Wolf Hall is the best new book I’ve read in the last few years. I have a somewhat embarrassing obsession with reading histories of Tudor era England, and here comes a book that not only dramatizes it, but does so brilliantly. I’m re-reading it for the third time in anticipation of the upcoming release of its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.
Part of what I love about Wolf Hall is that it is a novel that actually makes a convincing historical argument. Perhaps the author, Hilary Mantel, is a little too quick to explain away all of Cromwell’s deeds as benign. But it is plausible that Cromwell was not only an unusual intellect and a self-made man in an era with few self-made men, but an overall decent, honorable person. A modern man, a true humanist, more opposed to fanaticism than truly attracted by the severities of Renaissance Protestantism. Moreover, it also seems plausible that the Thomas More was not the fearlessly honest man from A Man for All Seasons, but a sadistic, masochistic religious fanatic.
One aspect, however, troubles me. There is an insinuation in Wolf Hall that More had some sort of sexual relationship with his daughter. I’ve read several histories of this era, and have not come across that particular accusation. If anything, his views toward educating his daughters were remarkably forward-thinking. One book suggests that More had his daughter flog him, but it seems an outlier. And that’s still not necessarily sexual.
If he did have a sexual relationship with his daughter, than there is no issue here. But what if he did nothing amiss with his daughter, and this is just some wrong-headed theorizing on Mantel’s part? Has she then done anything wrong? After all, the guy’s dead. Does it really matter if someone accuses him of incest?
I am reminded of Thomas Nagel’s essay Death where he argues that death is indeed a harm to you even though you’re not around to experience it. He says,
There are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person, with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances which may not coincide with him either in space or in time. A man’s life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries of his life. These boundaries are commonly crossed by the misfortunes of being deceived, or despised, or betrayed. (If this is correct, there is a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead man. For certain purposes it is possible to regard time as just another type of distance.).
I tend to agree with this. You can harm or insult a person even if he’s dead. Which I think means that historical novelists, who refer to real people, have a special obligation to portray people honestly. It is fiction, but it’s fiction that relies on real people and events, and has attitudes towards those people and events. It has the power to evoke attitudes in the reader, who is usually less informed than the writer. And so someone may still be slandered after his death. If in fact More’s relationship with his daughter was upright, Mantel did him wrong. Even if this case Mantel is justified, there is a wider issue here for all writers of historical fiction to take seriously.
I have no particular comments on this, really, but I just want to say that I’m 100 pages into Wolf Hall and enjoying it immensely.
Seriously, I have not run across a single person who has read it who doesn’t love it. I assume there must be someone out there.
While you may not be able to harm the dead *PERSONALLY*, you can certainly desecrate their memory (or, of course, consecrate it).
Going a completely different direction, I think about Mel Brooks and what he’s trying to do for “Hitler”. He, essentially, is trying to make Hitler a punchline. Someone that makes you think of The Producers or To Be or Not To Be and snort. “If you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win.”
hmm… fascinating.
I think this is markedly context dependent. The same story published in a science fiction rag, has more of a presumption of “not true, probably”
Also worthy of note: Thomas More is a Catholic Saint. My sister was married in St. Thomas More Church. Accusing him of incest can be far more than an indictment of his character but also of Catholicism as well.
Thomas More had many enemies who wrote about him. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs calls More a torturer and More denied it. Had there been any hint of incest, Foxe would surely have said something.
Thomas More was a complex man who seldom did as he wrote. Religious toleration is practised in Utopia but More would defend the Catholic Church once Luther appeared, calling Luther a shit eater.
Those of us who read Tudor Lit have some inkling of what a despotic and murderous monster Henry VIII truly was. Tudor England was a horror story. Men of learning and conscience were routinely beheaded and burned. Henry was a looter, a destroyer of much that was good, his destruction of the abbeys and monasteries puts me in mind of the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan only on a far larger scale. He raised men up and tore them down. Nobody was safe from his erratic despotism: Henry Tudor was England’s Kim Jong Il . Merrie Olde England, my ass.