Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, its sequel, The Testaments, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Top Banned Books List

This week, a Virginia school board voted unanimously for school libraries to remove “sexually explicit” books from their shelves. ‘After the Spotsylvania County School Board voted 6–0 to excise the books, board member Rabih Abuismail said, “I think we should throw those books in a fire.” Another, Kirk Twigg, said he wanted to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.” The board took the vote after a parent expressed concern over 33 Snowfish, a book about three homeless teenagers escaping sexual abuse, prostitution, and addiction. (https://fredericksburg.com/news/local/education/spotsylvania-school-board-orders-libraries-to-remove-sexually-explicit-books/article_6c54507a-6383-534d-89b9-c2deb1f6ba17.html)

A Kansas school district has removed almost 30 books from circulation in school libraries: ‘Goddard School District’s removal of the books comes after a Texas state lawmaker launched a bid to investigate books that deal with topics including race and gender in public schools. Julie Cannizzo (assistant superintendent for academic affairs for Goddard Public Schools) sent an email to principals and librarians with the list of 29 books last week…The list includes several acclaimed novels, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

‘Rep. Matt Krause provided school officials with a 16-page list of about 850 books covering topics including race, gender and sexuality, and asked them to provide information of how many copies of the books they possess, where the books are located, and how much they were bought for…’ (https://www.newsweek.com/school-district-pulls-29-books-libraries-1647822) [Update: The school now district has reversed its decision after a voluble outcry against the censorship.]

I remember an Honours English teacher in Junior High School, Colonel Piper, assigning me (and only me) to read ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ and ‘Sister Carrie’ (Theodore Dreiser), the heroines of which both get raped about five times in the first chapter (only slightly exaggerating) so as to chasten me, terrify me into my ‘place,’ and break my morale — which is to say Spirit. I was 14.

I read the books, then came back at him for it (he was SO obvious —his kind always are), nailing him for what he was trying to do, and what it was. I went up to his desk after class and told him I didn’t think he should assign these readings to young girls without some kind of contextualization for the times (18th Century Europe and 1930s America), the societies and cultures that supported these stories of multiple rapes and assaults against the female protagonists in the books. (This was 1966, and neither the apt terms ‘Rape Culture’ nor ‘patriarchy’ were yet in common use.)

I told him such works were injurious to young girls’ sense of safety and Self, and that they were demoralizing. I intentionally used that term because I knew, that as a retired military commander of high rank, ‘demoralization of those under his care and command’ (his students in the Miami Dade County Middle School system since his retirement from the military, in the event) was just about the worst thing you could accuse a military commander of doing. He didn’t say a word, just sat there silently boiling at my temerity, obviously infuriated but also stricken by my accuracy regarding his motives, tactics and abusiveness. He had the Assistant Principal, a big beefy John Bircher/jock/meathead guy of his own ilk call me to ‘The Office’ to inform me that I was to be transferred out of his class by the following day.

THAT was abusive use of a text. There is nothing abusive in Toni Morrison’s brilliant, searing and awakening works to harm High School age students. They only serve to awaken compassion and understanding. Brilliantly! Yes, it’s tough. But so are the so-called ‘classics,’ in ways that are infinitely worse, in that they provide no reprieve.

Morrison folds in hope, and reprieve —moral restitution, for the reader AND her protagonists. Unfailingly. Her tragedies provide us with relief and release, even when such reprieves are radical and exist in the non-ordinary realities of Magical Realism. Not so the grim fare encouraging the continuation of the good-ole’ patriarchy status quo, with it’s subjugation of women and non-Whites into hopelessness, futility and endless despair, often by the victim accepting their lot, marrying the enemy and/or ‘settling down.’

Empathy is only awakened by exposure to the suffering of others in a way that can be felt and understood, from which there is a doorway out. For Pecola, Morrison’s child heroine in ‘The Bluest Eye,’ her sense of safety — her escape — lies in madness. She flees into the delusion that she possesses the most potent icon of Whiteness, signifying that she will be respected and even cherished, this protective icon being the ‘purity’ of blue eyes. She never accedes to her own destruction. She finds a way out, to survive, spirit intact.