Cases 5 & 6 : Books as Threats to the Social Order
Books as Threats to the Social Order
“It is shameful to put one’s mind into the hands of those whom you wouldn’t entrust with your money. Dare to think for yourself.” (Voltaire)
For all of the upheaval that published religious and political ideas can actually create in the world, it is obscenity which has been perceived to be the real irritant by the majority of censors in the last one hundred years. In the United States, for example, despite the First Amendment right protecting freedom of speech and the press, the 1873 “Comstock Law” prevented many classics from being delivered by the United States Postal System. Indeed, a book can still be banned there if it is proven that the work has “prurient appeal, patent offensiveness and a lack of social value” as the publishers of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography books learned in the 1990s. The obvious problem is that the determination of what is “prurient” and “offensive” is a highly subjective matter. In addition, past censorship has tended to be unable to distinguish between pornography and erotic realism. It has been argued, for example, that Rabelais, Zola and Miller - all banned at one time or other in the English-speaking world - wrote erotic realism, but not pornography.
The presumption behind such censorship is that literature has the power to incite an uncontrollable sexual drive in the reader and that control of print and images is therefore necessary for the protection of society. Clearly, not all scholars and sociologists agree with this hypothesis. “We are taught”, writes one critic of this position, “that when an effect is out of all proportion to its supposed cause, there must be other factors of greater force at work. So when we hear of vague dangers arising from reading, we must look for some forces other than books in most unlawful behaviour, because books just do not have that kind of influence. We read, in fact, what accords with our preexisting interests. Sex maniacs, it often has been said, do not become maniacal from reading but read what they do because of their obsessive tendencies.”
Of late, censors have perceived another grave menace to society. This threat is not so much sexual, but is manifest in those books that challenge a society’s image of itself. The attempt to control the dissemination of such opinions has become known, ironically, as “liberal censorship” or more commonly “political correctness”. Starting with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (which was censured at the time of its publication both in Rome and England for identifying Christianity as one of the root causes of the Empire’s demise) one can begin to trace the denial of historical reality in favour of an unhistorical idealism. Plays like A Comedy of Errors (for its supposed misrepresentation of transvestites) and children’s stories like Little Black Sambo are regularly challenged today because their depiction of specific minority groups cannot be reconciled with modern sensibilities. Critics essentially maintain that it would be better to lose the lesson of history contained in such works by banning them rather than risk raising the spectres of injustice which our ancestors accepted and, at times, encouraged. Yet, “isn’t part of a publisher’s function the preservation of the historical record, even when it offends? Is the suppression of established writings a denial of freedom of expression? Can teachers and librarians foster understanding, tear down barriers between black and white, destroy ugly myths, and nurture social sensitivity by teaching, along with the revisions of history, the distortions and omissions of the earlier content, and by including in library collections books which reflect the total record?”
It would appear that this byproduct of modern liberalism is at least as intellectually dangerous to society as the intolerance which came before it since “all minorities stand to lose far more than they win from measures regulating knowledge or debate.” In fact, the phenomenon of so-called “liberal censorship” goes against the very foundation of liberalism itself with its emphasis on freedom of expression. It would have been a great shock to Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, to realize that her classic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would be banned for teaching intolerance when her intention was to demonstrate graphically the evils associated with that very intolerance. In the end, of course, such an approach to literature and knowledge becomes reactionary. This new sociological form of censorship is a phenomenon of the last quarter century and, as such, is the fruit of the various social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Literature that is deemed to be “politically incorrect” is now regularly challenged, especially in public libraries and schools. Those who analyze such things maintain that nothing has really changed with this type of censorship, except the motives. The end result is no different from what has been achieved by the censors of the past. As benevolent as their intentions may be, they still aim to prevent others from reading what they themselves dislike.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). La commedia. Vinegia : Petrus de Plasiis, Cremonensis, dictus Veronensis, 18 Nov., 1491.
In this book which considers the depths to which humans can remove themselves from the divine, Dante condemned corrupt popes to the eighth circle of hell, in the company of panderers, magicians, and those guilty of simony. The suggestion that churchmen merited eternal perdition because of their interference in secular affairs undermined the premise of Christendom as it was understood before the Reformation. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions recalled all copies of the poem for expurgation in 1581. In 1612, the Spanish Index eliminated three offending passages before permitting its dissemination.
Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400). The Caunterbury Tales. [London] : Printed by [R. Grafton for] Wyllyam Bonham ..., 1542.
This revered literary icon was challenged in British school jurisdictions as late as the 1950s. In the United States there have also been consistent attempts to limit its access since the first American publication of 1908. The pilgrims’ stories have often proven too vulgar for the sensitivities of many school boards, and as late as 1999 it was banned in the Columbia (Florida) County School District. Although an appeal of this judgment to the United States Supreme Court was launched by the ACLU, it was eventually dropped in 1989 “because the changed character of the higher court did not promise success even if the motion to argue the case were approved.”
Winwood, Ralph, Sir (1563?-1617). Memorials of affairs of state in the reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I. London : Printed by W.B. for T. Ward ..., 1725.
Winwood served as British ambassador to France and Secretary of State under Elizabeth I and James I. His hatred for all things Spanish and Catholic was communicated in this book of his correspondence which eventually found its way into the hands of Catholic authorities. Although the book never appeared on the Index, local bishops had the duty to censor books in their dioceses as needed. The end flyleaf of each of the three volumes belonging to this title records that they were “expurged by special order of his Eminency ye Lord Cardinal da Cunha, Inquisitor General Xa. Lixa, 2nd July 1731”. The censor’s ink (middle of the left and top of the right hand pages on display here) has, however, been subsequently bleached a very light brown to reveal the underlying original text.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston : Jewett, 1852.
Stowe’s ante-bellum classic was challenged from the moment it was first published and was banned in large parts of the southern United States. That fact notwithstanding, it still sold over three million copies in the United States alone. Because it was perceived to advocate the equality of all people, it was banned in Russia by Nicholas I in 1853. For reasons that are unclear it was also prohibited in the Papal States (though the author’s name never appeared on the Index). In 1984 the text was removed from the required reading booklist of the Waukegan (Illinois) school district, adjudged racist for the use of the term “nigger”.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, 1856.
Whitman’s greatest offence in this book was his use of vivid descriptions for bodily and sexual functions, in terms distressing to Victorian good taste. Literary reviews on both sides of the Atlantic immediately condemned its immorality and the president of Yale University even equated the work with permitting public nakedness. Informally banned by both New York and Philadelphia booksellers, it was legally proscribed in Boston through the 1880s. The British government only allowed its publication in an expurgated form with which Whitman himself expressed deep dissatisfaction.
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Alice's adventures in Wonderland. London : Macmillan, 1866.
Carroll’s book is a celebration of what one scholar called “the Victorian love of nonsense.” Although the author’s relationship with Alice Liddle, the little girl who inspired the stories, has caused unease among certain psychologists and school officials, it was not this feature that led to the one instance of the book’s prohibition. It was, rather, anxiety over the strange environment of Wonderland itself, where animals talked and appeared to be equal to humans. The Governor of the Hunan Province of China confiscated and banned the book in 1931 decreeing that “animals should not use human language and that it was disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level”.
Mark Twain (1835-1910). Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Toronto: Belford Bros., 1876.
This story of life in the Old South was banned by the Brooklyn Public Library immediately upon publication. In the early twentieth century, librarians regularly excluded Tom from their open shelves charging that, together with Huckleberry Finn, the author promoted “irreligion and mischief”. More recently the book has been subject to the far more serious charge of racism based on its honest depiction of the prejudices found in the ante-bellum South, with dialogue including the offensive word “nigger” only serving to validate such charges. In 1985 the work was banned from libraries in London, England and similar action was taken by the Plano, Texas School Board in 1992. In 1994 the title was removed from the seventh grade curriculum of the Westchester, Pennsylvania School Board.
Emile Zola (1840-1902). Piping hot! (Pot-bouille.) A Realistic Novel. London : Vizetelly & Co., 1885 [i.e. 1884].
In 1857 the British government passed the Obscene Publications Act, and under that law Henry Vizetelly was charged in 1888 for the translation and publication of Zola’s La Terre, Nana, and Pot-bouille. A journalist for the Methodist Times maintained at the time that “no one can read [these books] without moral contamination.” At Vizetelly’s trial, the jury requested that the offending passages not be read aloud precisely because of their obscenity, causing the publisher to recognize the futility of his cause, reverse his plea to guilty, pay the £100 fine, and withdraw the books from circulation.
Aristophanes (ca. 448-380 B.C.). Lysistrata. Sydney : Fanfrolico Press, 1925.
Aristophanes’ play presents one of the most innovative solutions to the problem of war that diplomats have never considered – withholding sexual favours until a resolution is achieved. This large-paper edition, translated by Jack Lindsay with illustrations by Norman Lindsay, captures the erotic nature of the work. In the first century, Plutarch (45-125) considered the prose obscene – an opinion shared by the Columbia County (Florida) School Board which removed both this title and Canterbury Tales from its reading lists in 1986, though no complaint against them had ever been lodged. The Board’s decision was challenged but upheld by the Federal Appeals Court, with the reservation that it was unclear “how young persons just below the age of majority can be harmed by these masterpieces of Western Literature.”