The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn by Stephanie Russo

Author:Stephanie Russo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030586133
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Historical novelists had to decide, therefore, how they were to account for Anne, especially as perceptions of gender began to change: would she be a feisty modern woman, a flapper or a nymph, or a cautionary tale about what happens to women when they transgress acceptable models of femininity?

Continuities

If the twentieth century was a period of immense growth for the cottage industry of Anne Boleyn novels, then it was also the period that, perhaps counter-intuitively, saw her story settle into established patterns. There is a familiarity to many twentieth-century texts, despite the different social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. It was in the early twentieth century that a master narrative emerged that saw various mythical facets of Anne’s life and character transformed into truisms. The more-or-less standard narrative runs as follows: the quick-witted Anne falls in love with Henry Percy, is divided from him by the wily Cardinal Wolsey (sometimes as a result of Henry’s sexual interest in Anne), vows revenge, capitalises on Henry’s interest in her as a means of obtaining that revenge, becomes twisted by ambition and power, and falls as a result of her inability to contain that lust for power. The similarities can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that historical novelists read each other’s work, and as historical novels about Anne started to proliferate, the accepted lore of Anne’s story concretised.9 These perceptions about Anne and her biography have achieved the status of established wisdom, only to be then reinscribed back into other historical romances.

The movement away from religion and politics into the realm of the private and affective meant that a different Anne emerged than had been seen in previous centuries. This Anne was more immediately accessible to the interests of twentieth-century women. The Victorian Protestant martyr Anne retreated and her story became increasingly secularised and depoliticised. The lip service often paid to the role of religion in Anne’s rise and fall can largely be accounted for by the secularisation of Western society in the twentieth century. Readers were simply more interested in sex than in religion, at least in their historical romances. Even when historical novels attempt to account for the political world of the Tudor court, these political entanglements are often reduced to sexual politics; private sexual passions and disappointments are usually represented as far more immediately important than the larger religious and cultural conflicts of the early modern world.

In 1909, Reginald Farrer declared, in the preface to his novel The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle , that he was tired of highly polarised representations of Anne Boleyn:If anyone declares that they would rather have back the inane and sentimental Anne Boleyn of romantic convention, or the pious Protestant, or the bland victim, instead of this haggard and rather awful woman, black with misery and despair in the achievement of her quest, then I reply that the truth, whatever be in its shape, no matter how fearful, is always more beautiful and wholesome than any lying convention, no matter how smooth and lovely.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.