Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was seen as trashy and obscene
(portrait from the wall of Shakespeare and Company, Paris)
It’s Banned Book Week. Do you know where your children are?
Yes, seriously. Well into the 21st century we still have to stand up for books. Of course, there’s the grand irony that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book about how far autocrats will go to prevent the free exchange of ideas will go, was itself a banned book.
I remember reading in my bedroom with the door closed age-inappropriate books like the novelized version of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde movie or historical romances I found laying around the house. After each reading session I would slide it back onto the bedside table where I had found it. That fact that they were in the house at all, however, sent a message that there were no “bad” books. I left the children's library at a young age and moved upstairs to find gruesome stories of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. But I never knew anything would ever be off limits to me.
With so many real dangers in this world, I’m stymied by parents who will make it a mission to remove Harry Potter and his friends from schools. Do they really think their precious young children will convert to Wiccadom after finishing the life of the boy wizard? If we vigorously fight to take books off the shelves, how does that make us so different from the individuals who declared a fatwah on Salman Rushdie? No, we don’t put a price on Alice Walker’s head for writing The Color Purple, but when a community puts books off limits and removes them from a library shelf they are saying that these contain ideas that will contaminate a mind.
It seems, though, that all the controversial elements in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn need to be brought out into the open to discuss the world in which they were written. When you remove the disputed language in the recently expurgated edition of Twain’s masterpiece to make it “acceptable” for the classroom, you miss so many opportunities to talk about our own history and how we got to where we are today.
Twain, himself responded to one of the first attempts to ban his books when in 1905 he wrote a letter to the Brooklyn Library regarding their concern about his writing. In a very true-to-Twain understatement he said:
“I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
Why should we care about books banned at libraries and schools? After all, if you want to read one you can just go buy it. Right? But what if you don’t have the money, or you live in a part of the country without bookstores? When books written with care and all seriousness, addressing the most important issues of an age, are forbidden for reasons of sexual themes, or violence, or language, or simply being contrary to some particular religious or political interpretation then where can our discussions about these issues begin?
Some books that you might be surprised to learn were banned are Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (was Jo too radical a feminist for the age?), and Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries (yes, the book that was made into that delightful little movie starring Julie Andrews and a young Anne Hathaway – flaming radicals both).
So in recognition of Banned Book Week, I’m going to pull out a couple of oldies but goodies to read. Maybe a little Thoreau On Civil Disobedience and a real bit of extremism with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. If you want to find some forbidden literature to read, look here and here. You might be surprised to find more of your childhood favorites on the list of dangerous books.
Come back and tell me about your favorite banned book or what experience you’ve had with censorship in your reading life.
Yes, seriously. Well into the 21st century we still have to stand up for books. Of course, there’s the grand irony that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book about how far autocrats will go to prevent the free exchange of ideas will go, was itself a banned book.
I remember reading in my bedroom with the door closed age-inappropriate books like the novelized version of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde movie or historical romances I found laying around the house. After each reading session I would slide it back onto the bedside table where I had found it. That fact that they were in the house at all, however, sent a message that there were no “bad” books. I left the children's library at a young age and moved upstairs to find gruesome stories of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. But I never knew anything would ever be off limits to me.
With so many real dangers in this world, I’m stymied by parents who will make it a mission to remove Harry Potter and his friends from schools. Do they really think their precious young children will convert to Wiccadom after finishing the life of the boy wizard? If we vigorously fight to take books off the shelves, how does that make us so different from the individuals who declared a fatwah on Salman Rushdie? No, we don’t put a price on Alice Walker’s head for writing The Color Purple, but when a community puts books off limits and removes them from a library shelf they are saying that these contain ideas that will contaminate a mind.
It seems, though, that all the controversial elements in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn need to be brought out into the open to discuss the world in which they were written. When you remove the disputed language in the recently expurgated edition of Twain’s masterpiece to make it “acceptable” for the classroom, you miss so many opportunities to talk about our own history and how we got to where we are today.
Twain, himself responded to one of the first attempts to ban his books when in 1905 he wrote a letter to the Brooklyn Library regarding their concern about his writing. In a very true-to-Twain understatement he said:
“I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
Why should we care about books banned at libraries and schools? After all, if you want to read one you can just go buy it. Right? But what if you don’t have the money, or you live in a part of the country without bookstores? When books written with care and all seriousness, addressing the most important issues of an age, are forbidden for reasons of sexual themes, or violence, or language, or simply being contrary to some particular religious or political interpretation then where can our discussions about these issues begin?
Some books that you might be surprised to learn were banned are Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (was Jo too radical a feminist for the age?), and Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries (yes, the book that was made into that delightful little movie starring Julie Andrews and a young Anne Hathaway – flaming radicals both).
So in recognition of Banned Book Week, I’m going to pull out a couple of oldies but goodies to read. Maybe a little Thoreau On Civil Disobedience and a real bit of extremism with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. If you want to find some forbidden literature to read, look here and here. You might be surprised to find more of your childhood favorites on the list of dangerous books.
Come back and tell me about your favorite banned book or what experience you’ve had with censorship in your reading life.
Art is what one thinks
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