I’ve written elsewhere about dealing with characters who express opinions that contradict my own but exemplify their time and place. Ongoing revelations of unacceptable attitudes and behaviors associated with formerly revered figures from history merely underline the point: many, if not most, of our ancestors held views we now consider racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, or otherwise unabashedly prejudiced against people whose innate personal or social traits led, according to the standards of the day, to them being classified as inferior.
To be sure, even today, such attitudes exist, more strongly in some parts of the world than others, but as recently as sixty or seventy years ago, they were far more common. And I haven’t even mentioned extreme punishments that were once regarded as acceptable, if not essential, never mind the ever-recurring threat of war.
Moreover, the change goes beyond the treatment of one group of humans by another. These days, I cringe reading even beautifully written historical novels where colonizers rip heedlessly through areas inhabited by native populations, destroying people, wildlife, and forest; industrialists gleefully build factories that pollute the water and the air while relying on the labor of young children forced into sweatshops and deprived of not only safety controls and an education but also food, water, clothing, and rest; or people try to make a living by slaughtering animals we now realize have societies, perhaps even intelligence, with rules that in some cases mirror our own. Yet this is the past, and if authors want to accurately reflect that past—even if we focus on those fighting for change and modernize the attitudes of our heroes to some degree—we cannot and should not rewrite history.
Since my stories take place before the Agricultural Revolution, for the most part I don’t have to tackle widespread ecological disruption or industrial ravaging of the planet’s resources, whether animals or plants. My characters’ lives depend on the seasons, and those who do not live off the labor of others kept in some kind of subjection (of which there is plenty) tend at best to scrape by. Attitudes toward other humans are constantly jarring, but my characters tend to live lightly on the earth, if only for lack of opportunity to do otherwise.
Even so, it’s the second type of change that has me struggling in my as yet unformed novel-to-be. As I’ve mentioned before, the heroine is a silk weaver, practitioner of a lovely art that produces goods once considered more valuable and infinitely more transportable (because lighter) than gold. The Silk Road may be a name assigned long after the fact, but silk itself was essential to the multiple trade routes that linked today’s Beijing with India, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Black and Caspian Seas, Persia, Anatolia, the Levant, Europe, and Russia. In the area where my new book is set, silk weaving occurred mostly in individual households where women worked on small, portable looms—perfect for a novel focused on the family of a polygamous merchant.
But—and this is where the ick comes in—those households produced not only silk textiles but the thread used to create them. And the more I find out about that process, the more my discomfort grows. The books I’m using for research describe rooms set aside with piles of mulberry leaves, feeding thousands of caterpillars (2,500 for each pound of silk), all of whom will be drowned in boiling water to release the cocoons so that hapless servants can reel off yards and yards of filaments that will eventually become silk thread. The caterpillars are then discarded or, in some areas, cooked and eaten.
I know. It’s a tradition that has existed for millennia, and over the centuries the silk moths have been genetically modified through breeding, so that the caterpillars don’t survive even if their producers release them before boiling the cocoons. And in many areas where silk threads are produced, sources of protein are scarce and insects an accepted form of obtaining it. (Are cows, pigs, lambs, and chicken not equally deserving of life?) My characters take the whole thing for granted, and I will write about their experience with that in mind.
But in my own life, I doubt I’ll be wearing silk again anytime soon.
Images: photograph of silk wool and caterpillar from Pixabay (no attribution required); woodcut of Chinese workers sorting cocoons public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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