Should These Women Authors Be Cancelled?
I’m not saying they should or shouldn’t be; just musing
Recently, a writer who contributes to the Literary Ladies Guide website (she’s also on Substack — Lynne Weiss is Telling Stories), asked me what I’m going to do about Alice Munro. Given the magnitude of Munro’s recent posthumous controversy, I told Lynne I’m not going to do anything. I never got around to reading anything by Munro, truth be told, so it will be easy for me to continue to ignore her.
Then, in the past week, I keep seeing news stories about a certain male author who is getting into deeper trouble as more women come forward with allegations. I don’t want to say who it is, since he’s still living. You can probably figure it out.
All of this has gotten me to thinking about other women authors who were found to hold abhorrent views (or whose views have become abhorrent to contemporary sensibilities). Should we stop reading them? Should certain things be overlooked if the author left this earth with more in the good column than the bad? Again, this is not for me to decide.
This list makes me vacillate. I could live without some of these writers; but others, ouch! It’s the old quandary of separating the art from the artist. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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Little House on the (Controversial) Prairie
Thinking about this subject brings to mind something I shared on Literary Ladies’ Facebook page in 2017, on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 150th birthday. It was an article in Smithsonian magazine, “The Little House on the Prairie was Built on Native American Land” that I simply shared without editorializing. But FB page followers, dozens of them, freaked out and were mad both at me and at Smithsonian.
Here’s a screen shot sampling some of the comments (names and identities redacted!):
Many of the comments were of the “she was a product of her time” variety. I wasn’t interested in getting further into the fray, but as an argument, that’s a weak one. Louisa May Alcott, for example, was also “a product of her time,” and she was a feminist and abolitionist.
Edith Wharton, Antisemite?
Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) was a wealthy heiress and a product of New York high society, never wanting for anything — except perhaps happiness. We can say she’s the Grande Dame of American Letters.
After divorcing Teddy Wharton in 1913, Edith moved to France, which was on the brink of entering World War I. Upon the outbreak of the war, she immediately plunged into relief work. Among her accomplishments were feeding and housing hundreds of child refugees, establishing hostels for other refugees; and assisting wounded soldiers and struggling families. For her war relief efforts, Wharton received one of France’s highest honors, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
Yet for all her compassion for war refugees, wounded soldiers, and orphaned children, Edith Wharton made no secret of her antisemitism. It was manifested in some of the characters in her books and in her correspondence. In 2017, The Jewish Federation of the Berkshires in Great Barrington, MA co-sponsored an event with the Mount (the palatial home Edith built in neighboring Lenox), “Edith Wharton's Antisemitism: A Consideration.”
It’s hard to square those two sides of Wharton coexisting in one talented, energetic, and complicated woman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, eugenicist?
This one is disappointing and surprising, given how progressive Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935) was in many other ways. She’s best remembered for the long short story on the (mis)treatment of postpartum depression, The Yellow Wallpaper, a women’s studies staple. She was also one of the leading women’s movement activists in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her nonfiction works (notably Women and Economics) details how women’s lives are impacted by social and economic bias are still (sadly) relevant.
It's jarring to learn about some of Charlotte’s racist and anti-immigrant views. And she held staunchly nationalistic views for someone dedicated to equality (at least gender equality. She had harsh words for immigrants, writing that they diluted the “reproductive purity” of Americans of British decent. She famously said of herself “I am an Anglo-Saxon before everything,” and has been labeled a “eugenics feminist.”
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose life and work overlapped with Gilman’s was quite popular the 20th century. She has also come under scrutiny for her possible sympathies with eugenics.
Colonialism in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885 – 1962; pen name of Danish writer Karen Blixen) is a 1937 memoir of her years in Africa, 1914 to 1931. She owned a 4,000-acre coffee plantation in the hills outside of Nairobi, Kenya. This memoir was made famous by the 1985 Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep as Dinesen and Robert Redford as her fickle lover, Denys Finch-Hatton.
No one disputes the literary merit of Out of Africa. But in recent years, it has been subject of harsh reconsideration through the lens of decolonization. A 2017 essay in Quartz Africa by Abdi Natif Dahir, “Celebrating Karen Blixen's Out of Africa Shows Why White Savior Tropes Still Exist,” argues:
“Since the publication of Blixen’s book in 1937, she has remained an important—and lasting—fixture in the study of Kenya’s colonial history … Ultimately, Blixen draws a hierarchy of life in which Africans have no place, in which she is the interlocutor of both ‘native’ and nature, and where ‘white men fill in the mind of the Natives the place that is, in the mind of the white men, filled by the idea of God.’”
And her biography on Post Colonial Studies states:
“Criticism of her work frequently shifts from admiration of her form to outrage at her portrayal of Africans. Karen Blixen’s complicated life and work continue to be studied, debated, and questioned in light of both the colonial society she inhabited and the modern reality of a postcolonial world.”
I rewatched the film last year, and whether because of today’s more critical lens on colonialism (really, it’s terrible to romanticize it) or that it’s simply slow as molasses, it didn’t hold up at all for me.
Enid Blyton: Offensive in all possible ways
Enid Blyton isn’t as known and read in the U.S. as she is (or was) in her home country of England. She was a wildly popular children’s book writer there, and apparently, in England’s colonies. Literary Ladies Guide contributor Melanie Kumar and her friends were fans of Blyton’s adventurous tales growing up in India. As an adult, she was compelled to reconsider her views. She writes:
“Quite often in life, the innocence and idealism of one’s childhood years are intruded upon by the realities and pragmatism of adult life. The author in question is Enid Blyton, who was called “a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a well-regarded writer,” by the members of the Royal Mint, who in 2019 blocked attempts to give her a commemorative coin.
When one is forced to reckon with the labeling of a favorite author of one’s childhood, there will necessarily need to be a dialogue with the past to find a balance with the present. The issue resurfaced when the UK-based charity, English Heritage, in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement, decided to update its website with information on Enid Blyton.
The website now states that Blyton’s work has been criticized during her lifetime and after, ‘for its racism, xenophobia, and literary merit.’”
Read the rest of Melanie’s essay, “When the Past Clashes with the Present: Reminiscences of Enid Blyton.”
Bob Eckstein and I collaborated on a book on famous writers and their cats (join his Substack, The Bob), coming out later this year (we hope). We’ve had to kick one writer out already.
. . . . . . . . .
Of course, many other brilliant creative artists and writers, male and female, were jerks (or worse) in their personal lives. Again, I’m not saying that the writers above should or shouldn’t be canceled or ignored. We all have the freedom to read or not read who we choose.
My final question is whether we judge female jerks more harshly than their male counterparts. I don’t have an answer to that one, though I’m leaning toward yes; I’d have to do more research. What do you think?
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My initial thoughts are it’s important to know these things about writers and other artists … to better understand their work. If we “cancel” them it’s the objectionable part of their story that we lose anyway, Little House et al are already out there. We can choose to stay in the dark and feel warm and fuzzy about the work but it’s the full knowing that’s the teachable moment, in my opinion. We may read these women differently knowing more about them, I know I will, but we should still read them or at least have that option.
Absolutely NOT. if we cancelled every artist of any form who had not conformed to our Moral Judgements there would be little art in art galleries and few books in libraries. The whole idea is nuts