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Mary Beth Keane discusses integrating historical features
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From the course by University of Virginia
Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction
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From the lesson
Seminar with Mary Beth Keane
In this module author Mary Beth Keane interacts with the seminar class students of Professor Holsinger’s Historical Fiction class to discuss her book “Fever.”
Meet the Instructors
Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
So, one of my favorite parts of the novel, it's very
specific, but it's the section where you talk about her cobalt hat.
>> There are so many questions about this hat.
>> I know.
I love the description on page 63, I'd just like to
read the sentence, first couple of sentences in the first complete paragraph.
It was a lovely hat.
Cobalt blue with silk flowers, and berries cascading around the brim.
Piled higher
on one side of the crown than the other.
It wasn't one of those floppy confession hints, to
appear suspended over the head by magic One of
those ridiculous dollops of cream that required mornings worth
of framing and supporting the hair that it sat upon.
I, I love this description here and I just, I just want to
know why you included this whole section about the hat and Miss Bo?
I'm sorry. >> Bowen.
>> Bowen. Yeah, thank you.
Who had the exact same one.
>> So the hat was one of the more, you know, overt decisions I guess I made.
I had a professor here at UVA, John Casey, maybe you've encountered him, who said, if
you are writing anything historical, and it's all
about the buttons, You know you are in trouble.
>>
[LAUGH]
>> You know, because nobody cares about the way it's in
the buttons and then you know I forget how we predict exactly.
But the point was that if you
are including, these are very historical details, what
people wore and the way they, that end up being a little bit too charming.
You know in, in a lot of novels and I thought if I am
going to include things like fashion I, I wanted to do some sort of work.
>> Mm-hm.
>> You know, it has to carry some of the burden.
And the hat I thought as a good way to represent Mary's class.
And her odd status as a person, a woman,
by herself in New York City who could support herself.
And was probably earning a pretty decent wage, and because she had
no family which was unusual, she could buy for herself whatever she pleased.
And, there was a moral component to that,
as I think there still is for a lot of women today.
You know, do you buy for yourself something beautiful because you like it.
And it costs a lotta money, you know, is that wrong?
Is it a wrong thing to do?
And I think Mary struggled with that, and
at this moment, she said, no, it's not wrong.
I work hard, I deserve it, I have it, and then there's Mrs. Bowen with the
same hat, which was beginning to happen a little bit in New York at this time.
and you know I'm sure she was completely scandalized by this.
And they both, you know, Mary goes in and
starts laughing with the other, making fun of her employer.
But I thought, this is the way, you
know, the, the classes are colliding a little bit.
And this is also the kind of friction that got Mary in hot water.
I, I believed early on in my research.
If Mary had infected a whole block of tenements and every person
died, she would not have been in the trouble she was in.
It was because she brought this particular disease to the upper east
side, you know, into, into Oyster Bay, that she got in trouble.
and so those two things sort of were represented to me in that hat.
But she's a woman, the same as Mrs. Bowen's woman, she wants
to look good the same as Mrs. Bowen wants to look good.
There's no difference.
and that I'm sure was a shock to Mrs. Bowen.
>> When I was reading actually, like we've been reading
several books that have to do with witches and plagues, and
when I was reading this, I just, I kept thinking of
Mary as being like, she's a modern day witch for me.
you know, she's sort of on the fringes of society.
She's a woman, she's sort of being a little uppity and out of her place.
And it's all about class and gender, and I was just sort of wondering
about your take on, and you sort of already mentioned it,
but the sort of scientific witch hunt that centered on her?
>> Well, I think she was a venerable
person, as uppity and outspoken as she was.
She for some reason Irish women came alone to New York, more than any other group.
So she was alone. she was unmarried.
She really did visit Alfred, her companion they called him sometimes,
when she was between situations.
But it was, you know, it wasn't a stable relationship.
and there was no evidence that she strived toward anything more stable.
Or that she strived toward any of the things
that women at this time were supposed to want.
And that made her, I thought of it as the, the fitting in criteria.
That made her not fit in. She didn't fit with her own group.
She didn't fit with the upper class.
She just did whatever she damn well pleased.
And that made me like her as a character but
I think it was really the thing that worked against her.
She was really an early feminist.
I think she
the fact that she got pride, she took pride
from her work, that she didn't feel, you know, reduced
by any of the work that she did, that
she kept, you know, herself afloat for all those years.
I think that that's something that's really
remarkable, and also made me like her.
I also think the likeability aspect of a, a character,
this is something I don't know if you've all been following.
It's been coming up a lot in New York Times reviews,
>> Mm-hm. >> Places like this.
And it's, it's something that's
come up a lot with Mary Mallon.
And I find it really interesting from a gender perspective.
whether Mary was likeable.
Some people seem to hold it against me
that I've wrote a novel where the main character
was not all that likeable, and yet, we see
male characters all the time who are not likeable.
Claire Messud had a very good response to this recently in an interview
that she did and she rattled off, you know, several male characters who
are not likeable at all, and we never question it.
And so Mary's likability never really came into it for me.
she wasn't a villain. She wasn't a victim, you know.
And I don't think it's a writer's job to
come up with a moral, you know, or a message.
It's just to present the story.
Make it fully fleshed out and vivid. And then hand it over to the reader.
>> That, that I think was one of the first things that we talked about,
>> Mm-hm.
>> Yeah. >> Mm-hm.
>> in class, was, I don't like this character, but I really like the novel.
Like it was this,
>> Yeah. >> strange duality,
>> Yeah.
>> where we were you know, how does, how does she manage
to write, >> Well,
>> a character like this, you know?
>> Well, why do women get?
I, I mean, I, I'm really, completely confused by this.
It's been happening now since the novel
came out, you know, about the likeability thing.
But, I think of someone like Don Draper, you know,
to take a very contemporary, well, historical I guess, example.
I mean, the guy, I'm sure, you know,
it's something a lot of you have probably experienced.
Or I'm think, I'm trying to think of other male
characters who are, we hold up.
And have sympathy for her, but we don't really, you know, hold it
against them when they are unlikeable in the way that Mary is at times.
Although I like her, by the way.
>> Mm-hm. >>
[LAUGH]
>> I liked her too. >>
[LAUGH]
>> So, you know, I think this is a really gendered thing,
>> Yeah.
>> that's, I can't quite get my arms around it, but it's troubling.
But yeah.
>> Is this something that only occurred after you wrote the story?
I mean, had you even thought about that this might
occur, or is it just something that happened after the fact?
>> After the fact.
After it was, you know, sold, you know.
And we talk about softening the character and things like that when she just
wasn't, in my imagination, a soft character.
she was the way she was.
And you can be a really nasty, difficult person, but if you're, you know, it wasn't
her fault that she carried a disease, and was passing it without realizing it.
I mean that, you, the person who's carrying disease is not to blame.
she didn't go out and, and get it on purpose.
She didn't pass it on purpose.
You know, although sometimes some papers at the time and
for maybe a generation afterwards
periodically create this Typhoid Mary character
who was you know, serving up skulls on a plate
to kind of get at the, you know, her rich employers.
And I really don't think that was the case.
but it really didn't.
I mean, writing a novel as you and I
discussed this morning is a really a private thing.
For years and then, all of a sudden, you
know, there are several more cooks in the kitchen.
and that's what's. >>
[CROSSTALK]
>> Weird, you know? So
>> Nicole, you had a? >> yeah, I just there was a passage
that I think really exemplified what you mentioned about just how females
it depicted, can be depicted negatively.
But it can still be kind of trying to put them in a positive light.
on page 79, there was just a really powerful description of women.
And after I read it, I was really shocked by it.
And then after you mentioned that just now, I think it was
because they were although empowered, they
were they were presented rather negatively.
It's the fourth paragraph, or third.
Mary shared with Mr. Emil the observation she'd made ages ago,
that all the great houses of New York are the same.
They are headed by women who should have been male.
And should have been ministers.
Women who go down to the employment agency
in their white gloves to look around like they're
in a brothel, scuffing turns with the, with the
madam while each whore to be hired looks on.
I had read that and it, it was just, I thought it was awesome.
And I think part of,
>>
[LAUGH]
>>
[UNKNOWN]
a more eloquent word. but I don't know.
I think, I think part of the reason for that was that it is
just kind of, I don't know, being
misguided, and going through a brothel, and then.
It's kind of like dirty, but it's made it more powerful for me.
>> Well, I think there's also a power relationship there that's the same.
It seems like a lot of the women in New York who were,
you know, partners to these powerful men, the
women who were, the Mrs. Bowens and whatnot.
They didn't, you know, part of their job as the head of their household and
as a person of status in the city was to sort of be an evangelist.
You know, Christi, I couldn't have. I mean, Christianity and God was
such a big part of you know, of the conversation in every single
household in, in the places where Mary likely worked, you know,
that they were part of Christian homes and at the women were
giving pamphlets out and sort of quizzing their staff on, on their
beliefs and have they come around to believe what their employers believe.
And I imagine Mary, because she was smart
and literate, though no one knows how she learnt
to read and write as well as she did, just sort of going with the flow and then,
you know, as soon as the door's closed, just rolling her eyes.
So, you know,, who knows if that's true.
Maybe she was more reverent than I'm imagining her.
But, I imagine that power relationship to be pretty much the same.
You do what you can to get paid, and then you, you know, get through it.
And she actually liked her work, which was a bonus.
But I don't think she liked the part, or in my imagination she didn't like
the part where she was having to
ascribe to beliefs that she didn't necessarily have.
>> I think in a lot of ways that speaks more to the, the
culture of that time as opposed to even just the faith of the religion itself.
That this was something that was so institutionalized,
or so ingrained in the way that things happened.
Where everyone just sort of seemed to just do what they do because it's
what they've always done and without stopping
to actually even think about, you know,
what's being you know, set forth as the way to be without
any sort of, I don't know, like justificational relational aspect to it.
I can see why someone like Mary would sort of resist
that, because, she seems to be someone who is very much
a business woman in a sense and if something doesn't make
sense to her she's not going to jump into it right away.
>> I'm very much a grown up, is how I imagine Mary.
And
I think a lot of the relationships between employers and their
staff at this time was a lot like parents to a child.
Like this is how you act, this is how you
behave, this is when you come in this is when.
And you know to keep their jobs and support their own families they listened,
you know, and they were dutiful and they let themselves be taught, you know,
in the way that I think was part of, of the arrangement, and part
of the relationship, you know, in addition to the actual tasks they were doing.
And I
imagine Mary, you know, didn't really need that relationship
in her life, because she was already a grownup.
I mean this is all, by the way, my imaginary Mary.
Who knows,
>> Mm-hm. >> what she was really like.
I visited her grave after this was all done a few weeks before the book came out.
And it was very, very weird.
Because I sort of realized I had done to
her what everyone at the time had done to her.
Which was rewrite her for my own purposes.
But, you know, who knows?
I think I've got it close but I don't know.
>> Did you come across any facts or parts in
your research that seemed to conflict with your image of her.
>>
no but there were some things that were just so confusing that.
I mean, their attitude toward germs and bacteria was so
contradictory that I couldn't quite get a handle on it.
When Mary was on North Brother, she actually baked for the hospital.
Which made no sense to me whatsoever. >>
[LAUGH]
>> And I, at first it was so
compellingly weird, that I wanted to include it.
But like, every time I came to it, or had
one of my readers, they'd like what, and like circle.
And I'm like, you know what, it's not important to the plot.
You know, it doesn't make any sense and so I just,
>>
[LAUGH]
>> But there, there was a lot of stuff like that.
That you could see even more why she was totally confused,
>> Yeah.
>> Mm-hm. >> by everything.
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