What I didn’t read…

Did anyone besides all theses dead white guys write something worth reading?

 We discussed in class, several weeks ago now, an article by Arthur Applebee that surveyed some 42 Literature anthologies in 1989. In short, his study found that even by 1989,

“some effort has been made to provide balance, particularly in the materials for Grades 7 through 10. In these volumes, between 26 and 30 percent of the selections were written by women, and 18 to 22 percent by members of various nonwhite minorities. The selections for the British literature course were much narrower, with only 8 percent by women and 1 percent by members of minority groups.” Full study here

While these findings are a bit dated, I can’t help but feel there is definitely more work to be done when it comes to diversifying the canon. What does this have to do with censorship? I can’t help but think of the textbook our class used in its British Literature course – in particular the absence of women writers. Leaving out women and minority writers constitutes, in my view, a sort of covert censorship. It wasn’t until I took American and British literature in College that I read authors like: Mary Wollstonecraft, Odulah Equiano, Mary Prince, Cabeza De Vaca or Crevecouer. And I’m still finding that there are many other influential authors I can’t help but feel I should have known about. This was part of the discussion on The Blog Books, in a post by Mari Hughes-Edwards…

“But what about the arts? Surely there women are given a better deal? After all, it’s nearly 200 years since Anne Elliot declared in Jane Austen’s Persuasion that “men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” And yet the vast majority of Booker Prize winners have been male. And, although the Orange prize for fiction at least attempts to redress the balance (with an all-female judging panel appointed this year) we’ve still NEVER had a female poet laureate in this country.

I run Edge Hill University’s MA in Women’s Writing: 1500 to the Present Day, and was amazed to be asked by an acquaintance recently whether enough female writers even existed to fill our two-year degree… our course demonstrates that women writers have been just as prolific as their male counterparts for centuries now. Female authors such as Aphra Behn were largely responsible for the creation of the novel form – yet still some other university English departments marginalise them and instead teach Development of the Novel courses which feature few, or no, female writers.”

Another author I should have heard about. I suppose a person could say that about any author (I could spend my lifespan reading and hardly make a dent in the amount of literature that is available), but nonetheless I was astonished that I had never heard Aphra Behn’s name uttered in any of my courses previous – Especially when Virgina Woolf had written about her:

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she–shady and amorous as she was–who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.”

– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

If you’re interested in learning more about Behn, visit The Aphra Behn Web Page

So I guess the point of this meandering post it two-fold; First, that we should look outside the anthology to incorporate diverse texts when the anthology does not, and second, that the canon is changing (hopefully for the better) and we shouldn’t think of it as a set of books that can’t be added to.