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

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

It's been ages since I read the Little House books, but they're a perennial discussion topic in the Literary thread on b.org. The last time it was discussed, I vaguely recall the consensus being that there was a certain amount of the unconscious racism that no white person of the time could have escaped, but that overtly hateful statements like "No good Indian but a dead one" were framed in such a way that you got the feeling that definitely Laura, and possibly others in her family, did not approve.

But that's all my recollection of a discussion of a series that I haven't myself re-read in decades, so, grain of salt and all that.

Re The Secret Garden, other than Mary's nastiness to her Ayah (shown as a symptom of her general nastiness and illness) and some fuzzy Magical Brown Person thinking WRT Hindu meditation and ritual chants, there's not much to object to racially.

On class issues, Dickon and Martha and their family are all robust pastoral Mary Sues and the grimmer realities of life for the rural illiterate poor of the North Country are glossed over, but they're at least not Magical Poor Servants who exist solely to enlighten Mary and Colin; they certainly do enlighten them, but they do it in the middle of living their own lives. You always get the sense that they're all doing things, all on their own, even when they're offscreen.

As best I can recall about my own booky upbringing, nothing was ever restricted, but our mom also had a bookshelf full of narratives of the Civil Rights Era and the Holocaust and all the racially fraught histories we might need to get context for the fiction we read, and when we watched or read stuff together she pointed out the unconscious blind spots to us (or as many as she could see herself; she's since said that I had everything to do with her eventually uncovering her own unconscious sexism blind spots).

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Read this, as forodwaith suggests, for another view of Little House: http://www.oyate.org/books-to-avoid/littlehouse.html (note: it is a little hard to take, as a childhood fan of the books, and in some ways unfair (must Pa be compared to Charles Manson because daugerrotypes are bad at capturing naturalistic expressions?) but I think worth reading.)

[larisa57.livejournal.com]

That was interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with a lot of it. For instance, I thought the book made it pretty clear that they were on the land illegally, while that makes it seem like the book never mentions it. (The way that they have to leave the land at the end of the book pretty clearly states that it's because it belongs to the Indians.) I thought that a lot of Laura's descriptions that he describes as as "mocking" were much more sympathetic. And through that book and the later ones, I definitely got the impression that Ma was really terrified of the Indians, while Pa at least sort of respected them. Pa's attitude wasn't perfect by modern standards, of course, but both Laura and Pa do not agree with "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." There are lots of things in those books that could be presented differently, and I definitely do think it's a book that requires some historical context, but I don't think it's as bad as he makes it out to be.

I also thought it was kind of pointless for that article to make such a case over Pa uprooting his family so often. That's not something hidden -- it's a main theme of the books, that Pa always wants to go further west, find somewhere new, get to someplace where there aren't any people around. Laura's the same way -- she always wants to continue, and she gets really terrified when she had to go into town where there are people other than her family. It's a pretty big source of conflict between Pa and Ma, where Pa wants to keep moving and Ma wants to settle somewhere where they can have a home and the girls can go to school.

[gingerk.livejournal.com]

I have read the books many times and a good deal about Laura Ingalls, and he appears to have read entirely different books than I did. First, as flea says, the idea of deriving character from a daguerreotype of Pa Ingalls is ludicrous. Exposure took about a minute; the subject's neck was in a clamp to stay still enough. Long beards were the fashion and it wasn't fashionable to smile in a photo for another 50 years or so.

He begins by saying that Pa participated in Indian massacres, then says there's no proof, but Pa wasn't around all the time. Huh? There's also no question that Ma served as the voice of conventional society, while Laura and Pa were rebels. Pa was obviously sympathetic to the Indians and Ma's "only good Indian is a dead Indian" bothered both Laura and Pa. The descriptions of the Indians he calls "mocking" I see as her horror at their hunger.

Yes, the Ingalls were part of a pattern of taking land that was entirely unfair to the Native Americans, but from Plimouth Plantation onward, what settler was not?