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Magical Realism in Historical Fiction
When an author throws magical elements into a modern setting, its called paranormal romance or urban fantasy. But what about when an author injects magic into a historical setting? Usually we still just call it historical fiction.
The use of magic in historical fiction certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. The reigning queen of the historical women’s fiction genre is Philippa Gregory, who loves to play with magic in her otherwise splashy but scholarly novels. The heroine of The Queen’s Fool has some sort of mystical ability as does the heroine of The White Queen, who is able to use her witchery connection to curse Richard III and her connection to the water goddess Melusina to turn the tide of a battle. Admittedly, Gregory tends to use magic in a plausibly deniable fashion, but sometimes she’ll use it to allow her characters knowledge that they couldn’t have otherwise had.
It’s an effective literary device and one that I expect we’ll see more often as the lines between genres begin to blur in the age of the e-book. For me, the wholesome peanutty goodness of a historical setting lends itself quite naturally to ribbons of rich chocolate magic.
After all, it’s only recently that we’ve come to reject magic as part of our reality.
To the ancients, magic was real. Though rationalists existed even then, magic was attested to as an every day phenomenon. In short, the belief in magic was so integral to ancient culture that it made up a part of who they were. That’s one of the reasons I chose to inject magic into my historical fiction series, starging with Lily of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra’s Daughter.
It fascinated me to see how eagerly the Egyptians embraced magic as a way of navigating the waters of a complicated world while the Romans greeted magic with suspicion and fear. While Egyptians were painting and carving magic spells in their tombs, the Romans were banishing fortune tellers from the Forum and cracking down on mystery cults that frightened them.
Given that historical background, it seemed inevitable that I should use magic as a way to juxtapose the two cultures within the framework of the remarkable life of Cleopatra Selene, who was ripped from her native Egypt at the tender age of ten and marched through the streets of Rome in chains. The historical Selene grew up a prisoner of war, a hostage in the emperor’s own household. She was a true survivor.
Giving her spiritual strength by way of Egyptian magic was my way of imagining her inner life: In my novel, Isis speaks to her in hieroglyphics that carve themselves into Selene’s hands. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. I could have just waved my hands over the whole thing and said, “The Goddess does it.”
However, when writing any work of speculative fiction, one has to create a consistent set of rules for magic. That it’s historical fiction doesn’t change that equation, and possibly makes it more important. After all, the world of history is no less mysterious and foreign than a fantasy world. The same dedication to world-building must be observed.
Consequently, I dedicated a lot of time to figuring out the rules of magic within this very real historical world. Hopefully readers will appreciate the effort!
Books About Cleopatra Selene
Cleopatra Selene was the sole survivor of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years. Taken prisoner after her parents committed suicide, she was only eleven years old when she was marched as a chained captive through the streets of Rome. That she survived these horrors to become one of the greatest queens in the empire is a story that should inspire everyone, but Cleopatra Selene is virtually unknown. Perhaps this is because she is entirely overshadowed by her more famous mother, but with a spate of books coming out about this most intriguing Egyptian princess, perhaps Selene will have her day in the sun.
Selene is mentioned only briefly by the ancient historians. The first biography of her life appears to have been written by Beatrice Chanler in 1934. Chanler’s book might be seen by academics as altogether too speculative for a biography–it supposes motives and often jumps into the heads of others like a benign omniscient narrator. For a commercial fiction writer, however, it is immediately recognizable as historical fiction. I was powerfully influenced both by Chanler’s lofty prose and her theory that Selene was a religious figure for Isis worshippers. Her book has long-since been out of print and it’s quite difficult to come by a copy of it; my own is one of my most treasured possessions because it moved me so. In fact, one of the motivations for my own work was to update Chanler’s ideas and make them more accessible for modern readers.
In 1971, Alice Curtis Desmond wrote a book entitled Cleopatra’s Children which covers both the end of Cleopatra’s life and the fate of her children, including Cleopatra Selene. This book is more firmly in the tradition of historical fiction and takes a number of creative liberties. For example, like me, Desmond imagined Selene being directly involved in her mother’s suicide. Though many of its theories have been disproved and it’s an old book, I would recommend it for young readers because of its direct, simple style.
Nine years later, Andrea Ashton would write Cleopatra’s Daughter, a romantic epic of Selene’s life, totally in keeping with the tradition of Bertrice Small. The book is filled with melodramatic flourishes, but she’s the first of the authors to approach Selene’s life with any concern for the Berber peoples over which Selene would rule as Queen of Mauretania. Though there’s no evidence that Selene and her husband Juba II ever set foot in Numidia, and recent scholars suggest they did not, Ashton threads genuine concerns about native populations and imperialism through her romance. Oh, sure, she gives us a spunky cheetah-keeping, chariot-driving heroine who has constant misunderstandings with her husband before they can find their happy ending. But she also sketches out some of the genuine difficulties a modern audience might have about a grown man marrying a fifteen year old girl and explores the psychology of exiled royalty like Selene and Juba with remarkable sensitivity.
Most recently, Cleopatra Selene was memorialized by the acclaimed historical fiction writer, Michelle Moran. Moran’s book explores the famous people, trials, customs and architecture of Rome in the Augustan Age. She takes the liberty of imagining Selene as an architect and inventing an anti-slavery activist known as the Red Eagle to represent slave revolts of the age. Whereas Michelle Moran applied an archaeological lens to her book, I embraced magical realism in my work and wanted to focus on the significance of the Augustan Age in the progress of women’s equality and spirituality.
Why Regency England Enthusiasts Should Love Augustan Age Rome
It may come as a surprise to most people, but the dominant historical setting in commercial fiction isn’t Tudor England. It’s Regency England–the godzilla of the romantic fiction world. I’d like to point out a surprising number of similarities between Regency England and Augustan Age Rome that make me think the latter should really make a comeback as a popular setting for fiction.
For one, there was the sexual repression. Though ancient Rome is known for wild orgies and sexual license, the Augustan Age was all about a return to “traditional family values.” Rome’s first emperor passed strict laws against adultery. Propriety in social situations was stressed. It would have been considered quite scandalous for a man to be alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife in the Augustan Age. The emperor once even chastised a young man for calling upon his daughter without his permission. If young men wanted to advance politically, they would have to marry, and if women wanted any degree of independence, they were required to produce children. Of course, the penalties for scandalous behavior in the Augustan Age were decidedly harsher than in the Regency period. For example, when the emperor’s own daughter was caught up in a scandal, she was banished for the remainder of her life.
As far as historical periods go, it was also very clean. The stress on daily bathing was a constant in ancient Rome and a form of flush toilet technology was not entirely unknown. The upper class would have been washed and perfumed, a perfect recipe for romance. Heck, the Romans even had recipes for toothpaste.
Fashion was as important in ancient Rome as it was in the Regency era. While most of the statuary of the period shows dowdy matrons blanketed in voluminous gowns and shawls, this is because of the above-mentioned sexual repression. Augustus wanted his family to be seen as icons of morality, so his wife was usually portrayed without jewelry. But this was a matter of official form. We know for a certainty that the emperor’s wife owned wildly expensive jewels.
Official form notwithstanding, young women wanted to be seen in society wearing the most fashion forward patterns and colors. Dyes were so expensive that the purchase of a royal purple cloak could bankroll the founding of a small city. Women of the time period adorned their clothing with golden clasps, silvered girdles and pearl embroidery. They wore dangling earrings made of precious gemstones. They plucked their eyebrows–indeed, well-bred girls in search of a suitor plucked everything but the hair on their heads.
Just as Regency England had a strict social hierarchy of nobility and trade families, so too did Augustan Age Rome. Though the emperor himself was born into one of Rome’s oldest noble families, the Julii, he was from a branch that had mixed with the lower equestrian class. Because of this, he needed to bolster his noble status, so he married Livia Drusilla of the Claudii whose noble pedigree was unimpeachable. (Of course, even Livia’s noble bloodline wouldn’t have impressed my heroine, Cleopatra Selene, who was herself the daughter of the Ptolemies, the most royal family of the time period. It must have been difficult for her not to remind the emperor that she was a princess descended from the kin of Alexander the Great whereas he was the descendant of a freedman–a ropemaker–on his father’s side.)
Like the Regency Era, the Augustan Age was a time of cultural resurgence. Some of the most famous Roman poets flourished in this time. Virgil. Horace. And Ovid–though the latter ended up in disgrace for his scandalous erotic themes. What’s more, the Augustan Age was rife with family drama. Marriages, divorces, and disastrous love affairs all swirled around the succession. Can you see how this would make a juicy time period for writers to sink their teeth into?
A Humble Proposal to Standardize Historical Fiction Citations
Historical fiction exists in the sometimes murky world between literature and scholarship. As authors, we rely upon sources both in the public domain and out of it, both contemporary and ancient. Yet, no uniform procedures or system for recording and giving credit to sources have yet been adopted.
While footnotes are called for in academia, they distract fiction readers. Consequently, historical fiction sources are most often cited in the acknowledgements page or at the end of the book in an author’s note. Unfortunately, due to the cost of printing paper, this solution is often discouraged by the publisher. Even when a publisher is amenable to this solution an author may only have a certain number of pages he or she can dedicate to the enterprise, and any information that crops up after the publication of the book cannot be added to the list.
Given the rise of the electronic book, this may soon prove to be no problem at all. However, we currently exist in limbo between a world of electronic books and a world that is still dominated by print. While this is still the case, I would like to humbly suggest an alternative solution. Given the ubiquitous nature of websites, authors should adopt a uniform system by which we record our sources on bibliographic pages on our own author websites as I have done here.
Some might argue that this is not an ideal solution, because readers often fail to visit such websites at the end of the reading. This may be true, but can be alleviated by a standardized system of reader expectation. If all historical fiction authors adopt this mechanism by which credit can be given to the writers who have come before us, those whose words or ideas have inspired our own work, readers will seek out this information. They’ll come to expect it. Best of all, such efforts might lead readers to learn more about the history than they might otherwise learn from our narrative fiction.
Has the Romance Genre Contaminated Historical Fiction?
I’m about to do something ill-advised. I’m about to pick a fight with a blogger. I don’t do this to be disagreeable. It’s just that I’ve decided not to shy away from my claim that Historical Fiction Doesn’t Have to be Good For You.
Hopefully, The Pen & Ink Blog will forgive me for using their comment as a springboard for discussion. The comment at issue extolled the virtues of historical writers like Mary Renault for “a fanatical desire to pack into every word accurate historical detail that makes the story real. In contrast, I feel the large majority of historical fiction is closer to the bodice-ripping romance novel which puts me to sleep. When a newcomer to historical fiction finds mostly the latter available in bookstores and libraries, is it any wonder that the whole genre suffers from a lack of interest?”
Now, first, I’d like to argue the point that historical fiction suffers from a lack of interest. It seems to be on the rise; it’s just that historical fiction suffers in comparison to teenaged vampire romances.
Second, I’d like to address Mary Renault and her ilk. I’m not sure that a fanatical desire to pack accurate historical detail into every word accounts for their success; certainly, in Mary Renault’s case, lush prose and an eye for the telling remark may have helped. But let’s concede this point for the sake of argument; after all, this is the commenter’s perception of what worked in these books. I think Mary Renault is brilliant, and as it happens, I applaud readers who know exactly the kind of fiction that pleases them best.
What I don’t like is contempt for fiction that doesn’t conform to one’s own literary fetish. It is all fine and well to acknowledge that the “bodice-ripping romance novel” is not your cup of tea–and may even bore the snot out of you. However, to then infer that the best-selling fiction genre in the history of the world has somehow contaminated historical fiction and lessened its commercial prospects strikes me as illogical.
To the contrary, I’d argue that the explosion of commercial works in the historical fiction genre has come mostly at the hands of female writers tackling issues of concern to women. Yes, we may all mock those headless heroines who grace historical fiction covers, but they serve as an important cue to readers–many of whom are looking to historical fiction to fill in the gaps of women’s history, a sorely neglected subject in schools today. Those same issues of concern to women are also tackled by historical romance novels. (Here, I would point in the direction of books by Tessa Dare and Courtney Milan, both of whom write very socially aware Regency Romances.)
So let us turn, then, to women in history. Much like the lives of women today, the lives of these women revolved around relationships. Relationships with their parents, with men, with children. Their primary value to society was often judged by the very bodice that is allegedly ripped. In short, matters of lust, love and family have always been denigrated throughout history as being women’s concerns, and therefore less legitimate for scholarly discussion than battles and coup attempts.
That this attitude still persists astonishes me, because any historian can name empires that have fallen for lust, battles won for love, dynasties forged through intensely personal relationships. It seems to me that romance isn’t trivial to history but central.
Certainly the era I write about–Augustan Age Rome–is the veritable poster child for soap-opera dramatics. Obsessions, divorces, remarriages, adulterous affairs, assassination plots, incest, and interpersonal intrigues aren’t merely the color behind the early Roman Empire–they are the backbone of the story. And I would argue it’s precisely these historical scandals that make the time period so interesting.
My historical novels aren’t romances and I have an obsession with historical accuracy that has sometimes prompted interventions from my husband and my agent. (My plan to ferment rotting shellfish in my backyard so as to reproduce Tyrian Purple Dye was met with round condemnation.) I spent more than three years researching my debut novel and by the time I’m done with the trilogy, I’ll have spent the better part of a decade amassing knowledge about a single thirty year period of Roman history.
But I never forget that I’m a novelist, not a biographer.
I’m generally of the opinion that if historical fiction ignores the romantic lives of its subjects, it renders an incomplete picture. It falls to the historical fiction writer to speculate about these human elements, because otherwise a biography would do just as well. Books that imagine the inner lives of historical figures in a way that stretches beyond the record does a public service. In fact, I’d argue that any historical novel that teaches a reader something new deserves respect. And that includes historical romance novels.
What do you think?
