When a young woman confides in a friend that a man has forced her to have sex, the victim is reassured that such actions are not acceptable in this day and age. “The time will come when we have to stand and refuse – and that time is now!,” the anti-rape campaigner declares.
No sane person would reject the sentiment, but viewers of Jamestown may balk at the fact that the “time” in question is 1619 in colonial Virginia. Sky1’s eight-part drama is based on the historical fact that young women were dispatched to become wives to the bachelor builders of the new world of America, meeting their husbands for the first time at the dockside.
You wonder, though, if the real 17th-century spouses were as feisty, cheeky and rebellious as Jocelyn, Alice and Verity, the main characters here. They slap men’s faces, joke about their sexual failures, campaign for tougher sentencing for sex criminals (“A man will hang for raping a woman!”) and encourage greater male emotional literacy: “Put your arm around your brother – comfort him!”
This may be how most 21st-century parents would want their daughters and sons to be, but was it really like this 400 years ago? Let’s never forget the legend of the movie, set in 1914, in which a character declares, “The first world war has just broken out!” – a vital reminder to writers of fiction set in the past that the people living through history are unaware of what comes next. The soldiers at the Somme didn’t know there’d be a second world war; Henry VIII probably expected each wife to be for life. And the real forced brides of the tobacco plantations presumably either didn’t realise they could rise up against the men, or were too frightened of the consequences to do so.
It’s true that female agency and achievements have frequently been airbrushed by male historians, and that drama can redress this, as TV adaptations of Sarah Waters novels, such as Tipping the Velvet and Affinity, have done for sexuality. The Jamestown scripts by Bill Gallagher – who also wrote strong period women’s roles in Lark Rise to Candleford – do acknowledge the dangers of the situation, in an early rape scene and an ominous shot of the noose that hangs ready in the community. In the second episode, their recalcitrance results in witchcraft trials, based on those at Salem.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/05/downton-abbey-jamestown-call-the-midwife-when-will-period-dramas-stop-horrendously-airbrushing-historyDude's right. It's another piece of the constant editing of history that goes on, at great risk to society as a whole. Societies are as much a product of their failings, missteps, and villans as they are of their successes, triumphs, and heros. Conceal the one, you diminsh the other to insignificance.
