After writing blog entries mentioning Anne of Green Gables last week and wondering why I felt more interested in reading novels than composing my own stories earlier this month, I began to see those two topics as related. A few years ago, I bought a Kindle collection of the Anne series, which included some later stories that the author wrote after World War I.
I had enough familiarity with the awful history of that time period to feel that maybe I should leave well enough alone and not even glance at the bonus books. Of course, leaving books unread is easier said than done—so I looked at them, only to find my first instinct was correct. Many people at that time still had notions of war as glorious and manly. Women often shamed young men into enlisting by giving them white feathers for cowardice, apparently without qualms about sending friends to die in a trench or on a foreign beach.
The 1920s began with a flu pandemic and got worse, with horrendous racism, lynching, eugenics, political corruption, organized crime, gang violence, and gross social inequality. It was far beyond anything happening today, and I don’t believe we are doomed to repeat that generation’s fate of a Great Depression followed by another world war.
Still, we are certainly not immune from the sort of cultural angst that seeped into most writing of the 1920s, and I wonder if that may have something to do with why I haven’t been as interested in creative writing this year. Better to leave stories unwritten, perhaps, than to let dark themes seep into them.
