Or even in Here Lies Arthur - Gwyna is easy to identify with, though her gender changes would be incomprehensible in modern society, so her 'relevance' is done with a generally sound historical sensibility.
Whilst agreeing in general, I'm not absolutely sure about this specific point - though that's mostly because I'm uncertain what you mean. Why is a cross-dressing/gender-changing girl less comprehensible in our society than in Gwyna's? Are you referring to the fact that most girls in our society already cross dress (i.e. they wear clothes that were traditionally reserved for males); or that fewer 'male' activities are now closed to them, reducing the motivation for needing to pass as male? Both those would be true, I guess, but both societies seem equally hung up on questions of gender, even so - even if that manifests in different ways. The stubborn binariness of gender remains for us, just as it did in the 5th (or was it 6th?) century.
Your comments also raise the question of generic convention. For whatever reason (and I'm sure we can both supply some likely ones) females dressing as males are very common in historical fiction. A reader used to these conventions will have them in mind as well as questions of historical accuracy (whether of the mentalite or external facts). The same is true, of course, of the mystery-solving children you mentioned to obsessedwelves. Our not believing in that premise's literal plausibility needn't affect the story's effectiveness as historical fiction, any more than one needs to believe in the unnaturally high rate of homicide in St Mary Meade to enjoy Miss Marple. Agatha Christie knew very well that murders weren't that common in idyllic English villages, and she knew that her readers knew, and her readers knew that she knew that they knew [etc ad nauseam]. In short, that aspect of realism is 'bracketed' for the sake of the genre.
So, we've got at least three things in play here: the historical reality (whatever that was, and however accessible it is or isn't), the contemporary world of the writer and reader (assuming for the sake of simplicity that they are both contemporary!), and the set of generic conventions within which the writer is writing and the reader reading. All these are moving targets, except perhaps the first - but then our only access to historical reality is by way of a framework of interpretation that's in constant flux anyway.
no subject
Whilst agreeing in general, I'm not absolutely sure about this specific point - though that's mostly because I'm uncertain what you mean. Why is a cross-dressing/gender-changing girl less comprehensible in our society than in Gwyna's? Are you referring to the fact that most girls in our society already cross dress (i.e. they wear clothes that were traditionally reserved for males); or that fewer 'male' activities are now closed to them, reducing the motivation for needing to pass as male? Both those would be true, I guess, but both societies seem equally hung up on questions of gender, even so - even if that manifests in different ways. The stubborn binariness of gender remains for us, just as it did in the 5th (or was it 6th?) century.
Your comments also raise the question of generic convention. For whatever reason (and I'm sure we can both supply some likely ones) females dressing as males are very common in historical fiction. A reader used to these conventions will have them in mind as well as questions of historical accuracy (whether of the mentalite or external facts). The same is true, of course, of the mystery-solving children you mentioned to
So, we've got at least three things in play here: the historical reality (whatever that was, and however accessible it is or isn't), the contemporary world of the writer and reader (assuming for the sake of simplicity that they are both contemporary!), and the set of generic conventions within which the writer is writing and the reader reading. All these are moving targets, except perhaps the first - but then our only access to historical reality is by way of a framework of interpretation that's in constant flux anyway.
Goodness me! Tricky, isn't it?