here's a Friday thought question

[flea]

What do you do about classics of children's literature that have, sometimes just incidentally, things that are racist, sexist, etc.? So far we've had to deal with this in Peter Pan (the book), which has disgustingly, to modern ears, "Ugh-How!" dialogue from the Indians. Looking ahead I see all kinds of pitfalls - "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" in the Little House books, Tintin in blackface, similar racist issues in Asterix, never mind the subtler but still problematic areas of race and class and gender in a lot of pre-1960s kids books.

Books that are both bad and racist tend no longer to be in print or available at libraries, but classics that have genuine good qualities are much tougher. Do you explain about history and people's ideas changing, and how much of that can a 5 year old take in? Assume they'll get the message from other sources in society and just let the book exist in its own universe? Sadly banish certain books from the reading list? I tried to on-the-fly tone down some of the Indian dialogue in Peter Pan (which caught me off-guard; I had either forgotten it was in the book as well as the Disney movie, or never read the book).

I mean, do I need to be worrying about class and the Sowerbys when I read Casper my beloved The Secret Garden?

What childrens' books can you think of that you love, but whose treatment of these issues doesn't stand up to scrutiny? Ideas for how to handle this?

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

What's weird about Tintin is how many times it's been revised -- the one set in Saudi Arabia originally took place in British Palestine. And modern editions no longer show Tintin blowing up the rhinoceros in Tintin in the Congo. (To my relief. Who does that to a perfectly innocent rhino!)

That said, I don't think they've been revised that much.

I remember talking this over with jonquil at one point, about how some of the Just-So Stories are relatively neutral on the surface, and some are unbearable, and some others would be okay except for one or two ridic lines. (Like, in the middle of "How the Leopard Got His Spots," the man says, "I don't know, I'm only a dumb black man" or something to that effect, but otherwise acts like a perfectly reasonable protagonist.) So you just omit that line, and the story survives.

Some beloveds have definitely fallen away, over the generations. I asked Mother once if she'd read Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, a novel about a long-lived doll still popular in her generation. She remembered it with fond haziness, but never did expose us to it. (In part, I suspect, because its racism is virulent and obvious.) It was rewritten in 1999, I suppose in an attempt to delete the racism, but the Amazon reviews suggest that the people who never saw the racism in the first place didn't take that rewriting very well. (I've never read the rewritten version, and only skimmed the original.)

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

We owned a copy of Hitty. I've read it at least a couple of times, at home. Don't recall any racism - do recall exciting sea-travel adventures!

Doctor Doolittle is also problematic.

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

I also remember loving Hitty but have no recollection whatever of any racist stuff pinging me. What was in it?

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I found a plot summary and some commentary and there are several areas that are likely to be problematic: shipwrecked and worshiped as a god by South Sea islanders, owned by a snake charmer in India, found in the Mississippi by two little black boys in the years just after the Civil War... basically, Hitty reflects mainstream white Protestant views of things circa the 19th century. So, savages, and kindly but condescending views of American blacks.