The Problem with Clean Fiction

Can one deal honestly with virtue without dealing honestly with vice?

I don’t read “clean fiction.” I don’t mean that I like or seek out smutty, pornographic, or gratuitously violent fiction. I don’t. I like fiction that is truthful and perceptive about human experience. That does sometimes include references to sex, violence, and vulgar language, but not in a way that panders to an appetite for those things. The fundamental problem with the idea of clean fiction, I feel, is that it fails to make that distinction.

I raise this because of a recent note from Retha V. Cabiness:

I have a lot of sympathy with her position here. But as I said in my comment, once you put “clean” forward as the principal virtue of a story, you will reduce your audience to those people for whom “clean” is their principal criterion for choosing a book (a significant market segment, of course). The rest of the world will lose all interest in the book the moment you attach that “clean” designation to it. It will do you no good then to protest that such a book can be exciting and epic. That may be true, but the word “clean” will kill all interest outside the community of “clean” readers.

We can see this effect at work in the movies. The movie rating system has actually worked to force more “adult material” into mainstream movies. No one will go to the cinema to see a G-rated movie unless they are trying to entertain a seven-year-old for an afternoon. The G rating is as much a kiss of death as an X rating, so movie makers have to aim deliberately for a PG or R rating to ensure that adults will buy tickets. Movies would probably be “cleaner” without the rating system.

And this is the problem with this kind of moral classification system. It not only affects the reader’s choices. It affects the writer’s choices as well. The problem isn’t morality; it is the act of classification. If a writer or filmmaker’s success depends on getting a certain kind of rating, all their effort and imagination will go into making sure that they are classified the way they need to be. The rating becomes not a judgment made independently after the fact, but a guiding star that governs the project and its creative decisions from the beginning.

And that’s a problem because the safest way to get the result you are looking for is to aim for the center of the target, taking no chances with being close to the line on one side or the other. And then, of course, when you do get the wrong classification, you demand greater clarity from the rating system, which leads to ever more mechanical definitions. Which words? How often repeated? How much skin? Which body parts? How much blood? And soon creation is done not by artistic vision but by a checklist, and you are telling some poor actress how many buttons she needs to undo to avoid the dreaded G rating.

Meanwhile, there are many classic novels that would pass muster according to “clean fiction” rules. There is no sex, swearing, or graphic violence in Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield or Anne of Green Gables. In part, this is because they were written under a speech code, and in many cases a legal code, that had restrictions pretty similar to the (somewhat loosely defined) modern criteria for “clean fiction.” After all, it was only at the beginning of the last century that writers like D.H. Lawrence deliberately set out, with novels such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover, to force a change in standards by courting charges of indecency. The vast majority of the Western canon is by modern criteria “clean fiction.” If they could do it then, why can’t we produce works just as good by applying the same constraints today?

In part, this is because those classics were written in a time when social mores were significantly different from today. People were much more dependent on their families and community for their safety and sustenance. The pill had not yet made promiscuity practical. The money economy had not yet made extreme individualism viable. Respectability was the glue that held society together, and so the social landscape of virtue and vice was substantially different from what it is today, not because people were more or less virtuous than today, but because their circumstances were different from ours.

And in part, because that landscape was so different, the whole culture lived under a shared speech code that drew a veil over sex, violence, and profanity on the page. Authors and audiences shared a set of literary conventions for talking about disreputable things without saying them directly. The Western canon is full of clever innuendo. The “clean” speech codes of the time were not so much an impediment to honest discussion of these topics as an occasion for sly and clever ways of discussing them that were known and expected by reader and writer alike. All sorts of things could be understood in context without being stated. We understand that Mr. Wickham has deflowered Lydia Bennet. This is the understood implication of “run off with”. It does not need to be said explicitly because it has been indicated by a convention well known to author and reader alike.

But these conventions, these habits of subtle and clever innuendo simply don’t exist today because our current speech codes and our current literature are much more frank about these matters. Indeed, such frankness is now seen as a sign of maturity. To hint at things in the same way in a modern work would be to seem coy or puritanical or to risk simply being misunderstood. The range of stories that can actually be told under the restrictions of “clean fiction” today is thus narrower than it was when these restrictions were universal speech codes.

And it is not just that. While the definitions of “clean” fiction tend to focus on three things: sex, swearing, and violence, there is also a broader implication regarding subject matter that tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, excludes a range of subject matter. It wants gentle stories of nice people, people whose sins are not only off the page, but out of the story altogether. Lydia Bennet “running off” with Mr. Wickham might not qualify after all. “Clean” has, in other words, something of the connotation of “cozy,” a term mostly applied to mysteries, but with the same implication of treading very lightly on the sinning.

I am not blaming anyone for having this taste. I would warn that there is a danger in it of falling into sanctimony, of imagining that by refraining from reading about sinners you will become more of a saint yourself. That is a danger, but it is not a certainty. And it is not in any way inappropriate to want to avoid the kind of smuttiness that does pervade much of modern fiction, a smuttiness that exists partly as crude titillation but, what is worse, as pandering to the audience’s sense that swearing and promiscuity, whether in life or in their taste in literature, make them seem sophisticated. It is the literary equivalent of smoking to look cool. I’m not interested in that kind of literature either. I find it unbearably tedious.

But in the attempt to shut out that kind of thing, a laudible goal in itself, the drive for a “clean” literature shuts out a great deal of literature that is not that at all, that is the very antithesis of that, but which does deal more directly and even more frankly with sins and with sinners, not for the sake of titilation or to inculcate a false sense of sopistication, but to fairly and truly depict the reality of human experience, of virtue and of vice.

My Cuthbert’s People series is set in the late 8th century, mostly in Northumbria but also in Northern Spain and Southern France. My protagonists are sisters, Elswyth and Hilda, the daughters of a minor thegn. the lowest level of nobility in what was essentially a tribal warrior culture. Life then was dangerous in ways that we can only imagine now. It was dangerous for young women in three ways in particular. The first is that childbirth was dangerous. Maternal mortality was high. A woman went into her confinement knowing that there was a chance she could die. The second is that infant mortality was high too, so high that in my books the sister’s mother boasts of never having lost a child, a rare distinction at that time. Thus every woman bearing a child knew that there was a good chance she could experience a devastating loss. The third is that, in part because maternal mortality was so high, and men could thus lose their wives in childbirth, young women were prized possessions for which other tribes, Vikings in particular, would go raiding.

Life was dangerous for young men, too, of course, all of whom would be called upon to serve as warriors in one capacity or another. There was no organized police force. The tribal mores that still influenced them despite their conversion to Christianity meant that the people of one tribe had little or no respect for the rights or dignity of those of other tribes, whom they felt free to enslave or take for wives. It was said of one particularly saintly king that in his time, a woman with a child in her arms could walk from one end of the kingdom to the other without being molested. Which goes to show that that was very much not the usual state of things.

Whatever safety young women enjoyed came from the protection of their own families, and often from the reputation and influence of their fathers, brothers, and other male relations who would take revenge for any harm done to their womenfolk. Separate a beautiful young woman from the protection of her kinship group, therefore, and she would be in very dire danger of sexual assault and exploitation.

This is the world my protagonists live in, and this need for protection, and the consequences of being deprived of that protection, shape their lives and their stories. It lurks always at the edge of their world, and, of necessity, it sometimes shows its face. These are not dark tales by any stretch. Their lives, after many trials, some of their own making, do turn out well. But this reality frames their peril. It informs Hilda’s caution and sensibleness as much as Elswyth’s wistful and reckless nature. It would be false to ignore it or to gloss over it. Indeed, much about their view of life, their fears, hopes, and motivations would make little sense if they enjoyed the kind of safety and independence enjoyed by most modern women. And so the reality of this danger cannot be ignored or glossed over in the novels.

And thus there is in the fourth book of the series, The Wanderer and the Way, a scene which would disqualify it from being considered “clean.” It is a scene that some reviewers feel compelled to mention as a trigger warning, which I understand, though it distresses me, because such a warning suggests that the book is something quite different from what it really is.

In The Wanderer and the Way, a young man called Theodemir returns home to his uncle’s villa in Asturias, a Christian Visigothic kingdom in Northern Spain, which is locked in a perpetual war of resistance against the invading Moorish armies from the South. His uncle, Witteric, is a medieval Jeffrey Epstein, exploiting young women that he has captured in battle or bought in slave markets. Elswyth (the adventurous and reckless sister) is living in the villa, having been kidnapped and married by force to a formidable, but absent, Viking in Witteric’s employ. Fear of her husband keeps Elswyth out of Witteric’s clutches for the time being, but the Viking’s return is long overdue. Theodemir falls hard for Elswyth and grows more and more fearful for her safety.

To bring Theodemir’s fears for Elswyth’s safety to a boiling point, there is a scene in which Witteric rapes one of his slaves in front of Theodemir. Here is that scene, in full. Witteric has been instructing Theodemir on what to expect in an upcoming visit from Alfonso the Chaste, the reputedly highly virtuous King of Asturias:

“What he wants about him,” Witteric said, “are men who fear for their own souls. Much safer that way, for a king.”

“Then I wonder that he visits here, Uncle,” Theodemir replied. “For I can’t see how he will feel safe in this house.”

This time the jibe landed hard. Witteric did not smile nor raise his cup. A look of grim contempt came over his face. Then he beckoned to Sakina, who walked slowly down the length of the table until she stood beside him. He gestured to her, and she undid the pins that held her dress and stood before him unclothed. He rose, grabbed her by the shoulders, bent her over the table amid the plates and cups, and raped her while Fatima stood stone-faced by his side, ignoring the knife that lay before her on the table.

That’s it. There is nothing more explicit than the statement that it happened. I don’t see how I could have said less and still framed the story correctly for a modern reader. It is the moment that shocks Theodemir from meek and ineffective protest and moves him to take decisive action.

It is not that I don’t see that the story could be upsetting to some people. Of course it could. So could all kinds of things that are depicted in all kinds of stories. We all have our triggers, our ghosts, and our bad memories. But we cannot purge every book of every scene that might upset any possible reader. There would be nothing left.

This is not typical of my work, by the way. None of my other books comes nearly as close to being banished from “clean,” though I can’t say for sure that they would all qualify. But for all the reasons above, I won’t be marketing them that way, even if I could. But if they are different, it is not because they pull any punches in their treatment of virtue and vice, but simply because those stories don’t happen to tread quite so close to this particular topic in quite this way.

But at the same time, The Wanderer and the Way is of all my novels the one most directly and explicitly concerned with virtue. It does not preach about it. I have no time for that sort of book at all. But it examines the nature of the very common human struggle to reform oneself and to live up to a new ideal of personal conduct to which one has been inspired, often, as in this case, by love. It is a struggle by no means confined to people of conspicuous religious faith. It is the struggle of anyone who has ever looked themselves in the mirror and become disgusted with what they saw there.

It is the story of a young man brought up in a licentious household in which women were considered merely one of the luxuries of the house. By falling in love with one woman in particular — a woman who persistently rejects him — he learns to see all women with different eyes, and learns a chastity that is not only formal but heroic. That is what the story is about. It is not reveling in sin, but exploring a long journey from casual licentiousness to heroic chastity. That scene is a necessary milestone on that journey. The story would be false without it. But because of it, The Wanderer and the Way is never going to be classified as a “clean” novel by those who care about such things.

This is the problem. It is not possible to write fully and honestly about the true nature of virtue without also writing fully and honestly about the true nature of vice. Not revel in it, not exploit it for titillation, but be sufficiently honest about it that its contrast with virtue becomes apparent and, most especially, that the difficulty of the struggle for virtue is made fully apparent. Because there is nothing more certain to inculcate the sins of scrupulosity and sanctimony than the suggestion that virtue is easier than it really is. Virtue is a hard slog, a daily grind, bought through suffering and patience, and never entirely secured against the perils of vice. To write about it any other way is to be dangerously false.

Can you write literature that does that while still technically meeting the criteria of “clean fiction,” given the nature of contemporary speech codes and therefore of readers’ expectations? I’m not sure. On some subjects perhaps, but perhaps not on others. More to the point, are the criteria for “clean” fiction drawn with that goal in mind? I fear not. I fear, rather, that those lines are drawn in a way that will incline writers to be false about the nature of vice and facile about the challenges of virtue. And in so doing, they may lead readers by the nose into a different kind of sin. I’m not saying that it must be so, but it is certainly a danger that in steering a course too far from Scylla, we may sail right into the maw of Charybdis.

Conversely, there is also the danger of a book like The Wanderer and the Way falling between two stools, between the modern sophisticate uninterested in any work whose theme is chastity, and the “clean” fiction advocates unwilling to read any work that depicts unchastity in any form. But if those two extremes define the market, what a great gulf lies between them, unexplored by a modern pen?

Where in all this is the Goldilocks zone, the writers, the readers, the books, that are neither too hot nor too cold, neither too firm nor too soft, neither too vicious nor too cozy? Readers, where do you fall? What kinds of books do you want?