to romanticize the past as a simpler time. Feel free to replace “simpler” with a bevy of other positive adjectives: more beautiful, more alive, more exciting. Historical fiction sometimes becomes a means for us to escape from the harsh reality of the present. Bemoaning trending short shorts and crop tops, we might marvel at the beautiful fashion of the Victorian aristocracy. We might wish to partake in a revolutionary Salon of the Enlightenment, displaying a Voltairean wit which might not be as well received today. Or we might want to reside in Mesopotamia, that mystical land where everything began, where men and women looked to the skies to foretell the quality of their futures. When we look at a past era, we might think that we would have had more important or fulfilling lives had we lived in that time. Historical fiction responds to our pervasive discomfort with the present. While our fantasies may suffer the limitation of being only partially based in reality, the appreciation that historical fiction awakens within us keeps us coming back for more.

 

Social Media as a Benchmark

Historical fiction fills in a much-needed gap in our collective subconscious for a connection with our past. Sometimes we can find social media overbearing. We feel like we know more than we want to about people leading predictable lives inasmuch as they are usually quite similar to our own. But the details of the everyday lives of people past are relatively unknown to us. And judging from the countless novels written about famous past figures, or purporting to utilize their perspective, we wouldn’t mind reading a play-by-play of their daily activities. The same applies to particularly intriguing time periods. Think of the success of The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory or Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. We want to know how people used to live in order to gather clues about human nature, and the recurrent themes that unite people across time. Historical fiction provides the characters, the setting, and the conflict to help us bear witness to those themes.

 

Doing More with Less

The past still has barriers that the present has already solved. Consider that even a few decades ago, the internet wasn’t a tool for the masses. Only a hundred years before that point in time did the first gasoline-powered car come out.

How were peoples of the past able to overcome the same problems that plague humanity while working with what we might consider a deficit of knowledge and technology? They came to live, and even thrive, with “less” to work with than we have now. Historical fiction provides us with the stories of the struggles of individuals deeply embedded in the unique strengths and weaknesses of their times. Yet these individuals must still contend with eternal human concerns, striving much like we do today, to understand the purpose and meaning behind life. Historical fiction is unique in its ability to show us how people with capacities similar to our own coped with environments beyond our ability to fully comprehend.