Category Archives: 21st century

Cultural Skirmishes about Banned Books and Classics

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When my mother hinted that the books in the children’s section were too easy for me, it was time to find something in the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf looked interesting and I pulled down one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers, cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out without incident. The next time I presented a book from the adult section to the checkout desk, Mrs. Brown was the supervisor and refused to let me have it until she cleared it with my mother, who coolly confirmed I had her permission. Mrs. Brown did not approve.  Now their  one-on-one confrontation over my reading selections sounds so quaint.

I am pretty sure that Mrs. Brown never had to implement a policy like the one now in effect at the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis, where parents can ask that YA books they find sexually explicit be relocated in the adult section.   In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish” in connection with the beloved Indianapolis writer John Green.  His acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars have been targeted for depicting teenagers struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness, and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink, and drive.  Green denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order.”

Lee weighed in by comparing Green’s work with Penrod, the classic novel of Hoosier boyhood by Booth Tarkington.   Lee suggested that Penrod’s boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than attendance at cotillions.  “He knew what bathroom to use, quips Lee, before continuing with:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Lee’s glib suggestions that yesterday’s classics still reflect the realities of young people’s lives did readers a disservice.  Yes, the characters in Penrod didn’t hook up, enjoy recreational chemicals in excess, or experience gender dysporia so superficially the novel looks more wholesome than Green’s Looking for Alaska.  Actually Penrod, a white middle-class eleven-year-old during the 1900s had something important in common with Green’s characters.  He was also left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today and had no difficulty getting into serious trouble and with that freedom, he acted on ideas that made his mother worry that he was headed for the  penitentiary.   Certain families forbade their sons to associate with him. Adult tongues might wag at the Schofields’ inability to rein him in, but kids his age obviously took vicarious pleasure in his antics.  He could talk back to the teacher and manage temporarily to elude punishment with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, staying with the Schofields to escape her drunken, abusive husband.  The tall tale was inspired by the silent film Penrod watched when he was supposed to be in Sunday school.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered inoffensive, is a typical caper where Penrod acts on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc.put out in the stable to be hauled away with the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, pharmacist Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” with the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Tester dog Duke can’t keep it down and the boys dream of administering a dose to Professor Bartlett, so the cotillion would be cancelled due to poisoning.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by (Maurice’s family is wealthier than either Sam or Penrod’s and the last name suggests that he is Jewish.)  Penrod decides on a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he can squire the adored Marjorie Jones at the cotillion.  He will graciously transfer his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets due to illness in the family.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted for the real one when he isn’t looking.   Maurice takes a deep breath and glugs it all down.  After a leisurely smoke, he heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for the dance.

Tarkington says nothing about how Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley.  What strikes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately suggests to Sam the brothers could be the star attractions of a show to which the impresarios will charge admission.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after their victory to say thank you.

Daniel Lee’s pronouncement that Tarkington’s Penrod is a book written back in the good old days when children were still children sounds as if he relied on a Wikipedia plot summary instead of reading it.  Classic books should have a place alongside contemporary problem YA novels, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a retreat into nostalgia, especially ones like Penrod, which belong to the all-American genre of novels about bad boys.  Growing up I reread Penrod multiple times and nobody tried to fool me into it was an anodyne story.  My mother assumed I was more than capable of realizing that emulating the boys (or girly girly Marjorie) would be ridiculous because Tarkington’s Indiana was a different time and place.

Looking at Penrod now made me wonder if critics took down Tarkington for crossing a line in the scenes between the white and black boys…  Were they transgressive by the standards then?  Were some children made uncomfortable or angry reading about them?  Now the lines are drawn in the sand at different places. George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue is notorious as an account of a young Black’s search for a meaningful, fulfilled life as a gay man.  What the book’s critics  are quick to point out that it includes a chapter about Johnson’s coming of age sexually, they neglect to note that the memoir is also a  loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  (Penrod certainly doesn’t express comparable feelings about his long-suffering mother and sister.)  All Boys is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages. How many would-be censors and commentators actually take the time to read carefully the books they write about instead of cherry-picking from the contents?  One problematic passage shouldn’t be enough to damn a book: all authors deserve a chance to make their case with readers.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex (and mixed) than its reputation: when a cultural commentator brings books front and center of cultural skirmishes, he or she owes the author and readers a considered opinion, not glib characterizations.

Barbie: The Doll Who Will Live Forever?

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Cultural commentators have had a lot to say about Greta Gerwig’s smash summer movie, but no one I’ve read has considered Gerwig and Baumbach’s clever script as a post-modern take on a classic doll story like Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First One Hundred Years (1929). The first I know of was Richard Johnson’s The History of a Doll (ca. 1780).  The heroine Charlotte could  describe and comment upon her experiences to the reader, from being carved from a tree branch to passing through several owners’ hands.  After surviving many accidents that required extensive restoration of her face and body, she was eventually burnt up in a fire.  Her lack of agency is central to the action: appearing lifeless to her owners, she is as much at their mercy, as if she were a servant or an enslaved person.

Barbie’s origins are more glorious than poor old Charlotte’s.  The little girls on earth are caring for their baby dolls when they see her in a striped one-piece bathing suit descending from the heavens like a goddess.  The little girls are so enchanted by the prospect of possessing a far more glamorous and empowering plaything that they immediately cast aside the baby dolls and heartlessly smash them to bits.  A less violent version of this scenario with a fairly happy ending plays out in Brenda’s “Victoria-Bess,” in which a beautiful expensive doll rules the nursery until deposed by an even more fashionable French one.  Ordered by her fickle, spoiled mistress to throw the shabby former favorite into the trash, a charitable relative rescues the humbled Victoria-Bess, who gratefully goes to a new owner, a poor girl recovering from surgery in the hospital.

Gerwig’s Barbie behaves less like a doll than an autonomous being that is not exactly human.  While the first shot is of a Mattel doll, the subsequent footage features Margot Robbie, who flirtatiously lowers her shades and winks.   What is that gesture supposed to mean?  A signal to not to overthink the ride on the hot pink roller coaster?  But the cracks and inconsistencies reveal some interesting angles on her creator’s game.

After Barbie finds herself thinking about death and her feet flatten, she is urged to consult the oracular Weird Barbie, a victim of rough doll play, from whom she learns that there’s a patch of cellulite on her thigh (surely impossible on hard plastic) and her old owner must be messing with her. While the director acknowledges that doll play comprises savagery, she roller blades around the possible plot implications of the Barbies being subject to the whims of Real World owners.  If Weird Barbies constituted the underclass, then mobs of mangled, neglected dolls like the one led by the Bad Doll in Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, might periodically roil Barbie Land.  If most girls’ nights were stopped dead by outbursts of existential angst, then the Barbies would all be in analysis and there would have to be a health care system.  The truly flawless Barbies could only belong to collectors, museums or extremely meticulous kids.  They would constitute the ruling class, which would disturb the benevolent, egalitarian administration of Barbieland’s vacuous perfection.Without any memories of having been a child’s plaything, Stereotypical Barbie has to seek the complete stranger who transferred anxieties to her and disrupted the rhythms of an rosy eternal now in the Real World (Los Angeles, naturally).   Throughout Barbie’s adventures, she is perceived neither as a doll or a human being all of the time: her status may fluctuate according to the situation, but her affect never changes.  When she crosses the border into Venice Beach, she passes for human in spite of her outfit—which didn’t seem especially outré for La-La-Land–because she attracts attentions from construction workers and a random bystander gives her shapely bottom a big smack.  The Mattel suits have no trouble identifying her as the doll that has to go back in the box, yet she can run like a gazelle in the painted-on, hot pink, lace-up bell bottom pants through the corporate head quarter’s labyrinthine corridors and maze of offices.

Reunited her owner and daughter, they all return to Barbieland and set the things which have gone so terribly wrong back to rights with the Mattel suits in hot pursuit.  After quelling the Kens’ abortive insurgence and restoring the matriarchy with only a few gracious concessions to the rebels, Stereotypical Barbie expresses the desire to be a real girl in the Real World.  She turns for help to Ruth Handler, the marketing barracuda behind the brand in her final incarnation as a sweet old bubbe who listens sympathetically over cups of tea.  This stand-in for a fairy godmother cautions her creation that humans get only one exit, but ideas live forever (presumably “Girls can do anything”). If Barbie truly wishes to be flesh and blood, i.e. sentient with a vagina, she, like Dorothy Gale, has always had the power to make her dream come true.  Without a dramatic wave of a wand that transforms plastic to muscle and bone (holding Ruth’s hands seem to have had something to do with it), the doll-being formerly known as Stereotypical Barbie leaves her dream house for Los Angeles, slips her flat feet into pink Birkenstocks, and is dropped off at the gynecologist’s.    And that’s all, folks.  No promise that she’ll live happily ever after.

For over a decade, a succession of creative teams tried to bring Barbie to the big screen, but crashed, and burned.  Margot Robbie was sure no one would finance the Gerwig-Baumbach script.  A successful director of small-budget Indie films who was ready to break the glass ceiling, Gerwig has to have known what side her bread was buttered on.  One way of keeping the plate with the Mattel logo up in the air was to avoid dark aspects which have always been present in doll stories.  Her claim that the movie had to be “totally bananas” could be interpreted as a palatable but slippery justification for furiously whipping the mixture to a froth and never letting it deflate. “Totally bananas” means that the poster boys for patriarchy had to be paper tigers.  The Mattel executives are more bumbling than the Keystone Cops, the Kens too disorganized to remember the all-important constitutional vote, and who could take Alan seriously?  The heartbroken Stereotypical Ken had to be satisfied by the stale old Tinseltown line that the key to happiness is the discovering that being yourself is better than good enough..  And the paradise of Barbies?  It’s a stretch to take seriously President Barbie, Dr. Barbie, Diplomat Barbie, etc. when they were brainwashed as easily as if they were bimbos (they are styled like them too).  Gloria’s rousing oration has no relevance to the powerhouses of Barbieland, none of whom have offspring to complicate their lives.  It’s really pitched to feminists and tired moms in the auditorium and to me it sounded more like a prompt to cheer at a pep rally than a serious statement about the difficulties of modern women’s lives.  And what would Ordinary Barbie look like?  Would she really be a marketable commodity?  Given the silliness of almost everyone Stereotypical Barbie meets during the film, it is hard to envision the advantages of trading one condition for the other.  Writer Barbie or exhausted executive assistant?  Unlike a doll in a traditional it-narrative, Stereotypical Barbie has told audience members too little about her thoughts and feelings for them to understand her dramatic change of heart.  Or did she?

With a billion dollars and counting in profits this week, Gerwig doesn’t have to apologize to anyone for any of her creative decisions. As eye-poppingly imaginative as the script and art direction was, more substantial ideas might have been mixed in with the fun for viewers to think about after they left the show.  Having seen it a second time last night with a first-time viewer, there’s plenty to talk about after the credits roll, but how much is the herky-jerky race through a landscape so packed with details that it makes your eyes bug.  Perhaps the film could be compared to a very elaborate doll house presented to a young girl, which the Edgeworths observed in Practical Education (1798), may not be able to hold her attention long, even though she may peep inside from time to time.

A furnished baby-house [ i.e. doll house] proves as tiresome to a child as a finished seat is to a young nobleman.  After peeping, for in general only a peep can be had into each apartment, after being roughly satisfied that nothing is wanting, and that consequently, there is nothing to be done.