History Belongs to the Adults
Mar. 14th, 2016 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny[Storytellers Unplugged, January 29, 2008; originally titled, "If this ferments long enough, it may become a story"; awesome reader=awesome]
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
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Date: 2016-03-14 11:22 pm (UTC)Interesting! I hadn't realised that there were so many children in the Donner party. The Salem witch trials are quite a popular topic for children's historical novels, so some of those do explore that dynamic - although I can't think of one off the top of my head that really delves into the way the child-adult power dynamic might have played a role. Food for thought - thanks!