Towards a happy history?

One of my suitemates is taking a class with history professor and University Provost Alan Brinkley, and her copy of his book Liberalism and Its Discontents was in the kitchen when I sat down to breakfast on Sunday. In the last of its essays, “Historians and Their Publics,” he explores how and why the relationship between historians and mainstream culture has weakened. Some of his points apply to all of academics—for example, he warns against unnecessarily technical scholarship fit only for its authors’ academic peers. But, in an argument new to me, he also traces history’s narrowed audience to its practitioners’ “increasingly intense awareness of the moral ambiguity of the past.”

“The increasingly skeptical stances of scholars—although they have helped attract some new audiences—have alienated other more traditional readers of history, who want the past to serve as a source of inspiration and entertainment,” he wrote. He does not condone this nostalgia, but he does recognize it. It certainly makes sense to me: “Thomas Jefferson as the scribe of equality” is an easier narrative to teach first graders than the one in which he allowed Sally Hemings and her children to live as slaves. And the first holds a decent helping of truth, doesn’t it?

This problem of conflicting narratives came up, in a way, at last week’s on-campus appearance by writers Toni Morrison and Assia Djebar. Gayatri Spivak, director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society , orchestrated a side-by-side partial performance of Morrison’s opera Margaret Garner and Djebar’s play The Daughters of Ishmael followed by a panel discussion. The event aimed, according to advertisements, to “place the lives of women at the center stage of history.” Both the play and the opera were deeply moving and—despite electrifying portraits of humanity at its most loving—deeply sad. It was the sort of experience I’d expected from these authors, so I was surprised how fully it resonated with me when a young woman posed them Brinkley’s question. I didn’t write down her exact words, so I’ll paraphrase: both these stories, she pointed out, were stories of suffering. Was there a way to teach women’s history that was something else?

Morrison was succinct: “All we’ve heard about,” she said, “are happy women.” She pointed out that we’ve seen revolutionary mothers and vivacious debutantes and laughing slaves—the dark stuff is new. If the dark stuff is dominant right now, it’s because we haven’t let ourselves see it before. A balance of light and dark in narrative is perhaps desirable in the long term, but only after we work through what has been ignored.

For Morrison, narratives like Margaret Garner are projects required of our historical time period. In older histories, we’ve seen only the female faces that affirmed the stories their societies wanted to hear. Were many women happy, even in circumstances we would now evaluate as oppressive? Of course. People find it in themselves, as often as they can, to be happy with the labors, relationships, and ideas they are given. Was this happiness in some way invalid because of the pain that surrounded it? It seems to me that judging whether or not others’ happiness is “real” or not is generally a lost labor. But their stories need no further affirmation. If we want to tell the past as it was, our study is needed elsewhere.

For me, Morrison’s response becomes the only answer to the sentiment at the heart of the “I’m-not-a-feminist-but” movement. : “After all, who wants to align herself with that kind of heavy history, with that kind of ambiguity, with that kind of pain? Aren’t we more than that? Aren’t the happy parts worth something too?”

The happy parts are deeply important, as is the inspiration and comfort with which they can imbue us. But they are one point of view, one cadre of voices, one side of the coin. Equal means whole.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore. She is the co-editor of the Commentariat, the official blog of Spectator Opinion.