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sophia_sol) wrote2018-02-11 03:09 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-02-11 03:09 pm
Homeland, by Barbara Hambly
This is an epistolary novel about the USA Civil War, as told through the friendship of two women, one Northern and one Southern. This book was recommended to me after I posted about a real-life Southern woman's Civil War diary I'd read a few years back, as a book that also gives a more complicated view of the war.
And like....it was that, and it was a well-written and well-researched book, and I cared a great deal about the main characters, but.... I don't know. The book ends with the basic theme of "War just generally sucks" which is an idea I can get behind, but I just don't feel like a historical period that is very specifically A War About Chattel Slavery is the right historical period to set your novel that's mainly about the hardships of being a white woman.
Yes, there's some content about slavery and racism, and trying to figure out what Right is, but all of this is from the perspective of white people, and the white people are absolutely the people the book is actually interested in. And yes, white people (and especially women!) did have awfully hard times in the Civil War, and there were people behaving badly on all sides of the war, as there always is because people are people and war is terrible. But in this context, the story just felt to me like it was giving the impression that, if both sides are bad then there's nothing especially wrong about being a supporter of the pro-slavery side.
And I agree with the book's anti-war message, I absolutely believe that war is bad and leads to lots of bad stuff happening - but if you're going to specifically write an American Civil War novel with an anti-war message, I kind of feel like you're morally obligated to indicate you have some sort of notion of how else the abolition of slavery might have been achieved. Or at the very least make clear that the narrative understands that black people being freed from oppression is just as important as white women being freed from oppression.
But as it is, though I feel desperately for Susanna and Cora and the awful things they experienced, a novel about the civil war choosing to focus solely on white people is making a statement about what people are the ones worth paying attention to. And in this book, the black people ultimately don't matter. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the entire book. Especially since the Civil War is so unfortunately continuing to be relevant to modern political discourse, and so the ideas about the Civil War that are out there matter to modern race relations and US politics.
I googled the author after reading this book, and discovered that she's the writer of the Benjamin January series I keep hearing good things about, which is a series featuring a black man in the antebellum south, so it's not that the author doesn't care about black people. And knowing that does make me feel better, somewhat. But that still doesn't fix what I see as wrong with Homeland.
In conclusion I would have liked the story about Susanna and Cora and their Romeo-and-Juliet-esque friendship-between-enemies far more if it were set in pretty much any other historical context. And I think this year is the right year for me to finally get around to reading at least one or two of the slavery memoirs on my to-read list.
And like....it was that, and it was a well-written and well-researched book, and I cared a great deal about the main characters, but.... I don't know. The book ends with the basic theme of "War just generally sucks" which is an idea I can get behind, but I just don't feel like a historical period that is very specifically A War About Chattel Slavery is the right historical period to set your novel that's mainly about the hardships of being a white woman.
Yes, there's some content about slavery and racism, and trying to figure out what Right is, but all of this is from the perspective of white people, and the white people are absolutely the people the book is actually interested in. And yes, white people (and especially women!) did have awfully hard times in the Civil War, and there were people behaving badly on all sides of the war, as there always is because people are people and war is terrible. But in this context, the story just felt to me like it was giving the impression that, if both sides are bad then there's nothing especially wrong about being a supporter of the pro-slavery side.
And I agree with the book's anti-war message, I absolutely believe that war is bad and leads to lots of bad stuff happening - but if you're going to specifically write an American Civil War novel with an anti-war message, I kind of feel like you're morally obligated to indicate you have some sort of notion of how else the abolition of slavery might have been achieved. Or at the very least make clear that the narrative understands that black people being freed from oppression is just as important as white women being freed from oppression.
But as it is, though I feel desperately for Susanna and Cora and the awful things they experienced, a novel about the civil war choosing to focus solely on white people is making a statement about what people are the ones worth paying attention to. And in this book, the black people ultimately don't matter. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the entire book. Especially since the Civil War is so unfortunately continuing to be relevant to modern political discourse, and so the ideas about the Civil War that are out there matter to modern race relations and US politics.
I googled the author after reading this book, and discovered that she's the writer of the Benjamin January series I keep hearing good things about, which is a series featuring a black man in the antebellum south, so it's not that the author doesn't care about black people. And knowing that does make me feel better, somewhat. But that still doesn't fix what I see as wrong with Homeland.
In conclusion I would have liked the story about Susanna and Cora and their Romeo-and-Juliet-esque friendship-between-enemies far more if it were set in pretty much any other historical context. And I think this year is the right year for me to finally get around to reading at least one or two of the slavery memoirs on my to-read list.
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