I just picked up a book from the library called Sinners about a woman in 16th century Rome that hates her dad and wants to kill him.
But she’s a daughter in a rich family so she might as well be a Disney princess. There is also all the other tropes like this guy she can’t help being attracted to even though she doesn’t want to.
My biggest issue reading this book is I’m just like, “you’re rich, what’s your fucking problem. Boo hoo you hate your dad. You made it to adulthood in the 16th century in a comfortable existence.”
These stories are never about the peasants or people who work for these rich assholes. It’s always some wealthy woman that likes reading as if to be a stand in for the reader. It really goes to shoe what a bourgeois medium the novel is
Is all historical fiction like this or have I just picked up a generic example?
Peasants did not often live interesting lives unfortunately
Wrong imo
Your view based on and derived from (popular knowledge of the peasant is derived from works written by the bourgeois and aristocrats, not by peasants themselves) the same sorta classist views that lead many of the rich people writing todays shows to think “who cares about the workers, they dont live interesting lives”
Just some of the stories you could tell about peasants:
Coming of age sports story about sportball competitions with the local villages going back generations
Comedy story about the feud thats been splitting the village for generations
Action-drama story about a peasant rebellion
Queer stories, whether focussing on the persecution or relative lack of persecution of queer peasants. Gonna emphasise here that Brokeback Mountain could literally be about two small peasants doing herding work for the bigger peasants before/after their harvest
Antiwar story about being forced to serve in the lords army
Horror thriller story about the spread of the black death
And they lived in a fantastical world, for better or worse, where they did not know about “germs”, “gravity”, “microorganisms”, “gut microbiomes”. There is so much room for stories told from peasants perspectives in a xenofiction type way, talking about well understood phenomena in in a fantastic way rendering them alien to us
Peasants, like all humans throughout all of time have had interesting lives. They have all had rich oral traditions with libraries of mythology and legends and folklore about recent events—this well of creativity is the foundation all urban market societies have been copying and slopifying and putting their names on for millennia.
Also, obligatory note that there are still peasants around today, in the global south mostly, who live (tragically and horrifically in all too many cases) interesting lives—and often have much more interesting stories to tell than the jackasses from middle management or the assholes trading stocks, just as their ancestors have always had more interesting stories than their rulers