On Literary Censorship: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
Scary kids scaring kids, and teachers, and parents…
There’s something inherently disturbing about kids. Not like “I don’t want kids” disturbing, but like “they haven’t yet been put through the ringer of social norms”. Kids have always been supernaturally upsetting in the horror genre especially, but even in real life they have a tendency to throw most of us off-kilter. For much of their early life, children don’t retain/continuously navigate the amorphous world of right and wrong words and actions. They’ll say things blatantly that the rest of us wouldn’t dream of because to do so when you’re older is the equivalent of social ostracization. But what of the pre-teen years, where everything depends on navigating cutthroat social situations? The wild streak is not yet fully buried, but it is smothered by socially established hierarchies if you’re low enough in the pecking order. William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies examines the effectiveness of these social confines in society at large through the lens of a group of children abandoned to fend for themselves on an island after a plane crash. The results, predictably, are not pretty.
I have read Lord of the Flies before, many times, but it seems with every reading I find something newly shocking about it. This go around, it was the one-two punch of how quickly things escalate to violence and the realization that every disabled character in this book dies, either by accident or at the hands of a malicious sociopath with a boulder to toss. I’ve read this book for years and never quite caught that. It’s…a lot. The book in its entirety is a nasty, sharp piece of work that brings the violence and savagery of human nature to the surface and doesn’t offer a whole lot of hope for its redemption along the way. Indeed, almost every marker of hope is snuffed out before the book’s end.
Simultaneously hailed as one of the most influential and #68 on the ALA’s top 100 most banned or challenged books for 1990–1999, it has been banned or challenged, predictably, for violence, language, and making disparaging remarks to various groups, from the disabled to the Black community. Part of the reason I assume I never thought much about the insults tossed around here is that kids are just like that. When you’re in any way out of the social ordinary, you’re immediately a bullying target. So Piggy’s position as target for the entire rest of the island (thanks to thick glasses, a thick body, and asthma) struck me less as offensive and more as true-to-life, sad as that may sound. The real world savagery of children is more in the way they speak to others than in their actions, Golding simply presents a scenario where the confining elements that try to teach them are removed, thus allowing them to descend fully into their weird, violent little selves.
The violence of this book is by far its most disturbing element, linked closely with the rapidity of the children’s forgetfulness of society and safety. They are victims of their fear from the start and, no matter how it seems to them, never fully break away from it. The three deaths of the disabled characters, each a disturbingly violent act, remind the children and us as readers exactly what it is they’re up against. The first, a young boy with a mulberry birth mark on his face, dies when the first fire they build gets out of control. He’s simply never seen again, the weight of his loss hanging heavy on Piggy — who cannot remember the boy’s name — and a few others who have no words to articulate death. Tangled with their mourning is a sense of awe at the force of nature they’ve been thrown into. They learn their lesson about where to build a better fire and almost never mention the mulberry-marked boy out loud again.
Simon, who faints often and may indeed be epileptic, is next, though it isn’t nature directly doing the killing this time. Where the first act was a freak accident of nature taking an unknown small boy, Simon’s death is more a signal to make just how far down the boys have fallen from who they were when they arrived on the island. Simon, though quiet and preferring to spend time alone, helped build shelter for everyone and made sure they had a water supply. He was a known entity among the boys, one without whom they might not have had basic necessities for survival. Jack — choir leader, hunter, and bloodthirsty counterpoint to Ralph’s diplomatic nature — has grown dissatisfied with his position and decided to form his own group of decidedly more feral kids. He lures the others with the promise of meat and performs ritual dances to honor his hunting skills. It is at one of these dances that poor Simon, mistaken for a beast, meets his brutal downfall. Caught in the heat and excitement of the moment, Ralph and Piggy — who had snuck over to the camp to see what the fuss of Jack’s greatness was all about — participate in a ritual performance that results in beating Simon to death and, upon realizing exactly what it is they’ve done, must reckon with the enormity of it. They succumbed less to their wild nature than to the pressures of their peers, and for their trouble a valuable friend was lost by their hand.
Both deaths so far carry an unspeakable enormity and weigh heavily on the boys, but it is the last and most intentional death that provides the truest break. Piggy — up to this point the novel’s moral compass and voice of reason — is killed at the hands of another boy who, we’re led to believe, has cruel tendencies at the best of times. Roger has thrown sand in the face of the small children simply minding their business, been blankly fascinated when one of them attempts to retaliate against him by narrowly missing with rocks, and is a part of the hunting crew that becomes so consumed with their bloodthirst for meat they accidentally kill one of their own. His worst, most violent act, is the one that brings about the descent of the novel. He throws a boulder, quite intentionally, at Piggy and kills him and the conch they had been using up to this point to establish a sense of order. Shortly afterward, he goes after Ralph with a double-edged stick until Ralph runs into the first sign of civilization they’ve seen in an indeterminate amount of time: a naval soldier lured to the island by the fire.
Beyond the simple “inherent madness of man” reading, there is something to be said for the rampant toxic masculinity present in Golding’s novel. Piggy, unable to keep up pace physically with any of the other boys, is shamed immediately and incessantly for it. Jack is driven mad with the need to shed blood to prove his worth and strength to the rest of them, all because in the initial confrontation with the pig he did what most any of us would and hesitated before striking, thus letting it get away and making him feel as though he needed to justify his lack of action because someone else was watching. Even the naval officer at the end of the novel perpetuates the idea of the boys — who have been abandoned on an island with little hope of rescue and created for themselves what is surely some level of personal hell that will haunt them for the rest of time — being weak for crying. That’s insane! Even if it is the ‘50s!
Unfortunately I’m not one hundred percent convinced Lord of the Flies’ narrative possibilities are too far off the mark. It feels as though it only gets more prescient with every reading and, given some of the things I’ve seen society let loose over the past several years, I don’t think group-madness of the kind we see play out led by Jack is fully out of the question. He who yells the loudest sounds the most right in our current time, just as he did in Golding’s novel. Every quiet voice was smothered into extinction by one force or another, whether it be drowned out by an all-consuming fire or drowned out by the actions of the mad group, or the brute force of one single-minded antagonist with violence in mind. Even typing this is getting kind of uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s time for a societal reexamination of Lord of the Flies? After all, if we can recognize such unforgivable acts in literature, why is it so hard to see in life?
