Ethnic slurs in old books that you like - what impression?

Cafe Society
1

I like reading the classic English murder mysteries: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. However, it’s not uncommon in Christie and Sayers to come across ethnic or religious slurs, used by the primary characters. Any time I come across this, there’s a momentary disconnect, since the convention of these books is that you are intended to identify with the hero or favourable characters, like Wimsey and Inspector Parker. (They’re not “modern” books, in the sense used by Miss Marple to describe the books her nephew Raymond writes, where none of the characters are very pleasant people.)

Interestingly, this doesn’t happen in Marsh’s books. When ethnic slurs are used there, the primary characters such as Inspector Alleyn usually disapprove and gently indicate that such attitudes are not, well, “not quite”. One reason for the difference, even though all three wrote mysteries set primarily in England, is probably because they came from different backgrounds: Christie was upper middle class England and Sayers was academic / clergy England, while Marsh came from New Zealand. She appears to have had a much different take on race relations - which leads to the depressing (to me, at least) conclusion that Christie and Sayers probably didn’t see anything wrong with the slurs they had their primary characters use - that was just the way society was for them.

Any thoughts?

2

You have to read texts in relation to the time they were written. Lysistrata is neither feminist nor pacifist, because those ideas simply aren’t relevant to the time they were written. Likewise, you simply have to accept that these “slurs” (and you should have provided examples, because I just finished reading all of the Miss Marple novels and I don’t know what you’re talking about–are you sure you aren’t confusing things that are slurs now with things that were perfectly PC then?) were standard and accepted practice when the books were written. If Christie and Sayers used “slurs,” it was because everybody used them.

Nothing irks me more than literary critics who don’t understand this. It’s why I got out of literature.

3

This would have been my first conclusion. Though I don’t see what’s so depressing about it. If one were to get depressed every time someone from the relatively distant past we admire turns out to be somewhat racist, we’d all need Zoloft. Those attitudes were near-universal at the time the books were written. I’d be surprised if Christie or Sayers weren’t cluelessly racist. Projecting modern attitudes toward race relations or, really, anything else, on people who lived in the past is a basically fruitless pursuit, unless you’re aiming for making yourself overwhelmingly disgusted with the vast majority of humanity.

4

As a young kid of ten or so, I was shocked when Fenton Hardy, stalwart father of Frank and Joe, in an original text edition of The Tower Treasure, made reference to a “nigger in the woodbox.” I had never heard that expression, though I had heard “monkey in the woodbox,” which now strikes me as just as racist, if my guess is right and it refers to a black person as well.

Sir Rhosis

5

Oh, I’m aware of the dangers of projection, jayjay - but the point of my post was that not everyone shared those attitudes, as Marsh’s books, written at the same time, demonstrate.

Sattua - in both Christie and Sayers, I’ve come across the n-word, the k-word for Jews, the c-word for Chinese - the list goes on. I can’t give chapter and verse, since I don’t have my copies handy, but two that I remember are “Death in the Air” by Christie, and “Unnatural Death” by Sayers.

In “Death in the Air,” a nice young couple is getting to know each other, with obvious signs of attraction. As the book develops, they’re the support couple for Poirot. In their intial conversation, they go through their list of what they like and dislike, and one of the items, casually thrown in, is black people. In “Unnatural Death”, one of the characters is a Jamaican clergyman - and there were a lot of casual ethnic slurs.

However, I must also admit that most of those occurences were in novels written in the 20s and 30s - I don’t recall seeing them in Christie’s later works, from the 50s and 60s, which may be an indication of a change in her awareness of the issue.

6

Well, no, and I wouldn’t expect everyone to. National cultures were much more isolated then than they are now with instant communication and international radio and television broadcasts circling the globe. New Zealand culture WOULD probably be a bit less racist than British culture at the time, simply because the Maori were much more numerous and prevalent in New Zealand than Pakistanis, Indians or Caribbean blacks were in Britain. Also, you have to take into account the social stratification of the respective milieus…I never got the impression that New Zealand had the same kind of separation of the classes that Britain did. That plays into it as well.

7

Hell, And Then There Were None (or Ten Little Indians) was originally titled Ten Little Niggers, set on “Nigger Island” and featured “Nigger figurines” as central to the plot. Beyond that, there was a good deal of anti-semitism thrown into the mix for good measure.

“O tempora! O mores!”

8

My late father-in-law, an elderly Canadian gent, tended to refer to almost all persons who were not of Anglo-Saxon origin as “coloreds” (this included residents of Spain, Italy, and Greece). While I initially found his use of the term “coloreds” rather alarming, I never once saw my father-in-law treat a person of any race in a discourteous or arrogant manner. He was as gracious and pleasant with an African-American janitor as he would be with the Queen of England.

Words aren’t everything. Racism is an attitude, not just a vocabulary.

9

This is a good point. I can remember reading (I forget whether it was in Kipling or Conrad) a passage where the narrator noted another character’s racism with contempt, and it was phrased something like “he was the sort of fool who assumed that he was naturally more intelligent than a nigger, because his skin was white.” Very dissonant to read now.

10

I’m a gay literature student. I sometimes joke that I spend a lot of time wincing :slight_smile:

That’s a bit of a tangent from ethnicity, but I doubt I’d be able to get through my courses if I took it personally, and didn’t just tell myself that it was the way people thought back then. It’s still annoying when I come across it in a writer I otherwise like.

It’s messier, of course, when talking about more recent writers. Recently, I looked into the work of a well-known Canadian graphic novel artist – David Sims – because if I ever teach a Canadian Lit class, I’d like to have at least one graphic novel on it. The work was excellent, but when I discovered that Sims used a later work to editorialize about the evils of the “feminist and homosexualist agenda”, I decided to stop buying his work. Nor would I teach it while he’s alive, as I wouldn’t want to support him financially.

As for the older writers, it does present a real window on the absurd things people will buy, if a silly idea is prevalent enough – it really makes you wonder what ideas will be considered absurd 100 years from now.

11

I recognize that’s how blacks were referred to and thought of then – not to mention Mexicans, Chinese, Irish and Jews – so it only minimally detracts from my interest if I genuinely like the book. Attitudes towards women often fare no better. You read theses things in the context of their times and the filter of the author’s worldview.

Certain authors, like Lovecraft, have reputations so precede them I’ve never read any of their stories.

12

Very dissonant, but very important.

My feeling is that the modern generation needs to hear what the very recent past was like to know just how far we have really come in a short time. I never encountered racism as I was growing up in the 70’s, and was absolutely astounded when I found out how recently institutionalized racism was banned in the US. (My lack of experience with racism was mainly due to growing up in an all white, all Christian rural midwest town. Not easy to see people disparage other races or creeds if those other people never show up to be disparaged.)

Anyway, I think that racist media should not be hidden, but should be shown and deconstructed. Case in point… Wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons. Kids need to know how we demonized the enemy to know what real war is like. And in novels, it trulyshows the actions of peopel a the time. People cannot forget the past unless we want to repeat it.

13

BoringDad. I agree with you about those images. One bad thing about NAACP protests of Little Rascals, Amos and Andy, Song of the South and of course Birth of A Nation is that supressing them allows people to be willfully forgetful about the level of even casual racism in the popular entertainment. One reason I’ve always liked Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is because of the montage racist imagery at the end from the WB cartoons to Mickey Rooney to Milton Berle to Stepin Fetchit.

14

Or even twenty years from now. I wish I could find a cite, but I remember reading about a twentieth-century book in which the opening sentence mentioned that someone’s shoes were “nigger-brown” and that this character said “F— you.” In a subsequent printing (within a decade or two) of the work, the description of the shoes was changed to something like “dark brown” and the character was quoted as saying “Fuck you.” I believe the sentence contained yet a third example of changing standards. Anyone know the exact passage?

15

Heck, I’d even be OK with doctored copies that contained brief stops in the story where a narrator came on to explain the context and the historical usage and a self congratulatory speech about how far our society has come. I have some very liberal friends who bemoan how our society is going straight down the tubes, and I have to constantly remind them how much change has happened within living memory of huge portion of society. In 40 years, people will be astounded that something as innocous as gay marriage was considered bad.

16

Now that you mention it, wasn’t there an hourlong show that discussed the social mores and racist attitudes prevalent in banned cartoons that was shown on some cable channel – the History Channel or maybe even as a late night Cartoon Network offering?

Rotten.com has a pretty good webpage on banned cartoons, too.

I think me and BoringDad hijiacked this topic away from old books long enough.

17

Nope, but I can narrow down the author with something like 99% certainty: Raymond Chandler.

I would speculate that the third example involved drugs.

“Nigger-brown” and similar terms were used adjectivally in several Raymond Chandler books, and have often been cleaned-up in later editions.

His early stuff had plenty of “fucks” and “shits” represented by “f—” and “s—”, and of course these have been restored.

Some matter-of-fact, neutral references to drug use (especially cocaine) were cut in some editions.

18

I’m a huge fan of Agatha Christie, and there are loads of examples of racist slurs and all that. Jews in her early books are invariable described in stereotypical language, and Chinese characters, especially in “The Big Four”, are treated in a very “Fu Manchu” kind of fashion.

But this was mostly her early novels- later ones, especially post-WWII, were pretty toned down. “A Carribean Mystery” (1964) featured two black characters that were spoken of in fairly positive terms, even though it may come off as somewhat dated now.

Personally, I always enjoyed Christie’s later books. Especially all the casual references to “queers” and “lesbians” that would pop up unexpectedly.

19

dunno where your quote came from, but I recall Kipling’s greatest compliment to Gunga Din was that he was “white inside.” I’ve never been certain whether that was intended ironically, or if Kipling really thought like that.

20

Peter Morris. Well, read this and see. Pretty sure it’s out of copyright.

The White Man’s Burden
By Rudyard Kipling
McClure’s Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899)

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward–
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden!
Have done with childish days–
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.