The Problem of the Plucky Heroine

Among all the problems of authenticity the conscientious writer of historical fiction must face is the one I call the Problem of the Plucky Heroine. By this, I mean a character who is out of character for his or (more frequently) her times. Whose values are strangely modern. Who is, in short, an anachronism, probably designed to attract the modern reader. Is this really a problem, or is it a legitimate way to engage readers who want to read about protagonists like them?

Having a Gay Old Time

Just like any anachronism, I would submit that it’s a problem. A few years ago I read a book set in puritanical seventeenth-century Holland, where homosexuality was punished by death. When the protag discovered that her husband, whom she didn’t love and who was a virtual stranger to her, was in fact gay, she had a moment of “Eeyew!” and then she accepted it in good twenty-first century fashion, deciding that everybody had to make their own choices.

Surely, we would applaud such open-mindedness today, but a young woman of that time and place is very unlikely to have thought the same way. Why wouldn’t she have greeted the news with the same horror as every other strict Protestant in the Dutch Republic? I think this was an authorial effort not to turn modern readers away from an attitude we of the Modern West deplore, having finally fought our way past it. But is it true to its time?

The Age of the Uppity Woman

As authors, we look for protagonists who are to some extent unique, odd enough to be interesting. But that doesn’t give us license to transplant a modern person into ye olden tymes. The past is a foreign country, after all. Their attitudes are not going to be ours. Period. By falsifying that reality, we’re watering down the world we offer our readers.

This problem seems to be most acute when it comes to female protagonists, who are all too frequently bold and unconventional, making demands and daring roles no woman of their times would have demanded or dared. Clearly this answers to a twenty-first-century ideal of proactive womanhood. If your gal’s is going to be uppity (and I, too, love an uppity woman), at least let her peers be horrified by her.

Now, there were certainly cases in the past of women in power, women who pretended to be men to fight in wars, women who ran their own lives without male supervision, etc. But keep it real. Why did they do what the did? Was it to show the world that women were the equal of men? Probably not, at least before the nineteenth century. Probably they were just trying to survive, to keep their country together, to stay with a man they loved, even on the battlefield. Probably they themselves were horrified by how they had to act; probably they made excuses for themselves. So, they acted in an extraordinary way even while sharing the values of their contemporaries.

Every Past a Different Foreign Country

Different times and places, even those which we’d characterize as patriarchal, have had different attitudes toward women. I’ve found myself drawn to the Near East in the Bronze Age precisely because of the role of women in governance, the legal protections they enjoyed, and the respect they seem to have been given, even though their lot was by no means equal to that of men.

But not all societies have been so broad-minded.

Some have been downright misogynistic and repressive, at least benevolently so. Whichever time and place you set your novel in, be true to those values. You’re doing your readers a dubious favor by trying to lure them in with a heroine they can identify with if that woman (or man, either) comes across as a time-traveler from our own age.