Sunday October 25, 2009
‘Middle-class rabbits’ not welcome
By ELIZABETH TAI
Some books, now considered literary classics, didn’t get a warm reception from the censors of their time. Below are eight popular titles.
The Odyssey by Homer
The epic poem, written 300 years ago, was deemed dangerous by the Roman Emperor Caligula in 35 AD because it expressed Greek ideas of freedom.
King Lear by Shakespeare
From 1788 to 1820, King Lear was banned from the British stage in deference to the reigning King George III’s madness.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
From 1864 to 1959, this novel with strong themes of mercy and forgiveness was listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), the list of books that the Catholic church deemed dangerous to the faith of Roman Catholics. The list was established in 1559 by Pope Paul IV. Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sarte, Jonathan Swift and Emile Zola were some of the authors listed. Index Librorum Prohibitorum was abolished on June 14, 1966, by Pope Paul VI.
Call of the Wild by Jack London
London’s 1903 tale of a dog reverting to his primal side in the wild was considered “too radical” in Yugoslavia. The book, and all of London’s works, were banned in Yugoslavia in 1929. Italy banned cheap editions of Call of the Wild the same year, while the Nazis burned the book in a bonfire in Germany in 1932.
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
The 1955 novel about a controversial affair between a 12-year-old girl Dolores Haze and a pedophile named Humbert Humbert was deemed too hot to handle by some countries. It was considered obscene in France from 1956 to 1959, in England (1955-59), in Argentina (1959), and in New Zealand (1960).
Interestingly, according to a 2008 Time magazine article, Nabokov fought with his publishers whether an image of a girl should be on the book’s cover and nearly burned his manuscript in disgust.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
In 1885, a year after the book was published, the library of Concord, Massachusetts, decided to exclude it from its collection. Reason: it was deemed “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
According to Canadian organisation Freedom to Read, by 1907, the book, which is about the adventures of a 13-year-old white boy and a runaway slave down the Mississippi River, was “thrown out of some library somewhere every year” because the hero was said to be “a bad example for impressionable young readers.”
Huckleberry Finn continues to be challenged in the United States till this day – people can’t seem to agree if it’s a racist or anti-racism book.
According to the American Library Association, it was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter
In the 1980s, the London County Council in Britain, newly taken over by the Labour Party, banned these books from being used in all London schools, saying that the stories portrayed only “middle-class rabbits”.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
In 1959, the US Post Office declared this novel “obscene and non-mailable”. The decision was overturned by a federal judge who questioned the postmaster general’s right to decide what is considered obscene. In 1960 Penguin Books was prosecuted in England for publishing the book, which was deemed obscene. Penguin won the case, and the book could then be sold in England.
(Sources: Freedom to Read, Wikipedia, Time Magazine and the American Library Association and Beacon for Freedom of Expression.)
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