What Does Historical Fiction Give Us? Part Two

Part 2 of 2: Land of Foreigners

There's a trend these days for readers to look for protagonists like them: girls want female heroes. People of color want to see other minorities triumph, etc. But that's only a good thing up to a point. Don't we also need to see how people unlike us are, in fact, like us? If the past is a foreign country, its people are always foreigners. They not only dressed and spoke differently from us—all of us now alive—they had different values and saw the world differently. We might disagree with them about a lot of things. A chance to get inside their heads without judgment should be mind-expanding, like any cultural exchange. Unlike straightforward historiography, historical fiction humanizes the people of yore. We laugh and cry with them; we discover that they had the same feelings we do and suffered many of the same basic human sorrows, whether they looked like us or not. I don't think it's even important that this glimpse of their hearts is mediated by a modern author, because fiction is the creation of the illusion of reality, after all. Through historical fiction, we feel for and with the people of the past as we see them before us. And that is empathy.

Try Again

Finally, there's the issue of learning from the past in the way that our high school history teachers described. “Such foolish mistakes”… and we still make them. “How wrong-headed”...and we haven't gotten better. Or maybe we have; maybe our attitudes are evolving, and just one more push can bring us through to real humanity. Sometimes you have to see some success to keep the hope stoked. And fiction, which presents up-close-and-personal the lives of our forebears, teaches us a lot about how far we've come in a way that makes us care.

Additional blogs from NL Holmes have appeared on the Florida Writers Association website floridawriters.net.