Monday
I recently came across an article in The Week about “27 of America’s most unexpectedly banned books.” “Unexpectedly” is a particularly apt adverb since, for many of the books, one would be hard-pressed to anticipate the objections.
That being said, however, I think many works of quality challenge readers to think outside of conventional boundaries—which means that there are few works of literature that won’t offend someone somewhere.
The article looks at censorship figures of the 2023-24 year. Apparently in the first half of that year, banning campaigns
eclipsed the entirety of the previous school year, according to the latest from the American Library Association. In the first six months of this school year, 4,349 books were banned, leading to more bans in fall 2023 than in the whole 2022-2023 school year.
I’ve written in the past about the banning of Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” so won’t touch on those. Here are the other books mentioned in the article that caught me by surprise:
–Edgar Rice Burroughs’sTarzan was banned in 1961 because there was “no evidence that Tarzan and Jane had married before they started cohabiting in the treetops.”
–the article believes that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was banned because (as a 1969 column in Ladies Home Journal opined), the book was “psychologically damaging for 3- and 4-year-olds.” Actually, I think certain people were unwilling to acknowledge child anger. The genius of Sendak’s book, I believe, is that it provides kids a healthy outlet for their tumultuous feelings—and also gives them a way to move past those feelings and reconcile with their parents.
–The banning of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, on the other hand, is just weird. According to The Week, it was deemed by a parents group in Kansas to be the work of the devil because it has two talking animals, with the result that it was subsequently barred from classrooms. The group’s central complaint was that “humans are the highest level of God’s creation, as shown by the fact we’re ‘the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.’”
But if one is going to ban books with animals that can talk with humans (or spell like humans), there go the Freddy the Pig books, the Narnia Books, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the Paddington books, Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass books, and on and on and on.
–Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach was “banned in Wisconsin in 1999 because of concerns the spider licking its lips could be interpreted as sexual.”
–Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was “banned from shelves because its titular character is, well, a spy. Some schools blocked Louise Fitzhugh’s book from shelves when it came out in the 1960s because of concerns that the 11-year-old child’s penchant for peeping on her neighbors, jotting down her brutally honest observations, and being generally disagreeable could negatively influence kids by setting a bad example.”
I wonder, however, if it is less Harriet’s disagreeable nature that offended censors and more her (possible) lesbian leanings. Perhaps adult readers sensed this. Queer teens certainly did, which helps explain why they were drawn to Harriet.
–And here’s a banned book that, in my recently released Better Living through Literature, I predicted could happen–only to discover that it already has happened. In 1996 schools in Merrimack, New Hampshire pulled Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, determining that its “jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance” violated the district’s ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction.’” As I write in my book,
Although Shakespeare generally flies under the radar of conservative parents (with the exception of a Florida school district that banned Romeo and Juliet), that’s in part because many teachers fail to unleash his full potential to challenge various assumptions. If they did, the Bard might well join Morrison on banned book lists.
Imagine Twelfth Night: or What You Will (1601-02) being taught in such a way as to foreground its strong gender identity themes, which fascinate young people struggling to make sense of who they are. In the comedy, we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity. If teachers did more to advertise the play as a chance to explore gender identity, inviting students to explore their feelings about each of these characters, they could well generate new excitement amongst students, including some who would otherwise groan over a Shakespeare reading assignment.
–With the rise (thanks to encouragement from Donald Trump) of white supremacy and neo-fascism, I’m thinking that the real reason for banning the graphic novel version of Diary of Anne Frank and Art Spiegelman’s Maus might be more nefarious than the fact that there are naked statues in the one and a picture of a naked woman (a Holocaust victim) in the second. Could there be Holocaust denial at work, just as there has been an attempt to erase African American history from certain southern schools? And if the seeds of fascism have been present in the culture for a while, maybe that’s why the Alabama State Textbook Committee wanted to reject Diary of Anne Frank in 1983, decreeing it to be “a real downer.”
A central thesis of Better Living through Literature is that great literature is constantly threatening to shake the foundations of this belief or that system, so we need never be surprised when people target it. What may be more surprising is how long it has taken certain censors to get around to banning certain books. Some speculate that the pandemic, when parents saw up close what their children were learning, may provide some explanation.
Then again, the cause may lie in how Trumpism has encouraged reactionary bullies to go after teachers and schools. If education is about preparing students for a new and constantly changing world, then anyone who wants us to return to the past is going to be automatically threatened by works that train us to think deeply and critically.
The lesson here is never be complacent or take reading for granted. People have had to fight for literature throughout history, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think we are automatically exempt.
