Frocks 'n' herbs....

Today’s discussion on the HNS Yahoo group got me reflecting on the sanitized nature of a lot of historical fiction, and why that might be. Chris Gortner has referred to this as the “frocks and herbs” type of histfic, in which much emphasis is placed on the details of dress and manners and speech, with the nastier bits like blood and fleas and syphilis and tooth decay edited out.

I’ve noticed it too; as others on the list pointed out, few women in historical novels ever seem to reference their menstrual cycles, or die in childbirth, or visit the privy. Various characters in my own recently-submitted manuscript do all of the above - and of course Jane Seymour dies of postpartum septicaemia right on schedule - but I had the nagging sense throughout the writing process that I hadn’t sufficiently captured the smells, the itchiness, the narrowness of daily life in the sixteenth century. It can be overdone as well, so I may have erred on the side of caution. Still, when I read, I’m not nearly as interested in what the character is wearing as I am in his/her psychology, or limitations of their field of political, religious, intellectual vision.

Here are some things that seldom come up in historical novels, plus a few anachronisms that get to me. There was an even better discussion in the Yahoo group, but I’m recapping it here and adding a few of my own:

1) Menstruation. As many readers observe, this untrivial detail of daily life has an effect on a character’s psychology and behavior, as well as being an annoying mess in the pre-Kotex era (and in some times/places, carrying a hugely negative stigma). But you almost never hear about it.

2) There seems to be a lot of childbirth, and miscarriages galore. These are sometimes neat (mom screams and baby pops out!) and sometimes messy, with water and blood all over the place. No matter how much the women suffer, though, both they and their babies pull through just fine with astonishing frequency, given the alarming rate of death in childbirth for both moms and babies right up until the last century.

3) No one ever has fleas, or is very dirty. If they do, they’re probably the villain.

4) Visiting the privy. Maybe it happens, but I never read anything about paper or cloth or water to clean up with afterward, or whether such places were segregated by sex. I had to guess at how 16th-century waiting women at court might have gone about relieving themselves in the course of their day, since there’s almost nothing written about it. It’s a little more possible to estimate how the king and queen took care of their needs, so I had to adjust it from there.

5) I kind of cringe whenever a character can “feel the blood pounding in her ears,” or seems to have an excellent understanding of the cardiopulmonary system, the way the lungs take in oxygen and distribute it through the bloodstream to the brain, etc. Your average citizen really didn’t have a detailed understanding of the inner workings of the human anatomy until well after the Enlightenment was underway.

6) When characters blithely violate social/religious taboos of their times and all they get are dirty looks, instead of whipping, imprisonment, or death by burning. Especially pre-modern women who seem to be walking around with 21st-century independence, self-esteem, and sexual liberation. I’m looking at you, Shakespeare in Love.

7) The poppy syrups. Oh, the poppy syrups. Everybody’s got an opiate readily at hand to dull the pain of headache/childbirth/execution/toothache/heartbreak/whatever. They would have been incredibly rare and expensive, and not nearly on a par with modern narcotics in any case.

I’m sure I can come up with more, and so can you. My summer reading, as a matter of fact, would probably yield a trove of many more. Anyone who can call any of these out, or provide guidance to quality fiction that breaks some of these down, I’m all ears.

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