Blog 30 History Through Fiction

I recently finished Tracy Chevalier’s A Single Thread. The protagonist, Violet, was a “surplus” woman, one of tens of thousands marooned in their lives in post-WWI England, widowed or without prospects of marriage resulting from the war’s carnage. Set in 1932, the story reveals the cramped, restrictive lives forced on these manless women. Often relegated to living in financial poverty, they were further impoverished by societal restrictions. Unaccompanied by a man, they couldn’t enter a pub, the center of British social life, without accompanying judgment as to their intentions. Men and women tended too often to treat them as suspect. In cities, without family support, they were required to live in boarding houses for women only, their freedoms subject to the Victorian whims of the women proprietors. Ultimately, they were excluded from almost all facets of British life.

If I’d been passingly aware of the surplus women, my awareness was now a fleshed-out memory, embedded within my consciousness by the fictional palette painted by Chevalier. It reminded me of the trove of potential learning offered by fiction, especially when the writer is faithful to the historical context in which she has set her story. Presented contextually, I believe historical facts (or the facts of almost any body of knowledge) are more impactful, more easily remembered. To a teacher, I would say: if you want to land a lesson, historical or otherwise, present it not as a linear progression, but as a mosaic, a tapestry designed to elicit attention.

A close friend of mine, ironically a history major in college, claims he only reads non-fiction. (In the case of my fiction and on the basis of our friendship, he offers me dispensation.) I have suggested to him how one might better learn from and retain historical knowledge from fiction by the way it stimulates thinking about historical context in a way that non-fiction often does not. Not atypically, non-fiction states its theme, then, delivers the message along its promised route. Fiction allows one’s thinking to diverge, to branch in unexpected ways, while simultaneously solidifying memory embedded in a context other than itself. The linkage to memory is further etched by the sensory experiences evoked by fiction.

An exception to this premise is narrative non-fiction. But then the writer is using a fictive method, creating a storied atmosphere, utilizing the scaffolding of a story, to deliver the message.

Of course, this is what I think. How about you? What are your thoughts?

A Single Thread: A Novel: Chevalier, Tracy: 9780525558248: Amazon.com: Books