So, I ended up hate-reading this instead of doing work on a rainy Sunday afternoon. For interested parties, it took me just under 3.5 hours in total. I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to learn that this novel does not, in fact, explore the lives of seventeenth-century women. At all. And I think that poor research can be held responsible for much of this. Highlights of the hilarious and terrible ways this shows up below. But first, a note that Gawthorpe Hall, where Fleetwood (sic) lives, does exist, though it is never described in the book, and unsurprisingly, some of the heavy-handed musings characters indulge in about their future do turn out to be based in historical events. More surprisingly, there was in fact a woman named Fleetwood Shuttleworth. I presume she was more competent than her fictional counterpart.
Things Fleetwood is frightened of include printing presses, talking to servants, and not having her wishes acceded to. (The fact that she was raised as a member of the lower gentry, and yet is somehow as frightened of talking to servants as the 2nd Mrs. de Winter, makes approximately zero sense.) She does, however, in a would-be-dramatic sequence, threaten a man whom she knows to be drunk and violent with a gun that she’s stolen. Completely normal, obviously. Totally believable. Not at all like a scene that wandered in from an old Hollywood gangster movie, somehow.
Despite, again, being allegedly raised to manage a household, Fleetwood can’t embroider, doesn’t look at accounts, and doesn’t even know basic Latin. She is also shocked to learn that King James’ Demonology is written in the form of a dialogue, even though this was *checks notes* completely normal for philosophical and didactic texts of the time. She is deeply upset when her husband decides to sleep in a separate bed; this is, he explains “not unkindly,” normal for husbands and wives. Indeed it was! But she is still deeply distressed. She is also completely distraught to discover that her husband discreetly keeps a mistress, fleeing to her mother’s house to complain that he has “broken me and broken our marriage.” He has done no such thing. He has never been shown to be anything but kind and solicitous to Fleetwood (sic), if occasionally preoccupied. He also keeps a mistress. Which is a) completely normal, and b) clearly a pragmatic choice, since Fleetwood has suffered numerous miscarriages, and he needs an heir. But he also is shown to be an affectionate father-to-be, anxious for Fleetwood’s welfare; he even buys little toys for their potential kids each time she falls pregnant. His historical counterpart matured to become a colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s army (hmm) but fictional Richard Shuttleworth is an all-around great guy. Which seriously undermines Fleetwood’s paranoia about him being part of an Evil Patriarchal Conspiracy. At one point, he expresses disapproval of Fleetwood’s just riding around the countryside all day, at which she is of course, again, distraught; can he not see that she is doing this for Important Reasons, although earlier she used to just do it for funsies? Anyway, since she is riding around the countryside getting mixed up with an ongoing witch investigation instead of, oh, say, doing the economic and social work of managing a household, I feel as though Richard has a point.
Also, about “managing a household.” A well-meaning older woman advises Fleetwood to concentrate on “family and home” instead of things they, as genteel married women, “have no agency over” which sounds hilariously, terribly like phrasing from a bad undergraduate paper. It sounds like a bad undergraduate paper because the author does not understand that the idea of family/home as a feminine sphere separate from public affairs belongs to the Victorian period, not to Ye Olden Days generally. What Fleetwood should be doing is working with her damn household ledger, making medicines, talking to the cook more, and maybe reading some books in order to become less stupid. She can keep riding her horse and going on hunts with her husband. That’s cool. She could also pay some more calls in the neighborhood; that way she could stop complaining about having zero friends.
For a novel allegedly exploring witches and witchcraft, wow, the author did approximately no research. A tell is that, in the acknowledgements, she thanks the person who modernized the language of Daemonologie for her. Guess what, lady? If you can’t read English contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s and understand what a significant primary source says about the phenomenon you’re investigating, you have at least one problem. Another sign of no research: she describes the Bibles that Fleetwood (sic) and Richard bought as having gold-edged, “petal-thin” pages. I howled with horrified derision. That’s what a copy of the KJV looks like if you buy it off the shelf for $29.99 in the twenty-first century. Anyway, witches. The hand-wringing about witch-hunting being just about hating women is a bad and lazy take, and I’ve explained why here. (For the existence of male witches, see here.) The accused Alice Gray laments, at one point, that women have been making medicines and practicing midwifery for centuries (indeed they have) and the only new thing is that the king is bothered by it. The problem is that this isn’t remotely true. Women were absolutely practicing domestic and professional medicine in the 17th century (see here and here.) What worried King James was demons. And witches. And Catholics. The ways in which anxieties about demons, witches, and heretics (for a seventeenth-century Protestant king, that’s absolutely the papists) became intertwined in the 15th and 16th centuries are examined here, in a paperback classic of the historiography that the author of this book clearly hasn’t read.
“In history,” Fleetwood wails with anachronistic concern, “when have witches ever been treated with lenity?” You see, she does believe in witches and witchcraft. She finds it creepy when young Jennet Device feeds her poppets and recites blasphemous Latin in order that drink may be brought. She is vaguely unsettled when her midwife, Alice Gray, takes her (Fleetwood’s) hair to make a poppet, and when a bowl of her blood mysteriously disappears. Still, she likes Alice, so accepts her witchcraft as useful (her medical knowledge definitely is,) and prevails on her husband not to hunt foxes, Alice’s familiar. So the problem, for Fleetwood, is… trials for witchcraft, I guess. Even though she believes in both witchcraft and its potential to harm.
In conclusion, Judith Bennett’s History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism is recommended reading; this book isn’t. Incidentally, I thought The Miniaturist did a much better job of exploring gender, material culture, intersectional marginalization and privilege, social violence, and economic and religious power in early modern Europe. But anyway: I read this book so you don’t have to.
areudirty
titsay
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