Every genre has its own little ticks. Some are beloved tropes, but others have become cliche and tired, dragging down otherwise promising works.
In historical fiction, one of the most common cliches is the overly-modern protagonist. Is your protagonist oddly enlightened for the time period in which he or she lives? You may have an overly-modern protagonist. Of course if you are writing about a real person and these views are verifiable in the historical record that is one thing, but many entirely fictional characters in historical fiction seem to have very 20th century viewpoints.
It is understandable, of course. As an author you want readers to be able to connect with your main character, and that can be difficult if your main character is joyfully buying slaves, or treating the women in his family as chattel. Unfortunately, if your protagonist is TOO modern you can take it from connecting with the reader to simply pulling the reader out of your story.
There are many opportunities to make your main character too modern, and one in particular seems to be going around over the past few years: the noble mother who insists on breastfeeding her own children. So listen, for much of European history there was these things called wet nurses, and if you were nobility, they were probably who fed (and often cared for) your infant child. In the past few years, however, many of the women between the pages of historical novels have insisted on nursing their own children, despite cultural mores and often the objections of their husbands or other members of their family.
Possibly due to the prominence of attachment parenting, breastfeeding rates have been rising in the U.S. in the past few years, so it might not seem surprising that this is something that authors have chosen to connect with female readers. This is a problematic trait to choose, however. It seems that many authors are using a female character’s insistence on breastfeeding when she would be expected to use a wet nurse as shorthand to tell readers that this is a woman who is admirable, who cares for her family and is a generally good person. In one novel I read recently, readers can compare the first and second wives of the main character by the way they respond to the birth of their children. The first wife, who would eventually be put aside, is perfectly happy to hand her children over to a wet nurse, although she can’t seem to control her household in the least. This man’s second, much more organized and proficient wife dotes on her children and insists on breastfeeding them herself.
You guys, this is sloppy characterization. She breastfeeds/doesn’t, so she is good/deficient. More than that, it is bad for business. Yes, breastfeeding rates are on the rise, but for many women this is an increasingly charged issue. Some women who cannot breastfeed or choose not to feel shamed by breastfeeding advocates. If you are trying to use breastfeeding to tell the reader whether or not a character is a worthwhile woman and human being, you may actually be distancing her from some readers. Plus, those of us who have read 30 novels using the same tack are simply going to roll our eyes and, possibly, move on to the next book.
