A Meta-Historical Study of Character Reconstruction in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

Abstract

Drawing on Hayden White’s meta-historical theory, this thesis examines the logic of character reconstruction in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. While existing scholarship on the novel has fruitfully explored Cromwell’s image, marginal figures, and narrative technique, it has tended to treat characters either as reflections of the archival record or as autonomous literary creations, leaving under-examined the meta-historical principles that govern Mantel’s construction of character at the intersection of fact and imagination. This thesis addresses that gap by deploying White’s tripartite framework of actuality, possibility, and reality. Actuality refers to the anchoring of characters in verifiable historical persons, events, and contexts; possibility designates the imaginative filling of archival silences with plausible experiences and motives; reality denotes the achieved effect of lived emotional truth, produced through sensory immersion and the restricted narrative perspective that positions the reader as a virtual witness within Cromwell’s consciousness. The thesis argues that Mantel’s character construction proceeds through an integration of these three modes, and that this integration embodies a meta-historical consciousness in which historical truth is understood as a constructive interplay rather than a passive inheritance from the archive. The study aims to move beyond the fact-versus-fiction binary and to offer a more precise account of how contemporary historical fiction generates its distinctive kind of truth.