On Reading Badly

I’m over at Stand Firm today.

I happened to be wandering around twitter a few days ago—I’ve been trying to collect evidence of “virtue signaling,” which is all the rage as you all know—and came across something that bothered me lots more than that. I don’t think that the author of the tweet was trying to signal anything one way or another. She had just got onto the platform onto which we all climb in order to complain about something that bothered her. But in so doing, she bothered me, because it is a subject about which I have strong feelings, and also desire to express them in public and online.

That’s the problem, really. There is a very thin, narrow, nearly impossible to walk line between talking about something that bothers you, and signaling your own virtue as you do so. I don’t manage it, frankly, and neither does anyone else. I’m sure all the clever people in the world of google and facebook and twitter could think of some algorithm to increase actual virtue, instead of stifling it, but honestly, I don’t think that’s their stated aim. They want us eventually to eat ourselves alive so they can dance on the rubble on the last day. Or maybe they aren’t thinking at all. And that is the other problem—blowing off steam online just relieves feelings, it is not about thought, though we all “think” that it is.

Ok, so, all that introduction aside, I’m not going to quote the tweet, because the person is a Christian, and I don’t think she is cosmically wrong or anything, and of course I think she has the right to be wrong (to have her own opinion–that’s just a little joke), but I think that the way in which she is wrong is so unhelpful, and so foolishly easy, that I myself would like to complain about it.

She was unhappy because an old children’s classic—The Secret Garden—has some racist sentiments in it. If you haven’t read it, and you should, the story opens with Mary, the protagonist, suddenly left alone in India because all of her relatives have died from a cholera outbreak, including her Indian nurse, to whom she is essentially abusive, as only an entitled, spoiled, undisciplined child can be. Mary is then despatched back to England to live with an uncle whom she has never met. Gradually she becomes a less sour, more self-controlled person, and learns the chief lesson of life, which is that other people are more important than she is and that gardening is a great way also to become holier and more virtuous.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read it to all my children. I sometimes read it myself when no child is around. It is up there, for me, with other troubling works like everything by Laura Ingalls Wilder (who has also been canceled) and Rudyard Kipling, who, well, I probably don’t need to tell you what his problems are. If you don’t like the same books as me, that’s totally fine. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of books in English, go read more books.

The tweeter said she did not, of course, believe in canceling books, but she was looking for some respite and did not find it in the Secret Garden, which I can totally understand, because it is a stressful book. I have only read two of Frances Hodgson Burnett and both of them are stressful. As a child, I deeply regretted reading The Little Princess and from thenceforth often dreamt about the deaths of my parents and how I would be alone and poor forever. I would say, honestly, that there are no children’s books that I have read that provide any sense of “respite.” Adults who write books for children are always trying to shock children into reality, or prepare them for the worst, or any number of the troubles and monstrosities that are looming over the horizon.

So anyway, I looked Burnett up on wikipedia, because even though I love the Secret Garden, I didn’t know anything about her, and the first thing I learned is that her favorite book as a child was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She loved it so much she acted parts of it out and tried to make it into a play, which is lost to us because her mother made her burn all her early childhood writing…read the rest here!