attackfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
attackfish) wrote2011-09-01 06:56 am
attackfish) wrote2011-09-01 06:56 am
Bittercon: the Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk
Steampunk is frequently realized as an idealized, shiny version of the Victorian era, with quite a few of the nasty bits missing or obscured. The real Victorian age was a mix of great wealth and progress with poverty, workhouses, and more. What does it say about us when the latter are left out?
For a previous round of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bittercon, I wrote about history and fantasy in which I touched briefly on the moral ramifications of using real world histories as a basis for fantasy worlds, which generated the most discussion. When I saw this topic, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to write a follow up. Recently, there have been several writers posting about how it can hurt when their own histories are played with. Steampunk I think shows the other side, how it can hurt when someone plays with a history they insist is not yours.
The Victorian era we read about and feel the sort of longing for that it prompts genres like Steampunk is the product primarily of the writings of the wealthy. This, combined with the natural filter of nostalgia means that it was almost inevitable that most Steampunk fans want the good parts version of history. People like shiny things. That’s why they’re expensive. We also like to play, and this is a fun genre.
However, just underneath the surface of the gilded age was a foundation of poverty, starvation, oppression, inequality, conquest, and colonialism. In America, the beginnings of the Victorian era were propped up with slavery and destitute urban labor, and the end was propped up with sharecropping and destitute urban labor. The tide of immigrants that flooded int the country outstripped even the speed at which the Federal government wrested land away from American Indians. In England and much of Western Europe, they sucked resources from the colonies, including Ireland, itself part of Western Europe, to prop up the homefront, and the poor choked the cities, desperate for work while the wealthy sprawled out in the country. In Russia, they didn’t need colonies, because the majority of people at home were still surfs. This was the era that so horrified Dickens and Marx and prompted attempted revolutions all over the continent and the colonies. Women held almost no power, and people with disabilities were treated with scorn and pity. Protestants called the Pope the Antichrist, missionaries tried to get natives to stop worshiping idols, and anti-Semitism was natural and acceptable.
When we ignore this to play in the Victorian Era, we say that those stories, the stories of the oppressed, don’t exist. The world is cooler without them.
None of this means that Steampunk is rotten at the core, any more than other fantasy and science fiction, which has an interesting history of erasure to say the least. Aside from the fact that it’s the right thing to do, there are some seriously amazing stories to be found in the underbelly of a Steampunk society. Steampunk in Victorian India, in the colonial cities of China, in colonized Africa, in places the Europeans were never quite able to subdue, Indian tribes using Steampunk, the women’s suffrage movement with pneumatic robots. Steampunk that maybe just acknowledges that someone’s servants aren’t happy and adoring. There is some of this out there.
Steampunk is in some ways a complete paradox. It is a product of a certain unconscious nostalgia, a sense that things were better then (or more interesting) and yet the Victorian era itself was full of great thinkers who touted the wonders of progress. The Victorians, especially the late Victorians, where most of the Steampunk I have come across focuses, had a very linear view of history with the industrialized west at the pinacle of human development, in which constant progress and universal betterment was the assumed outcome of the passage of time. This fit in well with their colonial aspirations, and is responsible in part for their belief in the “white man’s burden”. They had made it, they could teach others to make it, and then everything was going to just get better and better for everyone. This wasn’t of course to say there wasn’t a lot of nostalgia in Victorian times, especially for the middle ages, as evinced by Gothic revival architecture, books like Ivanhoe, the popularity of the King Arthur legend, an emerging Pan-German Nationalism (oh dear) and the entire romantic movement, but in general, like 1950’s America, progress was the word of the day.
Steampunk may itself be reflective of a larger darker movement of nostalgia in which subsets of the Religious Right talk about returning the country to its core values and deliberately invoke the Victorian era (and the 1950’s) for their supposed good behavior. Thankfully, most people who enjoy the genre probably know better than to fall for that, but does this adoration of the past help their cause? Nostalgia is natural and normal, but it can be dangerous.
Written forbittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Worldcon.
For a previous round of
bittercon, I wrote about history and fantasy in which I touched briefly on the moral ramifications of using real world histories as a basis for fantasy worlds, which generated the most discussion. When I saw this topic, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to write a follow up. Recently, there have been several writers posting about how it can hurt when their own histories are played with. Steampunk I think shows the other side, how it can hurt when someone plays with a history they insist is not yours.The Victorian era we read about and feel the sort of longing for that it prompts genres like Steampunk is the product primarily of the writings of the wealthy. This, combined with the natural filter of nostalgia means that it was almost inevitable that most Steampunk fans want the good parts version of history. People like shiny things. That’s why they’re expensive. We also like to play, and this is a fun genre.
However, just underneath the surface of the gilded age was a foundation of poverty, starvation, oppression, inequality, conquest, and colonialism. In America, the beginnings of the Victorian era were propped up with slavery and destitute urban labor, and the end was propped up with sharecropping and destitute urban labor. The tide of immigrants that flooded int the country outstripped even the speed at which the Federal government wrested land away from American Indians. In England and much of Western Europe, they sucked resources from the colonies, including Ireland, itself part of Western Europe, to prop up the homefront, and the poor choked the cities, desperate for work while the wealthy sprawled out in the country. In Russia, they didn’t need colonies, because the majority of people at home were still surfs. This was the era that so horrified Dickens and Marx and prompted attempted revolutions all over the continent and the colonies. Women held almost no power, and people with disabilities were treated with scorn and pity. Protestants called the Pope the Antichrist, missionaries tried to get natives to stop worshiping idols, and anti-Semitism was natural and acceptable.
When we ignore this to play in the Victorian Era, we say that those stories, the stories of the oppressed, don’t exist. The world is cooler without them.
None of this means that Steampunk is rotten at the core, any more than other fantasy and science fiction, which has an interesting history of erasure to say the least. Aside from the fact that it’s the right thing to do, there are some seriously amazing stories to be found in the underbelly of a Steampunk society. Steampunk in Victorian India, in the colonial cities of China, in colonized Africa, in places the Europeans were never quite able to subdue, Indian tribes using Steampunk, the women’s suffrage movement with pneumatic robots. Steampunk that maybe just acknowledges that someone’s servants aren’t happy and adoring. There is some of this out there.
Steampunk is in some ways a complete paradox. It is a product of a certain unconscious nostalgia, a sense that things were better then (or more interesting) and yet the Victorian era itself was full of great thinkers who touted the wonders of progress. The Victorians, especially the late Victorians, where most of the Steampunk I have come across focuses, had a very linear view of history with the industrialized west at the pinacle of human development, in which constant progress and universal betterment was the assumed outcome of the passage of time. This fit in well with their colonial aspirations, and is responsible in part for their belief in the “white man’s burden”. They had made it, they could teach others to make it, and then everything was going to just get better and better for everyone. This wasn’t of course to say there wasn’t a lot of nostalgia in Victorian times, especially for the middle ages, as evinced by Gothic revival architecture, books like Ivanhoe, the popularity of the King Arthur legend, an emerging Pan-German Nationalism (oh dear) and the entire romantic movement, but in general, like 1950’s America, progress was the word of the day.
Steampunk may itself be reflective of a larger darker movement of nostalgia in which subsets of the Religious Right talk about returning the country to its core values and deliberately invoke the Victorian era (and the 1950’s) for their supposed good behavior. Thankfully, most people who enjoy the genre probably know better than to fall for that, but does this adoration of the past help their cause? Nostalgia is natural and normal, but it can be dangerous.
Written for
bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Worldcon. ![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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