Since at least 213 BCE, book burnings have been a reaction to the power of the written
word.
When roasting paper in a giant circle went out of style (at least in the intellectual
sphere), governments would take it upon itself to ban books.
However, when we talk about book bannings today, at least in the Western World, we
are usually discussing a specific choice made by individual schools, school districts, and
libraries made in response to the moralistic outrage of some group.
This, while still hotly-contested and controversial, is still nothing in comparison to the ways
books have been removed, censored, and outright destroyed in the past.
Along with their authors.
So on that happy note, let’s … explore how the seemingly innocuous book has survived
centuries of the ban hammer.
Historically speaking there are usually three big reasons books are banned: Religion, morality,
and politics.
Back in the BCE era, entire ideas, religions, and political movements were wiped out.
Not with a mass tweet, but with book burnings and sometimes, if things were really intense,
people burnings as well.
One of the earliest documented examples in North America is the burning of Aztec and
Mayan manuscripts in the 1560s by Catholic priests and the Conquistadors.
In Tudor England during the schism between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic
Church, depending on which monarch was arbitrarily in power and which religion they followed
your choice of religious book could get you murdered.
This was done, as French writer and historian Lucien X. Polastron explains in “Books on
Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History:”
“Because, as the lawmakers of ancient China and the Nazis in Czechoslovakia decided, an
educated people cannot be governed; because the conquered peoples must change the history
of their beliefs, like the Aztecs; because only the illiterate can save the world, a
common theme of the millenarian preachers of every era; because the nature of a great
collection of books is a threat to the new power.”
Historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the
United States to experience a ban on a national scale.
Many Southern states prohibited the sale of the book stating that it stoked the flames
abolition and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often considered the book that helped start the
Civil War.
Which … is a hot take, but whatever.
One place you could call the Billboard Hot 100 of Banned books is the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum, or List of Prohibited Books.
This was a list of books and other publications deemed heretical by the Vatican.
If you were Catholic you could not read this content without permission from a priest or
higher.
(prayer hands)
This included romantic texts, astronomy, science, and anything else the Church saw as antithetic
to their faith.
Victor Hugo--Over it Copernicus and Galileo -- Cancelled
Rousseau -- ya gotta go
Funny enough Charles Darwin’s ​On the ​Origin of Species was not listed among
the banned texts in question.
Things that make you go hmmm.
It was banned from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge and in the United States,
kept out of many schools.
In Tennessee the book and teaching of evolution were banned until as late as 1967.
In Nazi Germany the government burned thousands of books written by Jewish authors, “communists”,
and “others”.
Included were the works of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller,
Lenin, Jack London, Karl Marx, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky
Those are political and religious reasons, but sometimes a book can get in trouble for
being too … risque.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is, according to Literary Professor Nicholas
Frankel, “one of the first novels in the English language to explore the nature of
homoerotic and homosexual desire.”
Charles Whibley, mentee of W.E.
Henley--the English poet, editor and critic, who fun fact was also the inspiration for
Long John Silver--reviewed Dorian as such:
“[...]Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while
The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he contributes to Lippincott’s, is ingenious, interesting,
full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art—for its
interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature—for its hero is a devil, it is false
to morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course
of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity.
[...]
Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed
noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other
decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.”
–The Scots Observer, July 5th, 1890
And this is the response to the edited version that Wilde’s publishers made, where, according
to Frankel they cut out 500 words from the original typescript without Wilde’s knowledge.
When Wilde was put on trial for his homosexuality--“gross indecency” officially-- in 1895, his novel
was used as evidence that lead to his conviction.
This prudishness didn’t just exist for the posh british victorians.
We in America had Anthony Comstock, an “anti-vice activist.”
He sounds … fun
Comstock got Congress to pass “The Comstock Law” on March 3, 1873, which prohibited
the mailing of “pornographic” materials.
His definition of the term was murky at best.
Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets dealing with reproduction, Oscar Wilde, and even The
Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
A bunch of “comstockery” I say.
Amy Werbel, Professor of the History of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, put
it aptly:
“Comstock most typically engaged in “direct censorship” when he seized and destroyed
materials to prevent their public circulation.
Direct censorship in any society, no matter how repressive, is just one means through
which discourse is limited.
Concern about the possibility of censorship in many cases results in an unwillingness
of artists and writers to risk producing potentially indictable work, resulting in self-censorship.
As individuals respond to perceived limits in this manner, a new “canon” is formed,
shaping the perception of what speech is considered to be normal or transgressive.
This process of “social censorship” typically serves to amplify the voices of those who
already hold power and to reduce, marginalize, and silence the expressions of those who are
vulnerable.”
Two legal cases that really helped move the conversation in a different direction
were The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses in 1933 and R v Penguin Books in
1960.
The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses centered around Irish author James Joyce’s
Ulysses: a book that I absolutely respect and hold in high esteem
The court argued that the book was obscene and Random House argued that the content was
protected by the first amendment.
Ultimately judge John M. Woolsey stated that the novel was “serious” and that Joyce
was “sincere and honest” in using a stream of consciousness to explore the mentality
of its characters.
Subsequently the book was finally allowed to enter the United States as a result.
In R v Penguin Books Ltd the book in question was D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover
which is a book about a noble woman who has an affair with her gardener.
Landscaping can be hot I guess.
During the trial Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecutor, asked the jury to decide if the
book was obscene and if it had enough “literary merit”
"Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well
as boys—reading this book?
Is it a book you would have lying around your own house?
Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"”
Wives and servants … reading … about pleasure ...I GASP
Aldous Huxley, in a handwritten deposition to the defence team: "Lady Chatterley's Lover
is an essentially wholesome book ... That a beautiful and serious work of art should
run the risk of being banned because its creator ... chose to make use of certain words that
it is conventional to regard it as shocking – this is surely the height of absurdity."
It seemed like the jury agreed with Huxley and they ultimately voted that the book was
not obscene.
Finally in 1973 with Miller v. California the US Supreme Court finally tweaked its definition
of obscenity from that of "utterly without socially redeeming value" to that which lacks
"serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
Progress?
Today LGBTQ books and books written by authors of color depicting the complexities of their
life are still often challenged.
Banned Books Week was started in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges
to books in schools, bookstores and libraries.
Additionally, every year, the American Library Association puts out their list of the Top
Ten Most Challenged Books.
In 2019, eight out of the 10 had to do with LGBTQIA content.
As Judith Krug, one of the founders of Banned Books week put it in 1972:
“... librarians are trained as librarians; we have absolutely no training or expertise
in being censors.
Our job--and yours--is not to limit the horizons of a child, be he six or twelve, ten or twenty.
Our jobs are to provide all the ammunition we possibly can to enable a child to expand
his horizons.
The right of any individual to read is an absolute necessity in a democratic society.”
Book banning is not about morality it is about control.
Controlling the scope of the imagination and smothering it before it can truly grow.
It is fine to expose children to complicated books, but doing so asks us to talk to children,
not just lecture them.
We limit the scope of the imagination if we start policing the quality of a book based
on subjective moral ideologies.
Should we be conscious of the kind of work we expose to children?
Of course, but banning books because they include LGBTQ families or because they talk
candidly about the realities of marginalized existence, ignores that there are children in those
families and in those realities who need these books.
To quote from Krug again, “...‘Intellectual freedom” is the right of any person to believe
what he wants on any subject and to express his beliefs orally or graphically, publicly
or privately, as he deems appropriate.
The ability to express one’s opinions, however… does not really mean very much if there is
not someone to hear what he is saying, to read what he is writing, or to view what he
is producing through other methods.
And so, the definition of intellectual freedom has a second integral part and that is total
and complete freedom of access to all information and ideas regardless of the medium of communication
used.
Information and ideas, in turn, give a man something to think about, to consider, to
weigh prior to coming to his own opinion and decisions.
Once these opinions and decisions are formed (and sometimes before!), he, too, is free
to express his beliefs.
And so we have a circle.
The circle breaks, however, if either the ability to produce or access the productions
is stifled.”
So in life we have a choice, do we want to be Team Comstock or Team Wilde?
Choose wisely.