Naming Names:Reflections on Referentiality in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy

This reflective essay explores the importance of character names in historical fiction. In particular, it considers the effects of the referential charactonym – the kind of name used in a declared work of fiction, that refers to a ‘real’ person in the ‘real’ world. The essay is divided into two parts. The first examines the general challenge that the historical novel posits for the widespread assumption that personal names used in ‘life’ carry reference, while those used in ‘fiction’ bear meaning. I suggest that the referential charactonym, used in a certain type of historical novel, occupies an underexamined space between reference and meaning, where names insist upon veracity and also resist it. Concerns among readers (particularly historians) about the historical novel’s claim to ‘truth’ can be ultimately traced to this tension. In the second part of the essay I read my case study – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – and trace how the charactonyms Mantel uses shapes her reader’s response to the text, and historiographical consciousness. I argue that by taking the referential name and then fracturing, mutating and decentring it, Mantel makes her historical fiction a way of reflecting back on the fictiveness of history.