Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction

E. Rousselot, E. Rousselot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375209
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays is dedicated to examining the recent literary phenomenon of the 'neo-historical' novel, a sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction which critically re-imagines specific periods of history.

Part I

Exoticising the Historical Other

1

Exoticising the Tudors: Hilary Mantel’s Re-Appropriation of the Past in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

Rosario Arias

In Wolf Hall (2009) Hilary Mantel breathes life into the character of Thomas Cromwell and centres on his rise to power, from being a low-born blacksmith’s boy to Cardinal Wolsey’s secretary and lawyer, and later Henry VIII’s minister and adviser.¹ In Bring Up the Bodies (2012), Mantel continues her project of rescuing Cromwell from obscurity, but also pays heed to Anne Boleyn, whose protean figure has been the subject of much interpretation. In this sense, Mantel acts as a resurrectionist, or a medium, because she channels communication between the Tudor world and today. Thus, to conjure up the dead is Mantel’s main project in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (and in the last novel of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, expected to be released in 2015), a project which has been well-received by readers and critics alike. Not only is Mantel a resurrectionist, but also a translator, since she renders her proposal of Cromwell’s life and political achievements available for the reader, transposing the sixteenth-century character into a fascinating hero, who believes in education and justice, and leaves an imprint on history. Interestingly, the metaphor of the translator is used by Cromwell in Wolf Hall and in Bring Up the Bodies where he acknowledges his role as interpreter, and translator of people, languages and history. Therefore, Mantel appropriates Cromwell’s ‘translating’ capacities, and becomes an author/translator who translates a foreign past into a familiar present, without falling into the trap of ‘domestication’. In this essay I aim to explore the strategies and techniques used by Mantel in her Booker prize-winning novels, in which she acts as a mediator between the Tudor past and the present, while providing a close encounter with the exotic Other. In so doing, this piece suggests a nuanced way of approaching the representation of the past in contemporary fiction, and offers a response to what Kate Mitchell and Debora Parsons regard as ‘the inadequacy of existing theoretical frameworks for accounting for the large number of contemporary historical novels that do seek to remember, represent, and Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction imaginatively restore the past, rather than simply reflect on the problematic of such representations’ (2013, p. 13).

The cross-fertilisation between history and fiction has been notable in the last twenty years. In the 1980s, changes in historiography deeply affected the conceptualisation of the historical novel. Drawing on Hayden White’s new approach to historiography, among others, and fuelled by the ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography, Linda Hutcheon renamed postmodernist fiction as ‘historiographic metafiction’ (1988, pp. 105–23), which combined ‘the provisionality of our textualised access to the past and the situatedness of historiographic discourse’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 27). Her focus on postmodernist fiction underlined the problematic representation of the past in contemporary fiction. She also dwelled upon the concept of nostalgia, a key term since the inception of postmodernism, particularly substantiated by Fredric Jameson and his critique of postmodern historicity.² Thus, generally speaking, nostalgia has been interpreted as an uncritical and naïve textual representation of the past, lacking in political and ideological underpinnings. In this sense, David Lowenthal’s The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) played a predominant role in studies on history, memory, and nostalgia in the late 1980s. Lowenthal’s work on nostalgia and the heritage industry signified a landmark, as he placed emphasis on the discontentment with the present-day of the 1980s:

People are normally aware that the actual past is irrevocable. Yet memory and history, relic and replica leave impressions so vivid, so tantalizingly concrete, that we cannot help but feel deprived [ . . . ]. The hopes and fears that the past arouses are heightened by the conflict between our knowledge that its return is impossible and our desire, perhaps our instinct, that it must and can be reached. (1985, p. 33)

However, in the 1990s there were signs that Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction was not adequate to discuss the ambivalent tension between history and fiction in the late twentieth century. Interestingly, although Lowenthal emphasised the retrogressive nature of nostalgia in the 1980s, he has recently qualified his views upon this in an interview he conceded on the occasion of the release of a new edition of his ground-breaking work. He now provides another side to the picture, seeing nostalgia not only as static indulgence, but also as offering manifold possibilities in relation to the lost past. Lowenthal can be aligned with other critics like Raphael Samuel, who understands nostalgia as ‘produc[ing] multiple stories, at least some of which challenge and critique official historiographies and other dominant images of the past, and all of which contribute to discussion about how the past should be remembered’ (Samuel qtd in Mitchell and Parsons, 2013, p. 16). More specifically, in that recent interview Lowenthal affirms that, however cynical and dismissive our contemporary attitude to nostalgia appears to be, the truth is that this notion is still double-sided and fascinatingly ambiguous. Interviewers Sarah Edwards and Juliette Wilson engage with him in a discussion of ‘multiple nostalgias’ (2013, p. 3), examining the relevance of ‘experience’ and ‘re-enactment’ over ‘authenticity’ in contemporary culture, which, in Lowenthal’s view, ties in with the predominance of memory over history: ‘the visceral quality of experience has triumphed over the museum-ised notions of authenticity, just in the way that memory has taken over from history’ (2013, p. 5). ‘The visceral quality of experience’, as Lowenthal puts it, is echoed in Mitchell’s argument that ‘the emergence of memory in historical discourse seems also to invoke an affective aspect of historiography’ (2010, p. 28). Mitchell goes on to suggest that recent historical fiction shows an indebtedness to the traditional genre of the historical novel, very much related to recollection and memory and in contradistinction to historiographic metafiction. In fact, she argues that the development of the neo-Victorian (read ‘neo-historical’) novel, which engages with the past as an act of memory, provides ‘a means to critically evaluate [its] investment in historical recollection as an act in the present; as a means to address the needs or speak to the desires of particular groups now’ (2010, p. 4). In fact, Mitchell affirms that many contemporary historical novels seek to show the relevance of the knowledge of the past, however problematic this may be, and in so doing, they are more concerned with the ways in which they ‘can lay claim to the past, provisionally and partially, rather than the ways that [they] can not’ (2010, p. 3; original emphasis). Along similar lines, Dana Shiller states that, unlike previous authors of postmodern historical fiction, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd ‘take a revisionist approach to the past, borrowing from postmodern historiography to explore how present circumstances shape historical narrative, and yet they are also indebted to earlier cultural attitudes toward history’ (1997, p. 540).

It seems clear that recent criticism on historical fiction propitiates a move beyond reductionism, proved by the fact that contemporary historical narratives deploy a more nuanced approach to historical recollection. As Elodie Rousselot aptly notes in the Introduction to this collection, ‘the neo-historical carries out its potential for radical possibilities in more implicit ways’ (2014, p. 5). Following this line of enquiry, I seek to address how Mantel’s resurrection of sixteenth-century figures, and more pointedly Thomas Cromwell, who has remained in obscurity in historical records, seems to endorse a view of historicism that involves a dual approach, laying a claim to the past whilst showing current concerns. From this perspective, Mantel’s role as a mediator illustrates the difficulties embedded in her position as historian/author in bridging the gulf between the past and the present. According to Alan Robinson, the past is to be understood as ‘an alien period, in its possibly incommensurable otherness’ (2011, p. 21), ‘a foreign country’, in Lowenthal’s terms. If the Tudor period is alien to contemporary culture, Mantel utilises several strategies to bring the exotic Other to our reality and to make the Tudor age intelligible for us. She negotiates with the dead, and lets them speak. This strategy is not entirely original in her production since she has always been fascinated with the occult and the dead, as is visible in her first two novels, Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985) and Vacant Possession (1986). But it is in Beyond Black (2005) that she probes her knowledge of the spirit world through her portrayal of Alison Hart, whose spiritualist gifts hide a traumatic past and a haunted mind. In addition, her memoir Giving Up the Ghost (2003), which covers several of her years abroad, focuses on the relevance of ghostly figures, explained as children who were never born due to Mantel’s endometriosis, a womb-related illness that prevented her from becoming a mother. Finally, her previous historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), also communed with the dead, this time tapping into the fascination she has nurtured for the French Revolution ever since she was fourteen (Arias, 1998, p. 288). In fact, she has manifested in an interview that she regretted ‘not having been a historian’ (Arias, 1998, p. 289).

In Wolf Hall Mantel reanimates the figure of Cromwell, traditionally shadowed by the imposing presence of Sir Thomas More, and in Bring Up the Bodies she proposes a new view of Anne Boleyn, a figure who, in Mantel’s words, ‘is still changing centuries after her death, carrying the projections of those who read and write about her’ (‘Author’s Note’, 2012a, p. 409). Wolf Hall is the first part of the trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, which covers the period 1527–35. The novel unfolds the story of Cardinal Wolsey’s descent as he fails to secure the King’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. It stages a series of important events such as the King’s falling in love with Anne Boleyn, her giving birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, her second pregnancy which ends in a miscarriage, and Henry’s estrangement from his wife, alongside Cromwell’s rise. As Mantel has posited in an interview, she noticed the obscurity of Cromwell’s position in history, due to the fact that no one had addressed his story (2012c, n.p.), and it was her ‘desire to commune with the dead and gain wisdom, make atonement, or restore what had been believed lost’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 6), thus offering an arresting portrait of this cunning politician.

The title Wolf Hall has nothing to do with the story told in the novel. It anticipates ominously Anne Boleyn’s demise, as Henry VIII will visit Wolf Hall, the Seymours’ country house, where he will meet Jane Seymour. Bring Up the Bodies begins exactly where Wolf Hall leaves off: at Wolf Hall. There, the Seymour family entertains the King and Cromwell who are spending a few days away from court, and these scenes at Wolf Hall reveal how the King is slowly falling in love with Jane, and with the prospect of obtaining a male heir. The second part of this planned trilogy narrates Anne’s downfall, and how Cromwell, following the King’s orders, brings her down by means of his manipulating abilities, accusing the Queen of infidelity. In so doing, Cromwell also takes revenge on a number of noblemen who decisively contributed to Cardinal Wolsey’s fall, and who played an interlude at court to mock the latter’s low fortune in Wolf Hall: Henry Norris, the aristocrats William Brereton and Francis Weston, and George Boleyn (Anne’s brother).

Mantel therefore acts as ‘an adept resurrectionist’ (Laing, 2009, n.p.) and is able to infuse life into a character whose reputation has been marred by history, in order to tell ‘Cromwell’s side of the story’ (Acocella, 2009, n.p.). She also channels communication between the Tudor world and us in such a way that this period seems closer than ever. Thus, to conjure up the dead, or rather, to ‘chase the dead’ (Mantel, 2009, p. 649), is Mantel’s main task in Wolf Hall and in Bring Up the Bodies, and a very successful one indeed. This notion has been theorised by Samuel, who develops the concept of ‘Resurrectionism’ to describe the new version of the national past that emerged in the 1960s. This new view of the national past ‘privileges the private over the public sphere’, focusing on ‘[h]earth and home, rather than sceptre and sword’ (Samuel, 1994, p. 161). Likewise, in Mantel’s neo-Tudor novels the private predominates over the public to counterpoise the dearth of publications on Cromwell’s life: ‘[b]iographies of him are cut up into topics: “Finance”, “Religion” and so on. He seemed not to have a private life’ (Mantel, 2012c, n.p.).

This sixteenth-century character, who begins his life in ‘provincial obscurity’ (Teitelbaum, 2012, n.p.), is rescued from oblivion and reanimated into a fascinating figure. Moreover, what these two novels commonly share is the search for what remains hidden in history and in personal stories: this was already the case in A Place of Greater Safety (see Hidalgo, 2002, p. 204), and it becomes a running theme in Wolf Hall – as well as in Bring Up the Bodies – where clearly ‘[b]eneath every history, another history’ can be found (Mantel, 2009, p. 66). This overall theme of the search for the occult, for what remains hidden beneath the surface of history, is developed in a number of ways: first, Mantel strives to reveal the story of the self-made Cromwell by resorting to family issues as a reflection of politics on a wider scale. Conversely, the many-times told story of Henry VIII’s marriages, and subsequent estrangement and break from Rome, is here rewritten by focusing on the power one individual holds: Thomas Cromwell, whose portrait cleverly intertwines the personal and the political. Finally, the phrase ‘beneath every history, another history’ also refers to the question of duplicity (inextricably related to the exercise of power), and, more specifically, to disguise and play-acting, as I will develop later.

As far as family and politics are concerned, it is patent that the impulse behind the writing of Wolf Hall is the story of the upstart Cromwell. As the author has stated in a recent interview, ‘[Cromwell] was born into a world that was firmly hierarchical. Yet he began as the son of a brewer, and ended as Earl of Essex. You have to ask, “How did he do it?”’ (Teitelbaum, 2012, n.p.). The novel opens up with Thomas Cromwell as a child, almost beaten to death by his drunken father, Walter Cromwell. This event prompts the child to leave his birthplace and his abusive father for the Continent, where he learns languages in different countries and acquires his multifarious abilities (as we find out through flashbacks). It also marks the close relationship between family relations and Cromwell’s own (personal and political) decision-making from this moment onwards. In fact, this ‘unhistorical act’ influenced Cromwell’s public life in startling ways, as a past that pervades the present ‘and irrevocably shapes it, just as the present shapes the interpretation of the past’ (Shiller, 1997, p. 544). In both novels, Cromwell cannot help but remember his early years with his father in Putney, a formative period which had important bearings upon his actions:

Once when he was a boy he had been in a rage against his father Walter and he had rushed at him, intent to butt him in the belly with his head [ . . . ]. Walter had been bashing out body armour [sic] for himself and his friends. So when he ran head-first, there was a bang, which he heard before he felt it. Walter was trying on one of his creations. ‘That’ll teach you,’ his father said [ . . . ]. He often thinks about it, that iron belly. And he thinks he has got one, without the inconvenience and weight of metal. (Mantel, 2012a, p. 226)

Cromwell’s childhood is evoked many times in the course of the two novels, and it seems that Mantel is offering a psychological explanation for Cromwell’s personality. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction
• Part I Exoticising the Historical Other
• Part II Exotic Fascination / Neo-Historical Subversion
• Index