From Susan/Miranda:
As readers of this blog may remember, I’ve volunteered as an interpreter at a nearby 18th century living history museum. Dressed as a colonial Pennsylvanian farmer’s wife, I’ve spoken primarily to school groups from the Philadelphia area as I led them around the restored farm, house, and outbuildings. One of my favorite “trick questions designed to make you think whether you want to or not” was to ask the kids to name the most important thing that immigrants brought with them to the new world. The answers would range from good (a plow or an axe) to ludicrous (electricity), but the students very seldom came up with the reply I was seeking: the information in your head, the knowledge and experience that were unique to you. Or, in pop-culture-lingo, their baggage.
So, obviously, when the Pilgrims came to New England, the settlers whose knowledge included felling trees and making fences had much more success than the “gentlemen” in the party, whose intellectual carry-on sailing in the Mayflower was more inclined to theological learning. One hundred and sixty or so years later, another Englishman, Samuel Slater, arrived in New England with very few actual belongings, but untold riches in his head – he’d memorized all the secrets of the spinning mill where he’d worked. He was able to recreate the first factory in America, pretty much single-handedly launching the Industrial Revolution in this country.
Just this past weekend, I heard of another example –– with fewer historical consequences, but just as telling. While comparing Thanksgiving celebrations, a friend of Irish-American ancestry described the full-blown “American” turkey-centered meal her extended family enjoyed. Sadly, she said that the one specialty they’d always added to their table had been missing this year: a great-aunt’s Irish soda bread. This venerable lady was the last member of the family to have been born in Ireland, and the only one who carried the family secret of this bread in her head. Yet she’d resisted all efforts by the family to write down the recipe, and when she’d finally died this year, the soda bread-secret had been lost with her. This was as much mourned by the family as the aunt had been herself, a humble recipe had been treasured as the final connection between this family’s Old World heritage, and their new lives in New York.
Which (finally!) brings me around to how all of this relates to characters and characterization. The best, most memorable, characters are defined not only by how they look or what they do, but by the intangibles in their heads: what they think, what they believe, how they’ve processed their past experiences and learning into who they are (or aren’t.)
It’s one more way that “show, don’t tell” rings true. Too often a character is described only as, say, a privileged lord of great wealth. We’re expected to take that a face value. The best authors will show us what makes him this way through all the little ways that make a lord different from an ordinary Joe Tenant-Farmer. He’ll sit his horse differently, or prefer a special wine that he first tasted years ago on his Grand Tour, or make allusions to Ovid based on his long-ago university education.
Would Jane Eyre have been so willing to stand up to Mr. Rochester if she hadn’t had suffered through the deprivations of Lowood? Would Huck Finn have been as satisfying a companion for Tom Sawyer if he hadn’t been a scrappy survivor, with all manner of skills and experiences acquired outside the schoolhouse? Would Goldilocks have been so bold about trashing the Three Bears’ House and belongings if she hadn’t been raised with such a strong sense of blonde entitlement?
Well, yes, so that’s a stretch to make a point. But what sorts of “baggage” do you feel makes a character touch you? Are you a sucker for a self-made-men heroes, or are you bored to death by yet one more “I survived an abusive childhood” heroine?