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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
In the decade preceding the Second World War, the historical novel in the Netherlands functions as a site for contesting aspects of Dutch identity. This challenge to traditional notions of Dutchness cannot be separated from issues of nationalism and patriotism which came to the fore as the decade progressed and a growing sense of being a small country sharing a border with an aggressive neighbour provoked a response throughout Dutch society and culture. Since the Netherlands were neutral during the First World War, it is possible that a less intense national feeling would have developed here than was the case in the countries engaged in fighting. An intellectual radical like Carry van Bruggen certainly felt able to adopt a highly critical stance towards European nationalisms in her major philosophical essay Prometheus (1919). (1) Furthermore, there was a conviction after the First World War that the Netherlands would remain neutral in future conflicts, and Prime Minister Colijn believed this well into the thirties. (2) At the same time, however, Anton Mussert, who was to lead the Dutch National Socialist Party, made an appeal to nationalist feelings at his first rally in 1930, and the first edition of the party newspaper Volk en Vaderland ['People and Fatherland'] appeared in January 1933. (3)
The idea that literature shapes rather than reflects context is not new, as Herbert Butterfield's 1924 essay on the historical novel demonstrates. In it he notes that the historical novel 'is often born of a kind of patriotism; it can scarcely avoid always being the inspiration of it' and 'in this way it becomes itself a power in history, an impulse to fine feeling, and a source of more of the action and heroism which it describes. The historical novel itself becomes a maker of history.' (4) This power, according to Butterfield, comes from the fact that the historical novel has its 'roots in the soil' (p. 41). The 'feeling for the history that breathes through the soil' can induce patriotism where none was intended. Not surprisingly, according to Butterfield, it is the 'epic of national liberty' that 'is specially calculated to produce the precise feeling that it describes, to stir readers to the aspirations that are its theme, to be a force for liberty itself' (p. 88). In this account of the historical novel, then, a story about the past can act upon the present. The starting point of my discussion is that the historical novel, even though its subject matter is history, is very much of the present, of the time in which it was written.
This article investigates how three Dutch historical novels seek to engage with the patriotic sensibilities of the Dutch in the 1930s. I shall be arguing here that although the Dutch situation required a patriotic response, there was little agreement about which aspects of Dutch society and culture formed the core elements of Dutch identity. Indirectly this was due to the democratization process which led the newly emancipated (mainly middle-class women at this stage, with working-class men and women to follow) to seek to adjust the notion of Dutchness to reflect their values. A number of historical novels published in the Netherlands in this period offer a range of images of Dutchness, and I am particularly interested in two kinds of challenge to traditional notions of what constitutes Dutchness. The first is a challenge to the exclusion of women from prevailing ideas of Dutch identity, their invisibility deriving from the practice of subsuming female identity under male identity. It is provided by the novel Vrouw Jacob ('Lady Jack', known as Jacqueline of Hainaut in English and Jacoba van Beieren in Dutch) by Ina Boudier-Bakker, which appeared in 1935. The second challenge is a more complex response to nationalism by the literary and intellectual elite associated with the influential figure of Menno ter Braak. It will be illustrated by discussion of De waterman (1933) (5) by Arthur van Schendel and Schandaal in Holland ['Scandal in Holland'] (1939) by E. du Perron. Despite the shared challenge to traditional notions of Dutch identity, there is no common ground between Boudier-Bakker and the literary elite. She is a traditionalist seeking to gain acknowledgement of the presence and importance of women in Dutch society and to give them greater influence while maintaining the family as the main social unit. In common with many women in Europe after the First World War, she has no faith in men's ability to govern wisely without the leadership of women, and in Lady Jack she offers her readership a warlike patriotic hero with a difference: he is a woman. The members of the intellectual elite under discussion here reject nationalism and uncritical patriotism, preferring to promote a new critical, sober, and honest sense of Dutchness. This new sensibility is not only reflected in what Van Schendel and Du Perron portray in their novels--flawed heroes and typically Dutch landscape and cityscape--but also in the way they portray it. These writers practise what they preach: the new sobriety and honesty must inform the style in which they write and the genre they choose, even if this will entail adapting the traditional historical novel to the new circumstances.
In this article, the reception of Vrouw Jacob and De waterman will be discussed in order to give a sense both of the prevailing patriotic mood and of the varying perceptions of Dutchness, together with the equally varied responses to these literary attempts to change ideas. The reception studies will be followed by an analysis of the ways in which each historical novel depicts and engages with ideas of Dutchness. The second half of this article is given over to a detailed study of Schandaal in Holland which involves an account of Van Schendel's role as model of literary Dutchness for the younger writer, followed by an analysis of how this sober and restrained Dutchness is inscribed in Du Perron's novel, informing genre and style, but also encouraging readers to adopt a critical stance towards their own history and culture.
The reception of Boudier-Bakker's Vrouw Jacob became something of a cause celebre because of the harshness of Menno ter Braak's attack on the novel in his review in Het Vaderland, the national daily paper of which he was literary editor. In 1921 Boudier-Bakker had published a pamphlet entitled De moderne vrouw en haar tekort ['The modern woman and her shortcomings'], (6) setting out her ideas on a new, more powerful role for women. This pamphlet clearly influenced the reception of Vrouw Jacob some fourteen years later, as Ter Braak alludes toit in the title of his review, in which he mocked the book in superior tones, laughing at the combination of bravery and what he called 'boudoir hysterics' in the protagonist. (7) His sense of superiority derives from the fact that he wilfully approaches the novel as if it were historiography, criticizing Boudier-Bakker for creating a historical character with modern sensibilities and comparing the novelist unfavourably with the renowned historian Johan Huizinga (an uncle of his, by the way). The subtitle of the article was 'Op de grenzen van het plagiaat' ['On the borders of plagiarism], referring to his discovery of Boudier-Bakker's main source of information, which was the only biography of Jacqueline of Hainaut, and of instances where her book of some 450 pages stayed close to this source. When the author responded to this criticism by saying that as a historical novelist she could do as she liked, Ter Braak printed this response together with a full-blown accusation of plagiarism which repeated the earlier one with some new examples. The dispute could never be resolved by argumentation because the opponents were using different norms and thus talking at cross purposes. Boudier-Bakker insisted that fiction was different from history-writing and that historical novelists were not required to list their sources, and Ter Braak insisted on using academic norms. This issue will also be discussed later in relation to Schandaal in Holland.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Ter Braak's view dominated the debate in other papers. In surveying a total of nine reviews, one is amazed at their failure to discuss the heart of the matter: the figure of Lady Jack herself. A reviewer of Vrouw Jacob in another influential daily paper, the Algemeen Handelsblad, commenting on the popularity of the historical novel after the First World War, actually said:
Doch is het niet onwaarschijnlijk, dat een behoefte aan heldenvereering, aan bewondering voor mannen-van-de-daad [...] een verlangen heeft doen ontstaan waaraan die biographie en de historische roman tegemoet trachten te komen. (8)
It is not unlikely that a need for hero-worship, for admiration of men of action, has created a desire which biography and the historical novels are attempting to satisfy. (Emphasis added)
This betrays a striking blindness to the gender issue which is raised so blatantly by the novel. The only woman reviewer in the group, Annie Salomons in De Maasbode, is so concerned by the confrontation between Boudier-Bakker and Ter Braak that the novel rather fades into the background:
Vooral in een tijd, nu stoffelijke belangen en noden onze samenleving dreigen te over heerschen en naar beneden te trekken, moesten zij schouder aan schouder staan, omdat beide strijden voor een ideeel goed, voor de literaire cultuur van Holland. (9)
Especially in a time when material needs and concerns are threatening to overwhelm us and bring us down, they [writer and critic] should stand shoulder to shoulder, because they are both fighting for something immaterial, for the literary culture of Holland.
Ter Braak tries to discredit the author by assigning the novel to a different genre, and the other reviewers tend to follow the red herring of Boudier-Bakker's treatment of her sources. A survey of the reviews creates a strong...
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