Dealing with ugliness
In the foreword to Rereadings, a collection she edited, Anne Fadiman writes of reading C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy to her young son, and of her shock at seeing things she hadn't noticed when loving the book as a child. She was troubled enough to try to discuss this with her son (e.g., "'Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy isn't really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?'"), although, as Fadiman says, "He didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate, or explicate the book." He was far more interested in the plot. He wanted to find out what happened to the main characters.
I suspect most readers have had these encounters with celebrated literature from the past, either recommended by others or fondly remembered by ourselves: the shock of finding sentiments and prejudices that stick in our craws. I grew up reading books that often treated girls and women as foreign creatures, not quite human. Whenever I encountered an offending statement, it would jerk me out of the book for a moment, and then I would shrug and think, "That's what they believed then, but we know better now," and go on to get whatever I could from the book. Which was often quite a lot. When I was a girl, the Second Wave of feminism was in full swing, in plain sight, in your face, and so the culture around me affirmed what I knew inside me: of course I was a person, no less real and valuable than a boy. And so I wasn't much shaken by any bigotry to the contrary in my literature.*
It's difficult, however, to know whether to recommend books with such anachronistic views in them, especially in the cases where we ourselves are not members of the group that's being disparaged. People have struggled with the depiction of American Indians in the Little House books, for example. Colleen Mondor discussed some of these issues when she blogged about reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek. I look at Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Alice Adams, the latter a recipient of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize. Both are delightful and wonderfully written books in many ways--except that much of what Tarkington writes about his African-American characters is cringe-inducing. Therefore, should we forget these books? Does the bad overshadow everything good in them? Or is it better to read such books with today's children and discuss history, and the books' flaws and misconceptions forthrightly? And who decides?
I don't know. I've wanted to blog about this issue for a long time, but since I obviously have a bunch of questions and no answers, I hesitated. Now I've decided I might as well put the questions out there, for what it's worth.
One thing I am cautious about is getting on too high a horse about any of this: "We were so ignorant in the past, but we're so enlightened now." I believe and hope we are more enlightened, but I always wonder what in today's literature will make our children and our grandchildren cringe when they read it decades from now.
*Which isn't to say that I thought chauvinism was completely dead, completely a relic of the past. But overall, there was a sense that the tide had turned, that the full empowerment of women was, if not a present reality, inevitable in the not-so-distant future. These days, I'm not so sure. But that's another story.
I suspect most readers have had these encounters with celebrated literature from the past, either recommended by others or fondly remembered by ourselves: the shock of finding sentiments and prejudices that stick in our craws. I grew up reading books that often treated girls and women as foreign creatures, not quite human. Whenever I encountered an offending statement, it would jerk me out of the book for a moment, and then I would shrug and think, "That's what they believed then, but we know better now," and go on to get whatever I could from the book. Which was often quite a lot. When I was a girl, the Second Wave of feminism was in full swing, in plain sight, in your face, and so the culture around me affirmed what I knew inside me: of course I was a person, no less real and valuable than a boy. And so I wasn't much shaken by any bigotry to the contrary in my literature.*
It's difficult, however, to know whether to recommend books with such anachronistic views in them, especially in the cases where we ourselves are not members of the group that's being disparaged. People have struggled with the depiction of American Indians in the Little House books, for example. Colleen Mondor discussed some of these issues when she blogged about reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek. I look at Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Alice Adams, the latter a recipient of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize. Both are delightful and wonderfully written books in many ways--except that much of what Tarkington writes about his African-American characters is cringe-inducing. Therefore, should we forget these books? Does the bad overshadow everything good in them? Or is it better to read such books with today's children and discuss history, and the books' flaws and misconceptions forthrightly? And who decides?
I don't know. I've wanted to blog about this issue for a long time, but since I obviously have a bunch of questions and no answers, I hesitated. Now I've decided I might as well put the questions out there, for what it's worth.
One thing I am cautious about is getting on too high a horse about any of this: "We were so ignorant in the past, but we're so enlightened now." I believe and hope we are more enlightened, but I always wonder what in today's literature will make our children and our grandchildren cringe when they read it decades from now.
*Which isn't to say that I thought chauvinism was completely dead, completely a relic of the past. But overall, there was a sense that the tide had turned, that the full empowerment of women was, if not a present reality, inevitable in the not-so-distant future. These days, I'm not so sure. But that's another story.
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