It doesn’t bother me at all one way or the other. Fiction from the past offers us some insight into how people thought. Gotta take the good with the bad.
Marc
Ngaio Marsh was Maori, and had probably encountered a fair share of ethnic slurs of her own.
I always thought Kipling’s poem was a protest against Colonialism, not an ode to it. His Song Of the White Men makes me more convinced of it.
No, they both were sincere. Kipling was a pretty ardent supporter of colonialism.
?? Lissa, to me, Kipling poems have always read like the unapologetic trumpheting of a proud member of her majesty’s colonial Empire who forswear the comforts of home to dispense civilization and Christian enlightenment to the ignorant heathen and Mohammaden.
“O well for the world when White Men drink to the dawn of the White Man’s day!”
Kipling’s not exactly known for sarcasm.
But it wasn’t Kipling speaking at that point, but his narrator, a rough Tommy who remembered the way they used to cuff, cuss and chivvy their native water-bearer around. Opinions expressed by the character are not necessarily those of the author.
In the final verse, the narrator takes it for granted that Gunga Din, being a heathen, is in Hell now, but that he himself, being a nominal Christian but by no means a good one, will be off to the same place in due course; but Gunga Din will still be allowed to deliver drinks of water to men who desperately need it, the same as he was in life. And the underlined phrase here:
…handily refutes the notion that being “white inside” was Kipling’s greatest compliment to Gunga Din.
P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are among my favourites of any kind of literature. There is one story in which a troupe of “nigger minstrels” from America plays a part. It is never made clear whether the performers are black people or whether they are white people in blackface; however, I do believe that Bertie (and some others, maybe) disguise themselves as members of the troupe.
The use of the word is jarring, and, of course, there’s the argument that in that time and place – early 20th century upper class England – the word would be in common use. However, it does offer the opportunity of deeper introspection. It acts as one of the few reminders in Wodehouse’s stories that the world he is writing about is wholly fantastical.
In the real world, the society portrayed as romantic and harmless in Wodehouse would be full of right bastards. The real villains would not be comical figures like Roderick Spode, but rather substantial assholes – imperialists, robber barons, etc. – and the idle rich of Bertie’s peers would harbour all kinds of hateful racist attitudes.
Well, it’s not wholly fantastical. It’s just that your politics are different than Wodehouse’s, so you see certain things as bad that he didn’t. Which is really what this thread is about.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms is moving along brilliantly - truly one of the great books - when Henry goes to see Cat in the hospital and is trying to make light; Cat says on his coming into the room “Here’s Othello back from the wars” and Henry replies “Othello was a nigger”
Just typing that crushes me. Hemingway was a revolutionary writer but so damn flawed. When he writes to his strengths he is amazing. When he lets his personality show he comes across as a misogynistic, rascist prick. That passage is particularly tough for me because aFtArms is a favorite book that represents what is great about his writing, but then hits that incredibly awful note. Most of the time, his writing is pretty well segregated - like he almost knew “okay, this is good, so I can’t be my usual asshole self in how I write this…”
Steinbeck was accused of racist writing for books like Tortilla Flat, but anyone who reads the books feels the love and respect he has for the local, poorer folk who lived by him. Clearly a case where intent matters far more than words…
I agree that Hemingway’s writing was exceptional, but I can’t say that I would be crushed at admitting his character flaws. Well, character flaws? That implies a discrete set of distasteful traits. It seems that Hemingway’s character, in general, would be objectionable. He’s pretty much a right bastard in most ways – plus his alcoholism eventually destroyed him as a writer, which takes away more from the “contributions” side of the scale.
Exactly my point. The poem tells the story of a Tommy who is surprised when an Indian behaves like a white man. It’s never been clear to me whether Kipling himself is condemning that attitude, or whether he thinks that way himself.
I got the impression that GD is in Hell voluntarily, giving water to damned souls, though not damned himself.
Point taken, it wasn’t his greatest compliment.
In the case of Dorothy Sayers, she was openly anti-Semitic. The very ugly anti-Jewish slurs in her books weren’t just the language of the times, they reflected her strong beliefs. In the 1930’s she stopped writing mysteries to concentrate on writing Christian religious tracts which had an anti-Semitic bias.
This doesn’t stop her Busman’s Honeymoon from being my favorite book, but when I re-read it, I consciously avoid the one extremely anti-Semitic section.
My sense is that Agatha Christie, who did change her language, not just about race, but about other subjects as well, to suit the times, was probably just using the language of the day in her earlier books, and didn’t hold racist or anti-Semitic beliefs.
While Ngaio Marsh was given a Maori first name, her parents were descended from British colonists, and she was not of Maori heritage. Her books, although written in the language of the times, are often pointedly opposed to racism.
Kipling is an excellent example. He portrays locals and colonials, but he also subdivides colonials into class strata. Although Kipling was surely upper middle class, he writes a lot in a more common vernacular (which is to me, at least, harder to read and process). The soldier praising Gunga Din is obviously a common man, not an elite. I’d say that Kipling, common to his time, had a sort of hierarchy. I’m not troubled by this; he was a product of his times and his circumstance. He sees both nobility and ignorance in the local populace. He’s quite harsh about their treatment of Mowgli in the Jungle Books, but characters like Mowgli, Gunga Din and others show that he also found a nobility of spirit there. So I’d suggest that he didn’t sense that the native Indians were naturally inferior, but perhaps inferior of culture and civilisation.
This might now be seen as politically incorrect, but it does give a good insight into how colonialism was viewed and accepted by the British in that time. I’d rather see it preserved as a lesson of how we have acted and a yardstick for how progress has been made than see it sanitized for our approval. I’ve used Kipling before with my children to help explain the progress that we’ve made in regards treatment of people in other cultures.
Huh.
I’ve never taken a literature course, so I didn’t know the true interpretation. It seemed to me to be so heavy-handed that it had to be sarcasm/parody, much like Nine Inch Nails’ “Man With a Gun.”
The problem is ubiquitous. You’d pretty quickly stop reading almost all literature if you tried to avoid racial stereotyping like this. Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Niggers” has already been mentioned, but the term is pervasive in British literature until recently – the movie of The Dam Busters has a dog named “Nigger” (TV prints now have this removed, but older videotapes are uncut). Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are downright insulting about blacks and orientals, with judgments about half-Chinese, half -black “Chigoes”, or practically all characterizations of blacks in Live and Let SDie (the book being far worse than the movie we’ve dissected on this Board).
The French comic strip (and its British translation) have caricatures of the black pirate that wouldn’t exactly pass muster in modern USA.
I love the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. J.T. Joshi castigates de Camp for his “parochial” statements about Lovecraft’s racism, but I don’t see why. I tried to explain Lovecraft’s “A Shadow over Innsmouth” to my daughter, and I realized that the story is in essence a condemnation of miscegenation, albeit with aquatic creatures. It’s be interesting to rewrite it as a condemnation of racist views, told from the viewpoint of Disney’s Ariel. it’s a helluva good read, but at its root it’s about the horrors of interbeeding with a different race of creatures, and no amount of arguing gets you away from that.
I love Mark Twain, and his works are critical of man’s inhumanity to man all oveer, and especially against blacks (as in Pudd’nhead Wilson or Huck Finn), yet tain himslf has only insults for the American Indian, in Huckleberry Finn and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (oddly enough) and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians.
There atre cartoons and comic books from the 1940s that are famously scandalous for they portrayal of black and oriental stereotypes. Some of these (like Bob Clampett’s “Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves”) Are masterpieces of animation, but absolutely, unbelievably offensive. Again, the offense is completely inextricable from the cartoon. There’s simply no way you can show this without utterly destroying the work with censored scenes.
i think that there are treatments and characters even today that will be thought objectionable in the near future. I thought that Neil Simon’s treatment of the hispanic maid (and other characters) in “Seems Like Old Times” was offensive at the time, and would be condemned by now, but it hasn’t. Treatments of gays in shows like “Will and Grace” will, I predict, be condemned in the future. “But we’re not nmaking fun of real peoople – we knowe that these are riduculous stereotypes” won’t fly as an excuse. I’m certain people felt tha way about the treatmwent of blacks back in the 1940s.
Even so, some authors stand out a little for their vehemence, even by the standards of their time. Trollope, for example – I really like his work, but it can’t be denied that he’s more than casually anti-Semitic. As a reader, I think it’s okay if you enjoy the work, but keep your mental reservations about the offending parts.
At the same time, I think there’s an extra level of appreciation that I reserve for those writers who were significantly less racist than their contemporaries. Willa Cather comes to mind. She was able to write in a pretty even-handed way about non-whites (and even about homosexuals). Compare her, for example, to her contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose stereotypical portrayals of Jews in The Great Gatsby are something of a shock to our sensibilities.
Agatha Christie wrote “Ten Little Niggers” in 1939. It was also known as “The Nigger in the Woodpile”. The title was later changed to “Ten Little Indians” and is today known by the title, “And Then There Were None”.
I’m certainly understanding of authors who wrote in accordance with the social norms of their day. I don’t condemn them for having a 1930’s attitude. However, I sort of wish that favorite authors could rise above the bigotry of their day. Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, have some nasty anti-semitic references.
It’s not just the use of a epithets (like “nigger” or “wop” or “kike”.) I can’t expect someone to understand that a word in common use might not be well thought of many decades later. Words change.
Nor is it the use of stereotypes (sneaky Chinese, theiving Jews, sex-driven blacks, etc.) A great writer can draw on stereotypes as a way of short-cutting; I don’t mind a Jewish character who is a stingy money-lender or pick-pocket. A stereotype exists because there were some members of that group who fit that description; not necessarily a majority, but some who were prominent.
It’s the concepts. I can wish that these great writers had understood that the class-sense and bigotry and snobbishness and exclusivity of their day is not, at base, humane or kind.
Shakespeare, for instance, writes sensitively with a Jewish character – although he has to cave in to social mores and so the money-lender Jew is the villain, defeated in the end by Christian virtue. But still, it’s pretty amazing for the time that he creates a (at least partially) sympathetic Jewish character. Shakespeare also, you will recall, has a sympathetic (if tragic) black character in Othello.
In Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe*, the Jewish characters are far better people than the Knight Templar villain (and how could Ivanhoe choose Rowena over Rebecca?)
So, there are authors who are able to rise above the social conventions of their time, and I respect them all the more for it. I love Dorothy Sayers, and I wish she could have seen further than her contemporaries.
I need to add that Conan Doyle does have one story in which the mother of a mixed-race child (and the child) are treated with great sympathy and understanding, so he apparently was able to see beyond the racism of his day, but not beyond the antisemitism.
I can’t believe I’m the first person to mention Margaret Mitchell and “Gone With the Wind.” The depiction of the slaves is deplorable–use of the “n-word” abounds, and their “dialogue” is horrible. Yes, Mitchell was writing about a time in history when that was the norm. I don’t even think she could get published today.
How many people skipped over the black people’s dialogue because it was too hard to decipher?
[Pause for anecdote]
A few years ago I was working on a client’s 100th anniversary celebration. The company had assembled a lot of old photos, old product labels, and a handful of what were called “Monday Memos” – little chatty or motivational notes the founder had written each week to the employees.
The founder is widely known as a philanthropist with a sterling moral character. He had an impeccable reputation for dealing with employees, suppliers and customers and inspired his descendents to go into public service, philanthropy, education, etc.
When I asked why the company reprinted so few of his papers, I was told, after a great deal of hemming and hawing, that “he was a man of his times” who used some terms that some people might find offensive. Specifically people who were not male, not white, not American, not Christian. . .