This is a long post but it hits
several issues about how your characters behave, including a way to shape their
convos and the timing within your story.
Of course you know that all your
characters have to behave differently. Olrik’s Laws describe what
the differences have to be. Their actions have to relate to those of the
protagonist and contrast with her actions either in kind or in result.
One blog quotes Georgette Heyer as
saying she had a Mark I hero, rough and foul-tempered, and a Mark II hero,
refined but manly. The blogger apologetically says it’s more complicated than
that, but the point is there’s only one main male in each novel. Olrik’s Law of
Contrasts says that all the other characters, including the heroine, must
behave differently from the Hero. And so you can see that Heyer’s Mark I hero
needs a shy and retiring heroine, according to Olrik’s Laws of Contrast. In Bath
Tangle she almost fails at this because Selena has so many of the same
traits as Ivo Rotherham – and you can ignore Emily Laleham because she jilts
Rotherham.
But in The Unknown Ajax, Hugo
Darracott is a soldier; his cousin Vincent is rather Heyer’s Mark II hero with
a jealous streak; cousin Claude is an extreme dandy who faints at the sight of
blood; and cousin Richmond is a young daredevil who helps smuggle liquor. They
contrast with Hugo’s uncle, a man of business (but not in trade) and their
grandfather, an old bully around whom they have to get if they want to live
their lives. Accomplished, sensible Anthea rebels against her grandfather’s
command to marry Hugo, but she is one of the first to suspect that his doltish
behaviour is a hoax and one of the least surprised when he outwits a Customs
officer.
In Chumash, Joseph is the main
character. He’s a spoiled brat and a dreamer, but he turns out to be a good man
of business. He’s sexy but he rejects a married lady’s advances and when he
rises in the world, he marries a priest’s daughter.
Reuven, his oldest brother, is a
study in contrast. He breaks the law of who you can have sex with by sleeping
with his father’s concubine, so that the Chumash has to immediately enumerate Yaaqov’s
progeny to prove to us that Reuven did not get a son on Bilhah. He’s a failure
as the oldest son; he goes along with throwing Joseph into the pit and his plan
to rescue the boy fails. When the family debates whether to go back to Egypt
for food again, he offers his sons as hostages to Benjamin’s life – forgetting
that he is not the paterfamilias with the right of life and death over his clan.
At the end of the saga, his descendants have settled on the east bank of the
Yarden, from which the Assyrians will eventually chase them.
Judah, in between these two in age,
sleeps with the wrong woman but at least she is not married or a concubine at
the time – and it’s the only way he will have descendants. He goes along with
throwing Joseph into the pit but tries to convince his brothers to sell him
away from the family. He fails, not because it’s a bad plan (something
has to happen or Joseph will never get to Egypt, and everything depends on
that), but because the Midianites beat him to it. When the family debates about
Egypt, he offers himself as hostage. At the end of the saga, his descendants
are two of the three that lead the Israelites into the Holy Land – but one
whole branch gets cut off at Ai.
This is the Law of Three at work as
well as the Law of Cascading Contrasts. It may seem overly restrictive, but
remember that the Law of Three is about magic numbers, and twelve is one of the
magic numbers, covering people with a unifying factor.
Notice that we have situations here
that I described last time. They don’t obviously or directly relate to the main
action or goal. The characters don’t participate in the same events, EXCEPT for
the pit-and-sale episode. But by the time Yaaqov turns down Reuven’s offer, we
kind of expect him to fail just because of his other failures, and maybe we
expect it to be Judah who makes the second offer. Also remember that when it
looks like they will lose Benjamin, Reuven is silent. Judah steps up to
the plate and makes a successful plea that leads to the recognition scene.
The Epic Laws also say you either
have two main characters, like the twins in Heyer’s False Colours, or
one secondary character who is almost as important as the main one. That is
Aharon’s relationship to Mosheh. Notice the contrast in their roles in
the narratives in both the Regency novel and the oral tradition.
You cannot contrast one character
with herself, until she has learned her lesson. And in fact, the only time I
can think of a character contrasting with herself, is in Cecilia where
she goes mad. If you read Little Women, you remember that when Professor
Bhaer was telling Jo what was wrong with her writing, he listed types of
personalities she could not portray properly because she hadn’t met any – like
madmen. And in fact Alcott had experience as a hospital nurse, but not at a
hospital for the insane. All her insane characters in her blood and thunder
days, were drawn from other people’s accounts. Trust me: there is no way a sane
person can understand an insane character well enough to write it, because the
definition of insanity is a state when somebody does things no sane person can
understand. The best you can hope for is to rip insane actions from the life of
a real person.
Unless you have a case study to
work from, therefore, your Regency novel will have to contrast the heroine who
enters the narrative, with herself as she exits it into her new normal.
Also notice that probably it's only your heroine who really learns lessons in your novel; everybody else behaves the same way at the end as they do at the start. In Persuasion Elizabeth is still vain and cold at the end and Mary is still selfish and often whiny.
And then there’s one more thing,
which Olrik didn’t describe, but which you find in the Torah: contrasting
narrations. Nobody ever exactly repeats something they said. When Abraham’s
servant is talking to himself at the well, he says things one way. When he’s
talking to Rivkah’s father, he tells the same story but not in the same words.
Exodus has the episode of making the ark and putting the tablets in it; in
Deuteronomy, when Mosheh retells this episode to the next generation, who are
about to enter the Holy Land, he does not tell it in the same words.
One of the reasons Plato wanted to
keep poets out of his Republic, was that Hesiod and Homer say conflicting
things about the gods. Theogony and Iliad are records of oral
traditions, one related to a Hurrian hymn and the other being a lay of the Sea
Peoples, the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa. Of course they are going to say different
things about the gods. Plato lived squarely in a literate culture, he didn’t know
the ancestry of the works he was talking about, and it jarred on him.
Literary critics talk about
unreliable narrators in Henry James’ books, but that’s not the same thing,
those people narrate in a confusing way, with incomplete utterances. I’m
talking about a one-person example of a truth Olrik expresses about oral traditions
in general: a given narrative in a tradition always changes slightly, whether
from narrator to narrator or from generation to generation. This truth explains
some of the differences between Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch, labeling
both as oral traditions (as well as daughters of a previous single oral
tradtion).
So when your characters tell the
same story to different people, don’t copy and paste. Each audience contrasts
with the other(s) in kind or in their relationship to the narrator. Think about
what the narrator wants each audience to know or think. Consider the passage of
time; if your novel covers many years, then later narrations should have some
details missing. If the first version of the narration has X do one thing and Y
do another, a version of the narrative told many years later could switch who does
what. This happens even in literate environments, in memoirs written years
after the events; facts in the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial differ,
sometimes wildly, from what the participants put into their memoirs ten,
twenty, thirty years later. You can copy and paste, but then you have to edit
to bring out, in a sense, why the narrator would repeat the story, other
than to selfishly hold center stage.
It’s not lying. Everybody
misremembers things at some time, forgets things, changes a story to tell how
they wanted things to be instead of how things were. It’s natural.
And if you are going to have a
character repeat a narration, try setting it in the second episode of a pair of
derived doublets. The alterations in the narration should make it a little more
vague, to go with the second episode being a “paler” version of the first.
If there's one final thing you need to learn to write Regency novels, it would be timing. Olrik observed that
within an oral narrative, time flows normally, events take the usual time to
play out, and people age normally. Once the Law of Closing has been carried
out, all bets are off.
The need for normal timing inside
your novel is why you MUST use Dugdale’s traveler’s guide. Willoughby’s journey
from London to Cleveland, which was in Lancashire near Bristol, covered over
100 miles. Even if he had “sixteen mile an hour tits”, that trip took over six
hours and his horses were practically dead unless he lodged somewhere for at
least a day before going back to London. The FHC only took four-hour runs to
prove their horses’ mettle.
You cannot have people commuting to
jobs. In fact during the Regency most crafts were still practiced in the home,
although fabric factories were starting to spring up (The Unknown Ajax).
The people who had jobs lived near their worksite; servants had quarters in the
house and tradesmen lived over their stores. The people who lived in fine
houses usually lived off their rents, their income from the Funds, or other
investments and they didn’t have to commute. The heavy traffic in London
resulted from long-haul shipping that fed and clothed the million Londoners and
the Upper Ten Thousand; from the post and the stagecoach; from local shipping
between shops and houses; from sending goods from the docks out of town; and
from the Upper Ten Thousand going to their play.
But the streets of London were not
then what they are now. On a modern map of London, at the north end of London
Bridge, there’s a broad thoroughfare called Byward Street that takes you to the
Tower of London complex. In a map from 1800 that I found online, there’s a narrow Thames Street,
with a bunch of tenements or warehouses between it and the River, and then
Presbyterian Wharf, which has been replaced by a much shorter Grant’s Quay
Wharf. And so on. It was easier to clog the streets in 1800 London.
Outside of both the City and its
environs, people did not commute because the roads were so poor. One of the
reasons your stagecoach could break down, was ruts from the rains. That’s why
everybody was so shocked at Frank Churchill going to London to get his hair
cut; it was a sixteen mile trip over country roads, and it took him two or
three hours each way to keep from laming his horses. His valet should have been
able to cut his hair to his satisfaction, or his uncle’s man could have taken a
stab at it. You cannot get around this in your novels. Don’t make your
characters travel unless the need is extreme – or they’re going up to London
and then back down at the end of some months. (The poor roads, along with poor
accommodations, also account for the length of visits.)
Learn from Pride and Prejudice
of the tension between operating your estate and socializing in your parish.
When the girls monopolized the horses, they practically took bread out of their
own mouths by cutting into their father’s income and also making it impossible
to get produce from the home farm to the manor house. Only Lady Catherine de
Bourgh could afford to maintain a pony phaeton for her daughter.
Remember the situation in Sense
and Sensibility. For Marianne to ride the horse Willoughby wanted to give
her, Mrs. Dashwood needed to build a stable for at least two horses, and
a bedroom for the groom, and a tack room – and buy feed for the horses
and pay wages to the groom along with paying for his food and livery (it’s
called “all found”). He had to live with the family, not commute from the
village. No intelligent person rides alone because horses are prone to spook.
No female of ton rides alone, not even in her carriage, which often has
not only Coachman on the box in front, but also a footman up behind to carry
her cards to those she meets or to the butler of a house where she stops. In my
hundred draft stories, only Lady Barbara Alastair Childe goes riding alone, and
she does it to escape her brutal husband.
Everybody else walked.
And that took time. A good walker
like Elizabeth might have been able to do three miles an hour like we can –
except that she had long skirts to manage. Also, her half-boots (ankle boots)
were not engineered for speed. It probably took her an hour and a quarter to
get from Longbourn to Netherfield, and then remember the state of her skirts
when she arrived.
Nor were girls supposed to run
after a certain age. That gave a hoydenish appearance. Only emergency could
justify it. This is why films of Northanger Abbey showing Katherine
running in the streets of Bath, are not good for her image. If Henry’s father
had caught her at it, he would never have invited her to his house.
Now think of how this affects
convos. If two people just have to tell each other something, and they don’t
live in the same household, or one of them is out of the house, first they have
to travel to get face-to-face, that’s one of your unities from the last
post. Or they have to write notes, which a groom or footman has to carry to its
destination. Or they have to write letters. The recipient has to pay for that,
and because the parents have all the money, they have a right and
responsibility to read the letter. It could mean trouble for their daughter if
it’s from a gazetted fortune hunter; it could mean trouble for their son if
some girl thinks he wants to marry her.
With a parent or governess in the
room at all times, girls rarely got the chance to say what they really meant
either aloud or in writing. Be careful about how explicit your convos are,
taking the setting into account.
Also, don’t try to get around the
time it took to operate a household. There’s a series, of three videos by Dr.
Julie Cox, that discusses the realities of servant life in the 1800s. The
servants not only had to do the cleaning, they had to make some of their
cleaning supplies, like the powder they used to shine silver. The cook needed
a skivvy to clean; if enough people lived upstairs she also needed a kitchen
maid to help her with the cooking, because she cooked for both upstairs and
downstairs. Only in towns could she send the kitchen maid to buy bread and
muffin; she might have to rely on the wife at the Home Farm to do her baking in
the country. In town, you might not have a butcher in your own street, and then
you had to trust your kitchen maid to get to the butcher shop and buy the right
cut of meat – before somebody else bought it. Remember Mrs Price’s complaints
of Rebecca and the girl under her.
Only a farm family nowadays could
appreciate all the work that goes into making meals from the ground up, and the
cook in a fine household also had to be an artist. Her jellies were not just
jiggly colored squares; she made them in fancy shapes and added fancy
decorations. A meal feasted the eyes as well as the stomach. And she had to
cook, not just for that day’s meals, but also for possible guests at any time.
It wasn’t polite to descend on a household without an advance letter – but
remember that Mr Bennet didn’t even tell his wife about corresponding with Mr
Collins until the very day of his arrival, and then hoped Mrs Bennet would set
a good dinner before them. A modern wife would have brained Mr Bennet with a
skillet.
On your next vacation, try living
Regency style. You can find Mrs Isabella Beeton’s book online; plan some
authentic meals for yourself, and try to keep house following her rules. You
may even try using a chamber pot instead of a toilet, although you’ll have a
toilet to empty the chamber pot into. You’ll learn pretty quickly that the
number of servants a household employed was not just for show, it was for
necessity, and things took as long as they took then, not how long they take now. Give your characters the time
they need to get where they’re going and do what they’re doing.
