This post is a reprint from the July/August 2013 issue of Imprimis, a speech digest publication of
Hillsdale College. The article was adapted from a speech delivered on March 12,
2013, by Meghan Cox Gurdon, Children’s book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal. I don’t usually do reprints as blog posts,
but this was just so stellar that I couldn’t resist. In my opinion, every writer
should read this. It’s that good.
**Warning** This article does contain some very mature
content related to very dark and, in some cases, graphic and obscene subject
matter, which I have reprinted uncut. I assure you, I would not do so if I
didn’t believe the point it makes is worth it. Any of my readers under eighteen
may want to let their parents preview the post. You won’t hurt my feelings if
you choose to skip this one, I promise.
~Mary
…
“The Case for Good Taste in
Children’s Books”
By Meghan Cox Gurdon
On June 4, 2011, the number one trending topic on Twitter
was the Anthony Weiner scandal. I happen to remember that, because the number
two topic on Twitter that day—almost as frenzied, though a lot less
humorous—had to do with an outrageous, intolerable attack on Young Adult
literature… by me. Entitled “Darkness Too Visible,” my article discussed the
increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young
Adults—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has,
in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction,
become increasingly more lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books
for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted
portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen
years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the
same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today,
too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense
of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young
Adult books is the first person tense—“I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers
use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the
reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is
that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal presin,
keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend
to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be
wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open. The late critic Hilton
Kramer was seated once at a dinner next to film director Woody Allen. Allen
asked him if he felt embarrassed when he met people socially whom he’d savaged
in print. “No,” Kramer said, “they’re the ones who made the bad art. I just
described it.” As the story goes, Allen fell gloomily silent, having once made
a film that had received the Kramer treatment.
I don’t presume to have a nose as sensitive as Hilton
Kramer’s—but I do know that criticism is pointless if it’s only boosterism. To
evaluate anything, including children’s books, is to engage in the faculty of
judgment, which requires that great bugbear of the politically correct
“discrimination.” Thus, in responding to my article, YA book writers Judy Blume
and Libba Bray charged that I was giving comfort to book-banners, and Publisher’s Weekly warned of a “danger”
that my arguments “encourage a culture of fear around YA literature.” But I do
not, in fact, with to ban any books or frighten any authors. What I do wish is
that people in the book business would exercise better taste; that adult
authors would not simply validate every spasm of the teen experience; and that
our culture was not marching toward ever-greater explicitness in depictions of
sex and violence.
Books for children and teenagers are written, packaged, and
sold by adults. It follows from this that the emotional depictions they contain
come to young people with a kind of adult imprimatur. As a school librarian in
Idaho wrote to her colleagues in my defense: “You are naïve if you think young
people can read a dark and violent book that sits on the library shelves and
not believe that that behavior must be condoned by the adults in their school
lives.”
What kind of books are we talking about? Let me give you
three examples—but with a warning that some of what you’re about to hear is not
appropriate for younger listeners.
A teenaged boy is kidnapped, drugged, and nearly raped by a
male captor. After escaping, he comes across a pair of weird glasses that
transport him to a world of almost impossible cruelty. Moments later, he finds
himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other
dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, heart, feet, penises. Where the f— was
this?”
That’s from Andrew Smith’s 2010 Young Adult novel, The Marbury Lens.
A girl struggles with self-hatred and self-injury. She cuts
herself with razors secretly, but her secret gets out when she’s the victim of
a sadistic sexual prank. Kids at school jeer at her, calling her “cutterslut.”
In response, “she had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained,
staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess
of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.”
That’s from Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 Young Adult novel, Rage.
I won’t read you the most offensive excerpts from my third
example, which consist of explicit and obscene descriptions by a 17-year-old
female narrator of sexual petting, of oral sex, and of rushing to a bathroom to
defecate following a breakup. Yet School
Library Journal praised Daria Sandowsky’s 2008 Young Adult novel, Anatomy of a Boyfriend, for dealing “in
modern terms with the real issues of discovering sex for the first time.” And
Random House, its publisher, gushed about the narrator’s “heartbreakingly
honest voice” as she recounts the “exquisite ups and dramatic downs of teenage
love and heartbreak.”
The book industry, broadly speaking, says: Kids have a right
to read whatever they want. And if you follow the argument through it becomes:
Adults should not discriminate between good and bad books or stand as
gatekeepers, deciding what young people should read. In other words, the
faculty of judgment and taste that we apply in every other area of life
involving children should somehow vaporize when it comes in contact with the
printed word.
I appeared on National Public Radio to discuss these issues
with the Young Adult book author Lauren Myracle, who has been hailed as a
person “on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression”—as if any
controversy over whether a book is appropriate for children turns on the
question of the author’s freedom to express herself. Myracle made clear that
she doesn’t believe there should be any line between adult literature and
literature for young people. In saying this, she was echoing the view that
prevails in many progressive circles—that young people should encounter
material that jolts them out of their comfort zone; that the world is a tough
place; and that there’s no point shielding children from reality. I took the
less progressive, less secular view that parents should take a more
interventionist approach, steering their children away from books about sex and
horror and degradation, and towards books that make aesthetic and moral claims.
Now, although it may seem that our culture is split between
Left and Right on the question of permissiveness regarding our children’s
reading material, in fact there is not so much division on the core issue as
might appear. Secular progressives, despite their reaction to my article, have
their own list of books they think young people shouldn’t read—for instance,
books they claim are tinged with racism or jingoism or that depict traditional
gender roles. Regarding the latter, you would not believe the extent to which children’s
picture books today go out f the way to show father in an apron and mother
tinkering with machinery. It’s pretty funny. But my larger point here is that
the self-proclaimed anti-book-banners on the Left agree that books influence children and prefer some books to
others.
Indeed, in the early years of the Cold War, many left-wing
creative people in America gravitated toward children’s literature. Philip Nel,
a professor at Kansas State University, has written that Red-hunters, “seeing
children’s books as a field dominated by women… deemed it less important and so
did not watch it closely.” Among the authors I am referring to are Theodor
Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Ruth Krauss, author of the 1952 classic A Hole is to Dig, illustrated by a young
Maurice Sendak. Krauss was quite open in her belief that children’s literature
was an excellent means of putting left-wing ideas into young minds. Or so she
hoped.
When I was a little girl I read The Cat in the Hat, and I took from it an understanding of the
sanctity of private property—it outraged me when the Cat and Thing One and
Thing Two rampaged through the children’s house while their mother was away.
Dr. Seuss was probably not intending to inculcate capitalist ideas—quite the
contrary. But it happened in my case, and the point is instructive.
A recent study conducted at Virginia Tech found that college
women who read “chick lit”—light novels that deal with the angst of being a
modern woman—reported feeling more insecure about themselves and their bodies
after reading novels in which the heroines feel insecure about themselves and
their bodies. Similarly, federal researchers were puzzled for years be a
seeming paradox when it came to educating children about the dangers of drugs
and tobacco. There seemed to be a correlation between anti-drug and
anti-tobacco programs in elementary and middle schools and subsequent drug and
tobacco use at those schools. It turned out that at the same time children were
learning that drugs and tobacco were bad, they were taking in the meta-message
that adults expected them to use drugs and tobacco.
Which is why good taste matters so much when it comes to
books for children and young adults. Books tell children what to expect, what
life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is.
Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as
the examples above show, the norms young people take away are not necessarily
the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of
so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a
girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and
anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she
will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Yong
Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one
heck of a good book.”)
The argument in favor of such books is that they validate
the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted,
or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing
these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And
teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.
In journalist Emily Bazelon’s recent book about bullying,
she describes how schools are using a method called “social norming” to
discourage drinking and driving. “The idea,” she writes, “is that students
often overestimate how much other kids drink and drive, and when they find out
that it’s less prevalent than they think—outlier behavior rather than the
norm—they’re less likely to do it themselves.” The same goes for bullying:
“When kids understand that cruelty isn’t the norm,” Bazelon says, “they’re less
likely to be cruel themselves.”
Now isn’t that interesting?
Ok, you say, but books for kids have always been dark. What
about Hansel and Gretel? What about
the scene in Beowulf where the
monster sneaks into the Danish camp and starts eating people?
Beowulf is
admittedly gruesome in parts—and fairy tales are often scary. Yet we approach
them at a kind of arm’s length, almost as allegory. In the case of Beowulf, furthermore, children reading
it—or having it read to them—are absorbing the rhythms of one of mankind’s
great heroic epics, one that explicitly reminds us that our talents come from
God and that we act under God’s eye and guidance. Even with the gore, Beowulf won’t make a child callous. It
will help to civilize them.
English philosopher Roger Scruton has written at length
about what he calls the modern “flight from beauty,” which he sees in every
aspect of our contemporary culture. “It is not merely,” he writes, “that
artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts”—here we
might include authors of Young Adult literature—“are in a flight from
beauty…There is a desire to spoil beauty…For beauty makes a claim on us; it is
a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.”
We can go to the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and stand before
Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath, and though we are
looking at horror we are not seeing ugliness. The light that plays across
David’s face and chest, and that slants across Goliath’s half-open eyes and
mouth, transforms the scene into something beautiful. The problem with the
darker offerings in Young Adult literature is that they lack this transforming
and uplifting quality. They take difficult subjects and wallow in them in a
gluttonous way; they show an orgiastic lack of restrain that is the mark of bad
taste.
Young Adult book author Sherman Alexie wrote a rebuttal to
my article entitled, “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood.” In it, he
asks how I could honestly believe that a sexually explicit Young Adult novel
might traumatize a teenaged mother. “Does she believe that a YA novel about
murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by
murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who
already lives in hell?”
Well of course I don’t. But I also don’t believe that the
vast majority of 12-to-18-year-olds are living in hell. And as for those who
are, does it really serve them to give them more
torment and sulfur in the stories they read?
The body of children’s literature is a little like the
Library of Babel in the Jorge Luis Borges story—shelf after shelf of books,
many almost gibberish, but a rare few filled with wisdom and beauty and answers
to important questions. These are the books that have lasted because generation
after generation has seen in them something transcendent, and has passed them
on. Maria Tatar, who teaches children’s literature at Harvard, describes books
like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Books, and Pinocchio as “setting minds into motion,
renewing sense, and almost rewiring brains.”
Or as William Wordsworth wrote: “What we have loved/others
will love, and we will teach them how.”
The good news is that just like the lousy books of the past,
the lousy books of the present will blow away like chaff. The bad news is that
they will leave their mark. As in so many aspects of culture, the damage they
do can’t easily be measured. It is more a thing to be felt—a coarseness, an emptiness,
a sorrow.
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as if it
does not matter.” That’s Roger Scruton again. But he doesn’t want us to
despair. He also writes:
It is one mark of
rational beings that they do not live only—or even at all—in the present. They
have the freedom to despise the world that surround them and live in another
way. The art, literature, and music of our civilization remind them of this,
and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of
desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.
Let me close with Saint Paul the Apostle in Philippians 4:8:
Whatever is true,
whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,
whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such
things.
And let us think about these words when we go shopping for
books for our children.
***
Reprinted
by permission from Imprimis, a
publication of Hillsdale College.
