Young Adult Literature: Historical Fiction

Titles Discussed

A Moment Comes by Jennifer Bradbury

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson

Genre Overview

Historical fiction is a popular genre within young adult literature. From early works like Johnny Tremain (1943), set in Boston during the American Revolution, to Sarah, Plain and Tall (1986), about life on the American prairie during the 1800s, young readers have long been drawn to stories about the past. Historical fiction is beguiling because the act of writing it is akin to filling in the margins of a history book. “Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction,” Larissa MacFarquhar wrote for the New Yorker. “It is pioneer country, without fixed laws.” E. L. Doctorow, the award-winning author of the novel Ragtime (1975), has been criticized for taking too many liberties with the lives of historical figures. In an interview with writer George Plimpton for the Paris Review in 1986, Doctorow defended himself and praised the way Shakespeare and Tolstoy also “fiddled” with history. “History is a battlefield,” he said. “It's constantly being fought over because the past controls the present. History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew.”

The majority of historical fiction novels center on periods of trauma, great change, or uncertainty. Lois Lowry's award-winning novel, Number the Stars (1989) takes place in Copenhagen during the Holocaust and World War II. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2006) takes place in Germany around the same time. John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006) is also set during World War II and is about the son of a Nazi prison guard. Out of the Dust (1997) by Karen Hesse is set in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s. Copper Sun (2006) by Sharon M. Draper and Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons (1996), a fictional account of the life of poet Phyllis Wheatley, both feature African protagonists who are kidnapped and sold into American slavery.

All three of the books discussed in this article—A Moment Comes by Jennifer Bradbury (2013), A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (2003), and Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson (2000)—feature women living in three different regions during three different eras in which societal attitudes toward gender directly conflict with their goals. Patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism have altered the way we talk about race and gender, and changing mores in regard to these legacies and institutions are evident in modern stories about the past. These novels provide a provocative lens through which to view the past; they slyly draw parallels between the past and present in order to invite readers to question accepted ways of thinking about the events portrayed within the pages.

Works

Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Fever 1793 takes place in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793, when an outbreak of yellow fever ravaged the young city, which was then the largest in the United States, killing nearly 10 percent of the population. Anderson's protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl named Matilda who is the daughter of widowed coffeehouse owner. Before the outbreak, Matilda works from sun up to sun down to help her mother and their African American cook and friend, Eliza, run the coffeehouse. Her prospects involve more drudgery and perhaps someday an advantageous marriage. Her mother hopes for the latter, more so than Matilda, who doesn't appreciate these plans until her mother falls ill. Matilda's father died when she was young, and her mother has been toiling to makes ends meet with the shop ever since. The life of a poor, eighteenth-century woman was difficult; the life of a poor, eighteenth-century widow was worse. “Had she ever enjoyed anything,” Matilda wonders, looking at her sleeping mother early in the book (68). “Had every day been a struggle?”

“Outbreak” is an appropriate word for the nature of the epidemic of yellow fever that year—the sickness literally broke the bonds of the society it ravaged. Matilda was afforded freedoms that would have been denied her in a well society, as was Philadelphia's African American population, as exemplified by Eliza. Anderson suggests that some of these changes became permanent when, at the end of the book, Matilda and Eliza become business partners and take over the coffeehouse themselves.

Matilda has only a passing interaction with real figures of the time. In fact, the only historical figure she comes in contact with is George Washington, whom she sees from afar. Her beau, however, is apprenticed to Charles Willson Peale, the famous portrait artist, and Matilda recovers from her own bout with the fever at Bush Hill, an actual place that was transformed by Stephen Girard, a French American war hero who saved lives during the epidemic by making French methods of treatment widely available. American doctors (like the one who treats Matilda's mother) advocated blood-letting as a form of treatment—a “cure” from which many patients never recovered. One of the more curious misconceptions about yellow fever in 1793 was the idea that people of African descent were immune to the disease. The African Americans of the Free African Society served as primary caregivers to the sick, even after many of them were infected themselves. Eliza is a caregiver and member of the society and brings Matilda, who had been cured and could not contract the fever again, to care for the sick and dying.

Jennifer Donnelly's award-winning novel A Northern Light takes place in rural, upstate New York in 1905 and 1906. Like Fever 1793, the fictional story is intertwined with a true historical event, which in this case is an infamous murder. In the summer of 1906, a man named Chester Gillette engineered the drowning murder of Grace Brown, a girl whom he had impregnated and refused to marry, despite the proper custom of the time. Gillette was soon arrested for her death, and his trial was one of the most sensational of the twentieth century. He was convicted and executed in 1908. So thoroughly did Gillette's treachery capture the national imagination, that in 1925, Theodore Dreiser wrote a famous novel about the case called An American Tragedy. The novel in turn inspired two films including the Academy Award–winning A Place in the Sun (starring Elizabeth Taylor as Gillette's other, wealthier paramour) in 1951. After reading Brown and Gillette's letters, which came to light during his trial, Donnelly felt compelled to create Mattie Gokey, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of A Northern Light, to explore the crushing injustice—and yet, incredible possibility—of being a young woman in America in the 1900s. “Mattie was born, in part, because I wanted to change the past,” Donnelly wrote in a short interview at the end of her novel. “I wanted Grace's death to have meaning. And I wanted her death to allow someone else to escape her confining circumstances and live her life, even though Grace herself didn't get that chance.”

Donnelly's story has an intricate relationship with known historical figures. Mattie, the eldest daughter of a poor, widowed farmer, already has a slew of her own problems when she meets a nervous woman named Grace. Mattie is working a summer job at Big Moose Lake, a resort in the Adirondacks. She doesn't want to cause any trouble. She just wants to blend in and earn money for either college in New York City or more likely it seems, a dowry. Donnelly's decision to have Grace and Mattie meet is provocative; her decision to then have Grace hand Mattie a sheath of letters and ask her to burn them (before being summoned out to a boat and her ultimate death) is fairly explosive. Mattie, whose own story is told in flashbacks, must decide whether to keep her promise to Grace or turn the letters over to the police after's Grace's body is discovered in the lake. By putting Mattie squarely in the historical action, Donnelly creates a powerful metaphor about having the courage to take control of one's own life.

Jennifer Bradbury's A Moment Comes takes place in India in 1947, during the months that the British Raj prepares to leave India and in so doing, formally divides it into two countries: India (predominantly Hindu) and Pakistan (predominantly Muslim). Sikhs, a distinct religious sect, were politically aligned with Hindus at this time. Bradbury tells her story from the perspective of three characters: Tariq, an eighteen-year-old Muslim who dreams of going to college at Oxford University in England; Anupreet, a teenage Sikh girl; and Margaret, a wealthy Caucasian girl from England whose father is a civil servant tasked with dividing up the ancient country. The partition, as it became known, was far more serious than just lines on a map. It was a horrendous undertaking borne of a political quagmire that forced many Indians to migrate. It introduced a period of extreme violence unlike any previous event in the region's history. People who had once been neighbors, friends, and family turned against one another for land. Bradbury's characters struggle from their relative safety to understand the escalating violence.

It is significant that Bradbury chose to tell her story from the conflicting perspectives of a Sikh, a Muslim, and a British citizen. Through Tariq the reader sees how Muslims were forced out of their homes and businesses and how frustration can turn to violence under the influence of the mob. Through Anupreet, the reader sees how dangerous it was for a young woman to survive when rape is deployed as a weapon of war and victims of sexual violence are socially maligned. And finally, through Margaret, the reader sees the folly of British colonial rule and how power and racism blinded the empire, tricking the British people into thinking that their presence in India and their subsequent exit, was somehow a display of benevolence toward the Indian people. While none of the characters mentioned are real, Bradbury has explained that the character of Margaret was based on a teenager named Pamela Mountbatten, who was the daughter of the last viceroy of India. Pamela and her mother make an appearance in the novel when Pamela confides to Margaret that her mother, Lady Mountbatten, has developed a deep emotional attachment to Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. This relationship—reportedly never consummated—is true and thematically touches on Margaret's confusion regarding her own crush on Tariq.

Conclusions

The three novels discussed provide a provocative lens through which to contemplate the present through a view to the past. In Fever 1793, a horrific epidemic allows a young girl—who was to be married off to her wealthiest suitor—to escape the strictures and customs of early American life and achieve her dream of running her own coffeehouse. In A Northern Light, a young girl painfully breaks a promise to her dying mother (and with it, the hearts of her father and sisters) to avoid a life with an unloving husband and pursue her dream of becoming a writer. In A Moment Comes, a young Muslim boy kills a Sikh man to protect a Sikh girl from being raped, and an English girl is forced to reckon with her own views about race and love. The novels draw subtle comparisons between the past and present. In Fever 1793, Anderson highlights the fact that the brunt of the epidemic was borne by the poor and by African Americans. Those with money and power fled the city to save themselves. In A Northern Light, Mattie quickly learns that her desires—whether or not she wants to be kissed, for example—are totally meaningless to her suitor. In A Moment Comes, an army of wealthy, white civil servants do wrong in another country by attempting to do right; modern readers will recognize in the former British India notes of Western wars in Asia and the Middle East.

These novels are well-researched but unmistakably of the twenty-first century, having all been written in the 2000s. They ask readers to contemplate historical events from the perspectives of the people less likely to have had the chance to share their view of those events: women, African Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, and the young. Chandra L. Powers, in an essay for Research in the Teaching of English called this “presentism.” Rather than merely inflict modern views on the past, presentism utilizes a more encompassing view of humanity to provide a richer understanding of history.

Bibliography

Collins, Fiona M., and Judith Graham. Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Rycik, Mary Taylor, and Brenda Rosler. “The Return of Historical Fiction.” Reading Teacher 63.2 (2009): 163–66. Print.

Bibliography

Johnson, Sarah. “Defining the Genre: What Are the Rules for Historical Fiction?” Historical Novel Society. Historical Novel Society, Mar. 2002. Web. 3 June 2015. <https://historicalnovelsociety.org/guides/defining-the-genre/defining-the-genre-what-are-the-rules-for-historical-fiction/>.

MacFarquhar, Larissa. “The Dead Are Real.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 15 Oct. 2012. Web. 3 June 2015. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-dead-are-real>.

Mallon, Thomas. “Never Happened: Fictions of Alternative History.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 3 June 2015. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/21/never-happened>.

Mantel, Hilary. “Booker Winner Hilary Mantel on Dealing with History in Fiction.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 16 Oct. 2009. Web. 3 June 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/17/hilary-mantel-author-booker>.

Plimpton, George. “E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94.” Paris Review. Paris Review, Winter 1986. Web. 4 June 2015. <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2718/the-art-of-fiction-no-94-e-l-doctorow>.

Power, Chandra L. “Challenging the Pluralism of Our Past: Presentism and the Selective Tradition in Historical Fiction Written for Young People.” Research in the Teaching of English 37.4 (2003): 425–66. Print.