Dead children in pre-modern setting
The reality of pre-Industrial Revolution times was that about half the children born died before age 5. It would be a mistake to think that parents cared less - we have multiple written records showing that they cared very much. At the same time, there was this coping mechanism - parents tried not to get too attached to very young children, because of the possibility of losing them. In some cultures, for example, children were not even named until about 1 year old. Another coping mechanism was of course that there were other children to take care of, and very soon the mother would be pregnant again. The lost children were mourned, but the loss was endured.
To a modern reader, losing a child is a tragedy one can hardly recover from, it very much is the end of the world. It is something that does not, should not, happen, a terrible mistake in the running of the cosmos. Treating the loss of a child as anything else is treated as almost inhuman.
Those are the two conflicting views I try to balance, setting a story in a pre-modern setting. The problem becomes particularly pertinent in a story that sprawls over several decades (with time skips), and thus the issue cannot be just "invisible". It seems my options are:
- No dead children. Every character has ~10 siblings, and consequently ~100 first cousins on each side. This option looks a bit crazy.
- Characters have dead siblings, somewhere in the time-skips they also lose children. All of this happens off-screen, and only gets mentioned in passing. Does this risk alienating my readers?
- Losing a child actually happens on-screen, within the melange of all the other events (but not taking central stage for very long). I address the tragedy and getting over it. Again, what would be more alienating - the previous option, or this one?
- People just seem to have a smaller number of children, no explanation given. This option is not too realistic, and always stretches my suspension of disbelief when I see it, but maybe it's necessary?
Are there any options I am missing? Or anything about the solutions presented that I am missing? Which solution is preferable?
My particular story is set in a royal court, and spans several decades. Under those circumstances, the number and health of royal children become important both to court politics and to international politics.
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Put the first instance on-screen, then use that as an assumed precedent for why the others disappear over time. You could use the solution of mentioning their deaths in passing, since that was likely part of casual conversation, but putting one death on-screen and using that as the precedent is fairly common for mass tragedy.
For instance, in Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, a plague is released into the country. They are alerted to this plague by one villager bringing the MC into their home to ask what's wrong with their kid, and the MC's brother and the village elder say that the kid has the plague, specifically "tokens" that mean he is going to die soon. The other deaths are then mentioned in passing (besides a death of a central character), such as a mention of prostitutes infecting the border guards that were supposed to be isolated. This was an organic way to 1) show the tragedy, but then also 2) show the effect of the tragedy without taking up too much of the viewer's time.
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I would go with characters have dead siblings; but that happens off-screen.
Showing it on-screen, and in-period-realistic, might be off-putting itself.
Everything you are talking about is a statistical distribution; averages, a bell-curve of sorts. Nothing says your character have to reside in the center of it. So child-deaths can happen primarily to others, not the MC king or his relatives.
Much of those deaths were due to the poor nutrition and the extreme labor of day-to-day living for the majority of people, that many royals need not experience directly. They have servants, they can rest all day, they don't have to struggle to feed themselves or other children.
So I would portray the societal milieu somewhat accurately, but my characters are lucky enough to not experience the child deaths directly (unless that serves some plot purpose). They still recognize it, they still fear it, but hey, they're special, God takes pity on them and they're grateful for it.
You can still have their relatives suffer that if you want, they just don't experience it themselves. A courier arrives with news of their sister Jane, she has lost her third child in a row. Thank God she has produced at least one heir. We must have her up for a visit, so we can comfort her.
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Is child mortality relevant to your story? If not, then I just wouldn't bring it up. There are all sorts of tragedies in the world. I don't consider a story unrealistic because it failed to discuss every possible thing that could go wrong with anyone's life. In the 21st century, people die from cancer, but most novels never mention cancer. People lose their jobs, but most novels don't discuss unemployment. People are robbed and murdered and kidnapped, but most novels don't mention these events. Etc.
Frankly, I would be very surprised if, say, a murder mystery said, "Detective Brown arrived at the scene of the crime. Brown had two children, a boy and a girl, plus a second daughter who had died of leukemia many years before. Brown and his wife were very upset when their daughter died. Mrs Brown cried uncontrollably for days ..." etc, and then have all of this never be relevant to the murder or to anything else in the story.
In general, we don't expect a story to describe everything that ever happened or might have happened in every character's life. We expect a story to have a point and a focus. I am suddenly reminded of a piece of writing advice I read many years ago: Don't tell everything that happened. Tell everything RELEVANT that happened.
You could, of course, write a good story about the grief parents suffer when a child dies. Or about the effect on society of high child mortality. But if that's not what the story is about, don't drag it in just because it exists.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42043. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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