Elsie MacGill - Forgotten Historical Figure in need of a Netflix miniseries

You may have heard of the Bechdel Test. Essentially, if a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation that doesn't mention a man, it passes the test. Sounds simple enough, but the fact that such a test is necessary gives you a pretty good indication that not many works pass it. So let's talk about Elsie MacGill.

Being a pioneer of aircraft design is a pretty good claim to fame. Being the first female aircraft designer on the planet is even better. Elsie's mother was a prominent justice and suffragette in British Columbia, who somehow found time to homeschool her daughter when the prestigious boys' schools wouldn't take her. Her troubles in the male-dominated world of education didn't stop there; she was asked to leave the University of British Columbia after just one term, and when she was finally admitted to study engineering at the University of Toronto she promptly contracted polio.

The "Queen of the Hurricanes" even had a comic book written about her

You probably know where this is going. Elsie drop-kicked polio, refused to be confined to a wheelchair, and graduated as an electrical engineer. She then went on to get her master's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1929-- the first woman to ever do so. Around the time the Second World War broke out, she had earned her doctorate from MIT, served as the chair of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and was at the forefront of global aviation design. She risked life and limb personally accompanying every pilot on test flights, and by the time the war ended you'd think she would have been ready for some peace and quiet-- but no. Elsie served in key roles in both the fledgling United Nations and the International Civil Aviation Organization, took up her mother's torch of women's rights, and made a name for herself around the world.

Reasons why her story would make a great Netflix miniseries:

1. The story of her childhood

I see this as two stories, separated in time but running in parallel to each other. While TV Tropes has a listing which details how strong female characters in fiction often owe their success to a man, here is a real-life example of a pioneering woman who draws her success from another pioneering woman-- her own mother. To watch Helen MacGill and Elsie MacGill fight the patriarchal system and become wildly successful professionals, separated by only a few decades, would certainly make for compelling viewing.

2. The alternative take on the Second World War

We're accustomed to seeing media about the Second World War; the D-Day landings, the trenches, the siege of Stalingrad. Any glimpses we're shown of the home front are usually of the girl who was left behind, but by telling Elsie MacGill's story we can see into the lives of those brilliant individuals who made victory possible. Think The Imitation Game and the significance of Alan Turing's wartime contributions.


And hey, if Netflix isn't the right fit, there's always the CBC #cancon

Hortense de Beauharnais - Forgotten Historical Figure in need of a Netflix miniseries

You may remember that Napoleon had a wife named Josephine, whom he loved very much but ultimately had to divorce because she couldn't bear him any heirs. What many people don't realise is that Josephine already had children when she became Empress; her first husband, Alexandre, had been guillotined during the French Revolution by Robespierre, long before Napoleon came to power.

The happy couple

So when Josephine married Napoleon, the children from her first marriage to Alexandre became Napoleon's stepchildren. Not being descended from him, they couldn't inherit his empire, which is why he was forced to divorce Josephine when she couldn't provide a Bonaparte heir. But Josephine de Beauharnais' children were dear to Napoleon nonetheless, and he ensured that they married into the Bonaparte line so that their children would be his blood relatives. Perhaps the most overlooked figure in the entire Bonaparte extended clan is Hortense de Beauharnais, Josephine's only daughter.

Hortense

Hortense was 9 years old when her father was executed, and two years later her mother married a general by the name of Napoleon. Hortense was raised in Napoleon's household, and married Napoleon's younger brother Louis (no one had any problem with this at the time, since the two had no blood connection, though it gave her the odd distinction of simultaneously being Napoleon's stepdaughter and sister-in-law.) 

Sometime after becoming Emperor, Napoleon named his brother King Louis of Holland, making Hortense a Queen in her own right.

Reasons why her story would make a great Netflix miniseries:

1. The story of her childhood

Hortense had a childhood marred by extreme loss in the form of her father's execution during the Reign of Terror, but then was raised by the most powerful general in France, who created a coup d'etat in 1799, became Consul of France not long before Hortense married his brother in 1801, and declared himself Emperor just three years thereafter.

2. The intrigues of the courts of Bonapartist Europe

Two years after Napoleon became Emperor of the French, Hortense became Queen of Holland. Holland at the time was a republic, but Napoleon wanted to consolidate his rule in the Low Countries. The idea was that Louis would be a French lord of Dutch subjects, but instead Louis fully embraced the local culture. He changed his name to the Dutch Lodewijk, learned the language, and renounced French citizenship in favour of Dutch. During this time, Hortense herself lived largely in France, though the two found enough time together to have three sons, despite modern speculation that Louis was a closeted gay man. Hortense also used her time apart from her husband for having an affair with the dashing general Charles Joseph de Flahaut. Their affair produced one son, Charles de Morny, who was the family's Jon Snow, if Jon Snow had become a successful statesman and capitalist.

When Napoleon was invading Russia, he withdrew all of his forces from Holland, leaving his brother's territory undefended. The British landed shortly thereafter, and a force had to be deployed from France to repel the invasion. Though Louis had been popular in Holland, Napoleon felt that he pandered too much to Dutch interests and in the aftermath of the would-be British invasion, expressed doubt in Louis' ability to protect Holland as a pretext to have Louis abdicate.

Meanwhile, Hortense's brother Eugene de Beauharnais was one of her stepfather's favourite military commanders, fighting in the Middle East and eventually ruling Italy as Viceroy. There were members of the extended Bonaparte family all over Europe, each with their own stories weaving in and out of Hortense's life between the courts of France and Holland.

3. The cast of characters

The classic love story of Napoleon and Josephine. Napoleon's brothers Joseph and Louis, whom he named King of Spain and King of Holland, respectively. Hortense's brother Eugene, conquering in Egypt and ruling Italy. The general de Flahaut. Jean Bernadotte, the man who invaded Holland and ousted Louis at Napoleon's command-- who also later became King of Sweden and King of Norway. And Hortense de Beauharnais, at the centre of it all. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell around her.

As mentioned earlier, Hortense had children of her own, all but one of them Bonapartes through Louis. She wasn't only married to a king; she birthed two sovereigns herself. When Louis abdicated, he did so in favour of his son, who briefly became the second Bonaparte King of Holland as King Louis II, making Hortense the Queen Mother. Holland was soon after incorporated into France, and the kingdom abolished-- though many years later, after the Empire had fallen and a new Dutch kingdom established, Louis I was invited by the king to travel the country in secret as a private citizen. Reportedly, word got out and there were throngs of people cheering for him wherever he went, nostalgic for the old days, and it gladdened the old man's heart.

But Hortense had another son, who also became a sovereign, though not for many decades. After the death of Napoleon and his elder brother Joseph, various Bonapartists insisted that Louis was the rightful heir to the Empire. Of course, the Empire was long since gone and Louis had always been more interested in Holland than France anyway. Hortense's younger son, however, was of a different breed; unlike his father and elder brother, he had never sat a throne. But that was all to change in 1852, on the fiftieth anniversary of his step-grandfather's initial coronation as Emperor of the French: he became Napoleon III, and created the Second French Empire.

Hortense de Beauharnais lived an interesting life in interesting times. All of Europe was in a state of upheaval, experiencing social and political changes that went unrivalled in scope until the First World War. Her life was marked by loss, perseverance, and a constant struggle to define herself in a world dominated not just by men, but by Bonaparte men.




Note: Josephine's cousin, Aimée du Buc de Rivéry could be the subject of her own Netflix miniseries as well. She may or may not have been kidnapped by pirates and become a Sultaness.

Honoré Jaxon - Forgotten Historical Figure in need of a Netflix miniseries

Once upon a time, there was a place called Saskatchewan:

It looks like this.

The man who would later become Honoré Jaxon was born William Henry Jackson in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. When he was 20 he moved to the frontier to make a living, and it was in the town of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan that he first encountered the Métis people.

Unlike his own white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background, the Métis were of mixed white and native blood, spoke predominantly French, and were mostly Catholic. Canada was still dealing with some of the fallout from the 1870 Red River Rebellion, which had been started by Louis Riel and his fellow Métis allies in response to perceived injustices by the Anglophone-dominated government. After the rebellion was quashed, Riel had been forced to flee to America, where he was twice elected to the Canadian federal government by the people of Manitoba but was never allowed to take his seat for fear of being arrested.

Jackson sympathised with the struggles of the "half-caste" Métis under English rule, and when their leader came out of exile in America in 1884, Jackson joined with Louis Riel to fight the Canadians. On the eve of Riel's declaration of provisional government in Saskatchewan, William Henry Jackson was baptised into the Catholic faith under the new name of Honoré Jaxon, thus going native before T.E. Lawrence and Avatar made it cool. 

The North-West Rebellion was the closest thing Canada ever came to a civil war, but it was eventually destroyed by government forces. Riel was tried and hung, and Jaxon was sent to an insane asylum. Once there, he promptly escaped and fled to America, where he became active in the labour and socialist movements, and joined major protests in demand of an eight-hour workday. 

Jaxon eventually moved to New York City where he spent decades collecting the largest library of Métis history ever assembled, with a view to creating a museum of the Métis people. He was evicted from his apartment in 1951 however, and the city destroyed his entire collection, effectively erasing much of this history that was not recorded anywhere else. Jaxon died soon after.

Reasons why his story would make a great Netflix miniseries:

1. The story arc

From a city boy trying to make his way on the frontier, to changing his religion and culture to fight for a cause against overwhelming odds, to being on the forefront of the American labour rights movement and marching in Coxey's Army, to his eventual aspirations of building a museum dedicated to his adoptive people. Here is a man who shows us many different faces, but never seems to be at peace.

2. The colourful characters

If Louis Riel and Jaxon himself aren't colourful enough, there's an entire cast to deal with. Riel's lead commander Gabriel Dumont was a fiercely bearded wilderness crackshot, who fled to America to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show after the rebellion was defeated. Riel's enemies included the legendary Mountie Sam Steele and Charles Dickens' son Francis.

3. The "stranger-in-a-strange-land" trope

It's an apostolic narrative about Louis Riel told through the eyes of his greatest devotee, and since Jaxon begins the story as an outsider it gives plenty of opportunity for plot points to be explained to the audience as they are being explained to Jaxon. 

Since Jaxon's story is ultimately tragic and a little depressing, it can be hard to see it in terms of an ongoing series. So maybe we can look to the words of Ron Howard at the end of Arrested Development Season 3: "I don't see it as a series... maybe a movie."

Dembei - Forgotten Historical Figure in need of a Netflix miniseries

For our first-ever post, let's talk about Dembei. The only source available on the man seems to be a rare out-of-print book by Benson Bobrick, which is the basis for this Wikipedia article. Dembei was a Japanese merchant who was carrying goods by ship when he ran into a storm. The ship was wrecked, and he ended up stranded on the shores of Kamchatka, arguably one of the most remote and inhospitable regions on earth.

Cossack, pirate and explorer.

Dembei was rescued by Vladimir Atlasov (pictured), a cossack and sometime pirate who also happened to be one of the first Russian explorers to Siberia and the Far East at a time when the Empire knew almost nothing about those places. Dembei was brought to St Petersburg (then the Russian capital) against his will; he was presented to Emperor Peter the Great, and it was through him that the Emperor and his court learned of Japan. He ended up spending the rest of his life in St Petersburg.

Reasons why his story would make a great Netflix miniseries:

1. The survival story

Everyone likes a good story of shipwrecked survival. Just look at Robinson Crusoe or the more recent Castaway and Life of Pi. When someone is stranded on their own and forced to survive against the odds, they can be the only person on the screen and we'll still eat it up. Not to mention the subsequent journey through Siberia Dembei must take with Atlasov, plundering along the way.

2. The intrigues in Peter the Great's imperial court

If the cossack explorer Atlasov weren't interesting and badass enough on his own, there's an entire imperial court to deal with once we arrive in St Petersburg. Peter the Great was the man who inherited the Tsardom of Russia and, through a combination of military victories and diplomacy, turned it into the full-fledged Russian Empire.

Under Peter's rule, Russia transformed from a somewhat remote  and insular Eurasian state into a new European power with its capital in St Petersburg, a city named for him and built from scratch under his command.

Peter was busy modernizing his country, but there were competing interests between the various Western advisors-- as well as between his own people. When the head of the Russian Orthodox Church died, he refused to name a successor. Instead, he assembled a synod of ten clergymen to run the church, all jockeying for position and influence, while at the same time making enemies within the church by banning all men under 50 from joining a monastery.

Speaking of making enemies, Peter also reformed the aristocracy in the early 1700s; before then, nobility had existed on a hereditary basis (similar to how they have traditionally existed in Britain) but Peter decided that titles should be based on service to the Emperor rather than noble birth. This cannot have been popular among the members of his imperial court, many of whom would have been competing with his Western advisors, merchants, clergy, and military figures for influence.

Lastly, during the first ten years of the 1700s Russia fought against the Swedish Empire in the Great Northern War, the defining moment in much of Russian and Swedish history, while also engaging in armed struggles against the Turks and being forced to quash rebellions within their own ranks, notably the Bulavin cossack rebellion and the infamous alliance of Ivan Mazepa's cossacks with Sweden. There is certainly no shortage of suspense and intrigue in Peter the Great's Russia to be mined for television.



3. The "stranger-in-a-strange-land" trope

Dembei, as our protagonist, stands in for us; he is as much a stranger to 18th-century Russia as we are, and key plot points can be directly explained onscreen to him as a proxy way of directly explaining them to the viewers. His surprises will be our surprises, his victories our victories, his losses our losses, and all because he is in a land as strange to us as it is to him.

We don't know how long Dembei lived, and as a matter of fact we know very little about his life. But Dembei would make a great protagonist for a Netflix miniseries, if for no other reason than to give us a window into this most fascinating time in history.