Lives writ large in miniature dolls

GIVEN its popularity, there is something fascinating about the way historical fiction makes so many people so uneasy.

Jacob Appel’s The Dollhouse of Petronella Oortman (c. 1710)

GIVEN its popularity, there is something fascinating about the way historical fiction makes so many people so uneasy. Usually it’s historians doing the grumbling, about novelists playing fast and loose with the facts. But they’re not alone: literary critics often seem equally uncom­fortable with the genre’s tendency to elide the boundary between the popular and the literary, a discomfort that frequently seems to disguise a larger anxiety about the genre’s status (and, one suspects, its association with traditionally feminine forms, such as historical romance).

In many ways, English author Jessie Burton’s heavily-hyped debut, The Miniaturist, perfectly illustrates this tension. Set during the Dutch Golden Age, it is simultaneously an entertaining, intelligent and richly detailed excursion into historical pastiche and an interestingly revisionist exploration of the lives of the sorts of characters usually excluded from the pages of history by virtue of gender, race or sexual preference.

The novel centres on 18-year-old Nella Oortman, daughter of a dissolute debtor from Assen­delft, who as it opens has just arrived in Amsterdam to take up residence with her new husband, the successful but elusive Amsterdam trader Johannes Brandt.

Unsurprisingly Nella is apprehensive about what her new life will bring: not only is Johannes considerably older than her (at 39, “a true Methuselah!”), but she barely knows him, their union having been arranged by her mother and Johannes’ sister. The two previous encounters between the pair have been brief and oddly inconclusive, their wedding night unconsummated after Johannes begged leave to depart early on business.

Nella’s confusion about the nature of her new life only grows once she takes up residence in Johannes’s house. Although he is generous and good-humoured, her new husband is phys­ically distant and curiously detached in his dealings with her, and on the one occasion Nella attempts to seduce him he resists her caresses.

Nella’s frustration with Johannes’s behaviour is only amplified by the mysteries of his household, in particular the unpredictable temper of his unmarried sister, Marin, who vacillates between coldness and contempt and odd moments of kindness; the over-familiar and gossipy maid, Cornelia; and Johannes’ coloured manservant, Otto, a former slave freed by Johannes.

On their own, this group of characters would be interesting, yet Burton weaves another narra­tive around them, one centring on the dollhouse Johannes gives Nella soon after her arrival, and the miniaturist Nella employs to create dolls and furnishings to fill it, creations that quickly prove not just disturbingly lifelike but unsettlingly prescient.

While the mystery of the miniaturist’s identity and connection to the household ends up being a bit of a damp squib, the dollhouse is anything but, providing a potent metaphor for the novel’s interest in the lives of women, and more particularly the ways they both exercise and are denied agency by the world they inhabit.

For while Marin may rage that women “can do nothing” except maybe “stitch up the mistakes that other people make”, the novel also offers a vision of the subtle ways in which women do manage to exert control over their lives, and also stark reminders of how those same social structures can constrain the lives of many men.

Like many historical novels, The Miniaturist trades on its fidelity to what is known of the past. Even the novel’s central image, that of Nella’s dollhouse, has a real-world analog in the form of the fantastically detailed dollhouse that once belonged to her namesake, which now resides in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Yet, as often tends to be the case, this density of detail also seems to disguise gaps in the novel’s imagining of its characters’ inner lives, and more particularly the foreignness of their minds. Certainly its construction of sexual identity seems entirely contemporary, as does its difficulties in imagining the way social class shaped people’s attitudes.

It’s possible this curiously ambiguous relationship to reality is at least part of what makes so many people uneasy about historical fiction. Yet to focus on historical accuracy is to miss the point, and not just because it fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between fiction and reality, but because it fails to grasp the complex ways historical fiction allows us to re-encounter and re-imagine the past, and by extension the present.

For as Johannes observes at one point late in the novel, “by telling me lies … (he) … made me see truth. The way a painting can better represent a thing while never being the thing itself.”

James Bradley’s new novel, Clade, will be published by Penguin next year

The Miniaturist

By Jessie Burton

Picador, 400pp, $29.99