There’s been a lot of ink and pixels spilled in the past decade or more, discussing how The Message is ruining our entertainment, and complaining that it’s impossible to find a movie, TV show, or book that doesn’t shove the latest political correctness in one’s face.

It’s an annoying trend, for sure, but it’s not a new one by any means. Message fiction- as in, fiction that contains an obvious moral lesson, often to the detriment of its power to entertain- is probably older than fiction that doesn’t contain an obvious message. It make sense; stories are a powerful tool for spreading information, and wrapping a lesson in more or less entertaining fiction makes it more memorable.

Writers of the Victorian Era loved their message fiction. The printing press was already a few hundred years old by 1800, then advances in mechanization and ink production, plus reducing the taxes on printed material (in Britain), led to a mid-century explosion of novels and magazines, teeming with stories, advertisements, and thinly-disguised advertisements in story form. American culture followed suit as the telegraph and railroads increased the speed of information travel.

I’ve speculated, along with other people, that because this phenomenon occurred alongside an increasingly mobile population- physically, monetarily, and socially- message laden fiction was used as a socially acceptable way to teach the nouveau riche how to act as they rose through the ranks- and the nouveau riche, always feeling insecure in their new social position, bought these books by the thousands, driving a market that wouldn’t have existed without them.

And holy mackerel, did the messages in those books have staying power. I’ve opined briefly about the subject here and in other venues- I’m fascinated by Victorian Era culture and specifically, how a million or so people, living over a couple of generations, managed to convince the next few billion people that their way of life was the only way, and had always been the only way. There are so many social and cultural trends in the West that everyone takes for granted, from the roles of men, women, and children, to the way we set our dining room tables, that were popularized- or sometimes invented out of whole cloth- by upper middle class Westerners living between about 1800 and 1900.

It was a time of great dynamism and advancement in so many ways, and people of the time were no stupider than we are today- they could see the tension between old and new, and that tension drove a lot of trends in literature and art, and the later backlash against those trends.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing around 1850, was right in the middle of this dynamic era, and was keen to make his views known via fiction. The Scarlet Letter was a huge hit, much to the disappointment of English Lit classes for decades to come, and he followed it up with The House of the Seven Gables.

You could reasonably argue that House of the Seven Gables isn’t message fiction; it’s merely obnoxious. I’d accept that argument. You could also argue that I’m a philistine with a short attention span, which prevents me from appreciating the beauty of the work. That’s slightly less true.

The vocabulary and phrasing are lovely, but there’s not enough story to support such extensive flights of poetical fancy. The plot could be told in a novella, and Hawthorne expanded it out to a little over a hundred thousand words.

This was a trend of the time- authors of serials got paid per installment, so they had a strong incentive to spin the story out as long as possible- apropos of nothing, I’m currently reading Little Dorrit, by Dickens- and the trend was so strong at that point that even authors publishing self-contained works, like House of the Seven Gables, adopted a similar style. That alone doesn’t make it message fiction, of course, but it makes the message more obvious, because it gets repeated over and over to fill up space on the page.

So you have multiple chapters of Hepzibah, an old lady from old money, lamenting her current lack of money and her inability to do anything so plebeian as keep a shop- the most agreeable face of the aristocracy that America was trying to leave behind at the time. On the flip side is her cousin Judge Jaffery, who is the alternately smiling and threatening villain. He’s also a symbol of old money, gone wrong, and falls victim to the family curse because of his own greed.

Then you have Phoebe, who’s repeatedly described as a ‘ray of sunshine’ archetype- the kind of young and cheerful person who everybody loves and quickly makes herself indispensable. She’s pretty obviously a symbol of both American youth and energy, and gentle, domestic Victorian womanhood; she’s very active, but only in the service of her dead-weight relatives. Her eventual love interest, Holgrave, is the mysterious lodger who might have radical philosophical views, until he doesn’t- more on that later.

The characters are archetypical to the point of stereotypical, so I think House of the Seven Gables falls into the message fiction category partly because the characterization is so obvious and repeated so often, and- simultaneously- because almost all of the characters act out of character one time, for the sake of drama. The contradiction hammers home how stereotypical and symbolic they are; they’re not real people; they exist solely to represent a series of traits the author wants to put on the page, to be thrown aside when the plot demands it.

The most glaring example of this comes near the end. Hepzibah and Clifford are older people who hardly ever leave the house. For them to suddenly decide they’re going to take a train ride to nowhere is extremely out of character. Yes, they’d discovered a dead man in the house, but two elderly, passive, and house-bound people aren’t going to suddenly acquire the energy and drive to send them out of the house and to the train- which was a fairly new technology at the time and not intuitive to navigate. Then they decide to come back, again for no reason. Well, they probably returned because they had no money and no where to go, but that’s not stated, and in a book where everything is spelled out ad nauseum, the lack of detail is jarring.

A lesser example, and probably more noticeable because I was looking for it by that point, is Holgrave, who starts out as a free spirit and becomes domesticated in the last few chapters, as his love for Phoebe is revealed. Yet another example of how Victorian women were supposed to be a moral and domesticating influence on their wayward friends and relatives.

For such a long and poetic book, there’s not much subtlety in this thing. Which is kind of the definition of message fiction.

And now that I’ve taken you on this long rant about history, culture, and literary trends that are way older than most people realize, tell me your thoughts, on old message fiction, new message fiction, and how to make fiction-with-a-message, rather than writing a screed disguised as a story.