Gillian at The Portrait of a Would-Be Artist as a Young Woman posted a video in which Twain scholar Melissa Harris-Perry explains why the upcoming sanitized release of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is problematic. Gillian does a fantastic job commenting on Harris-Perry’s point in her own post, so I just want to address a particular point about modern reading culture that this topic brings up.
I believe children are challenged less and less by what they take in from culture. Much of their input comes from FCC-sanitized network television, where gunshots occur but never cause too much bleeding. They are ill equipped to deal with controversial issues because they are largely sheltered from the reality of them. They are not introduced to canonical literature until much later in their education and in my opinion they are less capable handling the social ambiguities of this literature.
In the case of Huckleberry Finn, many teachers are banning or skirting over a pivotal part of the American literary canon because it contains frequent use of an offensive word. These teachers are often afraid to address student discomfort for fear of inciting students’ or parents’ wrath. Instead of teaching students the historical context of the material and examining the differing attitudes of the past and present, these teachers are brushing years of social history under the carpet and letting children deal with them in the outside world without the tools to analyze them.
We need to instill a healthy reading culture at an earlier age. Students are introduced to much more insidiously harmful material in pop culture, whether it is misogyny in music or racism in the casting of their favorite films. If they encountered difficult reading material in an academic setting at a younger age, these students would be better prepared to intelligently process it. Students can learn so much from the irony of Mark Twain or the adept prose of Charles Dickens despite their respective uses of racial terms that are offensive in today’s society. They can also learn a lot about our progress (or perhaps lack of progress) as a multicultural society by looking at the history of race and class relations.
GilliaN!
When Huck Finn gets banned, it’s not even the teachers’ decision. Usually it’s the school board acting because a parent or group of parents called the issue (or non-issue) to their attention.
I wasn’t taught either Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer in high school. I had read them both when I was much younger, but now that I think about it, I’m surprised neither of them ever came up in school. The only books I remember being assigned that really presented uncomfortable racial truths were Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. No word of a lie, I wasn’t assigned Beloved until my junior year of college.
Even when I took American Lit classes in college, Twain never made it onto the syllabus. The only Twain work I formally studied was his Letters from the Earth in my Bible as Literature class.
Sorry for the double-typo, Gillian! I re-watched “12 Monkeys” recently so I must have Gilliam on the mind.
Regarding teacher-imposed bans, that’s really just what I’ve seen from my experience. I grew up in uber-liberal MA where there were no formal ban of books by the school board, yet most of my English teachers avoided anything they deemed too controversial. My AP US History class was the only history class in the school to fully cover the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Funny enough, this came up again in college of all places. Our film studies professor announced we would not watch “Birth of a Nation” because she didn’t want to offend anyone, but strongly suggested we watch it on our own because of its technical importance to film. To me, it would have been more interesting to publicly discuss the complexities of film that is atrocious by today’s standards with its pro-KKK stance yet directly influenced how every film is made today (single camera/continuous edits/etc.).
No on the typo. When I was freelancing, my byline said Gilliam once or twice too.
I watched Birth of a Nation just last year for school. It was for a writing independent study, not a regular class. The librarian definitely gave me a funny look when I went to pick it up, and I definitely felt a little dirty afterward. But then, there are a lot of books that I’ve read and felt the same way. Some things about life aren’t fun to examine, but it’s basically the responsibility of art to hold a mirror to those things to garner people’s attention.
I’m usually written up as “Thalia,” much to my very-Greek mother’s delight.
Yeah, Birth of a Nation leaves a pretty icky feeling. It’s sad that cinema history was largely formed by propaganda films for the bad guys. (Don’t even get me started on my disgust for Leni Riefenstahl…)