Walking the Walk with Historical Characters
Setting is one of the
main elements of a novel. Setting shapes
characters, evokes environment and immerses the reader into the imagined world
constructed by the writer. Setting must be successful for a novel to succeed.
Historical fiction writers construct settings through researching time and
place – and then through the prism of imagination. Despite the passing of
hundreds of years and locations almost unrecognisable from what they were in
the past, it is not uncommon for writers to visit places important in the lives
of their historical characters.
How
important is this kind of research? In 2007, I travelled from my home in
Melbourne, Australia to England and Spain to “walk the walk” with the historical
personages in my Tudor fictional work in progress. This paper explores the
power of setting through investigating the practice of other historical fiction
writers as well as revisiting the day I spent walking from the Tower of London
to Westminster, along the coronation route of Katherine of Aragon and Henry
VIII.
Our past is situated elsewhere
On February 7, 2009, an event happened that
brought home to me the erasure of setting: my home state of Victoria suffered
the worst bush fires in Australia’s recorded history. Black Saturday we call it
now. That Saturday, driven to distraction and increasing dismay by unending
news reports about the fires raging all over our summer scorched state, my
sister and I headed to a lookout, thirty minutes from where we now live, to
gaze at the burning hills of Kinglake. We knew what we saw would change those
beloved hills forever, and construct a different setting to that of our growing
up years. From a safe distance, we watched the place of our early history go up
in smoke.
Kinglake is altered now. Fire devoured huge
areas of bushland, fuelled by the eucalyptus oil found in gum trees. Visiting Kinglake
not long after Black Saturday, we saw crews with chainsaws cutting down fire-ravaged
gums, marked as too dangerous and too far-gone for survival. Many more gumtrees
were chopped down later because locals viewed them through fear. A symbol of lost
lives and livelihoods, trees – to many in the Kinglake community – represent the
possibility of future bushfires and further tragedy.
Now I wonder how my grandchildren will see Kinglake,
the setting that nurtured and enriched me, widening the doors to my
imagination. Kinglake gave me the space and periods of isolation necessary for
the start of my writerly journey. Will my grandchildren understand the
importance of this setting to me, and how it helped construct my writerly identity?
What they will see and hear will not be what I saw and heard as a teenager
walking along rough, dirt tracks shaded by upright, sky reaching gumtrees. Only
my memory can paint in my mind the Kinglake of my youth and recall the times I
stilled to listen to the distant rush of the wind as it travelled through
densely treed bushland to my home. The wind’s voice soon became a roar, an
engine drone that bowed the heads of trees in reverence as it passed. In a
rural landscape where human habitation was measured by distance, I can only construct
this setting through a personal, textual prism that remembers my past. The
daydream necessary to writing practice returns my history to me. But surely to
dream of your past also acknowledges the erasure of time?
“Such dreams unsettle our daydreaming and we reach a
point where we begin to doubt that we ever lived where we lived. Our past is
situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality.
It is as though we sojourned in a limbo of being” (Bachelard and Jolas 1994:
57-58).
It is true. The
past is situated elsewhere – even more for the historical personages who stride
the stage of our storytelling. “The past is another country; they do
things differently there,” L.P. Hartley once wrote, setting the stage for The Go Between (Hartley and
Brookes-Davies 1997: p.5). For fiction writers, how useful is researching
setting by visiting places in the now
to evoke the past? I explore this question by revisiting the time when I walked
with a friend and fellow Anne Boleyn devotee along the coronation route of Katherine
of Aragon and also by drawing upon the practice of other historical writers.
Evoking
the past
I am an Australian who writes about
the Tudor period – my imagination prefers to situate there. Perhaps this is
because of my English father, who grew up during World War II in the slums of
the Isle of Dogs. My father had a great love of history. His bedtime stories
conjured up the past, firing up my own love of history early in my life. Ironically,
I discovered years afterwards a possible Tudor connection to The Isle of Dogs – Henry VIII may have kept
his hunting dogs there (The Isle of Dogs:1994).
The
first draft of my Tudor novel, Dear Heart, How Like You This? (Dunn 2004) was written without ever visiting England, other than
through constructing a sense of place and time by listening to my father’s stories
and memories. A sense of place and time was also built through years of reading
books set in an England of a far earlier time. With my interest in the Tudors, it
is not surprising that much of my youthful reading was fiction envisioning that
period. Nowadays, when I construct my own Tudor fictional works, the bulk of my
reading concentrates on historiographical works to help unpack this
period. I agree with Linda Hutcheon, who writes,
“The process of
making stories out of chronicles, of constructing plots out of sequences, is what
postmodern fiction underlines. This does not in any way deny the existence of
the past real, but it focuses attention on the act of imposing order on that
past, of encoding strategies of meaning-making through representation (1989: 63).
My
first visit to England altered my view of researching world building simply
through books. What I discovered then showed the importance of walking the
walk with my characters. Describing this type
of research, Sandra Worth writes, “My next book is set in Byzantium. I visited Istanbul,
the former Constantinople. There's nothing left of the fabled Greek and Roman
world that once existed there on those hillsides, but my mind erased the
continuum of flat-roofed apartment buildings and replaced them with
orchards and trees, and the golden crosses of the churches and monasteries
that used to stand there. I "saw" Constantinople the way it had been”
(Worth,
S., 2011, interview, 2 March).
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| Evoking the Past |
Stephanie Cowell speaks of this seeing,
too. “In the old City of London almost all
the original churches and buildings are gone due to the Great Fire and the
Blitz, but there are still those narrow crooked streets with the enchanting
names: Fishmongers’ Lane, Aldermanbury, Love Lane. I see the old city but my husband
who comes with me only sees the tall financial buildings and is puzzled by my
rapture” (Cowell, S., 2011, interview, 2
March). Her rapture does not puzzle me; I
understand it entirely. This understanding left me determined to “walk the walk of my characters”
as part of the research for my second novel, the first planned for a trilogy
imagining the life of Katherine of Aragon.
Are
we there yet?
Prior to leaving Australia with my then
eleven-year-old son for England in 2007, one of my cyber friends who knew of my
research plans offered to take me along the coronation route of Katherine of
Aragon. Walking along this route opened my mind to Katherine and her world in
ways I never expected.
The day I met
with my friend Valerie was also my last full day in England. I have always been
fortunate to be blessed with days of beautiful weather in England (Scotland is
another story!), but it was overcast when I joined Valerie outside the Tower at
10am. From morning to afternoon we were spattered with rain, but that didn’t decrease
our resolve to reach Westminster Abbey before 5pm.
From the Tower
of London, we followed Katherine’s journey to Westminster trailing the Thames; not
the Thames we know today, but the river’s course in Tudor times. With Valerie’s
provided map in hand, we walked together, Valerie often stopping to point out
to me where the river once flowed. I
saw the evidence for myself when I peered down at the old Whitehall palace’s
waterfront steps. The present day Thames glimmered in the distance from the palace
and their long obsolete water steps.
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| Whitehall watersteps - setting changed by time |
On our list of settings
was Baynard’s Castle. Henry VIII gave this castle to Katherine of Aragon on
their marriage. She had originally stayed there as a young princess, recently
arrived in England, before the pomp and ceremony of her first wedding to Prince
Arthur, Henry VII’s eldest son and heir. His early death started Katherine on a
long, rocky road before she married his younger brother Henry shortly after his
accession to the English throne.
This important castle
to the Tudors met its end during the great fire of London in 1666; nothing
remains of it except what is conveyed by walking the confines of Baynard's Castle
Ward. This gives a sense of the castle’s size and placement.
Valerie, a
proud and very knowledgeable Londoner, pointed out to me the layout of the castle
and its surrounds. As I listened it seemed the modern buildings disappeared. I saw
before me the stronghold, its open grounds, the nearby Blackfriars Priory, also
now gone – I imagined the view the inhabitants of these settings would have had
of the Thames. I imagined, on a footpath cut through flower adorned meadows, Katherine
of Aragon walking with her women to visit the monks at the priory in spring. I
soaked in the heady atmosphere of place that took me from the now to the past.
Continuing our journey, one hour from the
Tower of London I turned to Valerie. “When should we arrive at Westminster?” I
asked her.
“Quite a bit to go,” she replied, striding
ahead.
Following close behind, I felt at a loss. I
remembered the description of Edward Hall, who wrote The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster, a
chronicle of the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII published in 1548.
{T]he noble prince with his queen left the palace for
Westminster Abbey at the appointed hour. The barons of the Cinq Ports held
canopies over the royal couple who trod on striped cloth of ray, which was immediately
cut up by the crowd when they had entered the abbey (Hanson 2004)
“They walked
all the way?” I questioned Valerie.
Researching Katherine of Aragon’s coronation, I gained the impression through
Hall’s account that the royal couple, protected by canopies, had trod their
merry way from the Tower of London to Westminster, walking the route on the striped
cloth of ray.
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| Baynard's castle |
Valerie looked blankly at me. “Of course
not! Royalty either rode or were carried in Litters.”
At home, my imagination was often shaped by
interpreting the reading I did for research. I prided myself that I sought out
primary materials for my fictional world building. But I have never been good at
reading maps or working out distances. Now I discovered two things: Westminster
was not close to the Tower of London and that I would not have discovered this
by constructing my world building through books.
Author Pauline Montagna speaks strongly on this subject. “You cannot
understand how your characters thought and felt until you've been in their
environment. No book or film can convey the beauty of Tuscany, the effect it
has on your very soul. My series on Rome was to end with Lars Porsena lifting
his siege on Rome and withdrawing to Etruria. He could have taken Rome if he
had had the will, but instead he withdrew. I had attributed this to his need
to return to Clusium because of war in Etruria. It wasn't until I visited
his hometown, then called Clusium, now Chiusi, that I really understood why he
would really want to go home. It would be because he's just plain homesick.
I know, because I fell in love with Chiusi the moment I saw it” (Montagna, P.,
2011, interview, 1 March). Umberto Eco also speaks on this subject: “For The
name of the Rose, I drew hundreds of labyrinths and plans of abbeys, basing
mine on other drawings and on places I visited because I needed everything to
work well, I needed to know how long it would take two characters in
conversation to go from one place to another. And this also dictated the length
of the dialogues. If in a novel I had to write, “while the train stopped at
Modena station, he quickly got out and bought the newspaper,” I could not do so
unless I have been to Modena and had checked whether the train stops there long
enough, and how far the newspaper stand is from the platform” (Eco 2005: 314).
By 5pm Valerie and I were across the road from
Westminster. Making a few Tudor detours and a stop at the London Museum on the
way, we had walked for hours. Time had run out for me to see the interior of
Westminster Abbey. I had to get back to my English relations and take them out
for a thank you dinner. I hailed a cab, kissed Valerie goodbye, expressing my
gratitude for a wonderful day. Framed in my memory is my last sight of her in
2007, waving, getting smaller and smaller as the cab headed towards a London train
station.
I had just lived through one of the most valuable
research experiences of my life.
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| Detail of the Tudor Thames |
“Walking the Walk”
I asked four historical fiction authors how important
was it to “Walk the walk” with their historical characters. While I acknowledge
other writers might answer this question differently, all my four authors regarded
this kind of research as pivotal to the construction of their historical
narratives.
For myself, I am grateful that my first published novel
took years to find a publisher because the passing of time offered the opportunity
to visit England and places important to my storytelling. During this first
taste of “walking with my characters,” to my dismay, I discovered my
imagination failed to comprehend the actuality and dominance of setting. “Landscape
is character,” Henry James once wrote (cited by Butler and Burroway: 15). Visiting
settings in the now underlined that
landscape indeed possesses its own entity.
I saw for myself why the English sky is often
described eggshell blue, and the reality of William Blake’s “England's
green and pleasant land”. I sat under the shade of majestic oak trees and
watched my children play in gardens garlanded with every colour imaginable. In
the mornings, I woke to birdsong far sweeter than the more vocal, competitive
songs albeit still beautiful songs of Australian birds. I climbed narrow,
spiral staircases and imagined how difficult it must have been for women of the
period in their long, heavy gowns. On the coast of England, I shivered for
hours trying to sleep during a night that drove home a cold that went straight
to my bones, and soaked into my imagination.
Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart and Claude and Camille, says this about the worth
of researching historical settings in the now, “You can’t feel what it is like to walk through certain rooms, or
uphill, or how the wind smells, or how the stones feel through books. It is
amazing to say of your character, “He stood here!” (Cowell, S.,
2011, interview, 2 March)
Likewise, author
Sandra Worth, writes, “Historical figures are
just names in a book until I visit the places that gave birth to them.
Then they come to life for me.” She also powerfully says, “It makes the past
real. I see what they saw - the air, the weather, the topography. I
"feel" the place. I remember when I was writing about John
Neville, Lord Montagu, brother of Warwick the Kingmaker. I went to Bamborough
Castle, and stood at the window in the munitions room, looking out at the
North Sea. The room is the only original part of the castle left, and the window
is a narrow protrusion. I stood there, and knew I was seeing what
John saw five hundred years ago, and when I leaned my hand against
the stone wall, I had the sensation that John Neville had done that
many times when he was constable of the castle. It was a strange connection I
felt with him at that moment” (Worth, S., 2011, interview, 2 March).
Worth’s
experience is similar to mine when I visited the Tower of London in 2007.
Standing in the dimly lit, larger than expected chamber that saw out the last
days of Sir Thomas More, I could not resist resting my hands upon the walls,
imagining Sir Thomas doing likewise. On that spring day in 2007, I felt thankful
I wore a woollen cardigan that protected me against chilling drafts. Those
confined in the dungeons of the Tower often complained about the cold, and now I
began to appreciate why. How harsh, I
thought, it must have been to live here
in winter.
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| St Thomas More's chamber |
Looking
around the chamber, my imagination went into full play. I daydreamed of Alice,
the wife of Thomas More, wringing her hands, as she tried to make her husband bow
to the winds of change.
“What the good year, Mr. More,” quoth she,
“I marvel that you, that have been always hitherunto taken for so wise a man,
will now so play the fool to lie here in this close filthy prison, and be
content to be shut up among mice and rats, when you might be abroad at your
liberty” (Sylvester, Harding et al. 1962: 243). Approaching the window of his
chamber, I recalled More had watched the monks of the Charterhouse going to
their death and turned to his family to say, “Lo, dost thou not see that these
blessed fathers be now as cheerful going to their deaths, as bridegrooms to
their marriages?” (Sylvester, Harding et al. 1962: 242).
 |
| St Thomas More's Privy |
My recollection of this time would one day
go on to influence the construction of a scene for my PhD artefact and Young
Adult novel, Light in the Labyrinth, when
Kate Carey, niece of Anne Boleyn, attended her aunt in in the Queen’s
apartments situated in the grounds of the Tower of London:
Kate nestled against Aunt Nan’s knee. Flickering fire
and candlelight netted them in amber glow. Shifting on her cushion in
discomfort, Kate lowered her gaze, trying not to think about the night, and how
it walled her in. She looked back at her aunt. For a long time now – too long –
Aunt Nan had sat on her stool without moving, without speaking.
Her back poked by cold
fingers of air, Kate’s bladder tingled and twinged. Shivering, she gathered her
shawl over her shift, lifted her head and looked towards the darkness that hid
the bed and the clothes coffer. Should
she get her woollen cloak? Within the circle of light, she saw Aunt Nan’s
workbasket. Draped over one side was the sleeve of a child’s night shift. Aunt
Nan had finished it tonight, putting the last touches to the beautiful
scarlet-work that embroidered the edges of sleeves, neck and hem. Reminded of
her cousin, Kate turned to her aunt. “Do
you think they’ll tell Bess?” she asked.
Aunt Nan stared at her
and then cried out – a primeval cry of agony that caused Kate’s heart to thump
harder against her chest. She thought of men with their entrails burnt before
their eyes. Did they cry out like her aunt? Cry out so very stones would hear
and remember, forever (Dunn 2012).
Like
Worth and Cowell, for me the force of setting was emphasised by visiting places
crucial to my storytelling. I also discovered, “Space that has been seized upon by the
imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and
estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but
with all the partiality of the imagination” (Bachelard and Jolas 1994: p.xxxvi).
Arriving
to conclusion
All of us gain a sense of setting through a compost of
life experiences (Greene cited by Butler and Burroway 2005, p. 23), through our
own humanity and learnt empathy, through the books we read, through period
paintings we study to gain a sense of our characters, through movies that bring
the past alive for us. Writers dig deep into this compost for their
storytelling.
Time changes – this is immutable, indeed, set
in stone. Author Pauline Montagna, who, like me, grounds her historical fiction in
historiography, striving to tell a story through known facts and historical
context, says this about the value and worth of researching locations changed
by time, “[N]ovelists
have to be careful to take this into account. I daresay we can all recall
instances of anachronisms that result from writers imagining that as they
see things now, so have they always been” (Montagna, P., 2011, interview,
March).
James Thom also stresses this, “Places… change over the centuries, and it's sometimes
necessary to research in old accounts to see what the terrain, native flora and
fauna, were like in the earlier times, because I try to recreate not just the happenings
of history, but the world in which they took place. Most Americans, for
example, think the great Ohio River has always been deep and wide, because
they've seen it only since the locks and dams were built. In dry seasons before
then, you could wade across it. That can determine a historical outcome” (Thom,
J., 2011, interview, March). Researching the period, James Alexander Thom
speaks of this as “a responsibility to history itself” (2010: 44), aids historical
writers to achieve verisimilitude in their work, and to take their reader back
then.
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| St Thomas More's window |
Yet, despite the change of time, I believe the
past and future can be detected in the now – by a writer’s perceptive daydream,
for, “The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths”(Bachelard
and Jolas: 6). Margaret Atwood adds to this: “Where is the story? The story is
in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going
into the narrative – into the narrative process – is a dark road” (Atwood 2002:
176).
Historical fiction brings alive the past
and its people, who were once alive in fact. Walking with characters is itself
a methodology for writers. It allows them to soak in settings (Novakovich 1995:
25) and provides space for thinking and reflecting, which leads to daydream and
the process of imagination.
Visiting important settings of historical
characters in the now takes writers
to a deeper level of appreciation of lives lived in another time and place. It
is a bridge for the writer’s imagination to pass over to gain sense of the
setting responsible for character. Walking the walk with historical characters
is like being tugged by ghosts; behold, our characters will say to us, this is where I once lived; in this place I
suffered and hoped; I loved, hated, felt sorrow and joy. This place was
important to me. This place made me who I was. As James Thom says, “Some places, you’ll feel the haunting. Go. See.
Touch. Learn” (Thom 2010: 80). What time erases, a writer’s envisioning reveals
again through the construction of text.
We “read” a setting to “write” a setting (Bachelard
and Jolas 1944: 14). Worth discovered this, too. “Sometimes, when I'm there looking out on what had
once been their world, a scene will leap into my mind. Those are the most
rewarding moments” (Worth, S., 2011, interview, 2 March).
I conclude now with Bachelard. He
speaks of the poet, but with words valid to the fiction writer as well:
The poet lives a daydream that is awake, but above
all, his daydream remains in the world, facing worldly things. It gathers the
universe together around an in an object. We see it open chests, or condense
cosmic stones in the casket. If there are jewels and precious stones in the
casket, it is the past, a long past, a past that goes back through generations,
that will set the poet romancing. The stones will speak of love, of course. But
of power too, and fate (Bachelard and Jolas 1994: 84).
http://www.wendyjdunn.com/
Bibliography
Bachelard,
G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. New York, Orion Press.
Cowell,
S. (2010). Email interview March 2nd.
Dunn,
W. J. (2004). Dear Heart, How Like You This? : Anne Boleyn and Thomas Wyatt
--- the cost of love. Yarnell, AZ, Metropolis Ink.
Dunn W. J. (2011) Light
in the Labyrinth, PhD Artefact: Swinburne University.
Eco, U. (2004). On
Literature. Orlando. Harcourt.
Hartley,
L.P. and D. Brooks-Davies (1997) The Go-Betweeb. London; New York, Penguins
Books.
Hutcheon,
L. (2002). The Politcs of Postmodernism. London; New York, Routledge.
Montagna,
P. (2011) Email interview March 1st.
Sylvester, R.S., D.P. Harding, et al.
(1962). Two Early Tudor Lives. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Thom, J. A. 2010 The
Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction, Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's
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(2011) Email Interview March 2nd
