The Silly Side of Banning Books.
Can Sleeping Beauty be banned because Prince Charming’s kiss wasn’t consensual? C’mon now, really?
“Kids want to hear about reality. They don’t care if it’s ugly.” Eazy-E
Wasn’t there a time when we knew what was risqué and what wasn’t? Certainly Henry Miller was risqué. Same with Charles Bukowski and Norman Mailer. Whose kids came home from school with copies of Tropic of Cancer, Post Office or Naked and the Dead?
For many years, good Christian values kept books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Madame Bovary under the bed covers. Better to have Dickenson or Browning on your nightstand. Nobody had a problem with them. Even Remarque’s All Quiet On the Western Front was okay, since books on war didn’t so much influence children as scare the crap out of them.
Today, parents aren’t interested in scaring their kids. They’ve become radically protective, finding racism, hedonism, pedophilia and even bestiality in some of our most beloved classics. Beauty and the Beast? Fur-baiting. Heidi? A little too happy for an orphan. Where’s the separation anxiety?
Could The Little Mermaid be a euphemism for a woman giving up her identity? Didn’t the Caterpillar give Alice mind-altering mushrooms?
What about Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew? Petruchio was the worst chauvinist roaming Verona. Kate was no wallflower, calling him all sorts of names but, in the end, she became—horrible as it sounds—dutiful.
Even Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carroll are being re-examined. Isn’t The Little Mermaid giving up her identity? Didn’t the Caterpillar ply Alice with mind-altering mushrooms? And the violence in Little Red Riding Hood? Who doesn’t see the wolf as a euphemism for men?
We’ve gone from moral dilemmas to hyper-scrutiny. Fairy tales may be time-worn classics, but that doesn’t make them unassailable. Kids shouldn’t be taking cues from big bad wolves, or seven dwarfs who don’t have the decency to give a girl her own washroom?
They don’t want their little spunkers getting the wrong idea about sex.
As some parents see it, fairy tales and literature need to be cleaned up. Nobody wants their little spunkers getting the wrong idea about sex.
Just the other week, Sarah Hall, from Northumberland Park, north Tynside, made a request to her local school board, asking that Sleeping Beauty be removed from the school’s curriculum. Her problem? Prince Charming didn’t have “consent to kiss the princess.”
“These [stories] are indicative of how ingrained that kind of behaviour is in society,” she said, admitting she wouldn’t have given it a second’s thought if it weren’t for the #MeToo Movement. “I think it’s a specific issue in the Sleeping Beauty story about sexual behaviour and consent. It’s about saying is this still relevant, is it appropriate?”
Sarah’s story brought out a lot of comments on Facebook, often from women recounting their own concerns about fairy tales from the past. “When I was seven,” Turtie Ailanthus wrote, “we read the story of Apollo and Daphne, and then acted out the story in a little play. The teacher appeared totally unaware of the fact that it’s a story about attempted rape.”
By comparison, Prince Charming’s a saint but, as Turtie Ailanthus explained, “I think waking up and being kissed when you don’t want to be kissed would feel pretty icky, wouldn’t it?”
Well, truth be told, most Greek mythology — not to mention Hellenistic and Roman — had so much sexual romping, it’s a wonder we even allow Zeus’s name to pass our lips. He married his sisters, Demeter and Hera, and had an affair with his daughter Aphrodite. By comparison, Prince Charming’s a saint but, as Turtie Ailanthus explained, “I think waking up and being kissed when you don’t want to be kissed would feel pretty icky, wouldn’t it?”
Personally, I think Turtie needs to imagine being under a spell for a 100 years. Imagine locking lips with someone after all that time. It must be like kissing an old urn.
In Minnesota, the Duluth school district banned Harper Lee and Mark Twain’s books, claiming the racist content made students feel “humiliated and marginalized.”
Stephen Witherspoon, president of the local branch of the NAACP said that the books were “just hurtful,” adding that they use “language that has oppressed their people for over 200 years.”
To say that Huckleberry Finn “marginalizes” students is more the fault of teachers than the content itself.
Actually, Harper Lee and Mark Twain were both anti-racist. Twain fought for many years against the genocide of blacks in the Belgian Congo. To say that Huckleberry Finn “marginalizes” students is more the fault of the education system than the content itself.
If teachers can’t put these books in the context of their time, or the NAACP doesn’t find value in a white lawyer, Atticus Finch, trying to prevent a black man from being lynched, I’m sure banning Sleeping Beauty is fine, too. She’s white afterall, and if kissing a white woman without consent is wrong, it’s just as wrong doing it to a black women.
My favourite book ban, if it’s possible to have a favourite, was the removal of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree,” because it “disparaged the forest industry.” Forget that these companies clear-cut thousands of acres of trees a day, leaving huge patches of arid ground. Better to ban a book, even if it’s one of the most beautiful children’s stories ever written.
In fact, every book mentioned has more moral integrity than the people wanting them banned. Lee and Twain wrote to expose racism. Carroll wrote to expand the logical minds of children. Silverstein wanted kids to know it’s okay to be silly, goofy and even nutty.
Ignoring the concerns of a parent could lead to riots with signs like “We Don’t Give A F**k About Huck.”
How this can be seen as “disparaging” or “marginalizing” is slightly nutty itself. Kids see the wonder, parents see the creepy. Schools, libraries and governments have to see creepy, too. Ignoring the concerns of a parent could lead to riots with signs like “We Don’t Give A F**k About Huck.”
And what’s wrong with cleaning things up, anyway? they’ll say. Why can’t we have a Prince Charming who respects courtesies, even if it means waiting another hundred years, since spells don’t exactly break themselves?
Turtie Ailanthus believes students should write their own Sleeping Beauty story, perhaps where the princess doesn’t get kissed. “That’s the proper way of doing it,” Daemon Archaon Atredies responded. “Personally, I’d love to see kids write such stories to see what they come up with.”
Perhaps she awakens to the sound of people demonstrating equal rights. Or maybe she uses a laser on Prince Charming. Kids aren’t big on sticking to one time period. If the prince needs a lesson in taking liberties, a laser or a cyborg dog will set him straight. Same goes for Apollo. Zap the jerk.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame should probably be banned, ’cause he’s seriously messed up, and throws Esmeralda over his shoulder without so much as a howdy-do.
A number of years back, a school board banned Catcher In The Rye — not because Holden orders a hooker to his room— but because he’s messed up, possibly a sociopath. It seems finding someone who’s more bummed out than you, only makes you more bummed out. The Hunchback of Notre Dame should probably be banned. He’s seriously messed up—and rude. Didn’t he throw Esmeralda over his shoulder without so much as a howdy-do?
If kids are so impressionable, anything literary is going to upset them. Regardless of the time period, writers and artists were never angels. They wrote for the time and, frankly, there were worse things to worry about, including war, famine and plague.
If you want Don Quixote banned because he’s bonkers, remember Cervantes was a slave for many years. There’s only so much political correctness you can absorb on a slave ship.
Classics are classics because they teach children that life isn’t necessarily safe. There are villains who aren’t sorcerers and ogres who aren’t Shrek. Banning books like Sleeping Beauty or Apollo and Daphne won’t protect them as much as rob them of reality.
We’re good because we want to be good. Often that’s in the face of bad.
So, sure, getting kids to come up with a better ending, something more acceptable, might be interesting. It still won’t change what literature really teaches. We’re good because we want to be good. Often it’s in the face of bad.
If children don’t know the difference, banning Sleeping Beauty or Catcher In The Rye or The Giving Tree won’t make them any the wiser. If anything, they’ll be worse off than Holden Caulfield. At least he asked questions about ducks.
There could come a time when children won’t.
Robert Cormack is a novelist, journalist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores (now in paperback). Check out Yucca Publishing or Skyhorse Press for more details.
