Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                      TURNING HISTORY UPSIDE-DOWN

            When you read a novel set in the past, you can nearly always be sure that history will somehow be distorted – to a smaller or greater extent. When you see a film set in the past, ditto. But it is very rare for a novel or film to turn history completely upside-down, that is, to present what exactly did not happen.

            Let me give two New Zealand examples.

Back in 2017, a novel called The March of the Foxgloves was published. It was written by Karyn Hay. Most of it was set in New Zealand in the year 1893. Its main character was a very hedonistic woman who revelled in parties and free sex and who spouted ideas which, frankly, sounded more like one version of feminism in the 2010s rather than a woman of 1893. This is one of the great traps of supposedly “historical” novels – too often writers put into the mouths of their characters concepts that are anachronistic. As the story went, the hedonistic, partying woman wanted liberation. A great petition was being circulated asking for women’s suffrage, but the hedonist could not sign it because she was not a New Zealand citizen. By chance her landlady was a crabby, puritanical church-going woman who hated alcohol, disapproved of wild partying and certainly did not approve of the new-fangled petition. So bravely the hedonist crept out and signed the petition in her landlady’s name… and women won the suffrage that year.

Which of course brings up the completely upside-down version of history. There might have been a [very] few pleasure-seeking women who signed the petition, but as I wrote when I reviewed this novel for Landfall-on-Line “the backbone of the New Zealand women’s suffrage movement was an organisation of church-going Protestant ladies called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The main impulse of the WCTU (including Kate Sheppard) was to give women the political power to oppose the demon drink and other such filthy male habits. In other words the likes of [the novel’s landlady] would have been the very people who signed the suffrage petition enthusiastically and helped the WCTU with its campaigning.” So the novel turns history upside-down.

More recently, I saw a film that encouraged another major fib. This was the film We Were Dangerous which I could criticise in many ways. It is supposedly set in 1954 on an off-shore New Zealand island dedicated to the rehabilitation of delinquent girls. I’ll skip over the film’s unreal, neatly brushed-up delinquent girls, who all look as if they come from polite middle-class homes and from a hairdresser. The film seems to be inspired by recent revelations about the abuse of children, adolescents and others in care in both state and faith-based institutions. The domineering woman in charge of this off-shore jail is apparently either a Catholic nun or a former nun – there is a brief flashback of her attacking another nun. Apparently the only lessons she teaches are religious and Biblical lessons. We do not see the girls having any other sorts of classroom instruction. All this is improbable.

But where it literally turns into the reverse of historical reality, we have a doctor coming to the prison and persuading the nun that she should understand the benefits of eugenics. For those of you who have forgotten, eugenics was the malign movement in the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, which sought to have only perfectly-formed people. Others should not be allowed to exist. The chronically ill, the deformed, the lame, the mentally impaired and the feeble-minded should be either sterilised or disposed of in some other way. This movement was not a small cult. It was mainstream – doctors and public figures went along with eugenics and thousands were (unwillingly) sterilised in European countries, the U.S.A. , Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Doctors knew what was right, didn’t they? It was only when Nazi Germany took eugenics a little step further – not only sterilising the feeble and ill, but also killing them -  that gradually eugenics lost its lustre.

So how is all this related to the film We Were Dangerous? The domineering nun goes along with the doctor in having a girl sterilised. To make it clear, there is a shot of the doctor coming out of the make-do surgery with blood on his apron, after the girl has been howling off screen. At which point I have to note that if there was one organisation that was fervently opposed to eugenics it was the Catholic church. Any bishop, priest, sister or nun would have regarded eugenics as sinful, and preached thus. Now it could be that in this film the domineering woman was not meant to be a real nun. After all, she doesn’t wear a nun’s habit. But all the iconography in her classroom is clearly Catholic – crucifixes, holy pictures etc. – which can only make viewers see her as a nun. Casting a nun as a champion of eugenics is as ridiculous as believing that hedonistic women won women’s suffrage.

Footnote: If you have the time, look up on-line the “Black Sheep” series. It includes an episode called “Eugenics: the story of a bad idea” which deals with how eugenics affected New Zealand. It shows how, right up to the 1950s, doctors still sterilised women who were regarded as delinquent or were feeble minded. Some women were sterilised on the premise that they were just being injected to stabilise their periods. Only at the end, the podcast briefly mentions that some people stood against eugenics – the nun Mother Aubert and some members of the young Labour Party who understood that sterilisation was often targeted at working-class women. BTW, this posting is not an apologia for the Catholic church. Like state and other and religious denominations, some Catholic institutions were guilty of  abuse in care.