Re-Visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past Through Modern Eyes by Kim Wilson (review)

Reviewed by: Re-Visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past Through Modern Eyes by Kim Wilson Angela Hubler (bio) Kim Wilson. Re-Visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past Through Modern Eyes. New York: Routledge, 2011. The contemporary historical novel for children, Kim Wilson persuasively argues, is profoundly ahistorical. What characterizes recent examples of this genre, she argues, is “a persistent thematic interest in what the past means to the present” (5), as well as the assumption that the present is superior to the past: “an inherently embedded humanistic metanarrative of positive progression” (5). Because readers are “consistently positioned to perceive the culture of the past from a modern ideological point of view,” the understanding of the past that results is often “anachronistic” (5). Wilson applies a heightened level of scrutiny to historical fiction for children, challenging the positive assessments that gloss over significant problems with this fiction, particularly that representing the experiences of women and minorities. Wilson begins her analysis with “Living History Fiction: A Past to Excite the Senses,” acknowledging the ways in which historical fiction concerns the present day. Rather than an understanding of the past, novels in this subgenre stress a modern acquisition of insight. Newfound knowledge inevitably aids in a focalizing character’s quest for “self-realization” and maturity (6). Wilson demonstrates this critique in her next chapter, “Perceptions of Reality: Joan of Arc in Historical Fiction for Young Readers,” by analyzing eight different retellings of the Joan of Arc story. Ideologies from each author’s historical moment, Wilson finds, are commonly “superimposed” over those of the fifteenth century in which Joan lived and died, misrepresenting rather than illuminating that historical era. In a third chapter, “Agentic Heroines: Reinscribing Female Selfhood in Historical Fiction for Young Readers,” Wilson argues that “there is a market demand on children’s historical fiction to provide stories with compelling and fully agentic heroines; however, these novels typically employ later twentieth-century ideologies of feminism that are anachronistic to the time period featured” (7). Wilson convincingly argues this point through examinations of highly regarded fiction, including Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy (1994), as well as lesser-known fiction set in the Viking era: Donna Jo Napoli’s Hush: A Slave Princess’ Tale (2008) and Jackie French’s They Came on Viking Ships (2005). Wilson finds a particular problem with the representation of agency in historical fiction by Avi, Celia Rees, and Colin McNaughton, in which female characters cross-dress as male as a means to gain power. “In an eighteenth-and nineteenth century context, cross-dressing was often a means to escape poverty and abuse or to gain greater personal and economic freedom,” Wilson finds (75). In the children’s literature she discusses, however, cross-dressing is typically a strategy employed by characters who “are from wealthy families, sexually inexperienced and unused [End Page 355] to manual labor” (75). Wilson’s point is that cross-dressing was typically a strategy of working class rather than privileged female characters, but that Avi, Rees et al. fail to represent the class conditions that actually led to cross-dressing in their fiction. However, I take issue with Wilson’s claim that “a novel that provided an accurate depiction of female agency in past times would be abhorrent to a modern female audience that anticipates far greater freedom and independence” (85). In fact, my experience is that students are often admiring and astonished when they read historically accurate accounts of women’s limited historical agency in, for example, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. Wilson claims to find a metanarrative of positive progress embedded in the books she analyzes; strangely enough, this metanarrative sometimes undergirds her own analysis. Wilson is at her most illuminating when she shows how historical fiction perpetuates particular ideologies, especially those of national identity (“Shaping Identities: Constructing National Character in the Scholastic Press Historical Journal Series”) and diversity (“Rewriting the Past: A Historical Multicultural Australia?”). In “Shaping Identities,” Wilson investigates Scholastic’s fictive journals, set in the United States, Canada, Australia, and...

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