First They Came for Toni Morrison, Then…

Thursday

I don’t know the degree to which attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved contributed to the GOP’s victories in Virginia Tuesday night. To the extent that education was a voting issue, I suspect the Democrats’ losses had more to do with people feeling unhappy about continuing Covid-caused chaos in the schools, for which they blamed the party in power. But Republican Glenn Youngkin was definitely employing racist dog whistles, which apparently never get old in American politics. The trick is to attack Black people while pretending to care about public safety or children’s education or some other noble cause.

Nevertheless, the idea that any literature that makes students “uncomfortable” is now red meat for aspiring rightwing politicians is disturbing. It leaves teachers and school administrators hunkering down, hoping to fly beneath the radar as Trumpists go looking for something to sink their teeth into.

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri, thankfully, offers us a little levity. Before the election, she imagined what school reading lists would look like if (as in fact has happened) Youngkin were elected governor. The column begins cheerfully:

Hello, everyone! We’re going to have a great year! Some minor, barely noticeable adjustments to the curriculum have taken place since Glenn Youngkin took office. This is a college-level class in which we’re supposed to be tackling challenging material. But you may remember the Glenn Youngkin commercial starring the mother who was trying to stop “Beloved” from being taught in her senior son’s AP English class on the grounds that he thought it was “disgusting and gross” and “gave up on it.” Anyway, he supported that kind of parental control over the curriculum, so we’ve had to tweak just a couple of things!

Now for some of her imagined tweaks:

Below please find our reading list new and improved reading list after being forced to bend to every concern from a parent:
—The Odyssey mutilation and abuse of alcohol, blood drinking
–Brideshead Revisited not sure what’s going on with that teddy bear; house named after something that should be saved for marriage
–The Handmaid’s Tale everything about book was fine except its classification as ‘dystopia’
–The Catcher in the Rye anti-Ronald Reagan somehow though we’re not sure how
–The Importance of Being Earnest includes a disturbing scene where a baby is abandoned in a train station in a handbag and the people in the play regard this as the subject of mirth
–Candide buttock cannibalism
–Don Quixote makes fun of somebody for attacking a wind-or-solar-based energy source
–Great Expectations convict presented sympathetically
–Les Miserables see above
–King Lear violence and it’s suggested that there are scenarios where parents actually do not know best
–The Sun Also Rises offensive to flat-Earthers
–Death of a Salesman features a White man to whom attention is not paid

The mother who led the attack on Beloved said that the book gave her son nightmares. Yes, literature is filled with nightmare-inducing scenes. Once scene Petri may have in mind is this one from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops:

Neither reply nor pity came from him,
but in one stride he clutched at my companions
and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies
to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Then he dismembered them and made his meal,
gaping and crunching like a mountain lion–
everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.
We cried aloud, lifting our hands to Zeus,
powerless, looking on at this appalled;
but Kyklops went on filling up his belly
with manflesh and great gulps of whey,
then lay down like a mast among his sheep.

I remember, as a high school student, reading this scene with horrified fascination. I also was riveted by Raskolnikov taking an axe to the old lady in Crime and Punishment. I gazed in horror as Milton’s Satan rapes his own daughter (Sin), who thereupon gives birth to Death, who then rapes his own mother, blasting her vagina and giving birth to hounds who live there, howling incessantly. And then there was Oedipus, who when he learns he has committed both patricide and incest blinds himself with his mother/wife’s brooches.

We’re trying to figure people out in our teenage years, and we get a sense of humanity’s darker side when we encounter such works. We read and we survive. High schoolers are tough that way. Our parents, however, although normally silent, swing into action when race and sex are involved.

If “student discomfort” is the new criteria about whether certain books should be taught, then we are indeed on a slippery slope. Petri makes this clear in her conclusion:

Nope, sorry, we aren’t reading anymore. A parent complained that the books on the reading list transported them to different times and places against their will and forced them to imagine the lives of people different than themselves. This is like kidnapping and probably also brainwashing, and we can’t possibly read any texts that do this.

We’re looking forward to engaging with complex, challenging texts that will teach us to read critically, write compellingly and look at the world with new eyes sitting here staring at the wall thinking about what it might have been like to read books all semester long!

When parents “protect” their kids against these books, they risk turning them into frightened adults who fear tough conversations and retreat into reactionary, fear-based politics. The nation is impoverished when this happens.

Further note: Lest you think I exaggerate about the passage from Paradise Lost, here is an excerpt. Sin is explaining to her father Satan what happened after he raped her and she gave birth to Death. First, here’s Milton’s description of her:

The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,               
But ended foul in many a scaly fold,
Voluminous and vast–a serpent armed
With mortal sting. About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

And now for her birthing story, which is a delivery table nightmare

“At last this odious offspring whom thou seest,
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way,
Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transformed: but he my inbred enemy
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death!
I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems,
Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,
Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,
And, in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry
Surround me, as thou saw’st–hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me; for, when they list, into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw
My bowels, their repast; then, bursting forth
Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits.

The endlessly proliferating hounds are a powerful expression of how sin endlessly engenders sin. I’ve never heard of parents objecting to English teachers teaching the episode.