Hello there.
I’ve been recovering from yet another bout of illness, this time necessitating a brief stay in the hospital. (The food there was awful, I must say!) Anyway, that is to explain my recent absence, and I must admit I’m not yet up to updating regularly.
But there are more important things afoot: My alma mater, New Rochelle High School, has removed pages from Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, which seniors are reading in class. The offending pages? Mentioned oral sex.
Oh noes! S-E-X? The horror!
Now look here: There are plenty of teen books that are much more graphic than Girl, Interrupted, which is really a fantastic memoir about struggling with borderline personality disorder — although I must admit I disagree with some of Kaysen’s conclusions, it’s a good book and a fascinating read.
I don’t disagree with her inclusion of the topic of S-E-X, though. Because, let’s face it: teens know about these things. Indeed, when I was a wee girl of seventeen — a very bratty one, too — my health teacher went into quite a lot of detail about various sexual acts. Of course she provided these details so that we students would be able to protect ourselves from STIs, but she provided the info nonetheless.
And you know, not everything we read in high school was so very chaste. I vividly remember a discussion about The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which some of us couldn’t help but wonder if the book featured a woman having … err … improper relations with a young boy. There was also the day, when I was a lass of fourteen, that my English teacher stood in the hallway ringing a bell and shouting, “It’s the sex scene! It’s the sex scene!” because we were watching Romeo and Juliet (the awesome seventies version) and our teacher wanted to make sure everyone was in attendance that day. When we did indeed watch the sex scene.
We watched Schindler’s List, too, unedited. And we read other inflammatory books.
The school administration’s decision to bowdlerize a book is not something I appreciate. Ripping pages out? Really? This is what you do to protect teenagers? And from what, exactly?
I should mention that New Rochelle, New York is a rather liberal city. It’s not a bit podunk or backwater or anything like that. And I don’t recall there being any censorship issues with the school newspaper or the school literary magazine when I was there oh-so-many years ago.
Which makes it even more disappointing that the district would rip pages out of a book.
But let’s face it: censorship is a rite of passage. All our favorite teen authors have been banned somewhere by someone. When Rachel Vail wrote recently of her children’s book being banned, I was of half a mind to congratulate her and half a mind to console her.
Although, at the end of the day, the “rite of passage” argument doesn’t make it any less frustrating that people can be closed-minded and, frankly, idiotic.
ml,
brina
Ahhh, censorship.
Meg Cabot gets all excited when she gets censored … at one point she was trying to solicit fans to help her get on a banned book list.
Sorry. Your post totally reminded me of that. Ha: http://www.megcabot.com/diary/?p=467
Of course, your post also reminds me that I have a Holiday Shopping Guide to get cracking on … YALA is on it!
Jami, I was thinking of Meg when I was writing this, imagining she would revel in such a thing. And that Maureen Johnson would do a whole video post about her high school censoring a book. And I was remembering various other authors being psyched about being banned.
But having pages ripped out of your book is worse than being banned. It’s disgraceful. A school district is effectively destroying a work of art — or blotting part of it out, at least. Imagine what would happen if we had to do that with every work of art that hinted at or referenced sex. We’d have to put clothes on Michelangelo’s David, or we’d have to cut part of it off and make it look like an over-sized Ken doll.
As for the holiday shopping guide, YA NY is on it, too. I’ll have book recommendations for you all — both some of this year’s best and some classics. Jami will have film recommendations. And, just to mix things up, Jami may recommend some books and I may recommend some films. Oooh!
It’s uncivilized and barbaric. Like where did whoever tore out these pages learn this behavior? A Renaissance fair?
Tally ho!
You’re actually pretty dead-on about the Michelangelo cover-up. At one point, the Catholic Church put ‘modesty drapes’ on the Sistine Chapel to cover up some of the nude bits. They were only pretty recently removed, when the whole ceiling was restored in the 80s/90s. So really, this kind of censorship is nothing new.
I had NO idea that Girl, Interrupted was a book. I’ll definitely check that out over break.
As a totally random side note, does anyone have any opinions on Virginia Woolf? I’ve got to read a modernist novel for an English project, and despite every adult I know raving over her, the previews of her writing (so. Many. Run-ons.) on Amazon are scaring me off.
Nina, can you read any modernist novel? I, alas, have not gotten around to Virginia Woolf in spite of meaning to forever. But I can highly recommend: Franz Kafka (and you could do a doozy of a project if you could get your teacher/professor let you compare The Metamorphis by Kafka with Fly on the Wall by E. Lockhart, though you’d have to find a creative way to compare the two other than plot devices).
Hemingway and Fitzgerald would also work, but I personally never warmed up to either of them. (Don’t get me wrong — The Great Gatsby is brilliant — but it doesn’t have any soul for me.)
In fact, other than Kafka, I can’t think of a single modernist I really love/loved. Except maybe Ralph Waldo Ellison (The Invisible Man) or Kate Chopin (The Awakening).
PS. I totally didn’t know about the Catholic church having covered up parts of the Sistine Chapel for modesty’s sake. It figures, though.
I have to say it irritates me more to see a few pages removed than an entire book not taught/ included in a school. Not only are you playing around with censorship then, you’re also screwing around with the story and pacing, because guess what, babes, now you’re editing, and THAT I’m not cool with.
Point is, the truth is truth, facts is facts, and the book is the book. You don’t like it, don’t teach it. But don’t go ripping pages out.
Maggie, you are absolutely right. I’m going to ask my friend who is attending the NR BOE meeting tonight for details on what happens there — hopefully quite a few people will turn out and complain. Loudly, but rationally.
Updates to come in a day or two, in this same thread.