(no subject)

[skygiants]

Months ago schiarire told me that Hilary Mantel was writing a book set in Tudor England, to which my response was basically "wow, she is writing a book FOR ME."

(Look, I know I am not the only person here to confess to an enormous fascination with those wacky Tudors. I would say, 'in my defence, I liked them before it was cool!' On the other hand . . . I don't think there ever was a time when it wasn't cool. But I didn't know it was cool when I was eight!)

Anyway, Wolf Hall is a biopic novel about Thomas Cromwell, a man of Humble Origins who became extremely powerful and influential with Henry VIII during the years of wacky shufflings when he was trying to ditch Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has been portrayed pretty negatively in Tudor media before, generally as contrasted against Saintly Thomas More (see: A Man for All Seasons) and Mantel is pretty clearly writing against that, showing him a as a logical and clear-thinking as well as ambitious person who is trying to create a different kind of country than the one he grew up in. People of rank frequently remark that Cromwell is a person, with mild surprise; the line that sticks with me is where he's thinking about the struggle to get people to accept Anne Boleyn, and muses that a country where Anne Boleyn could be queen might be a country where Cromwell could be Cromwell.

Mantel is also really, really good at writing complicated politics, and the way they do and don't intersect with the personal - how political enmity can be a kind of friendship, and alliances can turn to enmity like that. I think it's a very good book. I didn't love it the way I loved A Place of Greater Safety, but that's possibly because the emotional intensity did not run quite so high. It's a more logical, quiet book, to fit the protagonist.

Also - I can't quite put my finger on why, but for some reason I felt like this book was a lot better for women than the others of hers I've read. Which is weird, because it's not like there were all that many of them. But, I don't know. An Experiment in Love and The Giant, O'Brien are the kind of books that make you feel like there is no way to be female and happy, at all, ever. A Place of Greater Safety does not make you massively depressed to be a woman but it does not make you feel like as a woman you can have much of an impact on anything either. In a weird way Wolf Hall does not have so much of that distinction, which is bizarre, considering it is Tudor England and you would think it would have even more of one. (And I love Mantel's portraits of Mary Boleyn and Jane Seymour, especially.)

Maybe the thing is that this book opens a bit of a broader world for everyone - and speaking of, it was SO WEIRD to reach the end of a Mantel book and not feel like the world was entirely a hopeless and crushing place! I was utterly boggled until I realized that she is currently writing a sequel which will presumably take us to Cromwell's execution and remedy that oversight.

Anyway, while I am talking about Tudors, I am curious: how much of a widespread phenomenon is Tudorphilia? Are the Tudors crazy overrepresented? Does everyone know the names of Henry VIII's six wives growing up? I feel like it's a bit of trivia that people are way more likely to know than, uh, any other piece of English-history trivia, and not only because of John Rhys Meyers (though the overrepresentation has increased in recent years). But I could be wrong on this. I would like to know all of your thoughts!

Comments

[mercuriazs.livejournal.com]

I actually don't know anything about the Tudors, but I think I must read this book. I have such a Hyperrational Logical Protagonist kink.

(No REALLY???)

[skygiants]

Politics? Maneuvering? Sort-of-unwilling backstabbing? You will like it I think! :D I mean, we are not talking hyperrational/logical to, say, COMPLETELY Havelock levels, but something along those lines.

(I FOR ONE AM SHOCKED.)

[mercuriazs.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, sort-of-unwilling backstabbing!

(LA LA LA.)

[gramarye1971]

I am not all that fond of Tudor history, or at least how it's commonly presented, so any reply I might make is liable to sound dismissive. But I think that Tudor history (specifically Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) has that useful combination of wealth and sex and politics and very bloody outcomes that makes it very attractive to popular and fictionalized history. Lots of power plays and marriage-brokering, lots of nasty rumours and outright lies that end up getting people beheaded, lots of real and hinted-at and entirely made-up sex. It's drama in a can; add HBO and stir.

Tudor history also gets a boost from the Ren Faire circuits and the cult of Shakespeare's plays. Both of those cultural phenomena popularised the period, or at least certain aspects of the period. Compared with many other historical periods, it's a safe space for historical re-creation and re-enactment -- not so far back in time that it's remote, but just far back enough to be Ye Olde Historickal Periodde. So yes, I think it's over-represented, but I understand the reasons why it would be so.

As ever, Kate Beaton says it best.

[skygiants]

Hee! I loved that comic; Kate Beaton is always so on target.

I like to justify myself by believing that I got interested in Tudoriana as a kid because of the strong ruling queen aspect (and let's face it, Elizabeth is just more fun than Victoria). And that is partly true, but equally true I am sure is the whole hilarious gossipmongering aspect of the DRAMA!!! involved. I remember feeling a bit like snobbish old-school LOTR fans when The Tudors came out - "whatever, all you shallow people, I was here BEFORE those stupid actors and their stupid faces" - but I try to check that, because, I mean, there was really no time before those stupid actors and their stupid faces! I grew up with Anne of a Thousand Days! So I have no moral high ground really.

Also, I forgot about the Shakespeare aspect, but I think that is a really good point about the time periods that get popularized and presented. (Come on, guys! Jacobeans!)

[ceitfianna]

I've always been interested in the Tudors and I'm glad you liked this book since I've been curious about it. I blame my interest on Shakespeare but Sharon Kay Penman got me curious about the Plantangents. I don't think that's spelled right.

[skygiants]

I always feel like there should be more Plantagenet drama. Come on, those guys were ridiculous. Eleanor of Aquitaine! Richard the (cannibal) Lionheart! But the only thing I can think of that is not really Robin Hood focused (and no offense to Robin Hood, but, uh . . . accurate portrayal of the politics involved it isn't) is The Lion in Winter.

[ceitfianna]

I actually haven't seen The Lion in Winter and in my Robin Hood stuff tend to gloss over the politics a bit.

Politics are confusing and hard to write so I'm always so amazed by authors who can make me care a lot about politics, Penman and Dunnett can manage it.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

There's Becket (which slanders Eleanor but I feel might be hilariously accurate about Henry), and Murder in the Cathedral which is more historically accurate but which I did not like half as much. There's also Of Scarlet and Miniver, and yeah, kid's book, but it is so clearly inspired by Lion in Winter that it holds up to rereading as an adult. And Shakespeare's King John which does interesting things with the myth of Perfect Richard.

I may be a little obsessed with the Plantagenets; Eleanor is my great historical love.

[aberration]

Yeah, I know more about the Tudor period than any other I can think of in English history, but it's mostly because Iiiii don't know that much about English history :( My Dad had this ruler with Henry VIII's wives on it that I looked at all the time when I was a kid, and The Tudors was available streaming on Netflix (which is not knowing anything about history, because it's hilarious guilty pleasure sexy times Tudors that is mean to Thomas More, but it does get me to read what actual historians have to say about it). But even without the dramatization it was a pretty drama drama drama period of history. I actually own this book, but set it aside to read what's supposed to be a historical account of Anne Boleyn. Which means it includes all those important, serious things like explaining again and again how anything is known about this period, with things like 'figure 12: Coin that was maybe minted while Anne Boleyn was queen,' and you know, less with the fun drama and Natalie Dormer in pretty clothing. ... I'll finish it eventually >_>

[skygiants]

I know more about other periods now than I did when I was eight and mostly Tudor-obsessed . . . though I was pretty British-history-obsessed as a kid in general, I had a massive book of Kings and Queens of England and I remember just poring at it. But also I went to England a lot as a kid because my great-grandmother was there, and every time we went we'd get Six Wives of Henry VIII chocolate or something so it all got a bit drilled into my head.

*giggles* Yeah, I read a bunch of those when I was younger. The clothing is a DEFINITE asset (though even with the clothing factor, I could not watch The Tudors. I did actually try! But I could not get over the insurmountable obstacle of JRM as Henry VIII.)

Is The Tudors mean to More? I vaguely remember him being The Sympathetic One in the one episode I saw, but I could be wrong.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

Well ... *puts on history major hat* I think that possibly it is because Elizabeth is one of the great English national myths! Like, she basically replaced the function of the church, and she actually won some wars occasionally, and she had Shakespeare and the colonies and no kids, and so she became this symbol of English patriotism and power. And of course at the same time not everyone is crazy about English patriotism and power, so there is the "fuck you, you killed Mary Queen of Scots" thing. So she, and her family, seem enormously important to English history. I bet if the founding fathers had more bizarre, incestuous wife-murder and less uprightness we would have that kind of soap opera obsession with them.

Also come on HVIII is hilarious.

[skygiants]

It's true! And, to be fair, all that is PRETTY EPICALLY AWESOME. I will never give up my love for Elizabeth no matter how much it may be jumping on a bandwagon, it's an awesome bandwagon.

(. . . well, there's Ben Franklin! OUR SAGEST PLAYBOY. But I guess perhaps you have a point.)

This is a truth that can never be denied.

[dramaturgca.livejournal.com]

Plantageneeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

[skygiants]

I did not know those wacky Plantagenets had such a following on my flist! But I am not displeased to discover this. :D

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

People thought I was weird growing up for knowing the names of Henry VIII's wives, so I don't think it's too widespread (but I do think you're right that it's one of the better-known bits of English historical trivia).

Anyway, I'm glad you liked Wolf Hall! One of the things I thought was most interesting about it from a writerly/storytelling perspective was how incredibly tight the POV is through the whole book. It was really impressive to me that Mantel could paint the period so richly while staying so deeply in Cromwell's head the whole time.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting too! Especially since the other big historical epic of hers I've read was very much a multi-perspective book, so it was fascinating to see how she handled it here. After some initial jarring, I really like the way that she almost never used Cromwell's name, just using the pronoun - so whenever you see "he" used, by the end of the book, you almost assume it's Cromwell that it's referring to. Which is such a cool technique for centering a narrative in somebody's head!

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

AND THERE IS MORE COMING. OMG?! OMG!

I think it's kind of funny that Wolf Hall makes you less depressed to be a woman? But maybe that's because Wolf Hall is not about the same kind of power as A Place of Greater Safety, which is about a revolution in the public sphere, so the unfairness that meets women who want to ride cannons and/or make policy is obvious. No women get on any cannons in Wolf Hall (that I remember), so nobody can push them off . . .

I do think the Mantel's portraits of Mary Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and even Anne are incredibly rich. I think one problem the politically aggressive women in APOGS -- Anne Theroigne and Marie-Jeanne Roland -- have is that they often seem very hateful. (There are moments when you get kicked with sympathy, but in general they're hateful. I think.) One doesn't -- or at least I don't -- ever hate Mary, Jane or Anne. They're too much . . . people. It might be because APOGS was the Mantel's first book and some decades have passed since then (as well as many other books); i.e. because she's now a maturer writer.

The tight 3rd person narration obopolsk mentioned might also contribute. The Mantel tends to put her women-can-never-be-happy thoughts in the minds of women (or of Robespierre) -- and Cromwell isn't one. (Not that he's the enemy of women. In fact, I would cite his fairly open, positive orientation towards women as another contributing factor in the comparative less-than-crushingly-depressing picture of women in Wolf Hall.) Example:

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

-- An Experiment in Love

That said . . . I might not read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street any time soon if I were you.

Um, but my overall thoughts are about the same as yours: APOGS makes me more violently in love, but Wolf Hall is a less violent, though very accomplished book and so I like it in a more muted way.

[skygiants]

I KNOW. I did not realize that until I was looking up the book later! I was like "HOW DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THAT PART."

I think that's it, really. In Wolf Hall, all the power is this kind of subtle political power that relies on manipulating the people around you, so there isn't this sense of the huge divide between what women and men can do. And while there were active women in APOGS, it's true - you always got the sense that they are either completely out of their league, or hateful, OR BOTH. The women in Wolf Hall aren't out of their league, and they're taking the same kind of risks as everyone else. And I agree that the portraits of all of them are incredibly rich - I liked all of the them too, and even Katharine and Mary are given this treatment of being both understandable and understood.

And again, part of this is probably Cromwell, and the fact that part of his agenda is treating everyone as people. Which helps, when it comes to women and everyone else. He has sympathy for everyone, to a certain degree, which is one of the things that makes him such an excellent narrator. But I was also struck by the father-daughter relationships in the book - Cromwell and Anne, More and Meg - and how . . . amazingly non-poisonous they were? That was the other thing, is so many of the relationships that women have with other people that Mantel has written before are completely unbalanced or poisonous in some way - and, like, that is not necessarily women's fault, it is the fault of the positioning . . . but is still pretty miserable. But I believed in the healthiness of Cromwell's relationship with Anne! If, you know, she hadn't died tragically at age eleven.

APOGS

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

These just prove your point :( Some quotes about women from APOGS:

---

Now Louise Robert sat behind her till turning the hems of her dresses, her eyes on a volume of Rousseau, her ears open for customers and for rumors of a rise in the price of molasses. In the evening she cooked a meal for her husband and laboriously checked the day's accounts, her haughty shoulders rigid as she added up the receipts. When she had finished she sat down and chatted calmly to François of Jansenism, the administration of justice, the structure of the modern novel; afterwards she lay awake in the darkness, her nose cold above the sheets, praying for infertility. (p123)


She [Gabrielle] was quiet now; feeling her way from day to day, like a blind woman in a new house. She never asked Georges what had happened at the meetings of the District Assembly. When new faces appeared at the supper table she simply laid extra places, and tried to keep the conversation light. She was pregnant again. No one expected much of her. No one expected her to bother her head about the state of the nation. (p223)


[Gabrielle] My mother didn't need to ask for clarification. She just patted my arm. She said I was not the sort of girl to make a fuss. I had to be told that often these days – or who knows, I might have forgotten, and made one? (p367)


She [Mme Roland] looked down at him [Mr Roland]. She saw his sinewy hand, clenching and unclenching; then she saw that he had begun to cry, that tears were running silently down his cheeks. She thought, he would not want me to witness this. With a look of puzzled sadness she left the room, closing the door quietly, as she did when he was sick, when he was her patient, and she his nurse.


He [Mr Roland] listened until the clip of her [Mme Roland] footsteps died away, and then at last permitted himself to make a sound, a sound that seemed to him to be natural, as natural as speech: it was a stifled animal bleat, a bleat of mourning, from a narrow chest. On and on it went; unlike speech, it went nowhere, it had no necessary end. It was for himself; it was for Eudora; it was for all the people who had ever got in her way. (p463)


Eléonore, he [Robespierre] would have liked to say, I'm not practiced at this, and I wouldn't describe you as a natural. She arched her body against his. Someone's told her to work hard for what she wants in life, to grit her teeth and never give up . . . poor Eléonore, poor women. (...) He thought again, it's been too long, you do this often or not at all. (p466)

Re: APOGS

[skygiants]

Yes. :( :( :(

I remembered being especially struck by Roland, because - there's this sense with her, unlike with all the other major political figures in the novel, likeable or not, that she just doesn't get it. She isn't the kind of dazzling, loveable and detestable figure that the rest of them are. Whereas the powerless women are likeable and sympathetic. But powerless. There's no middle ground, and not even the sense that you can leverage powerlessness into power. Either you are trapped, or you are stupid enough not to realize that you are trapped and to go around pretending like you're not; there's no way open to successfully navigate that. This is a theme in An Experiment in Love, too.

[ashen_key]

No lie, I adore the Tudors. All of them. But I love Elizabeth the best, because she is awesome and I adore her flaws. And that book sounds really interesting!

But argh, JRM as Henry *twitches* Just. No. He was a good-lucking man when he was younger, yes, but he was big. AND HE HAD RED HAIR. HOW COULD THEY NOT HAVE THE RED HAIR. *shudders*

Also, I have an endearing love for the Plantagenets, too. So dysfunctional and fun.

[skygiants]

I think you would like it! It's cool because I think Mantel is pretty consciously writing against a lot of the older Tudoriana, so it's a very different perspective.

Aaaaand yeah. Because it's not like there are any redheaded actors in England! (Normally it's not like I care about "canon" hair color, either, but . . . the red hair is a BIG DEAL! Queen Elizabeth and heredity issues!)

Clearly I need to do a Plantaganet vs. Tudor cage match. :O

[vivien]

My mom had a book on Henry and his wives, and I memorized it as a kid, pretty much. I not only knew all the names of the six, I also knew about Margaret Pole and Thomas Cranmer! (There were lots of pictures of portraits in this book.) I stole it when I went to college. It is now on my shelf of Ye Olde British History.

I think one of my main fascinations with the Tudors stems from the fact that I grew up in the Episcopal faith, which is basically the Church of England transplanted to America. Elizabeth was the person who basically molded that church into being.

Plus they were all pretty Slytherins. How could I not love them?

I think I will get this book. :)

[skygiants]

Heeee, excellent! Margaret Pole and Thomas Cranmer didn't stick in my mind so much, but I knew alllll about Lady Jane Grey and the Devious Seymour Brothers.

Oh, interesting! Yeah, I can see how that would make it of extra interest. (Also: this is true. *giggling* Except for Anne of Cleves, Hufflepuff Out Of Her Depth.)

If you read it you must tell me what you think! :D