I find this topic fascinating. On of its central issues seems to be that if a text is racist or anti-Semitic, is it still worth reading? I think in most cases it is. After all, most classic books are written by clever, perceptive people. Most clever, perceptive people will know to go beyond stereotypes. Even if a character seems stereotypical of the evil, avaricious Jew, for example, quite often the author will be unconsciousness uneasy with it and when you look closer, the character becomes more 3-dimensional and other characters’ reactions to them more interesting. And if a character is racist or anti-Semitic, again, that might mean the author is implying something that’s not quite clear to them. (I know some people hate this kind of psycho-analytical reading, but I like it, so ner.)
As well as this, the racism and anti-Semitism says a lot about the society the text was written in. Literature in the 1920s and 1930s was rife with anti-Semitism and you can find it in the literature of loads of respected authors – Woolf, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wharton mentioned above, etc. It’s a little like how Arabs and Muslims are mentioned these days and shows how widespread a stereotype can be at a certain time.
Reading these texts also frees you, to a certain extent, from the taboos of our time, and can be almost refreshing. (I don’t mean at all that their being racist or anti-Semitic is refreshing, only that it allows you to think in a different mindset and see our society objectively.) One really good example of this is Saki’s short story,The Unrest Cure, which could certainly never be written today.
j.c., I’m willing to concede that you are absolutely right—I haven’t read the book for a long time and it’s entirely possible that I took the character too, well, personally. Sort of a black person reading Huckleberry Finn: even if “nigger” is meant to point out racism, it’s still hard to read, as was “oily Jew.”
Very interesting topic. (And it’s not just literature - do we listen to Wagner even tho he was anti-Semitic? Do we admire Jefferson even tho he owned slaves? etc.)
My take is, I can put up with the racism/sexism/stereotyping in many older worthwhile books - for adults. However, it’s much harder to deal with in books for children. If you read Babar or Dr. Doolittle out loud to your kids you have to do a lot of on the fly editing.
Now there’s a new twist on drug abuse. Heroin … it’s soooooo romantic. You can tie each other off and cross inject so you both vomit at the same time. Mutual orgasm is just so passe these days.
But seriously folks, I’m really glad to say that Forster has introduced a colorblind character by the name of Cyril Fielding to abate some of the racist frothing Brits. I saw this coming and will now be able to enjoy the book a whole lot more.
I think a much more serious form of historical bias has been mentioned in this thread. The constantly derogatory depiction of Jews in a lot of modern literature is in some ways a much more evil apparition. The “blood libel” that has been cast upon them for literally, millennia has had much more serious results. The Holocaust could never have been so easy to digest for the German people had it not been for all of the wicked stereotyping of Jews for centuries prior.
Only in the past few years has the Catholic church finally lifted the blinkers from its historical view of the Jewish faith. I dread to think of how much death and torture occurred at the behest of the filth and hatred that Catholicism perpetuated. That this was continued, even by modern authors, into recent literature is a glaring condemnation of enlightenment in the literary community.
I would also like to concur with some of the posters here about GWTW. Scarlett is not a true protagonist in any sense of the word. She is not just flawed but rife with the petty and tyrannical manipulation of others. Even Rhett Butler is not cast as any sort of Hero in the traditional sense. I can only speculate as to whether this sort of “Darth Vader” (the hero you love to hate) phenomenon was partly responsible for the book’s enduring popularity in some way. While GWTW’s fictitious chronicle of the Civil War era struck many deep chords within America’s historical psyche, I can only wonder as to how its inverted characters have managed to become so invested with their now legendary status.
I find that this makes more sense than my experience, however, the actual books I have encountered (all published in the U.S.) did not keep an Indian setting and the characters are not portrayed as dark Indians. They were clearly stereotypes of people of African descent.
It would be interesting to see an actual 1899 edition from a British publisher to see just how far the American publisher(s) tortured the presentation.
However, my comments regarding the use of the name Sambo stand. It is a name that was used as a derogatory “typical” name for a black man (frequently in the context of great sexual prowess) for fifty years or more prior to the publication of Ms. Bannerman’s book. (The British used a number of “black” references to various groups that, in the U.S., are limited to people of African descent, including, on occasion, the use of nigger to describe southern Indians. The name Sambo is one of those usages.)
The origin of “sambo” as a racial epthet grew out of a derogatory slurring of the word “swami” as applied to Indians by Victorian Brits. “Swami” turned into “Sammy” which turned into “Sambo.”
Eventually it lost it’s south Indian distinction and was used liberally for any people of color, but it was a slur on indians before it was a slur on people of African ancestry.
Um…maybe I spoke too soon. The above rendered word origin was related by a Eastern Religion prof I once had during a lecture in a class on Hinduism. After a little further research (including simply looking in a dictionary) I find that “sambo” probably came drom a Spanish word. “zambo” which means “bow legged.”
It’s not the first time I’ve found out that a college prof was wrong about something. I shall not parrot back lecture material anymore with checking it out first.
I think the following is from the original Bannerman text and illustrations ( though apparently she didn’t retain copyriht control, so many other illustrators were used for various versions ):
The caricature is definitely there - But in that first big illustartion, he looks like he has more wavy than nappy hair. Also note the use of “bazaar” - That might be a clue as well ( or maybe not, I’m not sure how common that term was for native markets in British sub-Saharan Africa ).
On the other hand, while some web sources agree it was set in India, this one, which has some nice biographical information, considered it a ‘fantasy setting that mixes elements of Africa and India’.
So I dunno, maybe that’s the answer. By the way the above page has a links to page of numerous non-Bannerman illustrations of Little Black Sambo from other editions.
Kipling is one of my favorite authors and Kim probably my all time favorite book. I hear people all the time calling him racist. I think they probably never read any of his books or poetry. He uses a lot of words of his time, which through the PC colored glasses of today can be offensive, but I wouldn’t call them offensive for the era they were in.
What’s racist and what’s a product of their time? I’ve been blindsided on these boards that many people in the US now find the word “Oriental” to be a horribly nasty term. When I grew up in norcal, Oriental did not mean a rug. Now it does. So, if I happened to have published something 20-25 years ago refering to an Asian as an Oriental, some people today would call that a racist bigoted piece of writing. I would disagree. Now, if I used Oriental today knowing how a segment of the US population feels about the word, then I would be knowingly doing something wrong.
And there are probably a lot more… I should have said “that I have ever heard of in a novel” and even then I’d probably have been wrong. Sorry about that.
It’s my understanding that interracial marriage was hardly unknown at the time, but for some reason the portrayal in the book did bother some people.