Anne Boleyn
As I said earlier, I became interested in representations of Anne Boleyn after writing an essay on "Royal Lives" for the Companion to Women's Historical Writing. Unlike Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, or--to a lesser extent--Lady Jane Grey, Anne has never acquired a true cult following (even if she does have her own fan site). Nevertheless, she and Catherine of Aragon have generally reigned supreme as the two most intriguing objects in Henry VIII's wife collection--with Anne's aura of sexual mystery often trumping Catherine's Catholic piety in the fascination wars. Despite Elizabeth Benger's attempt to restore Anne's reputation by making her a Reformation heroine (for which Benger did have precedent), she usually went missing from later 19th c. didactic biographical collections, and Agnes Strickland's account in the Lives of the Queens of England is unflinchingly hostile. (Strickland instead chose to rub popular opinion the wrong way by celebrating the really, truly unpopular Mary I.) More recent biographies, however, have proven intriguingly volatile in their assessments. Leaving aside the scholarly Retha Warnicke vs. Earl W. Ives debate, popular biographers have come up with Annes who veer from the proto-feminist (as in Antonia Fraser) to the amazingly salacious (as in Carolly Erickson). To make things more complicated still, the most recent dramatized Anne Boleyn, in the rather dreadful miniseries Henry VIII, is both sexually experienced and in search of domestic peace and quiet. What she wants, she says repeatedly, is "safety"--not power.*
Anne, in other words, remains a real problem, and real problems are always fun to write about. As it happens, there's a very long list of novelists who agree with me, and a very short list of critics who have chosen to write about them. (Warnicke's recent survey of literary Anne Boleyns leaves novels out of the mix.) The "representations of..." genre has its own peculiar pitfalls, of which Laundry List Syndrome comes head of the class. Even if the literary historian manages to avoid the laundry list, she still has to choose her emphasis: will the interplay between literary and historical narratives be more important than purely literary issues, or vice-versa? If the former, to what extent do questions of accuracy come to the forefront--and accuracy in relationship to what? Some critics structure their accounts so as to make literary representations develop towards modern historical interpretations, in which case earlier authors are (implicitly or explicitly) on trial; others focus on how literary authors interact with their contemporary historical texts, in which case rightness and wrongness are less important than principles of selection. The problem with the first approach's implied teleology is that representations of historical characters often zigzag instead of develop, and sometimes bow to pressures totally separate from academic knowledge. But the second approach can inadvertently perpetuate all sorts of errors, especially since since it's certainly possible to move from "principles of selection" to "not knowing anything about what is being selected."
Like most of my work, this project involves numerous primary texts. My usual method of operation with an article like this is to read several novels, then pause to identify and think through any shared concerns. After just five novels, for example, I've already been struck by the difficulties authors have had in imagining both Anne and Henry VIII as self-aware historical agents. That is, these novels all carry an overtly heavy burden of dramatic irony: the reader knows that this little flirtation will have vast national and international repercussions, but to what extent does the novelist grant the characters any insight into the shape and direction of their own narrative, as it were? Some novelists insert moments of prophetic awareness into the text; others make both Anne and Henry effectively blind. On a more pragmatic level, all of the novels are understandably preoccupied with offering plausible fictional explanations for the charges brought against Anne. One novelist, Norah Lofts, suggests that Anne commits adultery with three men (none of them among the indicted), but only in order to bear Henry a son; the others have, so far, found her innocent on all counts. Not surprisingly, none of the novelists have shown much in the way of sympathy for Henry--although this is apparently not the case in some of the more recent novels. There are a number of other shared formal and thematic characteristics, ranging from religious questions (obviously) to plot construction (very heavy on the courtship, while the marriage itself zips by in a flash) to literary allusions (direct and indirect references to Thomas Wyatt's poetry abound). I'm interested in a tack taken by some novels further down in my reading list: Anne's life as a counter-narrative to that of the romance heroine, who manges to get the guy while, well, keeping her head.
UPDATE: It's just a bit late, but I'm sure that Anne appreciates the thought, wherever she is.
*--By the way, I may be hallucinating things, but doesn't Sean Bean's last stand as Robert Aske look suspiciously like Sean Bean's last stand as Boromir in LOTR: FotR?