Editorial Content for Beheld

Increasingly, writers are turning to creative modes in order to address the silences, gaping voids and smaller concealments that plague our historical record. Historical fiction, in its unconstrained ability to imagine and fill these gaps, has emerged as a critical part of this endeavor.

In her new novel, BEHELD, author TaraShea Nesbit embarks on a project in this mode of historical repair. Using whispers left behind by the archive as impetus for creative speculation, she weaves together voices, both remembered and imagined, to tell the story of the first murder in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Drawn to “the omission of the lives of women in accounts from the seventeenth century,” Nesbit reframes the mythic story of the Puritans from the perspectives of two differently situated, but nevertheless strikingly similar, women: Alice Bradford, the second wife of Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford, and Eleanor Billington, a former indentured servant and wife of the town rabble-rouser. Through a skillful reimagining of these women's lives, Nesbit reconstitutes the mythological tale of America’s earliest settlers, creating an affecting story that exposes the hypocrisy and violence of this renowned settlement.

"Nesbit vividly reanimates voices lost in traditional historical accounts and shows us how these voices were questioned, critiqued, repudiated and ultimately silenced. But she doesn’t accept that they have been truly silenced."

The tale of the Puritans and their journey to find religious freedom in the new world is often taught to school children as an idealized story of conviction and integrity, but Nesbit renders a different Plymouth. BEHELD opens 10 years after the colonists have first settled in Massachusetts. The land is barren, the settlers suffer tremendous debt, and frictions are mounting between the Puritans and their indentured servants. When a new settler arrives to claim his plot of land, the tensions reach a fever pitch and a shocking murder is committed.

Although the ostensible core of the novel’s plot is this act of violence and the subsequent trial, Nesbit is less intent on building a compelling mystery than she is in exposing the Puritans’ cruelty masquerading as justice. The book is rife with scenes of grim violence justified by the Puritans as righteous and moral: Eleanor Billington is stripped naked and whipped through the town; a Native American’s bloody head is proudly displayed on a pole; a young woman is raped by her owner's brother and later killed when she is found to be with child.

Although Nesbit shows violence endemic throughout the colony, she is most interested in imagining the subjectivities of Plymouth’s women, who are subject to both institutional cruelty and the gendered hazards of everyday life. Protagonists Alice and Eleanor lead very different lives in structural terms; the former wields some degree of power based on her husband’s status, and the latter is the object of gleeful scorn by the townspeople. Yet both are hopelessly dependent upon, and violated by, their husbands. Alice is beaten when she oversteps, and Eleanor, though in a surprisingly steamy partnership with her husband, is ultimately betrayed by him and brutally punished for it. In stilted and formal language, Nesbit renders these female characters’ subjectivities as they endure, and occasionally transgress, the stringent bounds of their society.

In BEHELD, Nesbit vividly reanimates voices lost in traditional historical accounts and shows us how these voices were questioned, critiqued, repudiated and ultimately silenced. But she doesn’t accept that they have been truly silenced. They are there if you look for them, in the whispers and traces left by the historical archive, waiting for a little bit of imagination to do its work.