Fiction and History
Is Fiction a Reliable Guide to the Past?
I made my first history presentation when I was about nine. I gave a speech to my homeschool group on the role of Union general John Buford at the Battle of Gettysburg. I learned about the general not by turning to historians but rather by reading Michael Shaara’s novel about the battle, The Killer Angels. I was hardly alone in learning my history from fiction. Works of fiction from The Killer Angels to Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe books to William Shakespeare’s plays about Julius Caesar, Henry V, and Richard II to the novels of Patrick O’Brian to big-screen Westerns and battle epics probably feed the public more history than historians. I’d wager that most of the public awareness of Buford, an otherwise obscure general, comes from The Killer Angels.
But do works of fiction actually tell us anything reliable about the past? The answer has much to do with the vantage point of the author and the question one puts to the work of fiction. A history-minded reader can study the past through fiction from at least three angles.
The first angle is learning about the past from fiction made by those who did not live through those events. Most historical fiction, including The Killer Angels, falls into this category. This type of fiction does not have much to offer someone trying to gain reliable information about the past.
Historians must be true to the sources. They cannot make claims about the past not supported by other historians or sources produced by those who directly experienced the past, such as letters, diaries, memoirs, and photographs. Novelists and filmmakers are not bound by these rules. Much that historians know comes only through painstaking research – and there is still much that historians do not know and will never know because no source about it has survived. The makers of fiction can always “know” more because what they don’t know they can invent. Thus the novelist can tell you what Alexander the Great ate for breakfast on the morning of the Battle of Gaugamela even if no one recorded what happened. Makers of fiction can also simplify the past or make it fit the form of the story they want to tell even when that is not true to what happened. A Napoleon biographer has bemoaned a litany of alterations to the historical record in a recent biopic about Napoleon. Shaara invented the character of Buster Kilrain and admits in a note at the beginning of The Killer Angels that he “condensed some of the action, for the sake of clarity, and eliminated some minor characters, for brevity.” He als made his dialogue resemble the language of the mid-twentieth century more than the mid-nineteenth because, as he saw it, the Civil War era was so soaked in sentimental Christianity that “men spoke in windy phrases” that he feared would sound “quaint to the modern ear.”[1]
Even though is not bound to the facts, historical fiction can still tell us many true things about the events it chronicles. The Killer Angels is full of facts about Gettysburg. But historical fiction remains a weak source about the events in the stories it tells. If one is going to learn about the past from people who were not there, it makes far more sense to rely on those who can’t make things up: historians. Fictions about the past produced long after those events are best used for entertainment or stimulating the imagination about what the past might have been like.
But there are two other ways of using historical fiction that are more useful for gaining real knowledge about the past. Some fiction is produced by people portraying historical events they personally lived through, not events that came far before their lifetimes. Authors portraying their own time even in fiction are primary sources. Firsthand testimony is often rare and has to be sifted anyway, so it is a far more valuable source about the past than what makers of fiction far removed from the past say. Laura Ingalls Wilder really did experience nineteenth-century Kansas, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, the settings of her autobiographical children’s novels. Her depiction of eating wheat milled in a coffee grinder while snowbound during the hard winter of 1880-1881 in South Dakota, depicted in her novel The Long Winter, reveals something that settlers actually did that winter. Such a thing is corroborated by other firsthand accounts including Wilder’s nonfiction autobiography.[2] Historical fiction based on firsthand accounts a historian could not otherwise access might also be useful. O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924-1925) is based on interviews he performed with South Dakota settlers, for example.[3]
No historian would use historical fiction made by someone who did not live through the events he or she portrays, but historians treat fictional accounts of times the authors lived through as credible accounts of the past. At least one has used Wilder’s firsthand depiction in On the Banks of Plum Creek of the plague of grasshoppers that struck the Great Plains and Midwest in 1874.[4] Historian Alfred W. Crosby calls Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” set in the flu pandemic of 1918, an event she lived through, “the most accurate depiction of American society in the fall of 1918 in literature. It synthesizes what is otherwise only obtainable by reading hundreds of pages of newspapers.”[5]
Although any source has to be used with care, alert for memory lapses or attempts to obfuscate reality, this is especially true of fictionalized firsthand accounts. Authors writing about their own time are free to make up characters and situations. And fiction authors are always free to change details even when they depict real people. The Long Winter makes it appear as if the Ingalls family struggled through winter 1880-1881 alone, but they actually had another family, the Masters, living with them, for example.[6]
A third way to interpret fiction about the past, also useful to historians, is to interpret it as reliable concerning the author’s time, even if the subject of the work is events the author did not live through, that happened long before his or her time. I hate to break it to my nine-year-old-self, but no historian would use The Killer Angels to learn about Gettysburg. But The Killer Angels does tell us something about public attitudes toward the Civil War in the early 1970s, when the book was published. It certainly tells readers how Shaara viewed the battle. The book also might tell the reader something about how others viewed the war around that time because Shaara was shaped by a world of historians and public perception, and he wanted to make sense to the people of his time. Shaara’s modernization of the language of the dialogue is one example. One could write a history of changing public perceptions of the Civil War by analyzing films and novels like The Red Badge of Courage (1895), The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Killer Angels (adapted as a film in 1993), and The Free State of Jones (2016). Reviews and other public responses to these historical portrayals provide more opportunities to use a fictional portrayal of history to understand the time in which it was made.
Any fictional account of one’s own time, even if it is not set in the past can also be useful to historians. It tells us something about the maker and the audience with whom it was supposed to resonate. “How long,” asked the real Gerald Ford in 1966, “are we going to abdicate law and order – the backbone of any civilization – in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?”[7] The film Dirty Harry (1971) reflects this attitude in fiction. Likewise, although there was, of course, no real Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer, the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld really does tell us something about American attitudes toward race, abortion, sexuality, and the meaning of life because it was intended to reach an audience from that time.
Almost any work of fiction can be useful for learning about the past – if read from the right angle.
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[1] Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 2007), vii.
[2] Pamela Smith, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 219; Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter, rev. ed. (1953; reprint, New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), 198.
[3] Kristoffer F. Paulson, “Berdahl Family History and Rølvaag's Immigrant Trilogy,” Norwegian-American Studies 27 (1977): 56, 72.
[4] Gareth Davies, “The Emergence of National Politics of Disaster,” Journal of Policy History 26 (July 2014): 323n.
[5] Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 318.
[6] Hill, 203.
[7] James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 145-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 649.