It began, as it often does for me, with a painting.
Reimagining the violent fairytale Bluebeard had been an ambition of mine for many years, but I didn’t know where or when to set it. I had the bones of plot points floating above time, without the flesh of place or era. There had been a brief spell when I’d explored Victorian England as a possible embodiment, but quickly abandoned the idea when I realised the undercurrent of the tale required something more obviously visceral.
Enter The Rape of Prosperina by the Italian painter of the Baroque period, Simone Pagnini.
The eye is immediately drawn to the pale flesh of Persephone, the whiteness of which is so captivating that you almost miss the monstrous shape of Hades shadowed behind her: an extraordinary, almost irreconcilable contrast of light and dark. The god of death stretches his arm across the painting, his fingers gripping the white of her sleeve, as if to say that only an act of violence can connect these two worlds. Even as Persephone resists Hades, her body turned fully away from him, there is little ambiguity as to who will win.
So much of the art from the 17th century tells this story: light at war with dark, the profane elevated to the sacred, the holy blasphemed. Categories are pushed to their extreme and then shattered. I’m not an art historian, but I am a story teller. So I was not surprised to discover a narrative of upheaval in the century and the continent that produced such art.
Tensions in the aftermath of the Reformation in the 1500s led to religious wars across Europe in the 1600s that took an estimated 4 to 12 million lives, whether through direct combat, or through disease or famine. No one was safe, whether they be French Huguenots flooding into Switzerland to escape religious persecution, or the King of England executed in an unprecedented act of regicide. This century was undercut at every turn by violence and death.
And yet this is also the century of Louis the Sun King and the construction of Versailles, of Vermeer and Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age of art, of the authoring of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost, and the performance of Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth and King Lear—some of the best—or at least my favorite—of Shakespeare’s plays. It was an age of extremes.
There is a temptation, I think, in setting stories in this particular century to draw on these extremes (they lend themselves to such excellent drama) and lose the nuance of the human thread. Villains descend into tropes. Priests in long black robes with thin, templed fingers float through cavernous cathedral halls. Kings bloated in opulence with no understanding of human suffering bark out ludicrous demands expecting immediate fulfillment. Religion becomes an end itself, divorced from the very real, very embodied motivations of power, control, and safety for which it is often wielded.
This is why I love writing historical fiction, because of the grounding force of human nature that, as far as we can tell in the thousands of years of story-telling, has shifted very little. It’s this shared human experience that connects us to every age that has gone before, no matter how extreme, no matter how far removed.
Governmental and societal systems may have changed, but we have not evolved beyond jealousy, hubris, or hate. Nor are we any less moved by love, joy, and goodness. We desire. We destroy. We steal. We sacrifice. The human condition remains intact, and if we look beyond the tropes, we find something in the narratives of this particular century that resonate even now.
A religious man clings to a secret order, not because of undefined fanaticism, but because of the way it connects him to the woman he’s lost. A bumbling government official remains wilfully ignorant in order to be accepted by those he most admires. A nobleman’s daughter, in an effort to undo the wrongs of her father, blurs the lines between retribution and revenge.
Who among us has not found our motivations muddied by a desire to be loved, to hold on to what we’ve lost, even to do the wrong thing for the right reasons?
If I can allow my characters to transcend my own attempts at moralizing an otherwise difficult, nuanced narrative, taking place in a difficult, nuanced age, then perhaps with some semblance of flesh and blood, tropes melt into real people that anyone in any age can understand and see themselves in.
Perhaps I do myself a disservice to say this, but in the 17th century, when the human condition was bubbling so close to the surface, the stories almost write themselves.
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