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21st Century
US Historical Fiction
Contemporary Responses
to the Past
Edited by
Ruth Maxey
21st Century US Historical Fiction
Ruth Maxey
Editor
21st Century US
Historical Fiction
Contemporary Responses to the Past
Editor
Ruth Maxey
Department of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-41896-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41897-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover image: © Chris Hackett/Getty Images, Image ID: 555175279
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
In loving memory of my grandparents, Fritz and Margaret Hillenbrand
and
William and Margaret Jordan
Acknowledgments
This collection has its origins in a one-day symposium, “Historical Fiction

in the United States since 2000: Contemporary Responses to the Past,”
held in March 2017. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts, University of
Nottingham, UK, for its generous funding of this event. I am grateful to
the team at Palgrave for all their assistance in publishing this book. Above
all, I thank the contributors to this volume for their energy, enthusiasm,
and patient commitment to the project. Their inspiring work takes this
field forward in new and exciting ways.
vii
Contents
1 US Historical Fiction Since 2000 1

Ruth Maxey
Part I Imagining 19th-century America in Recent

Historical Fiction
2 Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream:

James McBride’s Song Yet Sung 17
Judie Newman
3 To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of Colson

Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad 33
Michael Docherty
4 Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction

of Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy 53
James Peacock
5 “Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power in

George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo 73
Clare Hayes-Brady
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Representations of the 20th-Century United

States
6 “We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in Joyce

Carol Oates’s The Accursed 95
Rachael McLennan
7 “Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”:

The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in
E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley 111
Villy Karagouni
8 Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two

Contemporary American Bestsellers 129
Aimee Pozorski
9 Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in

Contemporary American Fiction 149
Ruth Maxey
10 Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet

Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer 171
Debra Shostak
11 Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and the

Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman 191
Rebecca Martin
12 The Contemporary Sixties Novel:

Post-postmodernism and Historiographic
Metafiction 209
Mark West
13 “What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and the

Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia 229
Diletta De Cristofaro
CONTENTS xi
14 “To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge for

US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres 245
DeLisa D. Hawkes
Index 265
Notes on Contributors
Diletta De Cristofaro is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Litera-

ture at the University of Birmingham and a specialist in temporality and
writings responding to twenty-first-century crises and anxieties. She has
published widely on the contemporary apocalyptic imagination, including
her first monograph, The Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Novel: Critical
Temporalities and the End Times (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Michael Docherty is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English
and Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent. He has also
worked as a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at California State Univer-
sity, Long Beach. His research principally explores intersections between
race, masculinity, and mytho-history in twentieth-century and twenty-
first-century American literature.
DeLisa D. Hawkes is Assistant Professor of African American Litera-
ture and Culture and an affiliate faculty of the African American Studies
Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has articles forth-
coming in MELUS and the North Carolina Literary Review, and her
research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century to twenty-first-
century African American literature, critical race studies, historical fiction,
passing novels, and visual culture.
Clare Hayes-Brady is a Lecturer in American Literature at University
College Dublin and the author of The Unspeakable Failures of David
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, now available in paper-

back). She is editor of the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Her
research interests include medical humanities and narrative medicine,
adolescence in contemporary fiction, and dystopian narrative.
Villy Karagouni is a Lecturer at the Academy of Music & Sound in
Glasgow. A classically trained musician, she has a Ph.D. in English Liter-
ature from the University of Glasgow. She has published on Jean Rhys
and her current research centers on the relationship between music and
text. She is also involved in a number of contemporary musical projects
in Glasgow.
Rebecca Martin is a graduate of Ryerson University’s Literatures of
Modernity M.A. Program in Toronto. She is currently a Research Fellow
at Ryerson’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her writing has appeared in
The White Wall Review and The Yellow Nineties Online.
Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the
University of Nottingham. She is the author of South Asian Atlantic Liter-
ature, 1970–2010 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Understanding
Bharati Mukherjee (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and co-
editor (with Paul McGarr) of India at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
(Routledge, 2019).
Rachael McLennan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and
Culture at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Developing
Figures: Adolescence in American Culture, Post-1950 (Palgrave, 2008);
American Autobiography (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and In
Different Rooms: Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature
(Routledge, 2016).
Judie Newman, O.B.E. is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the
University of Nottingham and Honorary Fellow of the British Association
for American Studies. She has published 11 books and more than 100
critical essays on American and postcolonial fiction. Her Contemporary
Fictions: Essays on American and Postcolonial Narratives is forthcoming
from the Modern Humanities Research Association/Legenda in 2020.
James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature
at Keele University. He is the author of Understanding Paul Auster
(University of South Carolina Press, 2010); Jonathan Lethem (Manch-
ester University Press, 2012); and Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently

researching contemporary fictions of gentrification.
Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State
University and co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. She has authored Roth
and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (Continuum,
2011); Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature
(Bloomsbury, 2014); and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (Lexington, 2019),
and edited or co-edited volumes on Philip Roth, American Modernism,
and HIV/AIDS representation.
Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor Emerita of English
Language and Literature at the College of Wooster. She is the author
of Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (University of South Carolina,
2004) and Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel (Blooms-
bury, 2020), and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human
Stain, The Plot Against America (Continuum, 2011).
Mark West teaches at the University of Glasgow where he researches
twenty-first-century American historical and ecological fiction. He has
published articles on such contemporary North American writers as
Joseph O’Neill, David Foster Wallace, and Emily St. John Mandel, and
has work forthcoming on Lauren Groff. Currently at work on his first
book, he is also an editor for the Glasgow Review of Books.
CHAPTER 1
US Historical Fiction Since 2000
Ruth Maxey
Historical novels in English belong to their own long tradition but in

recent years the genre has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and com-
mercial popularity, reflecting “our current hunger for historical fiction”
(Park 2018, 112). As Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou
(2015) contend, “while the ‘history turn’ in the humanities has assumed
an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in con-
temporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and
intriguing manifestations” (1). Hilary Mantel, the British author of
two Man Booker prize-winning historical novels—Wolf Hall (2009)
and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)—devoted her 2017 Reith Lectures to
discussion of the genre, contending: “facts and alternative facts, truth and
verisimilitude, knowledge and information, art and lies: what could be
more timely or topical than to discuss where the boundaries lie?” (quoted
in Quinn 2017). Mantel’s allusion to the Trump administration’s cham-
pioning of false claims as so-called alternative facts can be linked to the
subject of 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to
the Past —namely, the suspicion and skepticism toward “truth” of many
R. Maxey (B)
Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages
and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: ruth.maxey@nottingham.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Maxey (ed.), 21st Century US Historical Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_1
2 R. MAXEY
American historical novels published since 2000. As a genre, the historical

novel invariably raises questions of evidence, authenticity, veracity, and
authority (Stocker 2012, 309–10), issues that overlap with the narrativiz-
ing, sense-making work of the professional historian (compare Slotkin
2005, 223; White 2005). These questions are of particular interest at the
present political and technological moment: if “historical novels are always
political in their implications” (Slotkin 2005, 231), then we also live in
a digital age where different forms of information—and “truth”—are so
abundantly available that they should be appraised even more closely.
21st Century US Historical Fiction speaks directly to these issues, fulfill-
ing the particular need for scholarly research into what Elodie Rousselot
has termed “neo-historical fiction.” Discussing contemporary British writ-
ing, she argues that the neo-historical novel “consciously re-interprets,
rediscovers and revises key aspects of the period it returns to …these
works are not set solely in the past, but conduct an active interrogation of
that past” (2014, 2). Rousselot also discerns “clear continuities” between
this subgenre and “the historiographic metafiction which emerged in the
1960s and 1970s …[through] similar postmodern preoccupations with
questioning prevalent cultural ideologies” (1–2). Historiographic metafic-
tion, as defined by Linda Hutcheon (1989), comprises
novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their

implicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic …Historio-
graphic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse with-
out surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic
parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on
parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual
past of both the “world” and literature. (3–4)
The “neo-historical” turn that Rousselot identifies can be distinguished

from this well-known model in that the contemporary fiction she
examines is less “overtly disruptive …[and] carries out its potential for
radical possibilities in more implicit ways” (2014, 5). For Rousselot,
such neo-historical novels—with their inherent paradoxes and contra-
dictions—occupy an ambiguous position vis-à-vis nostalgia, voyeurism,
commodification, and consumption, offering a privileged First World
reader a kind of “escapist fantasy” from the anxieties of a globalized
present-day world through “a perception of the past as inferior …si-
multaneously an object of allure and repulsion, fascination and rejection
1 US HISTORICAL FICTION SINCE 2000 3
…[an] otherness as …‘spectacle,’ to be observed and enjoyed at a

distance, and without accountability” (7–8).
Many of these “neo-historical” characteristics can be applied to twenty-
first-century American historical fiction. After all, contemporary US writ-
ers employ an authorial mode that is questioning and skeptical, anti-
positivist and distrustful of so-called master narratives of history. Their
work is also formally playful and often strongly intertextual. At the same
time, it seems reductive to confer too specific a designation upon the rich
panoply of recent US historical fiction, whether that be “historiographic
metafiction” or the “neo-historical novel.” As Paul Wake (2016) notes,
“while much recent critical commentary has been dedicated to the genre
in its postmodern iteration, the historical novel demonstrates a range of
characteristics and is itself subject to numerous subdivisions” (82). It is a
branch of fiction known for its “formal hybridity …[where] little consen-
sus exists about the principal forms [it] …has taken even within the same
cultural and/or geographical context” (Harrison and Spiropoulou 2015,
2–3).
Beyond this agreed formal hybridity, what, then, is distinctive about
US historical fiction produced since 2000? As for earlier American writers
working in this genre, the fictive subject matter is most often drawn from
American history (compare Savvas 2011, 1) and reflects what Lois Parkin-
son Zamora (1997) terms an “anxiety of origins.” According to Zamora,
this phenomenon
impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of com-
munity) rather than escape from them (in the name of individuation); to
connect to traditions and histories (in the name of a usable past) rather than
dissociate from them (in the name of originality) …its textual symptoms
are not caution or constraint …but rather narrative complexity and linguis-
tic exuberance …Their search for origins may be ironic and at the same
time “authentic,” simultaneously self-doubting and subversive. (1997, 5–6;
emphasis in original)
Pace Zamora, the continuing bid to create a usable past comes from an
anxiety that is richly generative. In many contemporary US historical nov-
els, that past is a twentieth-century one, as writers grapple with modernity
and rapid technological change. Within this twentieth-century timescale,
they are more likely to turn to the 1960s than the 1940s—the latter
decade being more characteristic of British historical fiction—and they
4 R. MAXEY
interrogate issues of race, war, and trauma in particularly American, but

also more transnational ways: US fictions of elsewhere, such as novelists’
imaginative responses to global conflicts in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam.
And as Mark West argues about the 1960s novel in Chapter 12 of this col-
lection, “post-postmodern writers” in the United States approach recent
history in more intimate and less ironic ways as they confront a past that
also, in some sense, represents their own personal memory and lived expe-
rience. In other words, their fiction uncovers a distinction between “the
past …[which] is ontological …and history [which] is epistemological”
(Savvas 2011, 2). That history is of course mediated through the lens
and lessons of today’s world. Indeed, the novelistic emphasis upon war-
fare (see Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 13 of this volume) reflects what Joseph
Darda (2015) calls “the narrative logic of permanent war” (82)—that is,
decades of uninterrupted US warfare overseas.
The fraught, complex, racially diverse roots of the contemporary
United States also require further excavation as writers fruitfully return to
the nineteenth-century nation: to the antebellum and postbellum periods
and to the cities of an industrializing North, especially New York (see
Chapter 4). In so doing, many of the American novelists considered in
this collection complicate traditionally dominant conceptions of national
identity by foregrounding minority voices and the vulnerable figure of
the child. Thus they counter the erasure of marginalized peoples by
exposing and recuperating hidden histories through fiction. This also
leads to new forms of memorialization. US writers in the twenty-first
century continue to question enduring mythologies since “at the core
of culture is a continuous dialogue between myth and history, ‘plain
invention’ and the ‘core of historical fact’” (Slotkin 2005, 229). Hence
a number of the writers examined here critique white privilege, especially
white male privilege. Some also question “compulsory heterosexuality”
in Adrienne Rich’s phrase (1980; see Chapter 11). American historical
fiction continues to be compellingly relevant because “writers …prob-
lematize issues by identifying the historicity of behaviors, motives, and
beliefs …suggesting that presentist approaches are part of the suppression
of underlying reality” (Byerman 2005, 9). Contemporary US historical
novels are also exciting thanks to their formal experimentation, as many
of the chapters in this collection reveal, and these literary techniques
are, of course, inextricably connected to the ways in which particular
themes are unsettled and contested. Polyphonic narration and a range
of other narrative devices are engaged here to suggest the restoration of
lost voices, while some writers also play with chronology, upsetting read-
erly expectations of any putatively straightforward—linear, sequential,
teleological—temporal framework. The energetic use of intertextuality
enriches these works further and—recalling some of the characteristics
of historiographical metafiction (Hutcheon 1989)—results in subversive
counternarratives that write back to US political and cultural hegemony
at home and abroad (see Chapter 10).
A number of scholars have recently produced monographs or edited
collections on contemporary works of historical fiction in English, reflect-
ing the significance of the genre and its ever-growing appeal to differ-
ent audiences. It is notable that these academic studies are primarily con-
cerned with British novels.1 By contrast, some important scholarly works
consider recent US historical fiction but they examine different writ-
ers and texts from the present study.2 In other words, there remains a
clear gap in the currently available scholarly literature on recent histor-
ical novels from the United States and it is this gap that 21st Century
US Historical Fiction fills. Providing some of the first critical insights into
very recently published and prize-winning US works, some by first-time
novelists—while also looking at the fiction of well-established American
writers—leading and emergent scholars from the United States, Canada,
Britain, and Ireland analyze key examples of the US historical novel
from recent years. Their essays ask how American novelists are examining
the past and investigate the periods they are exploring. They also ques-
tion why writers favor particular historical eras—for instance, antebellum
America or the long 1960s—over others.
The 13 main chapters in this volume are organized chronologically,
beginning with fiction set in the 1840s and ’50s. These chapters con-
cern recent novels by canonical writers such as the late E. L. Doctorow
and Philip Roth, and well-known literary figures including Susan Choi,
Jennifer Egan, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Joyce Carol Oates, and
George Saunders. They also consider such new novelists as David Means
and Viet Thanh Nguyen and tackle some of the most prominent and
provocative contemporary illustrations of US historical fiction: for exam-
ple, Anthony Doerr’s World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See
(2014); Nguyen’s Vietnam War narrative, The Sympathizer (2015); and
Colson Whitehead’s reclamation of US slavery, The Underground Rail-
road (2016)—all recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—and the crit-
ically lauded neo-Victorian fiction of Lyndsay Faye.
6 R. MAXEY
Part I, “Imagining 19th-Century America in Recent Historical Fic-

tion,” begins with Judie Newman’s chapter on James McBride’s novel
Song Yet Sung (2008). Set in 1850 on Maryland’s eastern shore, the novel
dissects the relation between history and popular myth, and the legitimacy
of African American folklore as an empowering, imaginative resource.
Controversially, in plot and symbolic structure, McBride exploits the
“Quilt Code,” the secret instructions supposedly sewn into quilts to aid
escaped slaves. Although roundly condemned by academic historians as a
hoax, the Quilt Code remains an example of fakelore, a synthetic prod-
uct claimed as an authentic oral tradition and used as the basis of class-
room lessons, museum exhibits, public artworks, and children’s literature.
Newman argues that if McBride mythologizes, he also demythologizes by
recreating two women from American folklore: the Dreamer, an escaped
slave based upon Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad;
and Patty Cannon, historically notorious stealer of free blacks, operat-
ing an Underground Railroad in reverse. Newman contends that while
McBride questions both official and oral narratives, his novel validates
the vital role of the imagination in historical critique.
In Chapter 3, “To ‘Refract Time’: The Magical History of Colson
Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” Michael Docherty examines
this acclaimed 2016 novel, contending that Whitehead challenges us to
rethink definitions of the “historical novel,” since—embedded within a
familiarly “real” setting, the antebellum South of historical record—he
creates an underground railroad that is a literal subway and events that
are frequently (and deliberately) inaccurate historically. Through these
spatiotemporal anomalies, Whitehead “shape-shifts and refracts time and
history” (Winfrey 2016). Docherty asks whether Whitehead’s creative,
flexible approach to history generates a usable past (or projects a future)
from its subject matter in ways that more “conventional” historical fic-
tion could not. On this basis, however, he also wonders if Whitehead’s
novel can or should be regarded as historical fiction at all, suggesting that
the author instead offers what one might call “magical history.” This leads
him to consider the significance of genre—“popular” historical fiction ver-
sus “elite” literary fiction—in Oprah Winfrey’s public championing of The
Underground Railroad and to a discussion of the paratextual apparatus
that shaped the novel’s early critical and popular reception.
James Peacock’s chapter examines Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham tril-
ogy of bestselling historical thrillers set in New York City in the 1840s.
Each offers the reader an appetizing mixture of Grand Guignol violence,

political intrigue, sentimentality, and apocalyptic conflagration. Peacock
analyzes the depiction of childhood in the trilogy, arguing that the ambi-
guities of these representations reflect both the vicissitudes of thinking
about children through history and the inherent tensions of the historical
novel in its need to speak simultaneously to past structures of feeling and
to the contemporary moment. If children have long been sites of ideologi-
cal contestation—variously conceived of as precious innocents, Dionysian
vessels for original sin, and morally superior creatures—then Faye’s fic-
tional children, imagined post-Freud within a pre-Freudian social envi-
ronment, are pulled in many directions. They move between myth and
material reality, innocence and experience, sentimentality and commod-
ity, between—in the context of the historical novel—their present and
the contemporary present of the readership, and so between multiple,
competing constructions of childhood in different historical periods. Pea-
cock argues that the time of the historical novel is also vulnerable: Faye’s
mid-nineteenth century exists in an uneasy dependent relation, perhaps
inevitably, with the post-9/11 era of the novel’s writing and readership.
Completing this first section is Clare Hayes-Brady’s chapter, “‘Every-
one, We Are Dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in
the Bardo,” which explores Saunders’ award-winning first novel as both a
work of historical fiction and an experimental tour de force. Hayes-Brady
argues that, although Lincoln in the Bardo was critically received as a
radical departure in form and focus from the familiar working-class late-
capitalist lens of the author’s short stories, it actually continues the themes
and strategies of Saunders’ earlier work, offering at its heart a sharply
contemporary vision of a divided society. After situating the novel in the
context of contemporary historical fiction, this chapter offers a close read-
ing of the novel’s unusual construction, demonstrating that its symphonic
narrative structure posits and reinforces the work’s central thematic con-
cerns. By foregrounding so many voices, and effectively leveling every
utterance, Saunders invites us to consider history, memory, and truth
in the context of death: the unavoidable event that universalizes human
experience. Yet he simultaneously demonstrates that even in death, there
are vestigial striations of privilege and power mediated through language
and narrative control.
Part II, “Representations of the 20th-Century United States,” starts
with two chapters by Rachael McLennan and Villy Karagouni. In
8 R. MAXEY
McLennan’s chapter, she argues that in Oates’s baffling, enormous

novel The Accursed (2013), the undecidability of genre is key to
an understanding of the text, which employs, deconstructs and par-
odies a number of conventions of historical fiction in its recount-
ing of seemingly supernatural events. Responding to the lack of crit-
ical attention this ambitious novel has received, McLennan contends
that Oates’s genre-defying exploration of mysterious happenings in early
twentieth-century Princeton, New Jersey, is conducted in order to
explore some of her most central concerns—principally the explicit and
implicit violence of power as it relates to gender and race in Amer-
ica—as these concerns complicate or compromise the act of telling sto-
ries about history. And she shows that through such concerns, the
novel can be read as a cautionary message to twenty-first-century Amer-
ica.
In Chapter 7, “‘Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens’: The
Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E. L. Doctorow’s Homer
and Langley,” Karagouni argues that music is a system of central his-
torical and narrative signification in Doctorow’s 2009 novel. She posits
that Doctorow brings together popular and highbrow musical styles and
their corresponding ideologies, exploring the multilayered relationship of
sound to the moving image and highlighting the interplay between differ-
ent forms of narrativization. In the novel’s closing pages it is revealed that
the blind narrator-protagonist Homer Collyer’s narrative has in fact been
recorded in writing with the help of several Braille typewriters. Moreover,
it emerges that the written word has come to replace Homer’s active
engagement with music in his final years, as his hearing diminishes and
eventually deteriorates altogether. Karagouni demonstrates that—far from
being a mere stylistic or allusive feature—music emerges as a pivotal nar-
rative motif and explicit intertext in Homer and Langley.
The next three chapters—by Aimee Pozorski, Ruth Maxey and Debra
Shostak—examine recent US fictions of war. In Chapter 8, “Archive
Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Best-
sellers,” Pozorski notes the “third-generation survivors,” a generation
removed from the Holocaust and drawing upon archival research in
their fictional writing. Her essay develops this question of the Holo-
caust archive in relation to two recent American bestsellers about
World War II: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014)
and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015), novels grounded in
historical research: a process both authors emphasize in their book
tours. What does it mean for authors from the Midwest and the West
Coast, respectively, to pursue the Holocaust as the topic of their fiction,
fiction that depends upon the scholarly enterprise of the past and a hope
for the memory of the Holocaust into the future? Through close readings
of the novels’ achronological representations of time and the figure of a
vulnerable child, Pozorski argues that these twenty-first-century American
bestsellers reflect a cultural trauma we have yet to confront: trauma that
grows out of both willful ignorance during the early parts of the Nazi
genocide and a failure adequately to help refugees upon the war’s end.
My own chapter, “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War
in Contemporary American Fiction,” asks why such different writers as
Philip Roth and Chang-rae Lee have produced fictional responses to the
Korean War in the past 10 years. Comparing the US-centrism of Roth’s
campus novel Indignation (2008) with Lee’s much lengthier, intergen-
erational Korea-based novel The Surrendered (2010), this essay explores
the diverse literary strategies used to render the war and its aftermath.
While Roth and Lee address the conflict by writing about it through a
specific ethnic and racial lens, they display a fundamental discomfort with
representing the war itself. Roth depicts it as an absent presence through
such techniques as prolepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, metonymy, and experimen-
tal narration. Lee’s novel also handles the Korean War with caution and
detachment, deploying the events of 1950–1953 as a framing device to
tell a larger, transnational, post-conflict tale of US imperialism, expatri-
ation, and the white American adoption of Korean children. I question
what kind of usable past these writers create through their Korean War
novels and to what extent they shed new light on the so-called forgotten
war.
In Chapter 10, “Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet
Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer,” Shostak argues that a white, West-
ern father’s failure to recognize his “illegitimate,” “half-breed” son in
Nguyen’s satirical The Sympathizer (2015) allegorizes the untold Viet-
namese story of the Vietnam War in American fiction of the postwar
period. She explores the manner in which the unnamed, unreliable nar-
rator, son of a French missionary and a Vietnamese woman he raped,
uses his doubleness/duplicity to construct a riddle of sameness/otherness
within the discourse of his life story, allowing Nguyen to illuminate the
problem of representation at the core of the violence perpetrated against
the Vietnamese, deprived of authority over their identities and traumatic
histories. Shostak’s chapter traces Nguyen’s thick texture of allusion to
10 R. MAXEY
American high and popular culture, within which the narrator rewrites
the novel of recent American history through irony and parody—in a
kind of displaced oedipal patricide—as revenge against and reparation for
misrepresentation and lack of recognition.
In considering works that re-imagine the long 1960s, Rebecca Martin
and Mark West use their chapters to assess the recent return to this period
by Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Christopher Sorrentino, and Dana Spiotta.
Martin’s chapter, “Queering the Lost Year: Transcription and the Lesbian
Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman,” analyzes Choi’s 2003
novel and its reimagining of Patricia Hearst’s (the fictional Pauline’s) “lost
year” from the perspective of Wendy Yoshimura (fictionalized as Jenny
Shimada). As the characters in Choi’s novel live in symbiotic isolation,
their images circulate widely in the public sphere. Drawing from Rich’s
essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” as well
as Jack/Judith Halberstam’s essay “Shadow Feminisms,” Martin exam-
ines the intense bond of survival that develops between Jenny and Pauline
within a fugitive space. She argues that, by foregrounding the difficulties
of attempting to connect to another person through mediated forms such
as letters, photographs, or even acts of violence captured on film, Choi
reveals the problematics of connecting through any language. In Ameri-
can Woman, the most potent relationship in the novel is the queer one
that exists beyond definitive borders or marked history.
West’s chapter, “The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-
postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction,” charts the attempt by
recent American writers to reappraise and historicize the social, political,
and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, particularly the extended period
between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the end of the Vietnam
War. Although this period has attracted writers from different genera-
tions, West’s essay focuses upon authors whose sensibility and attempts
at temporal experimentation might be described as “post-postmodern.”
Offering brief accounts of novels by Egan, Spiotta, and Sorrentino, West
considers their work in the context of recent scholarship on neo-historical
fiction, showing how their treatment of the period reveals their under-
standing of history and temporal experience and arguing that a return
to the 1960s becomes a way to reassess postmodernism and tentatively
mark out a “post-postmodern” aesthetics.
Turning to alternative historical and speculative fiction, Diletta De
Cristofaro and DeLisa D. Hawkes offer chapters that investigate recent
novels by David Means and Dwayne Alexander Smith respectively. De

Cristofaro’s “‘What’s the Plot, Man?’: Alternate History and the Sense of
an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia” situates this 2016 novel within the
context of critical debates and theories about alternative historical fiction.
Set in a world in which President Kennedy survives several assassination
attempts and pursues the Vietnam War in his third term, Means’ novel
provides a fertile example of the relationship between alternate history
and the postmodern turn in historiography. De Cristofaro argues that in
foregrounding the narrative nature of history, Hystopia shows how priv-
ileging certain historical narratives as objective over others can prop up
and legitimize power structures. She maintains that the novel exposes the
constructedness of history as orderly and meaningful by drawing atten-
tion to the mode of emplotment based on the sense of an ending and
exposing how this retrospective deterministic patterning of the temporal
sequence undermines historical agency.
In the last chapter, “‘To Avenging My People’: Speculating Revenge
for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres,” Hawkes
explores Smith’s 2014 thriller which pushes against traditional histori-
cal and speculative fiction by questioning which realities are possible if
people try to “fix” rather than merely critique history. Black rage, or
“black noise” in the novel, represents a psychological extension of US
slavery in the twenty-first century that results in adverse realities for black
Americans. The only way that the characters in Forty Acres can be cured
from “black noise” is to return to the moment where the illness began
by avenging their ancestors who were captured and enslaved through the
establishment of a secret society of successful black men who kidnap and
enslave white people. Drawing on legal theories of revenge and retribu-
tion as empowerment strategies, Hawkes’ essay examines Forty Acres as
a “speculative revenge narrative” or one that imagines a solution to his-
torical problems that fall out of line with current legal and social under-
standings of the real world. She asks how one can decide who is a worthy
recipient of punishment, how Smith engages with speculative fiction to
tell this story, and how the text considers US slavery and its complex
aftermath.
No collection of this kind can hope to be comprehensive. There are,
for instance, no chapters covering Native American or Latinx fiction.
And rather than revisiting the heavily researched historical fiction of Toni
Morrison, William Styron, or Cormac McCarthy, to name a few notable
examples, contributors turn their attention to post-2000 novels that have
12 R. MAXEY
received little scholarly notice to date, yet compel further reading and
interpretation. These are literary works that push US historical fiction in
new directions, both formally and thematically. Investigating periodiza-
tion, theoretical terms such as “post-postmodernism,” and notions of
genre, the scholars in this collection demonstrate the emerging canon
of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse array of
key American writers. As an original, groundbreaking, and wide-ranging
collection of essays, 21st Century US Historical Fiction offers a unique
contribution to this growing academic field through its particular combi-
nation of writers and texts and, as a collection, through its specifically US
focus.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Wallace (2005), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010),
Adiseshiah and Hildyard (2013), Mitchell and Parsons (2013), and Rous-
selot (2014). Cooper and Short (2012) also consider Australian and Cana-
dian writers, as does Hulan (2014), while Brantly (2017) provides a Euro-
pean focus.
2. These studies include Byerman (2005), Swirski (2009), Gauthier (2011),
Nunes (2011), and Savvas (2011). Only the works by Swirski and Sav-
vas contain any overlap with this collection since they offer chapters on
Philip Roth and E. L. Doctorow respectively. But the Roth and Doc-
torow novels considered by David Rampton in Swirski’s edited volume (see
Rampton 2009) and by Savvas (2011) in his monograph are earlier ones:
Roth’s American trilogy—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Commu-
nist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and Doctorow’s The Book of
Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), and The March (2005). De Groot (2010)
makes reference to several US historical novels, but his textual examples are
again quite distinct from the ones in this collection; Boulter 2011 discusses
Paul Auster, but no other US writers; and in Rousselot (2014), there is just
one essay on an American writer, Michael Chabon.
Bibliography
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Savvas, Theophilus. 2011. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past.

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PART I
Imagining 19th-century America in Recent

Historical Fiction
CHAPTER 2
Folklore, Fakelore, and the History

of the Dream: James McBride’s Song Yet Sung
Judie Newman
James McBride’s commitment to historical writing is evident right

through his literary career, beginning with his prize-winning memoir,
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996)
which spanned the 1920s to the 1990s and revealed that his mother
Ruth began life as Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, the daughter of an orthodox
rabbi in the American South, an immigrant from Poland. When she
married an African American in 1942, she was immediately treated as
dead by her family. McBride was her eighth child, born after his father
died, and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, eventually one of 12 children.
The memoir alternates between McBride and his mother and was an
immediate bestseller, partly because of its utopian post-racial message.
When McBride asks his mother whether God is black or white, she replies
that “God is the color of water” (McBride 1996, 51), which, of course,
does not have a color. When interviewed, McBride himself argued that
“we’re all pretty much the same” (quoted in Trachtenberg 2008). His
J. Newman (B)
Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages
and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: judith.newman@nottingham.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_2
18 J. NEWMAN
first novel, Miracle at Sant’Anna (2002), an account of the African

American “Buffalo” soldiers and the campaign of the 92nd infantry in
Italy in 1944–1945, was designed to demonstrate that “all Germans were
not bad, nor all Americans good” (Trachtenberg 2008). Similarly, “just
because you’re a descendant of a slave owner, you’re no less worthy. And
just because you’re the descendant of a slave that doesn’t mean you’re
right” (Trachtenberg 2008). It is a comment which bears interestingly on
Song Yet Sung (2008), McBride’s second novel, in which Martin Luther
King descends from the child of one of the less heroic slave characters,
whose survival depends upon the power of the gun of a white slave owner.
If the satirical, rumbustious, tragicomic treatment of John Brown and
the Harper’s Ferry Raid in The Good Lord Bird (2013) bears witness
to McBride’s irreverent treatment of history, Song Yet Sung gives the
demythologizing impulse full rein. Set in 1850 on Maryland’s eastern
shore, the novel interrogates the relation between history and popu-
lar myth and explores the legitimacy of African American folklore as
an empowering, imaginative resource. Controversially, in plot and sym-
bolic structure, McBride exploits the “Quilt Code” (secret instructions
supposedly sewn into quilts to aid escaped slaves). In 2007, plans were
unveiled for the Frederick Douglass Circle Memorial in Central Park
which involved an eight-foot sculpture of Douglass and an array of
squares, each of which represented a symbol, supposedly part of a secret
Quilt Code. Historian David Blight immediately condemned the code
as “a myth bordering on a hoax” (Cohen 2007), and battle was joined
between academic and oral historians. Despite the absence of any reli-
able historical evidence, the code remains the basis of classroom lessons,
museum exhibits, public artworks, and children’s literature. Defend-
ers argued that the code embodied both oral and women’s history, as
opposed to official history, and that academic historians needed to take
that on board (Brackman 2006, 7).
Song Yet Sung introduces the code, with an explicit reference to the
untrustworthiness of white words, as the enslaved Woman with No Name
describes it to Liz Spocott, the Dreamer. The woman has no name
because “whatever name was gived me was not mine. Whatever I knowed
about is what I been told. All the truths I been told is lies, and the lies is
truths” (McBride 2008, 17). The code is described as involving scratch-
ing a crooked line in the dirt, because evil travels in straight lines; double
wedding rings; five knots (North, South, East, West, and free); and the
song which has to be sung twice. She continues “the coach wrench turns
2 FOLKLORE, FAKELORE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE DREAM … 19
the wagon wheel. The turkey buzzard flies a short distance. And he’s hid-
den in plain sight. The blacksmith is handling marriage these days. Don’t
forget the double wedding rings and the five points. And it ain’t the song,
it’s the singer of it. It’s got to be sung twice, y’know, the song. That’s
the song yet sung” (18). In his “Acknowledgments,” McBride mentions
Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts and the Underground
Railroad (1999) by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard as “re-
quired reading for anyone interested in how the Underground Railroad
functioned” (357). Tobin and Dobard’s book was enormously influential,
with its argument that slaves made quilts with secret messages in them,
in code. A quilt might be hung outside a “safe house” on the Under-
ground Railroad, for example, or used as some sort of signal. Quilts are
knotted and much was made of the symbolism of knotting (important
in some African symbolic systems). Five knots supposedly protected trav-
elers. Reference was made in the book to the important role of black-
smiths (often cultural leaders in African secret societies) and the noise of
their hammering (recalling African communication by drumming), which
whites might well ignore, along with most women’s day-to-day activities,
such as quilt airing. Particular patterns meant different things, the mon-
key wrench pattern suggesting the need to collect tools for escape, for
example. (The wrench is used by blacksmiths to turn the wagon wheel.)
The wagon wheel pattern referred to the escape, the Drunkard’s Path to
the need to travel in a zigzag way, by an indirect route, the Flying Geese
to the route North, the Log Cabin to a place of safety, and the double
rings referred to chains (or to bells ringing or the ringing of hammer on
anvil).
The authors buttressed their case by analogies with the use of songs to
carry messages undetected, as has been suggested in the case of spirituals
which may encompass messages of protest, solidarity, or even, potentially,
instruction. “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” for example, has been inter-
preted as communicating how to find the north by the stars, by locating
the big dipper. “Wade in the Water” has been connected to throwing
dogs off the scent, and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” seen as referring to
the Underground Railroad (Bordewich 2007). While musicologists dis-
agree about the dating and interpretation of particular songs, novelists
have dramatized the use of song in this fashion from Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s use of “Steal Away to Jesus” in Dred (1856) to the use of “Tell
me sister, tell me brother” in a slave revolt in Sherley Anne Williams’
Dessa Rose (1986). McBride dedicated Song Yet Sung to Moses Hogan,
20 J. NEWMAN
the African American composer known for his settings of spirituals. Him-
self a saxophonist and composer, McBride has described how he grew up
“playing many of these songs, that pointed the way to freedom” (Seltzer
2008). Dobard and Tobin also referred to Harriet Tubman—known as
the “Moses” of her people, leading them out of bondage on the Under-
ground Railroad—who often communicated by song (Larson 2004, 188).
Her “all clear” signal was “Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits,” but fugitives
in hiding were cautioned to wait until the song had been sung twice
before it was safe to come out of hiding. If she sang “Moses, go down
in Egypt,” they had to stay hidden. Tubman, who came from the east-
ern shore, worked with a timber gang and as a result was well-acquainted
with the covert communication networks of Maryland watermen, slaves,
and free blacks (Larson 2004, 65).
The Quilt Code itself nonetheless remains an example of what Richard
M. Dorson (1950) has called fakelore, a synthetic product claimed as an
authentic oral tradition, often tailored for mass edification. There was an
explosion of interest in quilts and quiltmaking in the 1970s, influenced
by Afrocentrism and women’s studies. The first mention of a Quilt Code
appears in 1987 (Fellner 2006) and its popularity has been traced to
a children’s book, Deborah Hopkinson’s Sweet Clara and the Freedom
Quilt (1993). Clara, a slave, maps her plantation in various ingenious
ways and makes a quilt to help other slaves escape after her. There are no
arcane symbols, merely a representation of the plantation and surround-
ing landscape features, a hidden boat on the Ohio River and the North
Star at the top. In her second book, however, Under the Quilt of Night
(2002), Hopkinson introduces a quilt as marking a safe house, an idea also
employed by Courtni C. Wright in Journey to Freedom (1994), another
children’s book.
Tobin and Dobard got their “facts” from one informant, a woman
who sold quilts to tourists, telling them stories to increase sales (Fellner
2006). The historical evidence is unsubstantiated. Many of the patterns
mentioned as symbolic are anachronistic (dating from after the Civil War,
and as late as the 1930s). Although abolitionists did sell “North Star”
cradle quilts in anti-slavery bazaars to raise money for the fight against
slavery, and Harriet Tubman gave a quilt to a woman who helped her to
freedom, there are very few surviving slave quilts and no coded images
in them. No slave narratives, no slave letters, no WPA accounts of slavery
contain any references to a Quilt Code. The idea that slaves (mostly not
particularly well-clothed) would have the time and materials for making
their own quilts seems unconvincing. Quilts use two layers of fabric and a
great deal of thread. The Underground Railroad was cellular and the idea
of a code known by many people is similarly unlikely. Practically speaking,
quilts are fairly unworkable as code-carriers. How, from hiding, was an
escaped slave supposed to get close enough to a quilt to read its symbols?
Especially in darkness? Moreover, most slaves escaped from the border
states and hardly needed a complex code to help them. As McBride him-
self points out, freedom was less than eighty miles away from his setting
in Maryland: “in Annapolis on a clear day, a colored boy could climb a
tree and practically look out on Philadelphia” (McBride 2008, 104).
This is not to devalue the importance of oral history, especially for
African Americans. William Lynwood Montell famously reconstructed the
story of the no-longer-existent black community in South Kentucky from
oral sources (Montell 1970), and Gladys-Marie Fry demonstrated that
stories about “night doctors” were a clue to the ways in which slave own-
ers terrorized slaves to keep them on the plantation with tales of night rid-
ers who would sell their bodies to medical schools (Fry 1975). The exis-
tence of Jefferson’s slave children was dismissed and ignored despite the
oral history, until DNA proved their descent. (Dobard appeared on the
Oprah Winfrey show with Jefferson’s descendants.) But the Quilt Code is
not genuine. Its presence in the Central Park memorial would put Fred-
erick Douglass on the same mythical plane as Washington and the cherry
tree. Above all, it devalues the real hardship of slave escapes, the docu-
mented evidence of courage, resourcefulness and determination, and the
hunger, fear, illness, betrayal, and bad weather on the road to freedom.
The code is nonetheless very appealing to contemporary audiences, as
are stories of the Underground Railroad. As James Horton argues, the
Underground Railroad offers a real Hollywood story: “everyone gets to
be a hero” (quoted in Brackman 2006, 8). Whites are helpful; blacks have
agency and triumph in the end. The code puts a premium on intellectual
prowess, rather than physical endurance, minds not bodies, conveying a
sense of clever blacks with their own symbolic systems, getting the better
of dumb whites who cannot see what is right in front of their own eyes. It
corrects the whole notion of “stupid” slaves and shows that they are bet-
ter readers of signs than whites. Even better, it involves a cozy sentimental
artifact and a puzzle element. It is eminently suitable for children (and for
classroom activities) and represents a continuity of family heritage, a link
back to the slave past. As Fergus M. Bordewich, an expert on the Under-
ground Railroad, commented when reviewing the novel, “myths deliver
22 J. NEWMAN
us the heroes we crave, and submerge the horrific reality of slavery in a

gilded haze of uplift” (Bordewich 2007).
There are now some 15 different versions of the code circulating,
and it features in bestselling children’s books where its intrinsic visual
elements are an added attraction. Children’s books tend to favor Afro-
centric elements and pride in heritage. A good example is Bettye Stroud’s
The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom (2005) in which young
Hannah learns to sew the secret code into the quilt and she and her father
use its instructions to escape. The symbols are handsomely illustrated
and glossed from the beginning, and associated with African culture.
Hannah’s escape, for example, takes her to a church where she hides
under a floor covered in mysterious carved signs, from which she escapes
by tunnel to a river, following its bed upstream to Canada. This is
recognizably the First African Baptist church in Savannah, built by slaves
and known for its “Congolese” cosmogram carvings. Its position close to
the wharves of a busy port city is obscured in the tale. Children’s books
tend to situate escapes in rural areas, even though many slaves escaped
to cities. Inevitably, and understandably, they also protect their readers
from exposure to the more traumatic elements of the story, and in this
respect, fantasy and folklore are usefully deployed (Connolly 2013). In
many respects, children’s books explore not only what slavery was in
history but also what it still is in American society and culture. Slavery
is not a closed event. As a result, quilts are ever-present in all sorts of
plot variations. Marcia Vaughan’s The Secret to Freedom (2001) tells
the story of a 10-year-old slave girl whose brother, a conductor on the
Underground Railroad, gives her a whole sack of quilts which she uses
to help slaves escape. In Clarice Boswell’s Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s
Journey to Freedom (2002), the secret quilt patterns are introduced to
the slaves by abolitionists. Faith Ringgold’s Aunt Harriet’s Underground
Railroad in the Sky (1992) translates the Underground Railroad into an
actual engine and carriages conducted by Harriet Tubman, and features a
quilt as the sign of a safe house. Just as Ringgold’s book has carried for-
ward into Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008) where the London
Underground is the secret route to freedom, and Colson Whitehead’s
The Underground Railroad (2016) which involves real platforms, rails,
and trains, so the Quilt Code has permeated American culture via chil-
dren’s books. The puffing steam trains of the Underground Railroad
are clearly marked in stories as a fantasy motif, but the same is not true
of the Quilt Code. Indeed, the story has snowballed from fiction into
fact. The Plymouth Historical Museum, in Plymouth, Michigan, ran an

exhibition Quilts of the Underground Railroad for five years. Six thou-
sand schoolchildren viewed it. In Kingston, Ontario in 2004, a family
made a corn maze, through which visitors were guided by a Quilt Code
(Fellner 2006). The residents of Stony Brook were reported in 2005 as
claiming that local Native Americans also used Quilt Codes, to help slave
fugitives, and assertions have even been made that Jews hung quilts to
warn of Nazi dangers—a claim dismissed in 2006 by Severin Hochberg,
senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as
completely without foundation (Fellner 2006). The spread of the Quilt
Code story offers historians a rare opportunity to watch a historical myth
unfurl in real time. Yet despite vigorous challenges, no historian has been
able to prevent its spread. It has captured the public imagination and
clearly says something about our culture’s distrust of the official line, our
fascination with codes and visual symbols, and our need for a positive spin
on past horrors. Rather like Brer Rabbit, the story has a strong trickster
element in which the powerless fool the powerful, an abiding motif in
folklore which provides a basis for challenging the larger social order.
McBride is, of course, not a historian but a novelist and one might
argue that he should be perfectly free to use whatever myths he chooses.
James Stevens contested Dorson’s condemnation of fakelore, maintaining
that artists have always drawn imaginative inspiration from folklore, just
as Marlowe and Goethe did with Faust, or Byron with Don Juan, or
Washington Irving with Rip Van Winkle. McBride himself has remarked
that “the musings of scholars never stopped writers from drawing plot,
content, and character from disputed history to power the muscle of
their imaginations” (2008, 357). He went on to complain that Margaret
Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936), required reading for his
daughter’s ninth grade class, portrays African Americans as “babbling
idiots and bubbleheads,” but that “I recall no current literary wave
challenging that author’s license to let loose her imagination” (357). His
own novel makes wholesale use of the code. Song Yet Sung follows the
fortunes of Liz Spocott, an escaped slave, pursued by Denwood Long,
a slave catcher employed by her owner, and Patty Cannon, a notorious
stealer of free blacks whose henchman Liz has killed, triggering a mass
slave escape. The plot is structured around a series of pursuits, with Liz
variously helped or hindered by other characters, including Kathleen
Sullivan, a slave owner sympathetic to her three slaves, Amber, Wiley, and
24 J. NEWMAN
Mary, and the Woolman, a monstrously huge, black wild-man-of-the-

woods, whose son is taken by whites, and who then steals Kathleen’s son
as a hostage. In the action, McBride deploys most of the elements from
Tobin and Dobard’s account: quilts, songs, double rings, blacksmith’s
signals, knots, a crooked line scratched in the dirt, and an emphasis on
uncomprehending whites unable to see what is being signaled right in
front of their eyes. When Liz escapes, she encounters a slave and draws a
crooked line in the dirt to gain his trust. When she rescues Woolman’s son
from a muskrat trap, he leaves her food and supplies in a sack tied with
a rope with five knots. When Sarah leaves food for Big Linus, another
escapee, she ties five knots into her boat’s rope, with a collar running
East to West tied around each. The direction means that it is unsafe to
come out of hiding. Linus cannot remember the code, however, and is
shot dead. Amber hides Liz and tells her to wait for a man with no name
singing a song without words—his uncle, humming. Liz is eventually
hidden by the blacksmith, shown tapping out a five-two-five-two rhythm.
Her hiding place is reached by a trapdoor with two large rings as handles,
and the code is tapped out right in front of a white customer who is
blissfully unaware of it. Denwood, who has picked up some elements of
the code, recognizes that the message of the blacksmith’s hammer travels
faster than his horse. The whole landscape is signaling trouble to those
who can read the signs; watermen are running their sails to leeward (from
right to left) and a quilt has been hung outside the Gables farm. Another,
hung by Mary on a boat with its star pattern facing west, is enough to
convey a message to two black watermen, who then unload their cargo
and stack its barrels in a pattern of fives and twos facing west, secured
by five-knotted ropes. Unlike their white master (who is watching them
minutely), another slave, Clarence, decodes the message (that two slaves
are on the run) and communicates to the blacksmith that it is time to
“wake up the network” (239). The blacksmith’s message travels swiftly
to the plantations all around and a slave finds out where Amber is hiding
and sends the message back to Mary via another quilt, also star-patterned,
and a coded arrangement of five baked chicken pieces, one placed to the
left (west) on a mounded napkin. Mary promptly tells Denwood that
Amber is to the west, near an old Indian burying ground. While the
sequence of events certainly buttresses the notion that slaves had good,
covert communication networks, it has to be said that the end result is
less than satisfactory. Too many people seem to be familiar with the code.
And coded chicken pieces are probably a step too far for most readers.
Liz’s escape does, however, dramatize the importance of imagination for

slaves. Almost as soon as she runs, the story explodes into myth, growing
by leaps and bounds until Liz becomes known as a shape-shifter and
trickster able to take the form of a bird or horse, her story circulating
through jokes, poems, songs, and entire re-enacted escape scenes as slaves
rejoice that Patty has been “outdone by a colored woman” (20).
Not all of the story is unhistorical, however, though it is a history less
well-known, perhaps, than that of the Deep South. Unusually, this is a
story of slavery without large plantations, whippings, or cotton. McBride
draws on both the history of Maryland and on white popular myth and
folklore, using one myth to undercut another and to set up a critical
dynamic. The action is set in 1850, when the passing of the Fugitive
Slave Law made the Underground Railroad more secretive, more impor-
tant, and more heroic. Free blacks were being kidnapped in Maryland
(DiPaolo 1998) and sold into slavery, particularly once an influx of Ger-
man and Irish immigrants displaced them from skilled work and created a
surplus of cheap labor. The internal slave trade was also stimulated by the
fact that Maryland had moved to a less labor-intensive economy of small
farms. More slaves were manumitted, creating a large free black popula-
tion, and slaves could be bought cheaply in Maryland and sold at a large
profit in the emerging cotton plantations of the South (Clayton 2007).
Patty Cannon is a historical figure, though she flourished at an earlier
period to that of the novel. As Hal Roth (1998) has demonstrated, she
was a well-known figure in folklore, featuring in a penny dreadful pam-
phlet, novels, newspaper articles, a nineteenth-century melodrama, and
a modern play. McBride follows the “female fiend” elements of the leg-
end, portraying her as attractive, dark, physically strong, a ruthless killer
who enjoyed wrestling and employed a mixed-race gang of slave-stealers
(including her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, a character here). Popular myth
lacks ambiguity and exaggerates virtues and vices. Patty’s appeal may thus
be seen as directly the opposite to that of Harriet Tubman: the subject of
myriad plays, films, novels, poems, operas, and children’s books. Popular
myth took Patty Cannon—probably not a husband-poisoner or executed
serial killer, but a woman who died eventually of old age—and blew her
up into a stereotypically evil figure. Tubman, however, who packed a pis-
tol and was not afraid to use it to threaten vacillating escapees, a point
to which McBride refers in the novel, underwent the reverse process.
McBride has commented that “you do an injustice to history …when
you paint your characters as one-dimensional” (quoted in Seltzer 2008).
26 J. NEWMAN
He complains on Tubman’s behalf that “in a society that loves to mythol-

ogize its heroes and make them larger than life, her life is treated as a kind
of Aesop’s fable …a children’s tale, a moral, polite, good-girl story taught
to elementary school kids” (McBride 2008, 356), whereas in reality her
life was an adventure that should spark any writer’s imagination. Tubman
suffered a blow to her head in childhood which left her subject to trances
and visions (probably the result of frontal lobe epilepsy), just as Liz has a
head injury and dreams of the future, of rap music, and of Martin Luther
King—though Liz point-blank refuses to escape to the North and declares
skepticism about the possibility or the value of African American freedom.
Her dreams are almost entirely dystopian. The vision of slavery here is
complex in its moral shadings. In the novel, the blacksmith, a captain on
the Underground Railroad, betrays Liz, whose arrival has exposed other
slaves to danger; an African American woman extracts vital information
from Woolman’s son and passes it on to whites; Mary betrays her own son
Amber to avoid family separation; Liz shoots Woolman dead as he strug-
gles with the slave catcher; and only Kathleen Sullivan emerges untainted.
Patty’s crew includes black accomplices in slave stealing. Even the slave
escape is portrayed as a violent, animalistic event, with slaves fighting
among themselves. Woolman, the swamp-dwelling heir to Stowe’s epony-
mous Dred, is literally larger than life, but inspires nothing but fear and
horror wherever he goes. On the other hand, Denwood the sharpshoot-
ing slave catcher emerges as something less than a villain, with a strong
streak of morality. Unambiguous heroes are in distinctly short supply in
McBride’s pages.
And that is the point. McBride gives the reader a good run for his or
her money, exploiting popular folklore and myth, but at the same time he
demythologizes American history, breaking down easy binaries between
good and bad, slave or slave owner, in ways which undercut the very pro-
cess of popular mythmaking. McBride’s major strategy is to exploit the
myth of the Wild West, a myth which exemplifies the American love of
myth rather than history: “we Americans like our mythology. We need it.
We pay for it. We want it to run free. Otherwise how to explain the hun-
dreds of novels, films, and television shows based on the Wild West, an
era of gunslingers, cowpokes, and cattle drives that lasted twenty years,
from roughly 1870 to 1890” (358). Elsewhere McBride has described
the watermen of Maryland as “America’s original cowboys” (quoted in
Trachtenberg 2008) and Song Yet Sung develops the analogy. The area
is described as “rough, untamed land, populated by watermen, a breed
of white pioneer whose toughness and grit made the most grizzled West-
ern cowboys seem like choirboys by comparison” (McBride 2008, 22).
Denwood Long, the slave catcher, went west when his son died and has
knocked men through tavern windows from Kansas to Canada, tearing
up saloons across the Nebraska territory, and learning in the West “the
ways of the Devil” (34). In the upshot he finds the fabled West a hol-
low experience, realizes that he is “running in the same direction as the
emptiness” (31) and returns to Maryland, coming out of retirement only
for a hefty fee. Woolman lives out past the old Indian Burial Ground,
whose wall was built according to Amber by “the red man” (311) to
keep bad spirits out. The action culminates in this emblematic location
in a knife fight and shoot-out. Woolman, so-named for his long woolly
hair, is described as like a tree but also “as if he were magic and his feet
did not touch the earth” (47). His humanity is barely recognized. He is
likened to wild nature—he runs barefoot through the swamps as if his feet
were webbed or winged. Wiley describes him as tall, muscular, dark, wild-
looking, “more like an Indian than a Negro” (173). His son is described
as a “savage” (259). When the latter is held in the Town Gaol (and sale
into slavery is threatened), Woolman abducts a white child to exchange
for him, drawing on the plot of the captivity narrative as popularized in
classic films such as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). He ambushes the
boy Apache-style, concealed beneath greenery in a hole in the ground.
Unlike earlier noble savages of this type, such as Stowe’s prophetic, Bible-
spouting Dred, Woolman is not at all articulate and looks like “sculptured
evil” (260), an ogre from an all-American horror story. Patty Cannon,
“a rough rider” (186), and her gang animate a plot replete with fast
horses, knifings, shootings, ambushes, drinks in the Tin Teacup saloon,
and a range of weaponry from Colt Patersons to a Winchester. The action
culminates in a three-cornered gunfight, in which Woolman fells Patty’s
henchman Joe with a hatchet, tomahawk style, and wrestles Denwood
in a knife fight, close to the wall of the Indian burial ground. In the
fight, Denwood remembers wrestling men to the ground in Fort Laramie,
Wyoming and in Indiana, screaming “c’mon, you pimping, pioneering
frauds, I can take you all” (336). This time, as the two men grapple “like
savages” (337), he realizes he will not win so easily. The cowboy is being
beaten by the “Indian,” or perhaps the white Western hero is meeting
his match in the black Marylander. Denwood is only saved by a woman
when Liz shoots the injured Woolman, sending him to freedom. When
Patty Cannon appears and is about to kill everybody left standing in order
28 J. NEWMAN
to wipe out the witnesses to her crimes, it is Kathleen Sullivan (in the
Grace Kelly role from Fred Zinneman’s High Noon [1952]) who raises
her Winchester and shoots Patty dead. It will not have escaped the reader
that three women are the mainspring of the action here, and intervene
decisively, with deadly results, while the Western males are all losing their
footing. White Western prowess and the American myth of the frontier are
being demythologized with a vengeance. Both Western and slave-captivity
narratives culminate in a denouement in which Kathleen buys freedom for
Amber, and for Woolman’s child; and a white Maryland waterman’s wife
sets the black child free, to become the progenitor of Martin Luther King.
In the novel, the use of rival mythologies underlines the vexed nature
of truth. Like the No Name Woman, Liz is wary of truth claims. What
she believes in is the power of dreams: “that’s the one thing the white
man can’t take, you know, your dreams” (157). Dreams are linked to
freedom. It is in a dream that Liz learns how to twist branches in order
to force open the muskrat trap which has immobilized Woolman’s son.
In captivity, she wakes to find that in her dreams she has bitten around
the timber of the floor which was holding a small spike and uses it as a
weapon to get herself free. Throughout the novel, Liz also has dreams of
the future, culminating in a vision of Martin Luther King making his “I
have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Wash-
ington on August 28, 1963. The novel begins with the Woman with No
Name singing “Way Down Yonder in the Graveyard Walk,” which Liz
later recalls. The Woman did not know all the words but Liz hears them
in the dream, spoken by King: “he reached into the past and shouted a
song from our own time. A song not yet sung. I heard this preacher say
them. And when he did, them words changed the whole world somehow
…He said, Free at last – Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last” (281). The
line “Free at last – Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last” is the chorus to
the spiritual and is repeated after every line and at the end. The implica-
tion is that the song has finally been sung twice, that freedom is therefore
in sight. As the Woman said, it is not the song which is significant, but
the singer, Martin Luther King. Clarence, her interlocutor, strikes a warn-
ing note, however. If the preacher was “hollering about being free …well
then he wasn’t free, now was he?. …What time of tomorrow was you
dreaming about?” (282), he asks. Liz replies, “I said I would tell you of
tomorrow. I didn’t say tomorrow wasn’t gonna hurt” (282).
Arguably, the Underground Railroad was the first racially integrated

Civil Rights Movement, a huge civilly disobedient, grassroots organiza-
tion. But the novel asks its readers whether King’s Civil Rights Movement
was its fulfillment. King’s speech suggests that the capacity to dream, to
imagine, is vital to black survival, that imagination and rhetoric can move
us toward freedom and a better future—just as the Quilt Code inspires
present-day African Americans and underlines the importance of freedom.
Liz describes King’s speech as using words that seemed to lift him into
the air, transporting his audience. Her own dystopian visions, however,
focus on King’s debatable legacy. His utopian vision of a post-racial future
and his creed of nonviolence both contrast strongly with the present. Has
the promise of Civil Rights activism been fulfilled? As the Dreamer, Liz is
a danger to other blacks, unleashing a wave of violence, beginning when
she wakes from a dream and stabs her captor, Little George. The other
slaves first beat him to death and then turn on each other, fighting “out
of shame, fighting out of humiliation …and, mostly, fighting to get clear
of each other” (16). Violence breeds violence. Present-day violence draws
upon that of the past. McBride found his inspiration for Liz’s dreams
from a Meg Ryan movie, James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold (2001), in
which a nineteenth-century Duke time travels into the present (Trachten-
berg 2008). McBride wondered what a slave transported to the New York
of today would make of it, and concluded that a slave would see America
as primarily a consumer society. In her dreams, Liz offers a quasi-Martian
view of gangsta and rap culture. She sees fat, black children smoking odd-
smelling cigars, with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes, men
who have lost “every bit of pride, decency and morality” (McBride 2008,
1), in a society where music teaches murder, and girls trade black eyes for
blue. One whole dream concerns obese African American children gorg-
ing on monster portions, another shows children running from books as
though they were poison. Some of this is drily ironic. Amber is particu-
larly astonished by the description of obese children, never having seen “a
fat colored child his entire life” (126). Other elements are more cutting.
The black men of the future appear not to love their women or children,
but they do love gold chains, an obvious reference to the ways in which
materialism has become a new form of slavery, thwarting the promises
of true freedom. Rappers come in for McBride’s particular ire, evoking a
very different song to King’s. Liz dreams of one, clad in the clothing of a
farmer (denim) but covered in shiny jewelry, speaking with the speed of a
rat-tat-tat telegraph and preaching “murder and larceny, cursing women
30 J. NEWMAN
savagely, and promising to kill, maim and destroy” (248). Voicing the
words of a song by Petey Pablo, a hip-hop artist who had served a prison
term for armed robbery, he shouts “who am I? He seemed not to know”
(248). Through him Liz looks back through “generations and genera-
tions of who he was, and where he’d come from” (248). It is a vision of
the destruction of the dream of freedom by the violent legacy of slavery.
History will always be disputed. As the Dreamer says, “only tomor-
row is truly truthful” (304). The novel ends with the song “All God’s
Children Got Wings,” a claim for absolute justice in heaven, but in the
political and social sphere, the action ends on an image of unfulfillment
and a promise deferred. At the end Liz is carried to her final resting place
to die, as Amber and Woolman’s son set off for freedom, paid for by Kath-
leen who has provided written documents to ensure their safety. Amber
believes that the boy (unnamed) has a special gift, “some kind of abil-
ity to dream” (352). Kathleen is skeptical but concedes that “even to her
doubting ears, the story sounded wonderful, and even if it was just a fable,
you had to give the girl Liz – the Dreamer the colored called her – credit
for dreaming it up” (353).
“History has its own life,” as McBride emphasized in his account of
James Brown (2016, 20), which frankly delineates the myths and false sto-
ries which surrounded Brown, many set in motion by Brown himself and
well-nigh impossible to dispel. In his most recent volume, the short story
collection Five-Carat Soul (2017), McBride counters the dominance of
white history by dreaming up some history of his own. In “The Fish
Man Angel,” Abraham Lincoln draws his inspiration for the Emancipation
Proclamation from a fictional overheard conversation between two black
stable workers. In “The Christmas Dance,” the narrator, writing a thesis
about the 92nd Infantry, interviews black and Puerto Rican veterans of
the Battle of Sommocolonia, fought on Christmas Day 1944. Although
53 of the American soldiers present were killed, the battle is described as a
skirmish in the official record. The white officers, who resented leading a
black regiment, and whose incompetence killed most of their men, wrote
the reports which then became history. The veterans tell a different (and
true) story, that of the heroic death of a comrade who ordered them to
fire on his own position to prevent it being overrun by the enemy. His
original, John Fox, received his Distinguished Service Cross many years
later, after pressure from black veterans’ associations. The title of the lead
story of the collection, “The Under Graham Railroad Box Set,” refers
to a unique antique toy, a steam locomotive equipped with a tiny burner
and compressor, feeding water into a miniscule steam box. Commissioned

from Horace Smith (of Smith and Wesson fame) in 1859, it could run for
4 hours at 25 miles per hour on its track, faster than any horse and car-
riage at the time. The train was a gift from Robert E. Lee to his son
Graham. Two weeks after it arrived, Lee received a telegram to say that
his son was dead. His slave attendant immediately escaped on the Under-
ground Railroad, taking the steam train with her, hence its nickname. A
reporter baptized it in a story which played on the way that the train went
north, one train riding on another. The train was valuable also for another
reason. Within its tiny widgets lay a weapon of war. Lee realized that if
the train’s technology was available to Southern engineers and scaled up,
the war would turn in their favor: A full-sized version could revolutionize
troop movements. The slave woman had averted a potential Confederate
victory by taking the train north, never to be seen again.
This time McBride has invented every detail of the story. Robert E. Lee
never had a son called Graham and was survived by all but one of his seven
children. The train set is entirely imaginary. But the story conveys the
consequences of slavery as a living force in American culture and history,
a story which needs to be creatively reimagined and communicated in
each generation.
Bibliography
Bordewich, Fergus M. 2007. “History’s Tangled Threads.” New York Times,
February 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/opinion/02bordewich.
html.
Brackman, Barbara. 2006. Facts and Fabrication: Unravelling the History of
Quilts and Slavery. Lafayette, CA: C & T Publishing.
Clayton, Ralph. 2007. Cash for Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic
Slave Trade. Westminster, MD: Heritage Books.
Cohen, Noam. 2007. “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide.”
New York Times, January 23. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/
nyreagion/23quilt.html.
Connolly, Paula T. 2013. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010.
Iowa City: Iowa University Press.
DiPaolo, Joseph F., ed. 1998. My Business Was to Fight the Devil: Recollections of
Rev. Adam Wallace, Peninsula Circuit Rider 1847–65. Acton, MA: Tapestry
Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1950. “Folklore and Fakelore.” American Mercury 70:
335–43.
32 J. NEWMAN
Fellner, Leigh. 2006. “Betsy Ross Redux: The Underground Railroad ‘Quilt
Code’.” Author website. https://web.archive.org/web/20130120160626/
http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/betsy%20ross%20redux.pdf.
Fry, Gladys-Marie. 1975. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Larson, Kate Clifford. 2004. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman:
Portrait of an American Hero. New York: One World.
McBride, James. 1996. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White
Mother. New York: Riverhead Books.
McBride, James. 2008. Song Yet Sung. New York: Riverhead Books.
McBride, James. 2016. Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the
American Soul. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Montell, William Lynwood. 1970. The Saga of Coe Ridge. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press.
Roth, Hal. 1998. The Monster’s Hidden Face: Patty Cannon in Fiction and Fact.
Vienna, MD: Nanticoke Books.
Seltzer, Sarah. 2008. “Running to Freedom.” Publishers Weekly 255 (1): 34.
Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. 2008. “James McBride Song Yet Sung.” Wall Street Jour-
nal, February 9. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120222661678044327.
html.
CHAPTER 3
To “Refract Time”: The Magical History

of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground
Railroad
Michael Docherty
In this essay, I examine how Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Under-
ground Railroad simultaneously engages with and subverts conventions
associated with “historical fiction.” I further suggest that the novel’s
status as a publishing phenomenon, achieving a rare combination of
immense commercial success and literary critical acclaim, owes much to
that ambivalent negotiation of its own relationship with genre. In doing
so, I articulate the complex relationship between the novel’s remarkable
way of exploring history and its own history as a consumed object.
Plot Devices, Marketing Devices

Railroad imagines that the secret network used to move escaped slaves
out of the antebellum South was a literal, physical subway system. More-
over, although the states visited by Whitehead’s protagonist, the fugitive
Cora, bear familiar names, they are not historical, factual depictions of
M. Docherty (B)
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: m.j.docherty@kent.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_3
34 M. DOCHERTY
those states. Rather, they serve as what both Whitehead and one of his
characters refer to as “states of possibility” in African American history
(Whitehead 2016, 68; Kirch 2016). Whitehead draws episodes and ideas
from America’s tortuous racial history and renders them as conceptual
geographies. This narrative strategy, which Whitehead has also described
as a series of “takes” on America, embodies (and often blends) a range
of historically extant racial ideologies and political strategies as physical
spaces through which his characters travel (Gross 2016).
His North Carolina, for example, is a brutally punitive regime that
has outlawed black people entirely: “the negro race did not exist except
at the ends of ropes” (Whitehead 2016, 156). By Whitehead’s own
explanation, this state can thus evoke the specters of both Jim Crow-era
lynch mobs and Oregon’s foundation as a white separatist state (Gross
2016). In the novel’s narrative progression, it appears in marked con-
trast to the previous stop on Cora’s journey, South Carolina, where all
slaves are owned, cared for, given employment, and educated by the
government, in a system which initially appears quasi-benevolent, even
progressive, but is ultimately revealed as a sinister project of eugenicist
experimentation. Speaking to Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh
Air, Whitehead described the historical inspirations behind the “state of
possibility” embodied in his South Carolina:
In general, you know, the technology, culture and speech is from the year
1850. That was my sort of mental cutoff for technology and slang. But it
[the liberty with the historical record granted by conceiving of the book’s
settings as “states of possibility”] allowed me to bring in things that didn’t
happen in 1850—skyscrapers, aspects of the eugenics movement, forced
sterilization and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. (Gross 2016)
The work Whitehead does here, then, sounds like anything but “con-
ventional” historical fiction—a slippery categorization that must necessar-
ily incorporate a variety of writerly approaches but which might in the
broadest terms demand a certain historical faithfulness of setting or at
least the consistent, plausible illusion thereof, an imbrication of the fictive
plot within the veracities of documentary record. If, as Ladislav Nagy
argues, historical fiction has “always drawn some of its appeal …from
the blurred divide between fact and imagination,” the genre in its con-
ventional forms is nonetheless perhaps definable by what Barbara Foley
describes as the process by which “empirical data …reinforce the text’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Birmingham paper—very imperfectly, I am sure, exemplifying the
lustre produced by ecclesiastical labour in polishing what, perhaps, I
shall again be held disrespectful, in likening to the Pewter, instead of
the Grease, and Candlestick instead of Candle, of sacredly
inflammable Religious Society.
Professor Ruskin on the Clergy.
“Not many years ago one might throw almost any calumny against
the Church or her clergy without fear of contradiction or exposure.
Happily, for the cause of truth and justice, those days are gone—
unhappily, however, for the unfortunate individuals born too late for
the safe indulgence of their spleen. Amongst these, we fear, must be
reckoned Mr. Ruskin, the Oxford Professor of Fine Art. He issues
monthly [178]a pamphlet, entitled ‘Fors Clavigera,’ being ostensibly
‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain,’ but the
contents of which do not appear likely to edify that class, even if the
price (tenpence) were not prohibitory. In the forty-ninth of these
letters a furious and wholly unjustifiable attack is made upon the
Church. No abuse is deemed too unjust or too coarse to bestow
upon the clergy, and they are assailed in a tone of vituperation
worthy of the last century. The Professor says that, 3 ‘in general, any
man’s becoming a clergyman in these days implies that, at best, his
sentiment has overpowered his intellect, and that, whatever the
feebleness of the latter, the victory of his impertinent piety has been
probably owing to its alliance with his conceit, and its promise to him
of the gratification of being regarded as an oracle, without the trouble
of becoming wise, or the grief of being so.’ Much more there is in the
same insolent strain, as if the Professor’s head had been turned by
the height of critical infallibility to which he has elevated himself, and
from which he looks down with self-complacent scorn and arrogance
upon all fallible humanity, clerical or lay. He concludes by appending
‘a specimen of the conduct of the Saints to whom our English
clergymen have delivered the Faith.’ This specimen is afforded,
according to Mr. Ruskin, in two cases of revolting and almost
incredible barbarism, tried recently at Liverpool Assizes, in one of
which an unoffending man was kicked to death by a gang of street
ruffians, in the presence of an admiring crowd; and in the other case,
a drunken female tramp, drenched with the rain, was taken into a
field and outraged by half-a-dozen youths, after which they left her,
and [179]she was found there next day dead. We need not enter into
the details of these cases, which were given fully enough at the time;
suffice it to say that in the records of no age or nation will any tales
be found surpassing these two in savagery of mind and body, and in
foulness of heart and soul. And what is Mr. Ruskin’s reason for
resuscitating the memory of these horrors? What is the explanation
that he has to give of them? What is the judgment that he has to
pass upon them? Let our readers behold it for themselves in his own
words:—‘The clergy may vainly exclaim against being made
responsible for this state of things. They, and chiefly their Bishops,
are wholly responsible for it; nay, are efficiently the causes of it,
preaching a false gospel for hire.’ These words have the one merit of
being perfectly plain. Mr. Ruskin does not insinuate his vile charge
by any indirect hints or roundabout verbiage, but expresses his
infamous meaning as unambiguously as possible. The clergy, he
says, are ‘wholly responsible’ for the murders and rapes which
horrify us, which, indeed, they ‘efficiently cause’; and the chiefs of
these incarnate fiends are the Bishops.
“This very intemperate attack elicited a few temperate remarks from

one of the maligned class. The Rev. E. Z. Lyttel, of Werrington, near
Peterborough, wrote to Mr. Ruskin thus:—‘I have been reading your
words to my conscience, but is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-
conceit, or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me
from hearing the word Guilty? The Gospel I endeavour with all my
might to preach and embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by,
the Lord Jesus Christ; let His life rule your lives, and you shall be
safe and sound now and everlastingly. Is this a false Gospel
preached for hire? If not, what other Gospel do you refer to?’ Mr.
Lyttel seems to have thought that the charge brought against himself
and his clerical brethren of causing murders and rapes [180]was too
gross for notice, or too intoxicated to merit denial. He contented
himself with the foregoing very mild reply, which, however, proved
adequate to the occasion which called it forth. Mr. Lyttel was recently
curate of St. Barnabas, in this town, and has also held a curacy in
London. His personal experience gives him a claim to be heard
when he assures the Professor that he knows that the morality of the
parishes with which he is best acquainted has been made better,
and not worse, by the self-sacrificing efforts of the clergy. It is also
pointed out that while Mr. Ruskin has been freely travelling about in
the enjoyment of beautiful scenery and fresh air, Mr. Lyttel and other
clergymen have been occupied from day to day in stuffy rooms, in
crowded parishes, amongst ignorant and immoral people. And whilst
this censorious Oxford luminary makes a great fuss about getting
paid for ‘Fors Clavigera’ and his other writings, Mr. Lyttel hints that
surely the clergy should be paid for their teachings too, being quite
equally worthy of their hire.
“Our ex-townsman has so effectually disposed of the Professor’s

charges, that there is no need to endeavour to answer them further.
We have only noticed them so far in order to show our readers the
extent to which hatred of the Church becomes a craze with some
persons, otherwise estimable no doubt, whose judgment is for the
time swept away by passion. That there is no pleasing such persons
is the more apparent from Mr. Ruskin’s curious comments upon the
well-known story of the Rev. Septimus Hansard, the rector of Bethnal
Green, who has caught the small-pox, the typhus fever, and the
scarlet fever, on three several occasions 4 in the discharge [181]of his
pastoral duties among the sick poor. When he fell down in his pulpit
with the small-pox, he at once said he would go to an hospital, but
refused to enter the cab which his friends called, lest he should infect
it; and, a hearse happening to pass, he went in it—a fine instance of
courage and self-devotion. Mr. Hansard’s stipend is five hundred a
year, out of which he has to pay two curates. And what has Mr.
Ruskin to say to this? Surely this must command his fullest
sympathy, admiration, and approval? Far from it. His snarling
comment is as follows:—‘I am very sure that while he was saving
one poor soul in Bethnal he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned
at Tyburn, each of which would damn a thousand or two more by
their example or neglect.’ This peculiar mode of argument has the
merit of being available under all circumstances; for, of course, if Mr.
Hansard’s parish had happened to be Tyburn instead of Bethnal, Mr.
Ruskin would have been equally ready with the glib remark that
while the rector was saving one rich soul to Tyburn, he was leaving
ten poor souls to destruction in Bethnal. Are we to understand that
Mr. Ruskin thinks Mr. Hansard ought to be able to be in two places at
once, or are we to shrug our shoulders and say that some persons
are hard to please? The heroism of self-sacrifice Mr. Ruskin
considers to be a waste and a mistake. Mr. Hansard’s life has all,
says the Professor, ‘been but one fit of scarlet fever—and all aglow
in vain.’ That noble-minded men should devote themselves to the
noblest work of the Church for the love of Christ, and of those for
whom He died, is apparently beyond Mr. Ruskin’s conception. Love
of sensation, he says, is the cause of it all. ‘Sensation must be got
out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness.… And the culmination of
the black business is that the visible misery drags and beguiles to its
help all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the
honest strength of the really noble [182]type of English clergymen,
and swallows them, as Charybdis would life-boats. Courageous and
impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly
practical, and therefore complacent, in immediate business, but not
enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to
when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty
work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease.’ We have read
philosophy something like the above extract elsewhere before, and
we think the philosopher’s name was Harold Skimpole. What the
gospel is with which Mr. Ruskin proposes to supplant Christianity
and to regenerate the world, we do not know. A gospel of this tone,
however, published in tenpenny instalments, is not likely ever to
reach the hands of the workmen and labourers of Great Britain,
much less their hearts.
With this interesting ebullition, shall we call it, of Holy Water, or

beautiful explosion,—perhaps, more accurately,—of Holy Steam, in
one of our great manufacturing centres, a very furnace, it would
appear, of heartfelt zeal for the Church, I wish I could at once
compare a description of the effects of similar zeal for the—Chapel,
given me in a letter just received from Wakefield, for which I
sincerely thank my correspondent, and will assume, unless I hear
further from him, his permission to print a great part of said letter in
next Fors.
My more practical readers may perhaps be growing desperate, at

the continued non-announcement of advance in my main scheme.
But the transference to the St. George’s Company of the few acres
of land hitherto offered us, cannot be effected without the
establishment of the society on a legal basis, which I find the most
practised counsel slow in reducing to terms such as the design could
be carried out upon. The form proposed shall, however, without fail,
be submitted to the existing members of the Company in my next
letter. [183]
Action, observe, I say here; in thought I was too independent, as I said above. ↑
1
At least, I think the terms of my letter might have been easily construed into
2
such recommendation; I fear they were not as clear as they might have
been. ↑
I permit the waste of type, and, it may well be, of my reader’s patience, involved
3
in reprinting (instead of merely referring to) the quoted passages and letter, lest
it should be thought that I wished to evade the points, or, by interruption, deaden
the eloquence, of the Birmingham article. ↑
Birmingham accepts, with the child-like confidence due by one able Editor to
4
another, the report of Brighton. But all Mr. Hansard’s friends are furious with me
for “spreading it;” and I beg at once, on their authority, to contradict it in all
essential particulars; and to apologize to Mr. Hansard for ever having suspected
him of such things. ↑
[Contents]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LV.
No more letters, at present, reaching me, from clergymen, I use the breathing-
time permitted me, to express more clearly the meaning of my charge,—left in
its brevity obscure,—that, as a body, they “teach a false gospel for hire.”
It is obscure, because associating two charges quite distinct. The first, that,
whether for hire or not, they preach a false gospel. The second, that, whether
they preach truth or falsehood, they preach as hirelings.
It will be observed that the three clergymen who have successively

corresponded with me—Mr. Tipple, Mr. Lyttel, and Mr. Headlam—have every
one, for their own part, eagerly repudiated the doctrine of the Eleventh Article
of the Church of England. Nevertheless, the substance of that article assuredly
defines the method of salvation commonly announced at this day from British
pulpits; and the effect of this supremely pleasant and supremely false gospel,
on the British mind, may be [184]best illustrated by the reply, made only the
other day, by a dishonest, but sincerely religious, commercial gentleman, to an
acquaintance of mine, who had expressed surprise that he should come to
church after doing the things he was well known to do: “Ah, my friend, my
standard is just the publican’s.”
In the second place, while it is unquestionably true that many clergymen are
doing what Mr. Headlam complacently points out their ability to do,—sacrificing,
to wit, themselves, their souls, and bodies, (not that I clearly understand what a
clergyman means by sacrificing his soul,) without any thought of temporal
reward; this preaching of Christ has, nevertheless, become an acknowledged
Profession, and means of livelihood for gentlemen: and the Simony of to-day
differs only from that of apostolic times, in that, while the elder Simon thought
the gift of the Holy Ghost worth a considerable offer in ready money, the
modern Simon would on the whole refuse to accept the same gift of the Third
Person of the Trinity, without a nice little attached income, a pretty church, with
a steeple restored by Mr. Scott, and an eligible neighbourhood.
These are the two main branches of the charge I meant to gather into my short
sentence; and to these I now further add, that in defence of this Profession,
with its pride, privilege, and more or less roseate repose of domestic felicity,
extremely beautiful and enviable in country parishes, the clergy, as a body,
[185]have, with what energy and power was in them, repelled the advance both
of science and scholarship, so far as either interfered with what they had been
accustomed to teach; and connived at every abuse in public and private
conduct, with which they felt it would be considered uncivil, and feared it might
ultimately prove unsafe, to interfere.
And that, therefore, seeing that they were put in charge to preach the Gospel of
Christ, and have preached a false gospel instead of it; and seeing that they
were put in charge to enforce the Law of Christ, and have permitted license
instead of it, they are answerable, as no other men are answerable, for the
existing “state of things” in this British nation,—a state now recorded in its
courts of justice as productive of crimes respecting which the Birmingham
Defender of the Faith himself declares that “in the records of no age or nation
will any tales be found surpassing these in savagery of mind and body, and in
foulness of heart and soul.”
Answerable, as no other men are, I repeat; and entirely disdain my

correspondent Mr. Headlam’s attempt to involve me, or any other layman, in his
responsibility. He has taken on himself the office of teacher. Mine is a painter’s;
and I am plagued to death by having to teach instead of him, and his brethren,
—silent, they, for fear of their congregations! Which of them, from least to
greatest, dares, for instance, [186]so much as to tell the truth to women about
their dress? Which of them has forbidden his feminine audience to wear fine
bonnets in church? Do they think the dainty garlands are wreathed round the
studiously dressed hair, because a woman “should have power on her head
because of the angels”? Which of them understands that text?—which of them
enforces it? Dares the boldest ritualist order his women-congregation to come
all with white napkins over their heads, rich and poor alike, and have done with
their bonnets? What, ‘You cannot order’? You could say you wouldn’t preach if
you saw one bonnet in the church, couldn’t you? ‘But everybody would say you
were mad.’ Of course they would—and that the devil was in you. “If they have
called the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of His
household?” but now that ‘all men speak well of you,’ think you the Son of Man
will speak the same?
And you, and especially your wives, (as is likely!) are very angry with me, I
hear, on all hands;—and think me hostile to you. As well might a carter asleep
on his shafts accuse me of being his enemy for trying to wake him; or his
master’s enemy, because I would fain not see the cart in the ditch. Nay, this
notable paragraph which has given Mr. Hansard’s friends so much offence,
was credited and printed by me, because I thought it one of the noblest
instances I had ever heard of energy and unselfishness; [187]and though, of all
the sects of ecclesiastics, for my own share, I most dislike and distrust the so-
called Evangelical, I took the picture of Swiss life, which was meant to stand for
a perfect and true one, from the lips of an honest vicar of that persuasion.
Which story, seeing that it has both been too long interrupted, and that its entire
lesson bears on what I have to say respecting the ministrations of Felix Neff, I
will interrupt my too garrulous personal reminiscences by concluding, in this
letter, from that of March, 1874.
“The old cart went again as well as ever; and ‘he could never have believed,’
said Hansli, ‘that a cart could have taken itself up so, and become so extremely
changed for the better. That might be an example to many living creatures.’
More than one young girl, however, in her own secret heart reproached Hansli
for his choice—saying to herself that she would have done for him quite as
well. ‘If she had thought he had been in such a hurry, she could have gone well
enough, too, to put herself on his road, and prevented him from looking at that
rubbishy rag of a girl. She never could have thought Hansli was such a goose,
—he, who might easily have married quite differently, if he had had the sense
to choose. As sure as the carnival was coming, he would repent before he got
to it. All the worse for [188]him—it’s his own fault: as one makes one’s bed, one
lies in it.’
But Hansli had not been a goose at all, and never found anything to repent of.
He had a little wife who was just the very thing he wanted,—a little, modest,
busy wife, who made him as happy as if he had married Heaven itself in
person.
It is true that she didn’t long help Hansli to pull the cart: he soon found himself
obliged to go in the shafts alone again; but, aussi, once he saw he had a
mustard, 1 he consoled himself. ‘What a fellow!’ said he, examining him. ‘In a
wink, he’ll be big enough to help me himself.’ And, thereupon, away he went
with his cart, all alone, without finding any difference.
It is true that in a very little while his wife wanted to come again to help him. ‘If
only we make a little haste to get back,’ said she, ‘the little one can wait well
enough—besides that the grandmother can give him something to drink while
we are away.’ But the mustard himself was not of their mind, and soon made
them walk in his own fashion. They made all the haste they could to get home
—but before they were within half a league of their door, the wife cried out,
‘Mercy! what’s that?’ ‘That’ was a shrill crying like a little pig’s when it is being
killed. ‘Mercy on us, what is it,—what’s the matter!’ cried she; and [189]left the
cart, and ran off at full speed: and there, sure enough, was the grandmother,
whom the little thing’s cries had put into a dreadful fright lest it should have
convulsions, and who could think of nothing better than to bring it to meet
mamma. The heavy boy, the fright, and the run, had put the old woman so out
of breath that it was really high time for somebody to take the child. She was
almost beside herself; and it was ever so long before she could say, ‘No—I
won’t have him alone any more: in my life I never saw such a little wretch: I had
rather come and draw the cart.’
These worthy people thus learned what it is to have a tyrant in one’s house,
little one though he be. But all that didn’t interrupt their household ways. The
little wife found plenty to do staying at home; gardening, and helping to make
the brooms. Without ever hurrying anything, she worked without ceasing, and
was never tired,—so easily things ran under her hand. Hansli was all surprise
to find he got along so well with a wife; and to find his purse growing fatter so
fast. He leased a little field; and the grandmother saw a goat in it; presently
two. He would not hear of a donkey, but arranged with the miller, when he went
to the town, to carry some of his brooms for him; which, it is true, skimmed off a
little of the profit, and that vexed Hansli, who could not bear the smallest
kreutzer to escape him. But [190]his life soon became quite simple and
continuous. The days followed each other like the waves of a river, without
much difference between one and another. Every year grew new twigs to make
brooms with. Every year, also, without putting herself much about, his wife
gave him a new baby. She brought it, and planted it there. Every day it cried a
little,—every day it grew a little; and, in a turn of the hand, it was of use for
something. The grandmother said that, old as she was, she had never seen
anything like it. It was, for all the world, she said, like the little cats, which at six
weeks old, catch mice. And all these children were really like so many
blessings—the more there came, the more money one made. Very soon—only
think of it—the grandmother saw a cow arrive. If she had not with her own eyes
seen Hansli pay for it, it would have been almost impossible to make her
believe that he had not stolen it. If the poor old woman had lived two years
more, 2 she would even have seen Hansli become himself the owner of the little
cottage in which she had lived so long, with forest right which gave him more
wood than he wanted; and ground enough to [191]keep a cow and two sheep,
which are convenient things enough, when one has children who wear worsted
stockings.
(Upon all that, 3 Hansli certainly owed a good deal, but it was well-placed
money, and no one would ask him for it, as long as he paid the interest to the
day; for the rest, ‘if God lent him life, these debts did not trouble him,’ said he.)
He might then learn that the first kreutzers are the most difficult to save.
There’s always a hole they are running out at, or a mouth to swallow them. But
when once one has got to the point of having no more debts, and is completely
set on one’s legs, then things begin to go!—the very ground seems to grow
under your feet,—everything profits more and more,—the rivulet becomes a
river, and the gains become always easier and larger: on one condition,
nevertheless, that one shall change nothing in one’s way of life. For it is just
then that new needs spring out of the ground like mushrooms on a dunghill, if
not for the husband, at least for the wife,—if not for the parents, at least for the
children. A thousand things seem to become necessary of which we had never
thought; and we are ashamed of ever so many others, which till then had not
given us the smallest concern; and we exaggerate the value of what we have,
because once we had [192]nothing; and our own value, because we attribute
our success to ourselves,—and,—one changes one’s way of life, and expenses
increase, and labour lessens, and the haughty spirit goes before the fall.
It was not so with Hansli. He continued to live and work just the same; and
hardly ever spent anything at the inn; aussi, he rejoiced all the more to find
something hot ready for him when he came home; and did honour to it. Nothing
was changed in him, unless that his strength for work became always greater,
little by little; and his wife had the difficult art of making the children serve
themselves, each, according to its age,—not with many words neither; and she
herself scarcely knew how.
A pedagogue would never have been able to get the least explanation of it from
her. Those children took care of each other, helped their father to make his
brooms, and their mother in her work about the house; none of them had the
least idea of the pleasures of doing nothing, nor of dreaming or lounging about;
and yet not one was overworked, or neglected. They shot up like willows by a
brookside, full of vigour and gaiety. The parents had no time for idling with
them, but the children none the less knew their love, and saw how pleased they
were when their little ones did their work well. Their parents prayed with them:
on Sundays the father read them a chapter which he explained afterwards as
well [193]as he could, and on account of that also the children were full of
respect for him, considering him as the father of the family who talks with God
Himself (and who will tell Him when children disobey 4). The degree of respect
felt by children for their parents depends always on the manner in which the
parents bear themselves to God. Why do not all parents reflect more on this? 5
Nor was our Hansli held in small esteem by other people, any more than by his
children. He was so decided and so sure; words full of good sense were plenty
with him; honourable in everything, he never set himself up for rich, nor
complained of being poor; so that many a pretty lady would come expressly
into the kitchen, when she heard that the broom-merchant was there, to inform
herself how things went in the country, and how such and such a matter was
turning out. Nay, in many of the houses he was trusted to lay in their winter
provisions, a business which brought him many a bright bätz. The Syndic’s wife
at Thun, herself, often had a chat with him; it had become, so to speak, really a
pressing need with her to see him at Thun every Saturday; and when she was
talking to him, it had happened, not once nor twice, that M. the Syndic
[194]himself had been obliged to wait for an answer to something he had asked
his wife. After all, a Syndic’s wife may surely give herself leave to talk a little
according to her own fancy, once a week.
One fine day, however, it was the Saturday at Thun, and there was not in all the
town a shadow of the broom-merchant. Thence, aussi, great emotion, and
grave faces. More than one maid was on the doorsteps, with her arms akimbo,
leaving quietly upstairs in the kitchen the soup and the meat to agree with each
other as best they might.
‘You haven’t seen him then?—have you heard nothing of him?’—asked they,
one of the other. More than one lady ran into her kitchen, prepared to dress 6
her servant well, from head to foot, because she hadn’t been told when the
broom-merchant was there. But she found no servant there, and only the broth
boiling over. Madame the Syndic herself got disturbed; and interrogated, first
her husband, and then the gendarme. And as they knew nothing, neither the
one nor the other, down she went into the low town herself, in person, to inquire
after her broom-merchant. She was quite out of brooms—and the year’s
house-cleaning was to be done next week—and now no broom-merchant—je
vous demande! 7 And truly [195]enough, no broom-merchant appeared; and
during all the week there was a feeling of want in the town, and an enormous
disquietude the next Saturday. Will he come? Won’t he come? He came, in
effect; and if he had tried to answer all the questions put to him, would not have
got away again till the next week. He contented himself with saying to
everybody that ‘he had been obliged to go to the funeral.’
‘Whose funeral?’ asked Madame the Syndic, from whom he could not escape
so easily.
‘My sister’s,’ answered the broom-merchant.
‘Who was she? and when did they bury her?’ Madame continued to ask.
The broom-merchant answered briefly, but frankly: aussi Madame the Syndic
cried out all at once,
‘Mercy on us!—are you the brother of that servant-girl there’s been such a
noise about, who turned out at her master’s death to have been his wife,—and
had all his fortune left to her, and died herself soon afterwards?’
‘It is precisely so,’ answered Hansli, dryly. 8
‘But—goodness of Heaven!’ cried Madame the Syndic, ‘you inherit fifty

thousand crowns at least,—[196]and behold you still running over the country
with your brooms!’
‘Why not?’ said Hansli; ‘I haven’t got that money, yet; and I’m not going to let
go my sparrow in the hand for a pigeon on the tiles.’
‘Pigeon on the tiles, indeed!’ said Madame,—‘why, we were speaking of it only

this morning—I and M. the Syndic; and he said the thing was perfectly sure,
and the money came all to the brother.’
‘Ah, well, my faith, so much the better,’ said Hansli; ‘but about what I called to
ask,—must you have the brooms in eight days, or fifteen?’
‘Ah, bah—you and your brooms!’ cried Madame the Syndic; ‘come in, will you?
—I want to see how wide Monsieur will open his eyes!’
‘But, Madame, I am a little hurried to-day; it’s a long way home from here, and
the days are short.’
‘Long or short, come in, always,’ said Madame imperatively,—and Hansli had
nothing for it but to obey.
She did not take him into the kitchen, but into the dining-room; sent her maid to
tell Monsieur that Hansli was there,—ordered up a bottle of wine,—and forced
Hansli to sit down, in spite of his continued protesting that he had no time, and
that the days were short. But in a wink the Monsieur was there, sat down at the
table also, and drank to Hansli’s health and happiness; requiring him at the
same time to explain how that had all happened. [197]
‘Ah, well, I’ll tell you in two words,—it is not long. As soon as she had been
confirmed, my sister went into the world to look for work. She got on from place
to place, and was much valued, it seems. As for us at home, she occupied
herself little about us: only came to see us twice, in all the time; and, since my
mother died, not at all. I have met her at Berne, it is true; but she never asked
me to come and see where she lived,—only bid me salute the wife and
children, and said she would soon come, but she never did. It is true she was
not long at Berne, but was much out at service in the neighbouring chateaux,
and in French Switzerland, from what I hear. She had busy blood, and a
fanciful head, which never could stay long in the same place: but, with that,
well-conducted and proof-faithful; 9 and one might trust her fearlessly with
anything. At last there came a report that she had married a rich old gentleman,
who did that to punish his relations, with whom he was very angry; but I didn’t
much believe it, nor much think about it. And then, all of a sudden, I got word
that I must go directly to my sister if I wanted to see her alive, and that she
lived in the country by Morat. So I set out, and got there in time to see her die;
but was not able to say much to her. As soon as she was buried, I came back
as fast as I could. I was in a hurry to get home, for since I first set [198]up house
I had never lost so much time about the world.’
‘What’s that?—lost so much time, indeed!’ cried Madame the Syndic. ‘Ah,
nonsense;—with your fifty thousand crowns, are you going to keep carrying
brooms about the country?’
‘But very certainly, Madame the Syndic,’ said Hansli, ‘I only half trust the thing;
it seems to me impossible I should have so much. After all, they say it can’t fail;
but be it as it will, I shall go on living my own life: so that if there comes any
hitch in the business, people shan’t be able to say of me, “Ah, he thought
himself already a gentleman, did he? Now he’s glad to go back to his cart!” But
if the money really comes to me, I shall leave my brooms, though not without
regret; but it would all the same, then, make the world talk and laugh if I went
on; and I will not have that.’
‘But that fortune is in safe hands,—it runs no danger?’ asked M. the Syndic.
‘I think so,’ said Hansli. ‘I promised some money to the man, if the heritage
really came to me; then he got angry, and said, “If it’s yours, you’ll have it; and
if it isn’t, money won’t get it: for the expenses and taxes, you’ll have the
account in proper time and place.” Then I saw the thing was well placed; and I
can wait well enough, till the time’s up.’
‘But, in truth,’ said Madame the Syndic, ‘I can’t [199]understand such a

sangfroid! One has never seen the like of that in Israel. That would make me
leap out of my skin, if I was your wife.’
‘You had better not,’ said Hansli, ‘at least until you have found somebody able
to put you into it again.’
This sangfroid, and his carrying on his business, reconciled many people to
Hansli; who were not the less very envious of him: some indeed thought him a
fool, and wanted to buy the succession of him, declaring he would get nothing
out of it but lawsuits.
‘What would you have?’ said Hansli. ‘In this world, one is sure of nothing. It will
be time to think of it if the affair gets into a mess.’
But the affair got into nothing of the sort. Legal time expired, he got invitation to
Berne, when all difficulties were cleared away.
When his wife saw him come back so rich, she began, first, to cry; and then, to
scream.
So that Hansli had to ask her, again and again, what was the matter with her,
and whether anything had gone wrong.
‘Ah, now,’ said his wife, at last,—(for she cried so seldom, that she had all the
more trouble to stop, when once she began),—‘Ah, now, you will despise me,
because you are so rich, and think that you would like to have another sort of
wife than me. I’ve done [200]what I could, to this day; but now I’m nothing but an
old rag. 10 If only I was already six feet under ground!’
Thereupon Hansli sat himself down in his arm-chair, and said:
‘Wife, listen. Here are now nearly thirty years that we have kept house; and
thou knowest, what one would have, the other would have, too. I’ve never once
beaten thee, and the bad words we may have said to each other would be
easily counted. Well, wife, I tell thee, do not begin to be ill-tempered now, or do
anything else than you have always done. Everything must remain between us
as in the past. This inheritance does not come from me; nor from thee: but from
the good God, for us two, and for our children. And now, I advise thee, and hold
it for as sure a thing as if it were written in the Bible, if you speak again of this
to me but once, be it with crying, or without, I will give thee a beating with a
new rope, such as that they may hear thee cry from here to the Lake of
Constance. Behold what is said: now do as thou wilt.’
It was resolute speaking; much more resolute than the diplomatic notes
between Prussia and Austria. The wife knew where she was, and did not
recommence her song. Things remained between them as they had been.
Before abandoning his brooms, Hansli [201]gave a turn of his hand to them, and
made a present of a dozen to all his customers, carrying them to each in his
own person. He has repeated many a time since, and nearly always with tears
in his eyes, that it was a day he could never forget, and that he never would
have believed people loved him so.
Farming his own land, he kept his activity and simplicity, prayed and worked as
he had always done, but he knew the difference between a farmer and a
broom-seller, and did honour to his new position as he had to his old one. He
knew well, already, what was befitting in a farmer’s house, and did now for
others as he had been thankful to have had done for himself.
The good God spared both of them to see their sons-in-law happy in their
wives, and their daughters-in-law full of respect and tenderness for their
husbands; and were they yet alive this day, they would see what deep roots
their family had struck in their native land, because it has remained faithful to
the vital germs of domestic life; the love of work; and religion: foundation that
cannot be overthrown, unmoved by mocking chance, or wavering winds.”
I have no time, this month, to debate any of the debateable matters in this
story, though I have translated it that we may together think of them as
occasion serves. In the meantime, note that the heads of question are these:—
[202]
I. (Already suggested in p. 59 of my letter for March, 1874.) What are the

relative dignities and felicities of affection, in simple and gentle loves? How far
do you think the regard existing between Hansli and his wife may be compared,
for nobleness and delight, to Sir Philip Sidney’s regard for—his neighbour’s
wife; or the relations between Hansli and his sister, terminating in the brief ‘was
not able to say much to her,’ comparable to those between Sidney and his
sister, terminating in the completion of the brother’s Psalter by the sister’s
indistinguishably perfect song?
II. If there be any difference, and you think the gentle hearts have in anywise
the better,—how far do you think this separation between gentle and simple
inevitable? Suppose Sir Philip, for instance—among his many
accomplishments—had been also taught the art of making brooms,—(as
indeed I doubt not but his sister knew how to use them,)—and time had thus
been left to the broom-makers of his day for the fashioning of sonnets? or the
reading of more literature than a ‘chapitre’ on the Sunday afternoons? Might
such—not ‘division’ but ‘collation’—of labour have bettered both their lives?
III. Or shall we rather be content with the apparent law of nature that there shall
be divine Astrophels in the intellectual heaven, and peaceful earthly glowworms
on the banks below; or even—on the Evangelical theory of human nature—
worms without any glow? And shall [203]we be content to see our broom-
makers’ children, at the best, growing up as willows by the brook—or in the
simplest and innumerablest crowd, as rushes in a marsh;—so long as they
have wholesome pith and sufficing strength to be securely sat upon in rush-
bottomed chairs; while their masters’ and lords’ children grow as roses on the
mount of Sharon, and untoiling lilies in the vales of Lebanon?
IV. And even if we admit that the lives at Penshurst, and by the woods of Muri,
though thus to be kept separate, are yet, each in their manner, good, how far is
the good of either of them dependent merely, as our reverend Novelist tells us,
on “work” (with lance or willow wand) and “religion,” or how far on the particular
circumstances and landscape of Kent and Canton Berne,—while, in other parts
of England and Switzerland, less favourably conditioned, the ministration of Mr.
Septimus Hansard and Mr. Felix Neff will be always required, for the mitigation
of the deeper human misery,—meditation on which is to make our sweet
English ladies comfortable in nursing their cats?
Leaving the first two of these questions to the reader’s thoughts, I will answer
the last two for him;—The extremities of human degradation are not owing to
natural causes; but to the habitual preying upon the labour of the poor by the
luxury of the rich; and they are only encouraged and increased by the local
efforts of religious charity. The clergy can neither [204]absolve the rich from their
sins, for money—nor release them from their duties, for love. Their business is
not to soothe, by their saintly and distant example, the soft moments of cat-
nursing; but sternly to forbid cat-nursing, till no child is left unnursed. And if this
true discipline of the Church were carried out, and the larger body of less
saintly clerical gentlemen, and Infelix Neffs, who now dine with the rich and
preach to the poor, were accustomed, on the contrary, to dine with the poor and
preach to the rich; though still the various passions and powers of the several
orders would remain where the providence of Heaven placed them—and the
useful reed and useless rose would still bind the wintry waters with their border,
and brighten the May sunshine with their bloom,—for each, their happy being
would be fulfilled in peace in the garden of the world; and the glow, if not of
immortal, at least of sacredly bequeathed, life, and endlessly cherished
memory, abide even within its chambers of the tomb.

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21st Century US Historical Fiction:

Contemporary Responses to the Past

Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas 1st ed.

Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical

Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English

Educational Philosophy for 21st Century Teachers 1st

Everyday Resistance: French Activism in the 21st

Thatcherism in the 21st Century: The Social and

African Languages and Literatures in the 21st Century

Identification Practices in Twentieth-Century Fiction

ISBN 978-3-030-41896-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41897-7 (eBook)

Cover image: © Chris Hackett/Getty Images, Image ID: 555175279

This collection has its origins in a one-day symposium, “Historical Fiction

1 US Historical Fiction Since 2000 1

Part I Imagining 19th-century America in Recent

2 Folklore, Fakelore, and the History of the Dream:

3 To “Refract Time”: The Magical History of Colson

4 Growing Up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction

5 “Everyone, We Are Dead!”: (Hi)story and Power in

Part II Representations of the 20th-Century United

6 “We Cannot Create”: The Limits of History in Joyce

7 “Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens”:

8 Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two

9 Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in

10 Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet

11 Queering the “Lost Year”: Transcription and the

12 The Contemporary Sixties Novel:

13 “What’s the Plot, Man?”: Alternate History and the

14 “To Avenging My People”: Speculating Revenge for

Diletta De Cristofaro is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Litera-

Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, now available in paper-

Urban Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently

US Historical Fiction Since 2000

Historical novels in English belong to their own long tradition but in

© The Author(s) 2020 1

American historical novels published since 2000. As a genre, the historical

novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their

The “neo-historical” turn that Rousselot identifies can be distinguished

…[an] otherness as …‘spectacle,’ to be observed and enjoyed at a

interrogate issues of race, war, and trauma in particularly American, but

Part I, “Imagining 19th-Century America in Recent Historical Fic-

Each offers the reader an appetizing mixture of Grand Guignol violence,

McLennan’s chapter, she argues that in Oates’s baffling, enormous

novels by David Means and Dwayne Alexander Smith respectively. De

Savvas, Theophilus. 2011. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past.

Imagining 19th-century America in Recent

Folklore, Fakelore, and the History

James McBride’s commitment to historical writing is evident right

© The Author(s) 2020 17

first novel, Miracle at Sant’Anna (2002), an account of the African

us the heroes we crave, and submerge the horrific reality of slavery in a

fact. The Plymouth Historical Museum, in Plymouth, Michigan, ran an

Mary, and the Woolman, a monstrously huge, black wild-man-of-the-

Liz’s escape does, however, dramatize the importance of imagination for

He complains on Tubman’s behalf that “in a society that loves to mythol-

Arguably, the Underground Railroad was the first racially integrated

and compressor, feeding water into a miniscule steam box. Commissioned

To “Refract Time”: The Magical History

Plot Devices, Marketing Devices

© The Author(s) 2020 33

Professor Ruskin on the Clergy.

“This very intemperate attack elicited a few temperate remarks from

“Our ex-townsman has so effectually disposed of the Professor’s