Predictable problems with reading 1930s pulp fiction
So one of the absolutely predictable problems with reading a bunch of pulp fiction from the 1930s is they are racist and sexist. The ones I'm reading have been selected in collections for modern audiences so presumably screened for this and not necessarily representative. The stories themselves aren't racist and sexist but they are built on racist and sexist foundations (arguably, still are) and occasionally there's a real whammy of a sentence where one goes "huh" and then "I sure am reading a story from the thirties."
Weirdly, the stories themselves, like the storylines? Very tame. A lady pilot! How scandalous! And yet despite being a perfectly competent lady pilot she is several times discussed by other characters in a pretty creepy way that is absolutely not the moral of the story or addressed and is definitely supposed to be normal.
This is the predictable problem reading older stuff. I mean, it can happen for sure reading modern stuff. It's not like we have cracked that whole prejudice thing yet. But your odds go way up the further back you go. One has to be forever vigilant. I mean, it's occasional. I wouldn't be reading wall-to-wall shockers. We're not talking Lovecraft, here.
Another (slightly related?) thing about reading older stuff. There's a lot, obviously, but here's one. We noticed this reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen says her husband got drunk and made a scene. I feel like a lot of modern audiences are like... okay? This hardly seems like the downfall of society. But Anne Brontë doesn't really need to justify it. And doesn't try. It's understood. He got drunk and made a scene. He's a bad guy. End of.
On the other hand! So many words are dedicated to explaining why it is bad that her husband gets their six-year-old son drunk! He gives a child alcohol! To us, that's it, that's all that needs to be said. No one, but no one, now, would try to say that's okay. But Helen goes on for ages, more than once, trying to convince her book audience, and Anne Brontë presumably her book audience, that getting a child drunk is undesirable. And the characters in the book do not immediately accept that this is awful. In fact, some argue in favour of it.
Those two things seem completely flipped from an original audience to a modern one. I'm aware Huntingdon did not simply get drunk one time and horse about - he was an alcoholic and abusive. But there's a point in the story where that's all he has done so far and it does not pack the punch it would, presumably, in 1848. Obviously, also, or at least one would hope, modern audiences need less persuading as to why a woman ought to be allowed to keep her child and money after divorce, or why she should be allowed to divorce her husband, for whatever reason, and recognising this as abuse.
It makes me think about writing historical fiction and balancing all these things and realism vs safe spaces and also, wow, thank goodness I am not a straight woman trying to write het historical romance.