Excusing the past

How far does labeling someone as "a person of their time and place" get you?

A couple of days ago, I got into an interesting discussion with another Substacker (the wonderful Ani Beeler, whom you should all subscribe to immediately) about the question of how we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia. The subject came up because of a book I’d recommended to her—Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, by Haruki Murakami. The way Murakami writes women is jarring, at least to my western progressive liberal eyes, and Ani understandably was more sensitive to it still. I mentioned wondering how much of his approach came simply from cultural differences, and how far we’re willing to excuse writers for attitudes that are (or were) common in their cultural milieu, sometimes so common they’re nearly ubiquitous and thus taken for granted.

So, what do you think? For the record, I’m asking this question not because I’m trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

First off, I’m not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the brilliant Doctor Who episode “Rosa,” for example, are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South. Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I considering truly awful stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point. (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story “The Facts in the Case of Arthur Jermyn,” which is repellent right from the get-go.)

I’m more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn’t form an essential part of the story. The topic was actually on my mind before Ani brought it up, because I’ve been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Ngaio Marsh amongst the greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers’s work doesn’t smack you over the head. The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there’s no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time. And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes. Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman’s Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist or at least write under her married name, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place. There’s one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good, I guess. But when one of their descendants returns to England, he’s very much looked at as an aberration. The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in White English society isn’t really portrayed negatively, but there’s no doubt he’s played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism. There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the “of course he’s money-conscious, he’s Jewish” stereotype. In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there’s something about it that reeks of, “I’m not racist, I have a Black friend.”

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were “people of their times,” whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in. In Sayers’s early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of White British superiority. The bigotry is almost by default. The characters don’t set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, religions, and cultures; it’s more that the message is, “Of course we’re superior, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be nasty to you—as long as you know your place.”

But was Sayers writing non-Anglo individuals that way in order to highlight characters who were bigots—or because she was one herself?

Christie, honestly, is not a lot better. One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written. But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot—Ten Little Indians. Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme—Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it. But that doesn’t alter the pervasive wealthy White British superiority that runs through all her work.

Even authors who you’d think would be more enlightened sometimes include stuff that is mighty sketchy. One of my earliest favorite books was Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time. The third book in the Murry family series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, has a neat theme—riding through time and trying to prevent a catastrophe by altering timelines in selected places—but the “blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad” trope that skims along right beneath the surface gets cringier the longer you look at it. (Especially since the “blue-eyed Indians” have blue eyes because they have European ancestry. Which makes them... better? Eek.)

I’ve found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I’m honestly not sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now. Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read works of theirs that have no racist aspects at all? More recently, what about Orson Scott Card’s homophobia? His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don’t recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender’s Game. What about worse things still? Since reading about her alleged role in her husband’s sexual abuse of their daughter, I can’t read Marion Zimmer Bradley—but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her writing in the first place? Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to give authors’ bad behavior a pass solely because we don’t want to give up reading them?

The sickening allegations against Neil Gaiman—whose work I love, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane were immensely formative in the development of my own writing style—have made it nearly impossible for me to read his books. Is it honestly possible to separate the creator from the creation, the product from the toxic culture that produced it?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this. I’m certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as “The Facts in the Case of Arthur Jermyn” ignores the fact that there’s way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I’d love to hear how you approach this as a reader. I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that’s how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how destructive they actually are. But what about reading solely for pleasure? I loathe the words “woke” and “politically correct”—they all too often become synonyms for “stuff I don’t like, so you shouldn’t either”—but don’t they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn’t reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I’m not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers and Christie. I can’t deny that even Lovecraft—at least his stories where race doesn’t come into it, even subtly and implicitly (“At the Mountains of Madness” comes to mind)—have been major positive influences on my own work. As for Gaiman and Card, well, I don’t want my money supporting people whose attitudes and actions I find repulsive, so I won’t purchase their work. But it’s a way more complex, and less clear-cut, topic than it appears.

What do you think? Is there merit to the “(s)he was a person of the times” argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old—or because we like it otherwise?