Creating Cromwell: an analysis of the historical novel’s position and potentiality through a study of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy

ABSTRACT

This article considers the role historical novels can play in representing the past, and to what extent (and how) such fiction can both challenge and enhance historiography. Focusing on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, it looks at how a novelist can use literary techniques, imaginative reconstruction of gaps in the historical record, and alternative interpretation of existing historiography (including primary sources) to radically alter our perception of the past; and indeed whether as a genre it may be able to do so more effectively than traditional (academic) historiography. In doing so, it traces the development of critical theory on the historical novel from Georg Lukács through postmodern critics such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon, to the recent work of Rosario Arias and Elodie Rousselot. Acknowledging the subjectivity and unreliability of ‘history’ (often presented as fact or ‘the past’) it argues for a blurring of the line between historiography and historical fiction, concluding that at least some historical novels should be granted admission to the field of historiography. The first steps towards this have been taken in the gradual acceptance of narrative history as subjective and just as incapable of ever truly representing the past as any other form of writing. It is to be hoped that there might be a similar acceptance of the historical novel’s ability to represent the past (albeit differently), to imaginatively reconstruct pasts that might have been. Rather than an inferior form, sharply delineated from ‘history’, might historical novels form a rich addition to a historiography considered as a spectrum rather than an exclusive and excluding discipline?

KEYWORDS:

• Historical novels
• Wolf Hall
• historiography
• historical fiction
• Thomas Cromwell
• Hilary Mantel
• postmodernism
• historiographic metafiction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the University of Wales Trinity Saint David for its support during the writing of this article. Particular thanks to Dr Alexander Scott for his detailed and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article follows Keith Jenkins in using ‘the past’ to indicate what has happened previously and ‘historiography’ or ‘history’ for the writings of historians, the latter being (as Jenkins argues) interpretations of the past (Jenkins 1991, 6).

2. In fact Cromwell is not entirely comfortable with this character assessment, but it suits him to have Wriothesley think this way.

3. For Mantel’s metanarrative on the fact–fiction relationship, see Gregory (Cromwell’s son) in Wolf Hall who says of Le Morte D’Arthur: ‘Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories’. (Mantel, 2009b, 222).

4. For White’s earlier work on constructivism and the subjective nature of history, see White 1966.

5. Dunn’s approach may be controversial, but her novel demonstrates the postmodern argument that historical fiction can give voice to the marginalised in society; the novel alternates between Anne’s life and that of Henry VIII’s pastry-chef, Lucy Cornwallis.

6. Susan Wabuda argues that Elton in fact bent ‘Cromwell out of shape’ in order to make his point (Wabuda 2019, 484). On the idea of Elton telling a ‘story’ in spite of his ‘scholarly’ style, see Horowitz 2011.

7. This point is not universally accepted, Stephen Greenblatt for example arguing that instead of the title of Wolf Hall foreshadowing the future Mantel is asking us to ‘suspend our awareness of what is going to come to pass’ (Greenblatt 2009).

8. For an illustration of the historical novel’s potential to not just alter cultural memory but radically reverse ‘historical thinking’ through recovering a lost ‘cultural ethos’, see Michael Lackey’s fascinating discussion of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s biographical novel Sally Hemmings, Lackey 2017, 344–345.

9. For a defence of the dividing line between history and fiction, see Toby Litt 2008.

10. Slotkin, in fact, goes further than White here, suggesting that the historical novel can ‘restore, as imaginative possibilities, the ideas, movements and values defeated or discarded in the struggles that produced the modern state’, can show us what might have happened had events taken a different turn, a sort of alternative history, Slotkin 2005, p. 231.

11. First used in 1978, ‘bodice-ripper’ is a descriptor for historical (or gothic romance) novels in which the heroine is subject to violence.

12. On the idea of history and the historical novel existing within a shared space see particularly Wake 2016 and Demos 2005, 334–5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Marie Harvatt

Anne-Marie Harvatt is a Medieval Studies master’s student at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She earned her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Language at Balliol College, Oxford, and has a particular interest in late medieval monasticism and the reign of Henry VIII.