Showboat is a book by Edna Ferber that was published in 1926. The book spans three generations and begins in the late 1800s. The book was turned into a musical and its usually the musical people are familiar with("fish gotta swim ... birds gotta fly ... I'm gonna love one man til I die....").
Every now and then, a production of Showboat will be banned because of its stereotypical portrayal of black people. We're dumb apes.
One of the most compelling storylines in the book and the musical is the story of a black woman who marries a white man in one state, where it's legal, and then travels to another state, where its not. They're on a Showboat, traveling along the Mississippi, a river which crosses many state lines. They have to keep track of where they are and there is much discussion about just how black the black woman is because the law differs from state to state and the degree of her blackness matters.
It's not a pleasant thing to read, but what business do we have asking for everything to be pleasant? The truth is, how black you were is something that was measured in fractions back then and as much as I'd like to change it, that's how it was. You can't read the book without absolutely falling in love with Julie, the black woman, and you can't put it down without knowing, love isn't about color. Instead of being banned, the book should be required reading.
The complaint about it is that it portrays stereotypes of minorities. It probably does. It was written by a white woman and published in 1926 and you can hardly fault her for not being prescient enough to foretell a time where she would be castigated for using words like: mulatto, quadroon, darkie etc. She was already taking a huge risk and undoubtedly paid a price for writing Julie's story. 1926 was just an exhale away from the Civil War and decades away from the civil rights movement. I'm sure no one was happy with what she had to say about love between a black woman and a white man.
What's more, there is historical value in her misrepresentations. Her misrepresentations are part of the history of how white people and literature have treated black people. We need to know that. We need to remember. Maybe we're too lazy to put literature into historical perspective.
Something else I often hear is that Robert A Heinlein was a sexist or a misogynist. I answered a post on medium.com that was fed to me through flipboard on the topic not too long ago. I figured the silly young lady needed my help. I mean, if she couldn't figure out how spectacular it was for a man born before women could vote to have women characters in his science fiction at all then I was happy to enlighten her.
Nothing much came of it but nothing much does come of these things. It's easy to say Heinlein was a sexist or a misogynist.
I don't know everything about Heinlein. I haven't even read all of his books. Although, I have read a lot of them... But here's the deal....
He was born in 1907 and was a teenager before women were allowed to vote. The book most people point to, Stranger in a Strange Land, was published before the civil rights movement, before the sexual revolution, and not long after the most socially constipated time in American history, the 1950s.
So, he was 53 when Stranger was published. What people object to is how his characters speak to women. It bothered me at first but even when I first read it I knew it was written "a while ago" and took that into consideration. Since I first read it thirty years ago we're now talking "a while a while ago".
Also, I noticed, women take charge in his books. Although, they don't take charge like men. But why should they? We're going to pretend men and women are the same? Dumb apes.
In Stranger, it's Jill who takes Valentine Michael Smith out of the hospital. The stupid man who does all the deciding and pontificating, Jubal Harshaw, doesn't do anything without consulting the pack of women he has hanging around. Yes. they're hot and flirty. Often, they're willing. So what. We'd be happier with ugly sexless women? Even women don't want to imagine that future and it's certainly not less misogynistic to imagine women sans libido and mammary glands.
Jubal Harshaw admits women run the world and so does Heinlein, over and over again. All of the fanny patting characters in Heinlein's novels, all of them defer to the women around them. As a teenager surrounded who read authors like Asimov (who was 13 years younger than Heinlein) it was nice to read science fiction written by a man who wasn't afraid to include women in his stories. They were women I liked. They didn't depend on men to support them. They didn't assume sex equalled marriage or that love meant forever. They had a sense of humor and their wits about them.
He even did something male writers hardly ever do -- even now, although I don't blame them really -- he wrote at least one entire novel from a woman's point of view. He also wrote a novel where a man became a woman. So, once I got past the silly fanny patting and what really sounded like old fashioned grandfatherly language to me, I came to appreciate his healthy respect, appreciation, reverence and awe of women. He was a man unmanned by women who remained a man.
So, I've been asking myself, why do blog posts about Heinlein's misogyny infect the internet?
For some reason, lots of science fiction readers expect science fiction authors to escape the context of their own time. It's an impossible thing for anyone to do, even when we try. We can test sociological limits but escape it? Break free of our own context, something more a part of us than we can possibly understand, and leave not a whiff of how we've been taught to think and speak and the things we use to understand the world around us -- that's not happening.
What's even more interesting to me is that we wouldn't want them to. So, as usual, we're our own worst enemies. Dumb apes.
If a science fiction writer from today wrote something that completely escaped their context, we would have a terrible time understanding it, seeing how it was relevant, and relating to it. Science fiction asks the question, "What if?" but it's a reflection of a future we find plausible. A future we find plausible contains current context.
We lower our societal trailblazing expectations for authors who lived further in the past than Heinlein. Authors like HG Wells (who was considered a feminist) and Jules Verne are less likely to be called misogynists even though just like Heinlein, they were stuck with what people would be willing to believe. Which in general is, progress ... but not too much... something different ... but not too different...
Which is what Heinlein did. The book was published in 1961 and does a thorough job of confronting all of our taboos -- including cannibalism. So ... he had to have written this book in the 1950s .... Interesting. Maybe only to me.
Every now and then, a production of Showboat will be banned because of its stereotypical portrayal of black people. We're dumb apes.
One of the most compelling storylines in the book and the musical is the story of a black woman who marries a white man in one state, where it's legal, and then travels to another state, where its not. They're on a Showboat, traveling along the Mississippi, a river which crosses many state lines. They have to keep track of where they are and there is much discussion about just how black the black woman is because the law differs from state to state and the degree of her blackness matters.
It's not a pleasant thing to read, but what business do we have asking for everything to be pleasant? The truth is, how black you were is something that was measured in fractions back then and as much as I'd like to change it, that's how it was. You can't read the book without absolutely falling in love with Julie, the black woman, and you can't put it down without knowing, love isn't about color. Instead of being banned, the book should be required reading.
The complaint about it is that it portrays stereotypes of minorities. It probably does. It was written by a white woman and published in 1926 and you can hardly fault her for not being prescient enough to foretell a time where she would be castigated for using words like: mulatto, quadroon, darkie etc. She was already taking a huge risk and undoubtedly paid a price for writing Julie's story. 1926 was just an exhale away from the Civil War and decades away from the civil rights movement. I'm sure no one was happy with what she had to say about love between a black woman and a white man.
What's more, there is historical value in her misrepresentations. Her misrepresentations are part of the history of how white people and literature have treated black people. We need to know that. We need to remember. Maybe we're too lazy to put literature into historical perspective.
Something else I often hear is that Robert A Heinlein was a sexist or a misogynist. I answered a post on medium.com that was fed to me through flipboard on the topic not too long ago. I figured the silly young lady needed my help. I mean, if she couldn't figure out how spectacular it was for a man born before women could vote to have women characters in his science fiction at all then I was happy to enlighten her.
Nothing much came of it but nothing much does come of these things. It's easy to say Heinlein was a sexist or a misogynist.
I don't know everything about Heinlein. I haven't even read all of his books. Although, I have read a lot of them... But here's the deal....
He was born in 1907 and was a teenager before women were allowed to vote. The book most people point to, Stranger in a Strange Land, was published before the civil rights movement, before the sexual revolution, and not long after the most socially constipated time in American history, the 1950s.
So, he was 53 when Stranger was published. What people object to is how his characters speak to women. It bothered me at first but even when I first read it I knew it was written "a while ago" and took that into consideration. Since I first read it thirty years ago we're now talking "a while a while ago".
Also, I noticed, women take charge in his books. Although, they don't take charge like men. But why should they? We're going to pretend men and women are the same? Dumb apes.
In Stranger, it's Jill who takes Valentine Michael Smith out of the hospital. The stupid man who does all the deciding and pontificating, Jubal Harshaw, doesn't do anything without consulting the pack of women he has hanging around. Yes. they're hot and flirty. Often, they're willing. So what. We'd be happier with ugly sexless women? Even women don't want to imagine that future and it's certainly not less misogynistic to imagine women sans libido and mammary glands.
Jubal Harshaw admits women run the world and so does Heinlein, over and over again. All of the fanny patting characters in Heinlein's novels, all of them defer to the women around them. As a teenager surrounded who read authors like Asimov (who was 13 years younger than Heinlein) it was nice to read science fiction written by a man who wasn't afraid to include women in his stories. They were women I liked. They didn't depend on men to support them. They didn't assume sex equalled marriage or that love meant forever. They had a sense of humor and their wits about them.
He even did something male writers hardly ever do -- even now, although I don't blame them really -- he wrote at least one entire novel from a woman's point of view. He also wrote a novel where a man became a woman. So, once I got past the silly fanny patting and what really sounded like old fashioned grandfatherly language to me, I came to appreciate his healthy respect, appreciation, reverence and awe of women. He was a man unmanned by women who remained a man.
So, I've been asking myself, why do blog posts about Heinlein's misogyny infect the internet?
For some reason, lots of science fiction readers expect science fiction authors to escape the context of their own time. It's an impossible thing for anyone to do, even when we try. We can test sociological limits but escape it? Break free of our own context, something more a part of us than we can possibly understand, and leave not a whiff of how we've been taught to think and speak and the things we use to understand the world around us -- that's not happening.
What's even more interesting to me is that we wouldn't want them to. So, as usual, we're our own worst enemies. Dumb apes.
If a science fiction writer from today wrote something that completely escaped their context, we would have a terrible time understanding it, seeing how it was relevant, and relating to it. Science fiction asks the question, "What if?" but it's a reflection of a future we find plausible. A future we find plausible contains current context.
We lower our societal trailblazing expectations for authors who lived further in the past than Heinlein. Authors like HG Wells (who was considered a feminist) and Jules Verne are less likely to be called misogynists even though just like Heinlein, they were stuck with what people would be willing to believe. Which in general is, progress ... but not too much... something different ... but not too different...
Which is what Heinlein did. The book was published in 1961 and does a thorough job of confronting all of our taboos -- including cannibalism. So ... he had to have written this book in the 1950s .... Interesting. Maybe only to me.
