Sometimes well-meaning conversations about politically correct morality and literature written during the mid-20th century or before really frustrate me: What’s Wrong with To Kill a Mockingbird? (via Jezebel).
Of course a novel written 50 years ago is going to have some questionable racial…
I totally understand your frustration. The desire to provide a corrective for literature that modern audiences find to be “morally questionable” is ridiculous. I don’t think think it is all good-natured though because this sort of debate generally turns into debate about what should and shouldn’t be in the canon and thus taught, and then I start to get pretty scared about which works get included and which drop off.
As you know, literature is not created in a vacuum. Of course writers bring all their prejudices to the text, like you say. I just wanted to add that the main issue is that we expect the writers of so-called great literature to espouse our best and most progressive modern beliefs, but that isn’t possible because, as far as I know, Harper Lee did not own a time machine. Damn you, Harper Lee! How could you not know better? How dare you?
So, we blame writers when they fall short of being who we think we are right now. It’s pretty silly, and it might even be funny if this debate weren’t so tied to the question of what gets read. And, with the internet, people who don’t know shit about canonization or literature get to voice their opinions loudly about things they know very little about. That’s what worries me.
I ran into this problem of “OMG the author is saying something I don’t agree with and is thus not worth my time!” an awful lot when I was teaching 16th and 17th century drama. I’ve come to understand it as an inferior, uninformed approach to the text (undergrads do this a lot with Shakespeare, as you can imagine). Even though I knew the work I studied was beautiful, there was never any doubt in my mind about the staggering racism of Othello, the violent misogyny of The Taming of the Shrew or Hamlet, or the sickeningly pro-Tudor message of Richard III. But I don’t think Shakespeare is shit, and I don’t blame him for what he couldn’t know. My approach was always to study it in context, figure out what he’s trying to say, and do the fucking work before presuming to dismiss it. My fear is that people decide one thing about a piece of literature and then, in a fit of moral outrage, shut themselves off from it. Is Othello racist? Yes. Is it still worth studying? I think so. The prejudices in Othello are the same ones that fueled the heyday of slavery, world exploration, and colonization. But these days having an opinion about anything is more important than bothering to understand it in any detail.
On the critical side, there are people who write that Shakespeare had to have been an upper-class courtier, that there was no way the son of a glove-maker could have written these plays and sonnets. Think about that criticism contextually, and what the Academy is and who inhabits it and who is writing this sort of thing, and tell me that isn’t classist as hell. Wait, what? Critics don’t write in a vacuum, either? Well, hell! Now what?
There’s part of me that just wants to see this sort of debate as the modern equivalent of 16th/ 17th C pamphleteers and their little press wars. Still, I worry, you know?
Oh how I wish I could join in on this conversation (because I have found myself frustrated in the same way), but I just realized that I have diaper rash ointment under my fingernails (which says so much, truly).
