Banning Steinbeck

The following article is taken from a website called Critical Mass, an online journal "dedicated to commentary on the state of American academe" and maintained by Erin O'Connor, an English teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. This particular article is about how parents in an Ohio school district trying to ban John Steinbeck's short classic, Of Mice and Men, which we've just recently begun (or finished for some of us) reading.

http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2003/01/banning_steinbe.html


I have mixed emotions about this issue. When I was in highschool I vividly remember reading this book and staying with it in class for at least a week or two. I immensely enjoyed the book... an sentiment which was echoed 7 years later as I finished it last night while the rain came down and pattered against my roof.

I can see a couple reasons why people would want to ban this book:
1. Profanity (108 counted by the Ohio protest group)
2. Racial slurs (12)
3. Use of God's name in vain (45)
4. Sexual content (unabashed references to whore houses and visiting such)
5. Portrayal of women (Curley's wife, prostitutes)
6. Graphic depictions of death including murder (Candy's dog, Lenny's murder)

I wonder if perhaps the reason people wish to ban this book is the reason why this book is so widely read and appreciated. Obscenity and racism exist. People use God's name in vain. Some women are manipulative. Men like sex and there are women who will accept money for it. People are killed for pleasure. People are killed for mercy. And some people are killed for no good reason at all.

There is something "naked" I think, about good writing. There is something unabashed about a good author's ability to take what he sees and put it on the page. We must ask ourselves, why do we read books like this? Are books meant to show us how things should be? Are they meant to change minds? Should they only show us what we're comfortable with, what we wish for, what we think is right?

Again, I feel that the best policy is to know your enemy. If an author wants me to do something about poverty, would the writer give me a nice story about a poor person who is helped by another out of their situation, or does he/she give me a story about one forsaken by all, who eventually dies in a gutter cursing god as they slowly freeze and starve to death. Now I know which story would move me more. I know which character I would be more attached to. I know which story would be "filthier", which one would make me more uncomfortable, which one would move me more.

Why do we include Of Mice and Men in our studies? What do we want to show these growing adults? What do we want them to feel? I think that highschool should be preparation... preparation for college... preparation for life. And in the real world, no amount of flowery, un-obscene, and comfortable language is going to change the fact that people cuss, fuck, and die.

We don't want our kids going out and having unprotected and/or promiscuous sex with each other. But we know that it happens. So what do we do? We teach sex ed. We tell kids "abstinence is the 100% foolproof way to not contract a genital STD" and we tell them what an STD is. We show them disgusting and grotesque pictures of what can happen. We tell them disturbing tales of viruses and bacteria and disease. Why? Because it's necessary to educate. To show how things are in order to stress how things should be.

Without the ugly, the beautiful does not exist. I think Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is both painfully ugly and at the same time elegantly beautiful because it seems to true and real. It stands before us, naked, blatant, and unashamed. And I feel that touch with something so real and beautiful and ugly is worth having, and worth giving to others.