The Problems with the English Literary Canon (No, Seriously)

I read this really great article recently that made me think again about the impact of doing my degree in English. So this is going to be a bit of an expansion of what I said in this post. To sum up what I said before:

One of the hardest parts of my undergrad was the persistent feeling that I was being slowly stripped of my love of reading. As everyone who knew me from about grade three onwards knows, I have always been an extremely voracious reader. This was something that I felt myself lose a lot as I did my undergrad in English. I still enjoyed reading, but over the course of the school year, I had to read so much for school that I found myself enjoying it less, and during the summer months, I would read far less, and what I did read would be what academia would deem "trash" (and thus, to my delight, were utterly different than the sometimes unbearably dull or outdated works I was required to read over the course of year). This was in part due to the nature of the school I went to - I choose a small school to do my undergraduate degree at, which had many benefits, but one way in which it was lacking was in terms of diversity of courses. This, combined with degree requirements that placed a greater emphasis on early works of English literature (think before the 20th, even 19th century), meant that I had little flexibility when it came to courses.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do love me some older English literature. But there is a point (that came around second year) where I was so completely, throughly, and overwhelmingly DONE with reading works penned by old, white, Christian men. The lack of diversity was stifling. My fourth year was a delightful change from this - having finished all my required early English course work, I powered through several amazing classes. 

My friend was the one to originally share that article, highlighting the quote "when women read the hyper-masculine literary canon, their discomfort is punctuated by the knowledge that their male peers are reading these books, identifying with them, and acting out their perspectives and narratives." and commenting "I’d add that while I was in university, it wasn’t only my male peers who were “reading these books, identifying with them, and acting out their perspectives and narratives” but some of my male professors as well"

Megan and I went to the same small liberal arts university and did the same degree - a major in English literature. Bear with me for a moment while I break down the degree requirements. To do a BA degree in English, you were required to take:

• Introduction to Principles of Literary Analysis (I got to skip this because of having done AP English in high school - #winning - but it sounds hella boring, no?)
• Introduction to Poetry - as someone who loves poetry, I hated this class. I suppose I do have to grant it the title of being comprehensive, but in “surveying outstanding achievements in the English tradition” guess what gender and race it focused on? Zero points for guessing correctly. 
• Literary Periods to 1800s. White men. And Aphra Behn. 
• Literary Periods 1800 to Present. White men. 
• Then you could take up to two more classes from the 2000 level, including such rousing choices as Intro to Shakespeare, Intro to American Lit, and Intro to Canadian lit (I took all three because I was a tool and didn’t look at the academic calendar until I was picking my classes for third year). Guess what authors they focused on? Oh, except maybe Canadian Lit, which was taught by the feminist female professor who also taught women’s lit… I’m sure thats just a coincidence though. 
• Then you got to the 3000 level, where you were given the wonderful choice of taking three classes from the Medieval, Renaissance, 17th Century, and 18th Century subject areas. WHITE MEN. 
• Then you got to take five (FIVE) whole classes from at least five of the eleven subject areas: Medieval, Renaissance, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Modern, Contemporary and Theoretical Studies, American, Canadian, Postcolonial, and Literature by Women. Of course, what you could do depended on what credits you were using for other requirements, and you really couldn’t take more than one subject area, unless you were insane like me and overloaded, oh and it also depended on what was offered each semester, and whether or not they currently had a professor on staff that could teach some of the more niche topics like Postcolonial lit (hint: they didn’t). And guess what? MORE WHITE MEN. 

I was lucky enough, in the incredibly narrow options given to me, to take some really interesting classes - Literature by Women in the 20th Century, African American Lit, and Caribbean Lit. However, I would like you to look at the list of classes I just gave you, in a FOUR YEAR ENGLISH DEGREE that did not teach a majority of works by WHITE MALE AUTHORS.

I was taking both American Lit Civil War to Present and African American Lit at the same time, with the same professor, and he raised the question at one point as to whether or not we should separate African American Lit from American Lit. And I argued we should, for three reasons:

1. Due to the vastly different cultural background and social experiences, African American Lit emerges from a very different background than white American literature and should be discussed within that context and the experiences of their authors and how that shapes their literature. 
2. African American lit would then have to struggle to be heard within the pool of white American authors, and we all know they would not fare as well.
3. And this was what I said in class, is because I took African American Lit because I wanted to read books that I knew, knew, weren’t going to be written by some old white dudes. 

Memorably, a girl in my class once asked how she could write an essay disagreeing with a black author without coming across as racist. This doesn’t have anything to do with the extended rant I have going on here, I just can’t get over the things that girl said (she also commented that she was surprised by how well educated and spoken a black author was).

There have been so many instances in my degree program where both my male professors and male classmates have made me extremely uncomfortable, casually slinging out sexist comments and praising writers whose words I found offensive and sexist (I’m look at you Hemingway, you tool… and Shakespeare. Taming of the Shrew. Really?). And there is no, NO critical eye applied to these men, because they are literary classics. And you don’t want to speak up, ESPECIALLY if its the professor saying these things, because you don’t want to get a bad grade, or be looked down upon, or be subjected to one of many dismissive “oh you females” comments that men frequently sling our way.

NOR is there any consideration given to the disproportionate representation of men over women, both as authors and in novels, and the way those authors describe women… the way authors still describe women… and I’m not going to touch on the fact that women will inevitably, over and over again read books with male protagonists, while men consistently shy away from books with female protagonists.
I can’t even put into words how angry and frustrated I am with the English literary canon. How alienating it is. How narrow. How elitist literary fiction still is, how literary worth is determined not by how many people it touches but by how much of a headache it gives you to read it.

I went to a debate at the beginning of the year talking about the Booker Prize, and what it marks and means. And one of the panellists said some incredibly elitist things, talking about what is popular isn't necessarily good literature, when certain works that were popular in their time weren't considered good literature until much later. While I don't think anyone would argue that Fifty Shades of Grey is great literature, it is popular, and what is wrong with people reading things they enjoy? This obsession with high quality literature, and literature that has some great and deep meaning that is largely impossible to understand is probably a major factor in turning people off reading - I know a lot of people bemoan Shakespeare, especially having to do him in high school, and while I adore Shakespeare, perhaps some consideration should be given to how impenetrable the language can be, and let people who might get turned off of reading for life be given the chance to read something fun, instead of something difficult, and save the Shakespeare for people who are willing to really go at it.

Doing an english degree left me really disillusioned and disappointed in literature. By the time I was in my fourth year I wanted to tear my face off with how sick I was of white male authors wanking their poor, privileged ego all over the place while describing how awful women are, how much they want to **** them, and how misunderstood their sorry white arses are.

I also read another really good article dealing with kids books, and what it means that the majority of children's books are still written about white boys. Some good bits:

• Twice as many children's books feature male protagonists than female protagonists. 
• 57% of children's books published each year have male protagonists, versus 31% female.
• As with television and film, books with animated characters are a particularly subtle and insidious way to marginalize based on sex, gender and race. In popular children's books featuring animated animals, 100% of them have male characters, but only 33% have female characters.
• The average number of books featuring male characters in the title of the book is 36.5% versus 17.5% for female characters.
• Female characters in books that are for "everyone" are often marginalized, stereotyped or one-dimensional. Especially in traditional favorites that are commonly highlighted in schools and libraries. For example, Peter Pan's Wendy is a stick-in-the-mud mother figure and Tiger Lily is a jealous exotic.
• How many people would never consider buying Anne of Green Gables or Island of the Blue Dolphins for their 10-year old boy, but don't pause before giving a daughter Treasure Island or Enders Game? Books featuring girls are, for the most part, understood to be books for girls.
• Researchers of the study above concluded, "The gender inequalities we found may be particularly powerful because they are reinforced by patterns of male-dominated characters in many other aspects of children's media, including cartoons, G-rated films, video games and even coloring books."
• Of an estimated 5,000 books released in 2012, only 3.3% featured African-Americans; 2.1% featured Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders; 1.5% featured Latinos; and only 0.6% featured Native Americans.
• A girl's imagination and literary life would be a stark and barren place if she didn't learn early on to read books about boys, put herself in boys' shoes and enjoy them. As with other aspects of socially sanctioned behavior, children's ability to cross-gender empathize is a one-way street -- girls have to do it and boys learn not to.
• Researcher Isabelle Cherney found that half of boys ages 5-13 picked "girl" and "boy" toys equally... unless they were being watched. They were especially concerned about what their fathers would think of them if they saw them.
• Boys who grow up seeing themselves everywhere as powerful and central just by virtue of being boys, often white, are critically impaired in many ways. It's a rude shock to many when things don't turn out the way they were told they should. It seems reasonable to suggest media misrepresentations like these contribute, in boys, to a heightened inability to empathize with others, a greater propensity to peg ambition to intrinsic qualities instead of effort and a failure to understand why rules apply or why accountability is a thing. It should mean something to parents that the teenagers with the highest likelihood of sexually assaulting a peer and feel no responsibility for their actions are young white boys from higher-income families. The real boy crisis we should be talking about is entitlement and outdated notions of masculinity, both of which are persistently responsible for leaving boys confused and unprepared for contemporary adulthood.

This article actually made me really happy I'm going into publishing, where there are presses that focus on counteracting some of these problems of representation. But it just highlights the way that its not even the literary canon - from childhood, girls are reading books from the perspectives of boys - something that never goes away and never changes. And while I have no problem reading books by male authors or featuring male protagonists, the fact remains that there is a substantial inequality in literature. And as Junot Diaz, a creative writing teacher at MIT put it: "If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman. And it’s just the minimum. Because the thing about the sort of heteronormative masculine privilege, whether it’s in Santo Dommingo, or the United States, is you grow up your entire life being told that women aren’t human beings, and that women have no independent subjectivity" (x) 

Not to mention women writers will write under male pseudonyms in order to make their books more popular. 

Okay this was really long and rambly covered a lot of things and was mostly depressing (and should probably be edited more but I'm really annoyed now, so sorry if its not super coherent or cohesive) so I will leave you with this bit of funny: male novelist jokes.

I will be back soon with an update about my real life, not just the things that have been making me angry lately!