Past Guilt

One of the things about living in Florida is a breathless anticipation of autumn. In February I start noticing on Facebook all my northern friends (‘Tundra-dwellers’ to us Floridians) asking when spring will arrive. Here, starting in late July, we start wondering when fall will get here. Well, she’s finally getting here and we can’t wait. Less humidity, less burning sun, less sweaty backs when we get out of the car.

 

                On a totally unrelated note, I’ve been tinkering with an online game after watching my wife play a console game. Both were fantasy. Both irritated me. The irritation stemmed from their choice of aesthetic. Both games were trying, I suspect, to avoid this formula:

Fantasy = Medieval Earth + Elves.

                I should laud them. I mean, I’m all about creativity. Make your own path. Make the genre yours.

                Only I don’t like it. I couldn’t put my finger on it but those vaguely contemporary-looking clothes and weird architecture kind of bothered me.

I only realized recently why I don’t like it. It bothers me because deep down, the reason I like fantasy is because of my strong, almost fetishistic obsession with the medieval ages. The truth is, I’ve always sought out fantasy because high quality games and books and movies about the middle ages are so rare.

                This would also explain why I went and got a couple of history degrees. In the end, my thesis may not have been about the middle ages, but it was medieval history which got me interested in history to begin with. (I also suspect I didn’t write a medieval thesis because I knew I’d be sick of my thesis topic by the end. And I was.)

                Which brings us to my third and final tangent. As I reread Le Morte D’Arthur, I thought a lot about my obsession with the medieval ages, which goes back to when I was ten or so. As a child, I more or less ignored the plight of women, peasants, and ethnic minorities such as Jews.

                Now that I’m older, I have to quiet the historian in me to enjoy these books. I have to rekindle that romantic fool, the antiquarian. Antiquarians are often ridiculed by historians, but fact is, nostalgia for the past was a driving feature behind men like Tennyson and Lovecraft, so it can’t be all bad.

                It’s funny because there’s a certain shame in liking a brutal period in history. Once when I told an older (white) woman about my interest in history, she got excited and told me about her interest in the Antebellum South. She loved those southern belles and their dresses.

                Then pain flashed across her face.

                “But slavery was awful.”

                This immediately put me in mind of my obsession with knights—and my childhood blindness to the peasants.

                I smiled. “Of course it was. But you can still like the dresses.”

                Years later, I encountered a strange sort of epilogue to this story. I was teaching American History I (1492-1866). It was a night class full of professionals who’d came back for a degree. There were a lot of African American students in the class.

                I was on my antebellum lecture, which usually engages students of both races but reverberates with black students especially. My powerpoint reached a slide about the gross disparity between how the planter class lived versus everyone else. Naturally, I had a picture of a woman in a bright, voluminous dress with more ruffles than woman.

                An older black woman looked up from her notes. She’d made it clear from previous discussions that her ancestors were slaves. Her husband, a much older fellow, was born a sharecropper. Here was someone whose family were victims of those same southern belles, someone fully aware of how unfair the South was, antebellum or postbellum.

After staring at the picture, she heaved a sigh. “I love those dresses. They’re so beautiful.”

                “They really are,” I agreed with a smile.