Historical fiction, intersectionality, and secrecy: Yael van der Wouden’s ‘The Safekeep’

There’s a moment, just one page, in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024)—winner of last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction—that gathers its narrative threads and holds them together. The queer, the racial, the Jewish threads.

Thin threads and thick, stronger and weaker threads.

One page where they intersect and where the reader can see a snapshot of the image the author has composed for her.

This page reveals that, at the heart of this novel about the Shoah—its lingering effects in continental Europe (the Netherlands in this case)—and about unspoken queer desire, is an attempt to raise readers’ sympathetic hackles, and to highlight a paradox in postwar Netherlands: though 1961 was avant-garde and offered the promise of a sexual revolution, much of society’s structure of feeling was archaic.¹

Nothing could stop the march into the future, that is, except for the insistence on looking to the past.

Intersectionality

In this snapshot, these threads overlap and intersect: the singular facts of identity that mean that these characters are ill treated in the novel never appear uniquely.

In the late 1980s, legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced her concept of ‘intersectionality’.² She stressed that it is imperative to realise that Black woman-ness, for instance, is an identity that people experience differently from just adding its constituent identities together.

In short, being Black and being a woman is different from being a Black woman. The latter leads to intersectional considerations.

In the decades since, the concept of intersectionality has been applied beyond legal frameworks, including in literary criticism. Through an intersectional approach, Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak have enlightened women’s ‘historical fiction’—writing set in a past that the author cannot have lived or known personally.

They write that there are two chief benefits to their approach:

[T]he writing of historical fiction empowers women authors, functioning as a space for them to resist the patriarchal archive and utilise these her-stories to confront feminist concerns in the present. Similarly, it provokes readers to rethink official histories by acknowledging women who have been, in the words of Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘hiding in plain sight’[.]³

Whilst I might contest the way Barbour and Kardak express these ideas, I find immense value in the idea that historical fiction that highlights intersecting identities and inequalities in the past revises accepted narratives of the past and confronts today’s problems.

I think that van der Wouden’s novel, The Safekeep, manages to do just that.

The Safekeep

After a swim at a nearby lake, four characters repair to a local inn to avoid a storm.

The protagonist, Isabel, is there, doubting her own morality. That’s because she has secretly taken a woman lover, Eva, whom she had initially hated. ‘She knew what that made her,’ Isabel thinks, ‘what kind of person that meant she was. She ran hot with it now, indignant and embarrassed.’⁴

What’s more, Isabel had no conscious sense of her queer desires before Eva.

Eva, meanwhile, is also at the table. She is pretending to be in a heterosexual relationship with Louis, Isabel and Hendrik’s brother. Only Isabel (of course) knows that particular secret.

And, Eva—suitably named after the woman who brought all humanity into sin—is also on a secret mission. She has engineered visiting Isabel at her home—though she hasn’t engineered their romantic relationship—so that she can attain restitution. This is because Isabel lives in the home once owned by Eva’s parents, before the war—not that Isabel knows.

Eva’s family had to give up the house because, being Jewish, they were at risk of persecution during the Second World War. Eva’s father died at one of the camps. Her mother died soon after the war.

But no one knows of Eva’s Jewish identity. When asked, ‘”Where’s your family nowadays, Eva?”‘, she can only reply, ‘”Nowhere”‘ (p. 117). What seems repeatedly dismissive is euphemistic and factual.

Two men also sit at the table. Hendrik, Isabel’s brother, sits there listening to his boyfriend, Sebastian, tell the story of his upbringing. Hendrik keeps his queer secret only from the public, so the reader can witness how privatised identity and knowledge is held in tension in a public space.

However, that tension is redoubled for Sebastian, for whom an intersectional identity is only revealed to the reader on this and the previous page. That, as a son of a French mother and Algerian father, he ‘was the brown child [his family] desperately tried to pass off as white’ (p. 117).

Sebastian’s blackness only emerges as a factor in the novel because the reader has just seen why it matters: he was refused service at the bar unless he paid for the drinks in advance.

The reader thinks: because he’s gay? But not: because he’s Black. And then the reader thinks: imagine if these bigots also realised he were gay. How would they treat him then?

This is the result of the author’s gathering these narrative threads and these characters all together in one place, on one page.

Keeping it secret

Aside from the collision of these identities—the lesbian-Jew-pretending-to-be straight; the queer-Black man hiding his queerness—is a repeated motif of secrecy.

Some of these secrets are held back from one character, or sibling, to another. Some are held back from the anonymous public. But some are also held back from the reader: Sebastian’s blackness, Eva’s Jewishness.

If I had more space, I would be interested in thinking about whether our own readerly ignorance also leads to bigotry. Or whether the author keeping character secrets from the reader (however well or poorly trailed they are) heightens or lowers readerly sensitivity to intersectional inequalities.

Or, in other words, are we more or less sympathetic to characters’ unique experience of the world if we are denied their full identity and subjectivity?

---

1. I take the idea of the ‘archaic avant-garde’ from Terry Eagleton. Eagleton thought that certain forward-looking cultural moments lead to revolution by virtue of turning to the past for source material. See Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (Verso, 1995).
   
   I adopt the idea of a ‘structure of feeling’ from cultural materialist, Raymond Williams. For Williams, this term designates the way a whole nation or group of people with shared interests can, without realising, feel the same way about things even without sharing a specific experience. See this blog post from the Raymond Williams society for more information. ↩︎
2. Elsewhere on my blog, I’ve briefly touched on this idea. ↩︎
3. Catherine Barbour and Karunika Kardak, ‘New Directions in Contemporary Women’s Historical Fiction’, in Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe, ed. Barbour and Kardak (Cham: Springer), pp. 1–18 (p. 7). ↩︎
4. Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024), p. 117. ↩︎