A book about book banning in the 1930s – The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
The banning of books has been going on since books were first published. China is the prototype for this behavior – between 221 and 206 BCE, books were banned if disliked by the central government of the time, which was the Qin Dynasty.
Circulated books are ripe for arguing about, for loving, for hating, for wanting everyone else to read it, for wanting to burn it so no one else can ever read it.
In the U.S. the first banned book is considered to be author Thomas Morton’s. In 1637, Morton, a known free spirit, wrote a diatribe against the stodgy Puritans and their intrusive ethics. His book and he, himself, were banned from the Massachusetts colony. Several copies exist.
In 1852, the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
was published and sold 300,000 copies in this country the first year, 200,000 in England. It was violently
opposed by white people in the South, labeled false and slanderous and banned outright in the
Confederate states. Apparently, plenty of people got hold of a copy, however banned it was, because, as
in 21st Century America, they sent threatening letters to the author. She also received in the mail the
severed ear of a slave.
A historical fiction I just read, The Giver of Stars* by Jojo Moyes, 2019, is about the outrage over
a book disseminated with other library books to the hills and hollers families of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. A man is killed by a book (!), a pregnant woman is jailed because of a book, a town is divided because of a book.
It seems the least likely of things to get upset about. Although I do know that ignorant people like to ban things they don’t understand and people who want power are eager to ban books that might list sins that could dethrone them.
The Giver of Stars uproar is like today’s school board outrage and resulting banning over allowing into classrooms any books that might teach children things they shouldn’t know (in the case of The Giver of Stars, the outrage is about books telling women things they shouldn’t know).
The idea of banning is the result, always, of one person or a few persons disliking or disbelieving something – a word, a fact, a plot, a character, a situation – in a book, spreading their outrage to those who’ll believe anything they hear, and eventually staging an outcry to get the book out of circulation. Many of the out criers never read the book at all. And many people who would never have read it, search out the book so they can see what the fuss is about.
One would think that banning books is a no-win endeavor.
I love writing about book banning because of that deduction; and because I’ve wondered for years why a person can’t figure out that they don’t have to read the book. Or if they find they’re already reading something they loathe, they can quit. Or they can tell all their friends what they find objectionable in the book, and they themselves can keep their children from reading it at home or make it possible that their kids can leave the classroom during its use. Incipient book banners have many avenues in which to spew their hatred of a word or a fact or a whole book – write a column or a letter to the editor or a sermon about their anger. That they feel they must ban a book so others cannot decide for themselves is to me the objectionable side of what many of us never see as a problem.
There are many things that others do that we don’t have to do and that we don’t have to ban. I have no compulsion to be a cross-dresser, for example. It is, of course, easy to say for a woman because we’ve been wearing jeans and other male outfits for decades. Men do have more of a problem if wanting to cross-dress because it’s still alarming to many if a man wears a skirt and high heels. I don’t care. It’s a little late to be banning clothing that others wear. I don’t wear high heels because they are precarious. And they damage my feet. I don’t hear of people banning pumps because they’re dangerous.
I don’t like horror stories, so I neither read them nor see the movies. I don’t like the bloodletting in the Old Testament, so I don’t read the Bible, but I don’t see that tome banned because of its infanticide. I don’t like bad writing and poor usage of words, which could easily be banned because they’re unforgiveable in an intelligent society, except that I fear most of it comes from poor education and thus ignorance. If you look at Congress, you can see we don’t have a law against either.
And I don’t see people getting up in arms about misspelled words very often. [I wonder how many I have this time in a column.]
Most words that have to do with sex, the biggest reason for the banning of books, are not accidents, and they shouldn’t be. Using the correct word for vagina, for example, rather than one of the two dozen slang words (in the English language), prevents misinterpretation. Lots of people can’t say vagina, however; it embarrasses them. I don’t understand that. If you’re worried about sex being taught to children or exposing your child to a word like vagina, remember: it is the lack of learning that’s dangerous.
The origin of the stupidity of banning books is of course that we like to be in on other people’s private lives. We like to snoop, we like to judge, we like to condemn, we like to expose, and we like to tell others what to do.
Which means, we’ll be banning into the future as far as we’ve banned in the past – centuries forward from now people’s privacy will still be messed with. Unless we figure out what to do about human nature, the likelihood of an end to banning books is nil.
If we could only listen more often to Willy Nelson, who sings, “Mind your own business. For if you mind your own business, you won’t be minding mine.”
* similar book – The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson, 2019
