What is literature for?
I don’t find it particularly shocking or alarming that an Edinburgh school doesn’t want to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. There are a lot of better books, and schools can’t teach all of them, so…so what?
A Scottish secondary school will no longer teach the classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird after teachers claimed the book promotes a “white saviour” narrative.
Well, it does. I like the book, but more for its picture of childhood than for the Atticus Finch part. I don’t hate that part, I wouldn’t urge anyone not to read the novel because of that part, but it is there.
Now if it were Huck Finn it would be a different story, because that is a great work, despite “problematic” aspects. But Mockingbird, nah. It can take care of itself.
Stephen Kelly, headteacher at Liberton High, in Edinburgh, said that there is a need to diversify the curriculum and develop an “anti-racist culture that recognises notions of stereotyping, notions of white-centric attitudes, notions of white people being more important, notions of representation.”
Meanwhile are they doing any teaching of literature as literature at all? I’m all for anti-racism but that’s not the same thing as literature, and what makes it good and how brilliant writers go about it and what is the point of it are important for understanding (and getting joy from) literature.
What bothers me most about Mockingbird is the “woman lying about rape” part
Yes, although it’s really her father who’s doing the lying, and whipped her into corroborating the story. But yes, it’s not great.
You know, I’ve read some of those fiction books. They just make stuff up!
It’s an outrage!
I continue to be baffled that this book is so popular, and so widely taught, in the UK. It’s not as if there aren’t any books by English people (or even Scottish people) to teach in a literature class.
That whole “women lying about rape” thing (or, more accurately, “the men in a woman’s life claiming she was raped/disrespected/looked-at-funny by a black man”) was a well-known lynching vector in real life, in the time and place the novel was set. It says nothing of the woman’s character, except that she was a reckless adolescent who lacked the courage to ruin her own life in what would have been a futile attempt to save a black man’s.
Also, yes, I find it curious that the novel had become a focal point of instruction in the UK at all; while its themes are abstractable, they are most applicable and useful in the American South.
Huck Finn is a lot worse than problematic. While you were busy looking at the sympathetic portrayal of black people, you missed the truly vile racism against Native Americans. Clemens was an advocate of genocide.
And let’s make sure we stop teaching about abolition. Those pesky ‘white saviors’ like Wilberforce and Coffin just mess up the official narrative.
takshak – you don’t actually know that. You don’t know what I was looking at and what I wasn’t. You don’t know what I missed and what I didn’t.
Genocide is stretching it but Twain wasn’t a fan of “red Indians” at all (he calls King Arthur’s cohort “white Indians” at one point). On the urban civilization vs.rural/frontier barbarism front he’s very firmly on the side of urban civilization.