This is particularly evident in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It’s a modern novel written as a period piece, but there’s little presentism. There most certainly is racism and sexism, but it’s not aggressive and it’s clearly just a product of the time. The characters don’t feel any serious animosity toward blacks and Jews, but it’s simply accepted that they occupy lower rungs on the social order than good Christian men and women. As there is a major black character and a minor black character, period racism does come into play, but it never struck me as offensive, only archaic.
Racism and sexism in works by authors that have been dead for a while bothers me less than racism and sexism written by still-living authors. John Steinbeck’s or Mark Twain’s racism is occasionally shocking, but it’s also a reminder how far society has come in past 100 years.
In reverse, modern books or movies containing historical characters with painfully modern and enlightened attitudes tends to push my suspension of disbelief.
It wouldn’t have fit the tone of the movie, so ultimately I’d glad they didn’t do it, but it would have been interesting if, in Trek IV, Uhura had gotten shocked by racist assumptions in the 20th Century. Just as Chekov was surprised by the the anti-russian sentiment when he was looking for the aircraft carrier Enterprise–because he was a little fuzzy on just when the Cold War ended and didn’t realize that the US and the Soviet Union were enemies at this time–it would be interesting to see her and, say McCoy travelling back to Jim Crow times, deciding to masquerade as a married couple, and having difficulties.
I recently saw the movie Holiday Inn – one I remember loving as a kid – and was shocked to hear the song about the Darkies during the Lincoln’s Birthday scene – yowza. On the other hand, in reading Gone With The Wind, I take it as a 19th-century southerner’s point of view (you never saw such happy Negroes!).
Sexism doesn’t seem to bother me as much – maybe because it’s often so over-the-top that it’s easy to make fun of, versus racism that seems just hateful.
Now that would be an interesting story. They weren’t totally clueless about the past, though - when they met up with the revived Abraham Lincoln, there was some discussion of Uhura and the current state of equality.
However, I think Roddenberry was right in that treating it as a total nonissue wa far more powerful. When they got preachy, like in the Frank Gorshin episode, it was not pretty.
The show The Murdoch Mysteries (adapted from a series of novels) has fun with archaic attitudes sometimes. William Murdoch, a detective in Toronto in 1895, is generally a very progressive man. He employs cutting edge, experimental forensic techniques (like comparing and matching fingerprints), expresses a distaste for capital punishment, and so forth. In one episode, a black woman (whose husband was murdered) is a suspect. When the inspector refers to her as a Hottentot, Murdoch self-righteously informs him that the correct term is “negress”.
Overall, the show presents many archaic attitudes in a matter-of-fact way. Murdoch is Catholic, and that’s a big deal to some people. Smart people think that eugenics is a good idea (though the writer clearly does not). Murdoch’s forward-thinking attitudes are usually the anomaly, and sometimes he doesn’t know any better either.
I’m not saying they’re TOTALLY clueless; just that they’re almost certainly iffy on the details.
By the time of Kirk’s Enterprise, Earth has a single government, so most likely the United States is only of historical interest; it exists in the same sense that, say, Northumbria exists now–as a place on a map to which some persons have a sentimental attachment. And I doubt Uhura is one of those persons; it’s made explicit in the series that she’s from Africa. So while she may know that Jim Crow laws once existed and were done away with in the 20th Century, she wouldn’t know the exact date. Moreover, it’s VERY clear that in Trek, the notion different human races is completely lost, and consequently she (and, for that matter, McCoy) wouldn’t really have an idea of what prejudice between different human “races” is like. It might simply never occur to them. I can imagine Uhura thinking mistakenly that racial discrimination in the United States ended in the late 1800s.
A similar example would be a black guy from the United States of 2010 traveling back to medieval europe in 1510, and expecting everybody to be prejudiced against black people. Educated people might know that people from far-off africa had black skin, but but that’s about it. A dark skinned person would be an exotic curiosity, like someone with blue hair. Racism against blacks didn’t really get going until the trans-Atlantic slave trade was well established.
At least removing every incidence of the word “nigger.” I seem to recall there was other revisionism, too, but I can’t think of it. Maybe it was just censoring all the bad words. Yes, broadcast a Mel Brooks movie with everything inappropriate taken out - it should be about ten minutes long then. 
I appreciate how far ahead of its time ST:TOS was; just because it wasn’t as bad doesn’t mean it was good, though.
Which made it what–five minutes long? 
The only place it really bothers me is in science fiction. The best example is the short story “The Cold Equations”. This was in my 11th grade English reader. The set up is that a man on a relief ship with just enough fuel to get him and his emergency medical supplied down to a colony world in need finds out he has extra mass which must come from a stow away. He knows he is going to find some fool who thought he could get away with it. He figures there is a good chance the person meant no harm. He gets a gun and is ready to just push the stow away out the air lock without even listening to his story because it is either that or the ship will crash and millions could die. But when he opens the closet and finds a young woman, every thing is different. He does everything in his power to try and save this girl, where if it was a boy he would have been sucking vacuum inside of two minutes.
I read this in 1991 and the whole class just didn’t get what the big deal was. “But it’s a girl!!” Who cares. Throw her out the airlock.
Similarly, I like Keith Laumer’s work, especially his Retief stories, but the way he treats women in a technological society is ridiculous.
It all comes down to if it makes sense. If the author can convince me that the behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) make sense within the story, I am fine. But if it is just carryover from the author’s own sociological baggage, then it takes me out of the story.
I thought of another interesting example. My most advanced second-graders this past year read Little House in the Big Woods, and they enjoyed the heck out of it; it was great. The group had four girls and one boy, four white kids and one black kid, if that matters. I was reading a chapter or two ahead of them so that I’d be ready for discussions.
It was going swimmingly. And then I hit the chapter that ends with Pa singing a happy little ditty about a happy little darkie.
I talked with my co-workers about it, and eventually decided to address this with them, but in a low-key way: “Some people used this word for black people back then,” I explained, “but it’s not a word that we use today.” That was about it.
Had I not been reading it with kids, it would’ve only registered a wry grin and not so much a reassessment of Pa’s character as a reminder of the times. With kids involved, however, it was somewhat trickier.
I was also thinking about Christie while reading the thread. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me because it comes across as just the prejudices of the characters. Sometimes these prejudices even lead characters to make assumptions that are later proven to be incorrect, like the book where a character says the murderer must be either a woman or an Italian because the victim was stabbed to death, and an Englishman wouldn’t commit such a hot-headed crime.
But other times the reader is apparently meant to sympathize with the prejudices of the characters, and that’s a lot more uncomfortable. In A Murder is Announced there’s “comic relief” involving a Central European servant (I don’t believe anyone even bothers to specify her actual nationality) who is afraid of the police…because she’s a Holocaust survivor. She keeps saying things like “No, I won’t talk to the police! You won’t send me to a concentration camp again! The Nazis killed my family!” and we’re apparently supposed to find this amusing. The other characters basically just say “Oh, that Mizti. Ha ha, how she carries on!”
I think you seriously misunderstand this story. Certainly you’re misremembering some details; there are not millions of lives at stake, for instance, but rather about eleven.
Here’s the deal. The pilot is discomfited not because of the stowaway’s gender, but because of her youth and innocence. He’s a middle-aged man, and he’s expecting an adult to be the castaway, someone on the ship for a crass and possibly criminal reason: intending to hijack the ship, perhaps, or trying to escape prosecution. Even in that case, he’s not happy about what he will have to do; he has to take a moment to steel himself for the task of looking a man in the face and either forcing him into the airlock or shooting him and then shoving his corpse there. Instead he sees a kid of about 17 or 18, who cheerfully and honestly admits her crime, offers to pay a fine, and, when the fact of the matter is made clear to her, DOESN’T TRY TO ESCAPE OR JUSTIFY HERSELF, BUT ACCEPTS HER FATE. She even feels guilty because of the pain her folly will cause her brother and parents. The very fact of her acquiescence makes it harder for him, because he cannot tell himself that she truly deserves her fate.
The fact that she’s female isn’t really the point; it’s that she is about to die for the crime of her own naivete and the intransigence of the universe*. More than anything, I think, it’s her youth that distresses him. She’s a kid; she pings his “take care of” meter, not his “deal with violently and expeditiously” meter.
The story is not in the least bit misogynistic or misandrist. I’ll concede that it’s somewhat condescending towards women, but it does not follow that it’s dismissive or contemptuous of men. Bear in mind of the six characters (the pilot, the , the captain of the mother ship, the radio operator of the mother ship, and the girl’s brother, and the radio operator of the colony who takes the initial call), the only female is the girl. Artistically, I’d say that this is meant to highlight the isolation of her situation, the fact that she’s such a fish out of water; and of course it’s a way to completely undermine his expectations of what he’ll find in the supply closet at the very beginning. But the story would work just as well if it were a 17-year-old boy on trying to visit his older sister.
Also, the pilot hardly does ANYTHING to try to save the girl (Marilyn). He knows the situation is hopeless from the very beginning. Either Marilyn, he, and the eleven men who need the medicine will die, or Marilyn alone will die. What he does is reduce the deceleration of his ship so that he can save fuel, allowing her a few more minutes of life; and note that she, of her own volition, doesn’t even take the entire time that she might have, but rather chooses to go into the airlock after speaking with her brother. Other than the reduction of deceleration to save fuel, all the pilot does is ask the mother ship captain if there is any other ship that can be diverted and might save her (though in his internal monologue he notes that this is surely hopeless) and, and he gets the mother ship to calculate how long he can reduce acceleration safely. He doesn’t try to jettison any extraneous items on board, or anything else. He just gives her the mercy of a few more minutes of life.
“Cold Equations” is not “girls rule, boys drool!” At most it might be seen as ageist, since the pilot treats the Marilyn as basically a kid; this might be offensive to some. But to many a 40-year-old person–me, for instance–a 17-year-old person IS still a kid.
*Yes, I realize that, despite Godwin’s intentions, the tragedy in “Cold Equations” is actually born of bad ENGINEERING, not the heartlessness of physics, but the pilot doesn’t realize that.
I haven’t read these books, but I would like to point out that your description of the slave girl isn’t all that improbable. For instance:
- There really wasn’t a racial component to roman slavery. Anyone could become a slave, and slaves could look like anything. A black slave, by virtue of being rare and expensive, might even reasonably be treated better than a run-of-mill white slave.
- Educating ones slaves was the same as increasing their value, and having really well-educated slaves was a status-symbol. Rich people took care to educate the slaves they kept close, because it reflected well on them. The easiest way to do this is communal lessons for slaves and children alike, so I see nothing wrong with slaves being allowed to sit in with the free children as such. the famous Cato is said to have bought cheap slaves, given them a basic education and sold them for profit, much like modern people (used to) flip houses.
- Buying a slave for a female child and letting her be basically idle is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption, so exactly the sort of thing a rich family would do. And it might even be the smart thing to do. A roman writer recommends buying really young slaves and raising them with your own children, to provide them with loyal personal slaves in adulthood. I expect many roman matrons had a close female slave, not unlike Victorian women had servant companions.
I’m sure these books are as terrible as you say, I just find it jarring when works set in antiquity portray roman and greek slavery as being identical to american black slavery. Not so.* Rome* was really good in this regard, with varied treatment of and attitudes to slaves.
As for sexism and racism in general, I don’t react to it if it is realistically portrayed as attitudes instead of realities. If the male character think of women as weak and stupid, and the women think of themselves as inferior, that is realistic and heart-wrenching. If all the women are actually described as useless ditzes, it bothers me more. Same with racism.
Casually beating ones slaves was never “normal”, and would always reflect badly on the owner. Not for moral reasons, but for prudent ones. A slave is a tool, and has value. Someone beating his slaves for shits and giggles would be seen as an idiot and possibly unbalanced, much like someone mistreating his horses. Think of how you would view someone who bought expensive cars and then intentionally damaged the paint work for no reason.
So, have them treat their slaves like they would treat their dogs and horses, assuming the characters are sensible: well-fed, adequately housed, and worked hard with minimal discipline.
Yes! See especially “The Yellow Face” (I think that’s the one - where the husband wants Sherlock to find out why his wife doesn’t want to be followed?)
That is all interesting, especially the third point. However, I suspect that even idle, well-kept slaves were not treated as equals with the children of the household. This household didn’t even have any other slaves, btw - the family did everything for themselves. That really is very unrealistic for a high-status Roman family of the time. (the father was something high up in the navy)
I forgot about the other child in the books - a mute street kid. Yup, he is also treated as an equal by the family. The father even tells the daughter off for assuming that the boy might be a thief, just because he’s dirty (and he was a thief too! Not out of choice, but still.) :smack: This daughter never ever suffers from any sexism, naturally.
It wouldn’t be so bad if this family were portrayed as being especially liberal, but no, they’re supposed to be the standard.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that the books weren’t stupid, they sound very silly indeed. Especially since there was no such thing as “high up in the navy”.
:dubious: Mark Twain was not a racist, and this is an extremely disrespectful comment. He was far more progressive in his time than you can hope to aspire to be in yours. :mad:
Such a slave was essentially a pet for the owner’s child…a human pet. And yes, it WAS conspicuous consumption.
Can I get a cite for this custom? I’m not aiming to cast doubt; I’d just like to know more.