Fahrenheit 451 in Overdue Podcast

Oct 16, 2021 Marcella rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2021-100-book-challenge, fiction, scifi-specfic

Have you ever been trying to appreciate a classic work of literature when you are interrupted by an aspect you just can't stomach (usually sexism or racism)? This is the problem I had with Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury hates women. The main female character, the protagonist's wife, is so stupid she cares only about acquiring more television and can't explain why she tries to kill herself every two weeks, and her female friends are just as vapid. One of them commits the "sin" of opting for Caesarean s Have you ever been trying to appreciate a classic work of literature when you are interrupted by an aspect you just can't stomach (usually sexism or racism)? This is the problem I had with Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury hates women. The main female character, the protagonist's wife, is so stupid she cares only about acquiring more television and can't explain why she tries to kill herself every two weeks, and her female friends are just as vapid. One of them commits the "sin" of opting for Caesarean sections instead of childbirth, which naturally prevents her from forming any attachment to her children, and another casually has "20 abortions." (Any liberation from natural procreation and childbirth is a sign of a midcentury male author's dystopia, whereas women authors' dystopias are made of the chaining of women to the same biological processes.)

In addition, despite Bradbury's lip service of cherishing independent thought and difference of opinion as idealized by the book form, he contradicts himself by disliking the objections "minorities" raise to, presumably, harmful representation. My suspicion at his mention of ideas like this in the novel is confirmed with the endnotes in which he equates a white person's dislike of a positive representation of a black person to a black person's dislike of a negative representation, failing to see the inherent difference. He hates it when womenfolk raise a stink about not being included in stories. If he weren't dead he'd be the spokesman of "cancel culture has gone too far" and "why are women and people of color allowed to be in my space stories." He cherishes books but really only certain books, and doesn't leave much room for the criticism of books despite his defense of independent thought.

But I try to dial myself back to 1953, the Cold War, the hydrogen bomb, fascism, McCarthyism, and the world in which this story was written, and try not to judge the book through 2021's eyes. (Bradbury was scared of being able to hear a radio through miniature earplugs. He was scared that a person could lie in bed and listen to music and people broadcasting. My god, he would have hated AirPods and podcasts.) When I do that, the book improves. The writing is beautiful, the sensation of flame and the natural world evocative, the monstrous invention of the eight-legged Mechanical Hound authentically scary. Some critics say this book is timeless, but I disagree; it is of its era. The few ideas that remain timeless are those of wanting to protect the power of critical thinking and not give in to a numbing life of mindless pleasure. We still need to watch out for that, but the milieu of the story itself is a period piece. ...more

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