Deconstructing DTfG

At its heart, Dicing Time for Gladness is about the conflict between the Old World – embodied in such characters as Josiah Blumfield (Constance's father) and City Councilman Hautious Sugging – and the New World – represented primarily by Victoria da Vinci and secondarily by intrepid, crusading muckraker/reformer/social activist Margaret Brady-Clemens (modeled on such actual historical figures as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens).

The Old World, stubbornly entrenched and resistant to change, is confronted by the brave, optimistic vision of the future offered by the New World. (This mirrors the struggle related to the fading aristocratic order and the emerging democratic order in Europe around the same time, which is why I take them to France in the second book, Crass Casualty.) I also wanted to explore two alternative avenues manifested within that outlook: Victoria's almost ludicrously sunny progressivism vs. the Nietzschean Will-to-Power espoused by the her villainous arch-rival Greta Greaves, which also foreshadows Ayn Rand and the Cold War doctrine of peace through strength. Both Greta and Victoria personally reject Church-based morality (although Greta is more than eager to exploit it when it suits her agenda). Victoria, however, follows a philosophical path that uses a utopianist blend of logic and metaphysics as the basis for just ethical behavior, while Greta pursues a course of rational self-interest which echoes Machiavelli.

Civilization tends to advance not in a linear way but rather through a series of painful, paroxysmal lurches – frequently sideways or even backwards. Constance, in this context, embodies the era, drawn with a conflicted mixture of enthusiasm and hesitation out of the Old World and into the New, only to find that the latter is not ready for people like Victoria and herself.

On an even larger scale, I wanted to capture the generational zeitgeist; post-Civil War, pre-World War I America was not unlike a troubled teenager getting ready to move out for the first time, trying to decide what to do with her life, excited but scared, not sure whether to cling to the familiar and comforting or boldly venture into the great uncharted unknown.

Ultimately, the destruction of the New Stratford Proscenium Theatre symbolizes the violence with which new ideas are often rejected.

A number of historians have expressed variations on the opinion that the Civil War was really the final convulsion of the American Revolution: the colonists shook off the bonds of the British Empire but never resolved the one question at the core of their own greatest internal division. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry were all part of a long-simmering tension, an uneasy interlude between the first peace (the Treaty of Paris) and the real conclusion of the conflict (at Appomattox Court House). That's a spectacular oversimplification of an extremely complex issue, of course – and many would argue vehemently and not without justification that the questions of state sovereignty and civil rights are still very much unsettled – but I do see Lee's surrender as the end of American adolescence in an important sense. So here we are, a nation awkwardly stumbling into quasi-adulthood in a world newly reshaped by the Industrial Revolution. Where do we go from here?