When you are the first child who can read in your grade, there’s a lot of pressure to remain one step ahead. Once the other kids can read sentences, you need to read picture books. And when the other kids can read picture books, you must then graduate to chapter books.
However, once the other kids can read chapter books, where else is there to go?
In my desire to be seen as a learned and sophisticated first grader, I began to rip through nearly every Classic Starts book in my school library, a series of abridged versions of classic novels to introduce children to iconic works of literature.
I remember cracking open the pages of the Classic Starts edition of Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera” on the sticky plastic seats of the school bus, eager to begin my journey into the depths of the Paris Opera House.
When I entered middle school, I was introduced to my first Shakespeare play, “Much Ado About Nothing,” in addition to numerous other literary classics. I fell in love with Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” almost as much as I fell in love with Gregory Peck when we watched the film adaptation in class.
Throughout my time in high school, I was lucky enough to be introduced to an even wider variety of diverse authors and works. I was exposed to historical classics like Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” as well as more modern standards like Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Toni Morrison’s “Sula.”
Out of my entire high school English curriculum, I can list the books that fell flat for me on one hand.
Reading Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” felt like watching paint dry. Even as a lifelong goody-two-shoes, I had to SparkNotes “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque — I couldn’t get through more than 10 pages at a time.
While I understood the cultural impact of Hemingway’s sparse prose, I wanted to tear my copy of “The Sun Also Rises” in two. And although I didn’t necessarily dislike the book, I remember finishing Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and thinking to myself, “This is it?”
When I think about the classic books that bored me, there’s a very clear throughline connecting them: They’re all written by men. More specifically, these stories are written by men, about men and almost fully for men — specifically white men.
That’s not to say I’ve never liked a classic authored by a white male. Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” remains an all-time favorite of mine, though I read it before I was old enough to digest its full beauty. I’m still waiting for my local library to get a copy of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely” so I can find out what crimes Philip Marlowe gets to the bottom of next.
This isn’t me standing here and bashing every white male author to have ever existed. Literary giants like Hugo and Dickens affirm that there is a justifiable place for white male authors in literature — I just don’t think it needs to be front and center.
Literacy has always been a tool of control leveraged against those on the margins of society.
I will never forget reading Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” in eighth grade. Learning about the lengths Douglass and other enslaved people had to go to in order to learn how to read and write made me understand the extent to which education — or the withholding of it — can be used to control and dominate.
Douglass’ memoir woke me up to the harsh realization that so many people’s stories have been lost to time because they did not have the ability to share and preserve their voice.
White men have had the freedom to speak their minds for centuries. I mean, we’ve been reading about Odysseus’ arduous journey for nearly 3,000 years. Isn’t it time to turn our attention to other stories, perhaps not in place of, but instead alongside these other classics?
It’s not that I do not feel for Holden Caulfield’s feelings of alienation or Jake Barnes’s sense of disillusionment. In fact, I deeply sympathize with these complex characters, as I think most people do.
Still, I can’t help but cringe at the way popular analyses of books of this sort encourage us to shake our fist at “society” without encouraging us to think critically about what elements of society we are really denouncing.
When we look at these novels from a feminist perspective, we often critique their poor representation of female characters and leave it at that. Yet there’s so much more to be said.
While women are its primary victims, men are not free from the dark shadow of patriarchy. Systematically, men benefit from their privilege. Individually, though, the patriarchy puts undeniable and harmful pressure on men to be the stoic conquerors this system posits them to be.
It reminds me of a clip from Jubilee’s “Middle Ground” series featuring politically conservative teenagers and liberal parents that went viral a few years ago. In the video, one of the teens laments that men experience the highest rates of suicide, work in the most dangerous workplaces and serve in the military in higher proportions to women.
One of the parents responds in a now oft quoted clip, “And who set that system up?”
So, I guess my qualm is less with these books than with the culture that upholds their characters’ experiences as the apex of human suffering without questioning the structures that got these characters so down in the first place.
Perhaps I would not have been so thoroughly bored by Fitzgerald and Hemingway had our classroom conversations explored less about male angst and more about what made these men so angsty.
Maybe it’s not about putting these “boring” classics back on the shelf, but seeing what other books we can brush some dust off of.
