One of my friends posted on Facebook that Shakespeare wasn't a feminist. He wasn't. There was no such word in the 16th century, when Shakespeare was writing, and he certainly doesn't fit our definition of feminist today. And yet, this friend was making the point that Shakespeare's views on women were so misogynistic that it's almost offensive to even associate the word feminist with him. I think I draw the line there. In the 16th century–when women couldn't own anything, even the clothes they wore, and were, quite literally, the property of their husbands–writing about women as real people with real feelings and some degree of agency was pretty remarkable (you can read a more detailed opinion on this here).
It seems to be in vogue nowadays to dismiss canonized writers simply because they've been canonized. Now, I understand that there are a lot of problems with our idea of "canon" in the first place–the disproportionate number of white, male writers, the predominance of writers from Europe and North America, the disproportionate number of writers who've been dead for decades. And yet (I say this as a woman of color, as a person who didn't read a single book about people who look and speak like me until my junior year of college), this is getting a little ridiculous.
It's great to push for the creation of a more inclusive canon. It's great to tell people about lesser-known writers who still write beautifully and should be in the canon. It's great to point out the place of privilege from which a lot of canonized writers were writing. It's great to questions whether we should even have a canon in the first place.
But jumping down people's throats for praising canonized writers, because we shouldn't be praising work that is racist, or sexist, or imperialist, or some other -ist by our standards today? That's where there has to be a line.
When I'm reading a work by a canonized writer that offends my modern sensibilities, I ask myself two questions:
- Is promoting our modern definitions of racism/sexism/imperialism the main point of this work?
- Is this work teaching me something I didn't know about the levels of racism/sexism/imperialism in the past?
If the answer to question 1 is no, or the answers to both questions is yes, then I tamp down whatever disgust I may feel and keep reading. Take Jane Eyre. When discussing Bertha, there's a long disquisition about the difference and inferiority of Caribbean people, how their environment makes them prone to madness and savagery and all kinds of evil. And people from the Caribbean aren't the only ones. For a while, Jane thinks of traveling to India to help civilize and minister to the savages there. I was disgusted. But, I didn't stop reading, and I don't think Charlotte Bronte was any more racist or imperialist than any other British person in the 19th century. Jane Eyre is not a novel about the terrible awfulness of people of color. And, for my American classmates, it was probably something of an education in the racism that played a part in founding the British Empire. So, although I was disgusted by parts of it, I actually enjoyed and liked the novel as a whole.
By the same token, I am sickened by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" and refuse to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Though they are part of the canon, often taught in classes on postcolonial literature to demonstrate 19th and 20th century British views on the people they colonized, the point of both works is to promote what we would call racism and imperialism. And, growing up in India, I learned enough about colonial British views on the colonized that I don't need to read more works demonstrating that.
Some day, we may end up blowing up the canon and, if we do, I may agree with that decision. But, until then, I will continue to read some writers who, if they were writing today, would be considered deeply offensive. But that's the point. They aren't writing today. They are artefacts of their time. And if their work isn't an endless stream of hate (as some canonized works are), I will even enjoy it.
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