When I get riled up about inaccurate (and downright insulting) portrayals in historical period dramas I often get people telling me “calm down, no one studies history from movies”
No but movies, especially when they become widely successful, do subconsciously influence the opinions of those watching, for better or for worse, especially if the audience does not regularly study the nuances of history. More people have probably seen Natalie Dormer’s Anne Boleyn than have read Eric Ives’ biography on the historical Anne Boleyn, and that’s fine. Movies and TV shows are more accessible, more fun to consume and allow the audience to feel an emotional connection to a person who otherwise would be confined to dusty history pages. This is all fine and well if it’s at least a nuanced portrayal but if all you receive is a caricature then what opinion are you making? What story are you being told? And if that opinion becomes popular enough then it enters common myth which becomes so incredibly hard to push back against in academia, something historian Jenny Wormald experienced when she wrote Mary, Queen of Scots: a study in failure. And all she was saying that Mary deserved to be examined and critiqued as a 16th century Queen attempting (largely ineffectively) to navigate politics, and not as a tragic fairytale victim.
A good example of this is Robespierre and the French Revolution, where that fake mythology has entered in high school textbooks and teaching and where everyone thinks that Robespierre was anything like what he was in A Tale of Two Cities (and that the French Revolution resembled what it was in A Tale of Two Cities) rather than what he and it were actually like.
Hear, hear!
Yes: this is what matters. While some people say”it’s only a film” or “it’s only a novel”, when it involves misrepresenting real people, there is a major risk of what I call ‘bleedthrough’. Fictional misrepresentations can contaminate historiography. (This has been a major thread in my own research and writing over the years.)
I‘m a great fan of Jenny Wormald’s Mary, Queen of Scots: a study in failure, and heard her lecture on it in 1987 in St Andrews (was sorry to learn she had died not long ago). It’s an important book, and I recall the tut-tutting from some old ladies in the audience at the end of her talk, because she trashed a lot of sentimental drivel.
Max suffers, as @lacommunarde says, from fictional demonisation bleeding through into non-fiction. However, he doesn’t really appear in A Tale of Two Cities: I suspect she means The Scarlet Pimpernel. Both have merged in the popular imagination to create the dominant Engish-language image of the French Revolution – and both have the same source: Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. It’s a bizarre book, by a profoundly weird, and in many respects proto-fascist 19C Scots writer, anti-democratic and obsessed with the idea of the ‘strong leader’. He trotted out all sorts of weird myths and propaganda stories uncritically (and even gets mentioned in Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, where he provides a sort of subtext). To tackle the misrepresentation of Max in English, it’s the lingering Undead influence of Carlyle that needs to be staked.
Published
Gay Hell 