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Genre: Historical: American, Inspirational, Novella, Romance
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Linda. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.
The summary:
Julia Broeder is only six months shy of graduating from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania when one small decision spirals out of control and results in her expulsion. Hoping to travel the world as a missionary doctor, her only choice is to return back home…or throw herself upon the mercy of Ashton Carlyle.
Formal and straight-laced, Ashton Carlyle is not pleased to see an expelled Julia arrive at his Manhattan office. His position as a junior attorney for the Vandermark family’s world-famous shipping empire entails taking care of the Broeders, longtime employees of the Vandermark family. But Ashton has no intention now of using his employer’s resources in defense of Julia’s impulsive and reckless actions.
What Ashton did not expect was a scathing reprimand from none other than the Vandermark family patriarch or the bewildering resistance from Julia herself when he’s forced to change his tune. At an impasse, Ashton and Julia never anticipated the revelations that arise or the adventure that awaits them.
Here is Linda's review:
I picked up “Toward the Sunrise” fully expecting to enjoy it, but ended up wanting to hurl my Kindle into the ocean like a frisbee of rage.
On its face, this is actually a well crafted novella with strong characters, emotional nuance, and a premise that seemed almost tailored to bring me joy. I genuinely believe that most people who read this will rate it highly—as the other SBTB reader who reviewed it did—but I am personally just thankful it was a relatively short experience because by the end I was forcing myself to read past my anger and nausea. Because unfortunately, underneath the charming plot (strong female protagonist! learning humility! baby goats!) and wonderfully stiff hero, was a backbone of unremitting Orientalism and historical revisionism. It makes me sad that Camden’s depictions of women are so progressive and thoughtful, but she seems to have entirely missed the boat on intersectionality.
Essentially, the two main characters spend an inordinate amount of time bonding over their shared love of the Orient. Julia is planning on moving to Asia to be a medical missionary and Ashton has regrets about deferring his youthful dreams of climbing the Great Wall for the practical reality of taking care of his aging father. Not a page goes by without some reference to this shared love of this idealized vision of Asia.
If you’re not sure why this Orientalism is troubling—and I don’t blame you, it’s not really part of mainstream conversation—this essay is a more eloquent primer than I could ever write.
That said, if “Toward the Sunrise” had just been two white characters waxing incessantly about their love of the Unknowable Orient, I think I could have still gotten over it. After all, it would just be one more of the many small indignities that come with loving romance novels as a woman of color. What I can’t forgive is Camden’s romanticization of colonial history. While not quite Gone With The Wind, this novella takes place in 1897, which is near the peak of the colonization of Asia and post both Opium Wars.
I’m usually not bothered by historical romance novels approaching history like it is a set of loose guidelines, but which aspects of history the writer chooses to gloss over or glorify can be incredibly telling. There is a scene in “Toward the Sunrise” where the hero reflects on his accomplishments and reminisces fondly about how “he had negotiated gifts for restless Tamil natives in their Sri Lankan tea plantations.”
RESTLESS TAMIL NATIVES, I angrily said to friend in a text festooned with angry emoji. I WONDER WHY.
If you’re not in the loop, this Wikipedia article explains why this disturbed me quite succinctly:
The British found that the uplands of Sri Lanka were very suited to coffee, tea and rubber cultivation, and by the mid 19th century Ceylon tea had become a staple of the British market, bringing great wealth to a small class of white tea planters. To work the estates, the planters imported large numbers of Tamil workers as indentured labourers from south India, who soon made up 10% of the island’s population. These workers had to work in slave-like conditions and to live in line rooms, not very different from cattle sheds.
I am sympathetic to the argument that Camden is writing from the perspectives of her characters, who lived at a time when such attitudes about Asia were not uncommon. But she is also writing in the year 2015 and I find that to be an inadequate justification if there’s no critique of the character’s beliefs in the text itself. In fact, she could have saved this book by having her protagonists move to Asia only to realize that it is nothing like the romanticized vision in their minds. They could have seen the lasting damage people like them did to my people and others in their lust to possess the Orient like a shiny toy. More simply, Julia could have become aware of the atrocities being committed abroad through the dispatches of missionaries and other travelers, and then pushed back against Ashton’s beliefs and actions.
Or Camden could have just made one or both her protagonists Asian. It’s not taking from us if you include us, and it wouldn’t even be farfetched since Asians did live in and travel to western countries during that era. In fact, there are records of Asian women graduating from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in the late 1800s—the exact same college that our fictional heroine attends. It would actually be completely historically accurate if Camden had made Julia an Asian woman.
And while I didn’t realize this novella was Christian Inspirational when I picked it up to review, I don’t think that changes anything. There are millions of Asian Christians in this world and I personally know many who would appreciate a Christian romance featuring Asian protagonists.
But, speaking of Gone With the Wind. I’m reminded of this Esquire review of the movie 75 years later, where critic Stephen Marche writes:
This is the underlying reality of the racism in Gone with the Wind: its abstractness. The War is an external force outside of the personal dramas of the players. Slavery, hatred, prejudice — all may well exist but not in any personal way.
In “Toward the Sunrise,” Ashton closes the deal of a lifetime by helping his company buy up the majority of the market share of a rare kind of rubber right before the demand for the material explodes. This is depicted as a personal coup resulting from Ashton’s extensive knowledge of Asia. In the same decade in real life, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State under his personal rule after claiming he was doing it for humanitarian purposes, but instead reduced the native people to serfs and forced them to labor on his rubber plantations. His rule is notable for its sheer brutality, as failure to meet rubber quotas was punishable by death or mutilation and it is estimated that roughly half the population in the Congo was massacred between 1885 and 1908. Part of me really wonders if Camden and I have read the same history, since she writes so blithely about the happy white person side of the rubber trade without a shadow of this ugly, inerasable component that looms so large in my mind. Camden is also a college research librarian with a master’s in History so this blind spot is even more alarming to me.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to write about this or even if I should. Part of me almost wanted to leave it out or only make it a small part of my review. After all, the overwhelming physical revulsion this novella caused me to experience is in part deeply personal, and many people will probably think this is an extreme reaction, since on its surface this book isn’t at the level of Marlon Brando in yellowface or that one Eloisa James novel.
But “Toward the Sunrise” doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It falls into a long Western tradition of using Asian culture and bodies in art to fuel the character development of white characters. From Eat, Pray, Love to The Last Samurai to Kill Bill to that one movie where Emma Stone says she’s a quarter Asian to Dr. Strange to Breakfast At Tiffany’s to Gwen Stefani’s entire persona and so on.
I’m not saying that that you can’t also enjoy these things. Like “Toward the Sunrise,” individually they’re ultimately harmless enough and many are great, but taken in aggregate they form a picture of Asia and Asians as an exoticized “Other.” There’s a reason why I get consistently get bile in my messages on online dating profiles or why a certain presidential nominee recently chose to describe China as “raping” the United States with its foreign trade policy. Orientalism is often seen as harmless since on its surface it seems to be appreciative and positive, but it actually fuels much of the racist depictions of and rhetoric towards Asians.
It is also worth saying that I don’t believe Camden intended to come off like this when writing “Toward the Sunrise” or that the disturbing aspects of this novella make her a bad person, but I’ve found that intent means so little in the proliferation of stereotypes and historical revisionism. People don’t mean to be racist when they touch my friends’ hair like they are poodles or tell me about how I must be so relieved to live in an advanced country like the United States (I was born in California). I also don’t think these people are inherently bad, but it doesn’t change how their small thoughtless actions still linger.
In a wonderful essay for The Toast, Nicole Chung writes:
When I think about the relative size and scope of microaggressions, I can’t help but feel ashamed of my inadequate responses. If these are just small offenses, not meant to wound, why can’t I ever manage to shut them down effectively, ensure they aren’t wielded again and again against others?
I too have regrets as a romance reader about not speaking up at these small things. Regrets about all the times I brushed aside those little record scratches while reading a romance where there was a troubling depiction of a minority character or non-western country. I am a staunch defender of romance among my friends, I push the meager few mainstream romances with people of color as protagonists into their hands and they are as hungry for them as I am. I even justified the fact that Camden has written ten novels and all of them only have white heroes and heroines (caveat: I only read the reviews and synopses for the others). “It’s not fair to drag her for this,” I argued with myself, “since she’s not any worse than anyone else in the genre.” (And ain’t that some shit.) But this time, I am going to say how I feel.
You know, Camden is a lovely writer and I enjoyed many elements of “Toward the Sunrise”—to the point where I briefly started reading the sequel. But this novella, this novella was like getting spit in the face.
Happy Asian Pacific Heritage Month.
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Thanks!
Such. A. Great. Review.
Thank you, Linda.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and intelligent review! Romanticizing colonialism is so frustratingly common. I know you said your reasons for disliking this novel are deeply personal, but I really believe that they are reasons more people need to hear and understand.
I’ve been thinking about Linda’s review since she submitted it. It reminds me a lot of Esi Sogah’s essay on Hamilton, titled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” In this case, we as readers hear one side of history (over and over, depending on what era you’re reading about), and usually only that one side. Romanticizing colonialism isn’t new, and neither is Orientalism, and there’s a lot of history people are not taught (that’s not news, either), but within the romance genre, which is based so deeply in empathy, the way we portray and consume history matters, and needs to change.
Thank you so much for writing this.
thank you for this very thoughtful review. I appreciate your perspective and your willingness to share it.
Thank you for this great review Linda. I really appreciate the supporting links and references that you included.
Thank you Linda for a well informed and thoughtful review. You’ve done a magnificent job.
F-yeah! Thank you for saying this. It’s so frustrating to be a minority, and a booklover, reading so many micro-aggressions in romance. I’m glad you spoke up on it, I am so glad you brought it to people’s attention.
We need more than just diversity in books, we need to stop portraying cultures and history through privileged, rose-tinted glasses.
Oh what a good review! So much to think about – I know I don’t always notice these things and then I read a piece like this or the Eloisa James review you linked to and it seems so obvious. Thank you for making me pay more attention. ps also this was really well written do you write somewhere I could read more of it?
What a fantastic review!
Preach it, sister! Thank you so much for this review. As another Asian-American (born in California too!) romance reader, I related to many of your points on a spiritual level. Your review is wonderful and so eloquent. It made me upset how much I understand your anger but also happy that I am not the only one who feels upset about Orientalism & microaggressions.
Happy Asian Pacific Heritage Month! Banh mi’s on me 🙂
Thank you so much for writing this.
I for one would love it if Linda would follow up with a (hopefully growing) list of romance novels that get it right.
Wonderful review!
I understand Linda’s emotional response to this book. She clearly describes her reasons, but I have to ask why the group here as a whole thinks a story should be written to appease a certain sense of social justice; why should the genre as a whole “need to change”?
Writing [fiction, at least] is art and art is not responsible for anything other than itself. It doesn’t need to, no, shouldn’t, conform to notions of propriety or correctness or historical accuracy or any other limiting factor. That thinking places an untenable burden on a writer by demanding that while she’s writing her fictional characters in a particular voice & mindset, she also somehow work in the appropriate amount of critique…in a work of fiction. And lord knows she might not get the critique right, and then what? Who gets to judge if there was enough or it was the right flavor?
I have a hard time with the notion that the artist/writer is in some way responsible for anything other than making their art, whatever it is. In this case my guess is the writer’s goal was to take us out of our reality and into *her* fantasy. It’s up to us to decide the value *to us* of any given piece of art and take what we can from it or leave it in the dust. Ultimately, the market will reward the art that people find valuable and the artists who speak to them.
To be clear. Linda’s review of the book is perfectly valid – she had enormous problems with it & that’s ok. What I have difficulty with is the idea that somehow authors *should* write a certain way or with specific guiding principles. The Oxford comma excluded; that they should use always.
Thank you for this review and going deeper into the problems.
Thank you so much for this review. I’m glad that you decided it was worth sharing your problems with this. I particularly loved this line:
“… but I’ve found that intent means so little in the proliferation of stereotypes… it doesn’t change how their small thoughtless actions still linger.”
I love the idea of a postscript to the book where they move out to Asia and find their world view utterly changed.
Here’s the thing: I do mind a bit when I’m reading a purportedly historical novel and all this twenty-first stuff is coming out of the protagonists’ mouths. If you’re an eighteenth century Duke who truly believes that you’re no different to your scullery maid, then you’re a wildly eccentric renegade who’d be treated askance by all your peers. I actually really liked it in the Poldark novels when Ross Poldark, the wildly liberal hero, supports extending suffrage – but not to EVERYBODY, not the poor and indigent, that’s crazy talk, and he never suggests giving the vote to women. He’s liberal for his era in that he minds witnessing starvation, privation and political corruption, but he’s not a modern-day Bernie supporter. He’s a creature of his times.
A Julia of the period probably WOULD have a wildly romanticized vision of the mysterious Orient, full of exotic barbarians to be ‘saved’, and she probably would have approached the prospect of becoming a missionary with the zeal of Jane Eyre’s St John. But yes, a good postscript with Julia living in a real place, doing real work alongside real people, would probably have gone a long way towards saving this book.
GOOD For YOU!!!
Thank you for being a discerning reader, a champion for truth. We need more reviews that challenge the story and the author.
Thank you.
@Sara: speaking solely for myself here, I see the genre as a powerful, powerful thing, a literary inheritance passed down among women that sustains many of us through crappy times, and communicates so many subversive concepts like sexual agency, self actualization, the history of women that are so often obscured or overwritten. The genre as a whole is deeply valuable and important to me, and part of what I do as a reader and reviewer is react to the books I read, and discuss what I liked or didn’t like about them.
Looking at the portrayal of history – and this is a historical novel, not fantasy; this is not a made up world, which is important to note – and objectifying, erasing, or diminishing the suffering of people isn’t a question of social justice. It’s accuracy and empathy. The author is responsible for accuracy of the history, and is responsible for the portrayal of people in the world the characters inhabit. The art the author creates has meaning, and in this particular case, it erases the presence and contributions of people who did exist, who were there. Moreover, “the market” won’t and can’t reward books that don’t get written because those writers and the characters in the books aren’t published. Presuming the market will reward anything presumes the market is fair, and it’s very much not.
I’ve said this a bunch of times and I feel like people are going to run hollering away if I say it again, but I will repeat myself here. If we put all the romances in one world, all the characters, every sub-genre, every setting, every story, in one big made-up universe, that world is very white, very heterosexual, and very Christian. It does not at all resemble the actual world, either now in the present day, or in the era wherein this book or any other historical novel is written. This can’t continue. I don’t want that, and as a reader who is invested in the genre, who discusses and cares deeply about the books inside it, it’s my job as I see it to talk about what I want, and what I don’t want to read. The genre doesn’t exist without readers, and the genre should include representation of the women who read and write it. Presently it doesn’t.
I tweaked my name so there wouldn’t be confusion.
SB Sarah- I agree wholeheartedly with what you’ve said.
“If we put all the romances in one world, all the characters, every sub-genre, every setting, every story, in one big made-up universe, that world is very white, very heterosexual, and very Christian.”
Word. I for one would like to see more well-written diversity in romance.
@The Other Sara:
There’s a joke in there somewhere about Sara(h)s, I think. 🙂
For portrayals of persons of color as real people in the English historical setting, try The Heiress Effect and Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan.
It would be nice to have more historicals with characters who are not white, straight Christians. Books in the 21st Century need not replicate books from the 19th Century to be “historically accurate” nor do we necessarily need to have white straight Christians behave with anachronistic sensitivity. Instead we can have books written in the 21st Century from the point of view of or with main characters who are not white straight Christians.
I really appreciate Linda raising this issue and liked the links.
Ahh thank you all so much for the comments, I’m blushing really hard. Also thanks to my friends Emily and Deepthi for reading my edits multiple times on this.
@Teev: I did blog about a novel er, exactly one time… I’ll link it in the site section. Planning on writing some more in the future maybe.
@Sara & @Tam: I see you and I have Thoughts, let me take some time to respond versus dashing it off.
@SB Sarah I hear you, but fiction is fantasy in as much as it’s made up and has no obligation to follow any rules. Authors of fiction have no obligation, nor in many cases, the motivation to get history or anything else “right”, hence the whole concept of literary license.
I’m speaking in broad generalizations, clearly. But my goal here is to protect the artist’s agency. They must be allowed to create their vision without restriction. Sometimes that will be with historical accuracy, empathy, progressive ideals, and food for thought. Other times it will not – it will be something that skates across its influences or uses its subject matter badly. Just because you don’t like the results doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written or read for that matter.
Which brings me to your last paragraph. You are not required to read anything, and should shout loud & proud about what you’d like to see written and what you’d like to read. I just don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell an artist how to make their art. Don’t buy it if you don’t like, tell your friends why you don’t like it, patronize the writers doing it how you define right. However, someone else may define “right” differently and that has to be allowed for.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this review – it resonates with me on many levels – especially your inclusion of the concept of intersectionality. As a rhetoric and composition instructor, I consider romance novels my “secret vice” and as such, have resigned myself to forgiving many affronts to history. You expressed the frustration I have felt most eloquently!
Sara – the trouble making one “I just don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell an artist how to make their art.”
I do not agree, society sets the standards that artists work within – if they don’t their work doesn’t sell – and those change over time. Do you really think say ‘Lolita’ could be written now? Or ‘Little Black Sambo’? Or many many other books? Part of the reason it is important that Linda wrote this review is that it helps shift those standards and I am grateful that she did so.
And to lighten the tone my cousin Sarah went to a ‘Sarah Day’ a while back just for women called Sarah or Sara etc!
Thank you very much for this, Linda; a valid viewpoint and well-stated. I wish authors and would-be authors would take note.
@Sara – you wrote, “I just don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell an artist how to make their art.”
I think, if I’m reading correctly, this is where you and I essentially disagree. I don’t want the job of standing over anyone and telling them what they should do while they’re doing it. No, thanks.
But I do think it’s necessary to say, “This work was racist/hurtful/offensive/revisionist/etc and that could have been avoided.” No art is made in a vacuum. Institutional racism, bias, deeply taught and unquestioned lessons and habits, other portrayals of people or the absence of people in similar works – all those things, along with a zillion other elements, influence an artist. I’m all for creation without limitation and vision. I’m also for considering what the art that’s made SAYS and DOES, because sometimes, to quote Glen Weldon from PCHH, “The thing you made isn’t the thing you think you made.” Artists have to consider what their art is doing, what it says, and how it portrays or erases people. I think that is part of the process.
@Jazzlet: I was one of four Sara(h)s when I was in school. I would have LOVED a Sarah Day! There are a lot of us!
Thank you for writing this, Linda.
@Sara – I am half-Asian (Korean, to be specific) and half-white, but I ID as Asian. If a book is going to treat Asians as exotic others (book, not characters) and elide actual historical events, that’s essentially telling me only my white heritage matters, not my Asian heritage.
I grew up in an all-white enclave. I was subject to very little overt discrimination or name-calling, but I was continually reminded I was Different and an outsider. That hurt. I have no desire to read a book for fun and be hurt by white being the default and everyone else being wallpaper.
Am I angry? You betcha. I have reason to be. You, as far as I can tell, don’t. There are plenty of books that you can read without being uoset or hurt. That’s not true for me.
FWIW, I read Camden’s Against the Tide and enjoyed it. But that she’s not a hack only makes it worse.
My two cents: I get historical context. I love historical context. However, in historicals where the characters never have the blinders of white privilege ripped off, I feel dissatisfied and let down. There’s a lack of depth to these stories.
And no, we can’t and shouldn’t t tell authors what to write. We can and should tell them when their efforts are ill informed or offensive.
Ultimately I think we all agree that we can’t tell artists how to make their art, but we can tell them when their product is offensive or badly done or not what we choose to consume, right?
@Jazzlet “Do you really think say ‘Lolita’ could be written now? Or ‘Little Black Sambo’?”
Yep. I think these kinds of things are being written all the time – and worse by far. And people choose to buy and read them. The difference is in the size of the audience now. They’re not mainstream because they are offensive to many. How will what we currently view as literature be viewed in 50 or 100 years? Who knows, but I’d be willing to bet that much of it won’t stand the test of time either – but the writers should still be allowed to write their vision.
@Lawless “Am I angry? You betcha. I have reason to be. You, as far as I can tell, don’t. There are plenty of books that you can read without being uoset or hurt. That’s not true for me.”
First off you know zero about me, so you have no idea what I find upsetting. I’m sorry you’re angry, but that doesn’t mean that a writer has to write with your feelings in mind. That’s not how art/writing works. I’d suggest that you patronize the artists/writers producing the things you love. That’s the kind of encouragement that makes change.
My thanks also to Linda for a well written review.
Re: “Writing [fiction, at least] is art and art is not responsible for anything other than itself. It doesn’t need to, no, shouldn’t, conform to notions of propriety or correctness or historical accuracy or any other limiting factor.”
My thoughts: Why?
Jazzlet has already pointed out above that “society sets standards art works within.” I’ll go further and point out that there was recently a lively discussion here about whether something without a happy ending could be called a romance. If you look at the guidelines for any romance publisher, they will tell you the things that are explicitly prohibited (incest, for example). Do these themes surface in other genres? Sure. But if there are a whole subset of people who REFUSE to buy or read books that include unhappy endings, cheating, incest, etc. why is it suddenly about artistic freedom when the thing people refuse to read involves racism?
Also, if you’ll allow me to add a bit of historical perspective: the idea of “art for art’s sake” or art that is “responsible for nothing other than itself” is extremely rare in what is loosely called the Western tradition. (I’m deliberately not talking about Asia or Africa, or the pre-Columbian Americas, since those aren’t my areas of expertise.) The ancient Greeks assumed that art (both visual and literary) was either religious or didactic or (more frequently) both. The Romans, following them, argued that art should “both teach and delight.” The principle of equal parts delight AND INSTRUCTION (moral, historical, or otherwise) was adopted in the middle ages, and remained basically untouched through the Renaissance, although the SUBJECTS of instruction tended to become somewhat more secular and less religious. Before the 18th C you’d be extremely hard put to come up with a single piece of painting, sculpture, literature or even musical form that DIDN’T have some explicit component beyond just entertainment. That doesn’t mean some of it isn’t extremely beautiful and/or entertaining, but if you’d told Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci that they were not supposed to “conform to notions of propriety or correctness” they wouldn’t have understood what you were saying.
The real defense of “art for art’s sake” ONLY starts in the early 19th C with the Romantics, and Keats’ famous line “beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all you need to know.”
Here’s the thing: the Romantic poets (Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.) were all fairly wealthy white men, living in one of the most powerful countries in the world. Their idea of the “hero artist” who was blithely unconcerned with anything other than “beauty” was coming from the position of men who were with the exception of Keats all landed gentry (e.g. in the top 10% of the population of one of the richest countries in Europe). Byron was titled nobility. IN SPITE of this, and in spite of their declarations to the contrary, most of them in fact did write quite a bit that WAS politically and socially engaged. (Percy Shelley’s “England in 1819” comes to mind as a great protest poem. Byron wrote about the Greek struggle for independence, as well as dying there.) They were to some extent rebelling against a millenia old tradition of saying that art HAD to be morally instructive and improving in order to justify its existence, but even in their rebellion they didn’t actually disavow engaged art.
After the Romantics there was an almost immediate reaction AGAINST their suggestion of “art for art’s sake” and you have the rise of the great social protest novel of the 19th C (Tolstoy, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Balzac, Galdos, etc.). All through WWI there is a pretty constant argument in favor of art being at the service of some moral imperative. And by the way, a lot of those “moral” imperatives were precisely the imperialism and other noxious ideologies that Linda mentioned in her review. It’s not an ACCIDENT that 19th C heroes are all brave colonialists, any more than the ideology in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Gone with the Wind are accidental.
The “art for art’s sake” argument, and the rediscovery of the Romantic “hero artist” position is really a mid-twentieth century development, in conscious political response to the communist ideal of the committed artist who only writes about the people, and the fascistideal of the artist who glorifies the folk and fatherland. (Think about the Nazis banning swing as “decadent” music.) Asserting the importance of the individual, and the right of art to be frivolous WAS a political position in those circumstances, standing against overwhelming political ideologies.
After the war, the people who again elevate the Romantics and push for “art for art’s sake” are the Modernist school of critics, mostly in the US. (The tradition in Europe is somewhat different.) You probably won’t be surprised that academics and critics in the 1950s were overwhelmingly white men, usually upper middle class (and usually Christian). Once again, the people most anxious to say that art shouldn’t incorporate critique happen to belong to the most powerful group of people in the most powerful country of the moment.
By the 1960s, that’s already crumbling and under attack, as musicians and artists and writers take a bunch of positions about a bunch of issues, and very definitely incorporate critique into their work.
So that’s a brief thumbnail history of the theory that artists have no responsibility except to “make art” and entertain their audience. It works out to two groups of very powerful men saying that artists shouldn’t have to worry about being anything except entertaining, and holds sway as an ideology for about 50 years out of 4,000.
Of course, just because you’re in the minority doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But given the VAST majority of artists and thinkers over the course of 3,950 years who thought that artists SHOULD concern themselves with educational or moral or political questions every time they create art….why are we all accepting that this handful of guys are absolutely right and everyone else is wrong without at least considering the other side?
Would love to hear from anyone who has expertise about the history of the arts in general (and literature in particular) in Asia and Africa, and whether “pure” entertainment has been more widespread there. I know bits and pieces about West Africa and Japan, but just enough to know my own ignorance, so if anyone wants to weigh in I’d be interested.
@Sara: You wrote,”That’s not how art/writing works. I’d suggest that you patronize the artists/writers producing the things you love. That’s the kind of encouragement that makes change.”
Here again I find another essential disagreement with you. The answer to, “This is erasing me, my history, and the existence of thousands of people who look like me, and it hurts me deeply,” cannot be, “Well, read something else.” The erasure is the problem, not the supply.
Okay, I have been around the internet a long time, and every time some book is criticized for perpetuating racism or otherwise being hurtful, someone will say “you can’t tell the author what to write, they should be allowed to write their vision” — as if pointing out problematic work is a deep attack on the author that attempts to suppress them. There are several reasons why I’m never convinced by this. Firstly, see Mary Robinette Kowal’s post on why she killed a project. She, like many other writers, reacted to learning that she had written something hurtful by deciding that that was something she didn’t wanted to do; she has certainly not suffered in popularity and success as a result. Secondly, who is more in danger of being suppressed — people whose writing fits comfotably into centuries of the dominant perspective, or people writing from marginal, colonized viewpoints? Listen carefully to the latter because they’re not often heard at all; the former have lots of people hearing them. Thirdly, as to the argument that you should keep it positive, not criticize and only patronize what you like instead… Well, one thing that is harmful about the existence of a dominant narrative is that it is so ubiquitous as to be invisible. It is comfortably accepted as the background that other things are different from. While promoting different narratives is good and necessary, it doesn’t fully address the need to make the background assumptions visible: only then can they be seen as what they are, as being written, usually, from a position that has dominated others and contines to.
Thank you for this review, Linda. You have brought a very eloquent focus to uncomfortable feelings I’ve been having with some of the books I’ve been reading lately.
By the comments this is an important topic for many of us. Besides voting with my wallet, how can I start to change what I see in the books I read?
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
@SB Sarah – Yes, you’re right of course that fundamentally the answer isn’t as simple as read something else. The ultimate goal is to change the culture to a degree that the stories we tell reflect that change and the racist character gets his comeuppance organically in the storytelling.
I believe that storytelling is one of the vehicles for that cultural change but not because we require certain boxes to be checked off in each story, but because people who have an “enlightened” (that’s not the right word, but I’m in a rush) sense of their place in the world tell stories that change other people’s hearts.
You said you don’t want to be the one policing the writer. Then what’s left but supporting the ones you like and not supporting what you don’t like?
I’m out now – sorry. I’m boarding a plane. Take care all.
Now I want to know more about Hu King Eng, Gurabai Karmarkar and Mary Platt.
@ReneeG: I think having conversations like this one helps change what gets written and published. Sites like this are primarily for readers, but writers and other people in publishing read these discussions and reviews too – and we apply what we’ve read to our work, thinking about pitfalls to avoid and how problematic elements might be addressed.
@Sara: I think the distinction to be made here is between criticism and censorship. I don’t think anyone here wants laws in place decreeing what people can and can’t publish, write, or read. But saying “I found this novel’s treatment of Asia to be hurtful” isn’t censoring it, any more than saying “this book was OK until the wheels fell off the plot midway through” or snarking the silly lines from “The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable Girl” is. I do think you’re correct, though, that shockingly offensive stuff does sometimes still get published, usually for a niche, non-mainstream audience; see “For Such a Time” (the infamous Jew/Nazi camp commandant inspirational romance reviewed here last summer).
I appreciate reading such a thoughtful review.
As a thirteen year old I loved GWTW. Reading it again many years later in my twenties, I shrieked, cussed and couldn’t finish it because it was so offensive.
@sara (who may not see this because of her flight) – Both are necessary. I already buy books I like and avoid the ones I won’t. But it isn’t always obvious which is which.
As others point out, critique both brings this to authors’ attention and coalesces readers’ thoughts on it, letting those of us who find this a hurtful erasure know that we’re not alone and that others support us. Feeling alone is, in fact, what hurts most about erasure. And as you admitted, just supporting authors and themes that aren’t hurtful isn’t enough to change the culture.
Sidenote: The subtext of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is anti-colonial. The book she was working on before she became too ill to write included a half-black West Indian heiress as a character. I doubt she was there just to reinforce the mores of the time about marriage. Inclusion and a knowledge of how what white people did affects others can, and has been, written for a long time. Asking authors to do better is pro-art, not anti-art.