Join My History Book Club!

[smccormack]

Fall semester is flying by! In the mad rush of midterm exams I’ve found a momentary escape from the stressors by reading fiction. I’ve never been a member of an actual book club so this week’s blog serves as an invitation to my virtual club here in the Macmillan History Community!

Here’s what I’m reading lately:

I came across Tony Morrison’s masterpiece The Bluest Eye (1970) while wandering a bookstore with my son, a college senior and aspiring writer. The store had a display of “banned books” and we spent some time discussing which we had read, and speculating about why each may have been banned. I determined in that moment that the next several books I read will be “banned” titles with the hope that I can expand my perspective of why book bans (still) exist in 21st-century America. What is it, for example, that leads a person/organization to believe that no one should have access to a book? Or that reading the book will endanger or injure a person in some irreparable way? And what can I learn about the current state of our society by considering those texts that some people don’t want other people to read?

I’m an historian, which means my perspective of Morrison's The Bluest Eye – simply stated, the story of a traumatized black child who desires blue eyes – is influenced more by my understanding of the time period in which the book was written than the literary merits. In the foreword to the 2007 Vintage edition Morrison wrote that she “focused…on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female. In trying to dramatize the devastation that even causal racial contempt can cause, I chose a unique situation, not a representative one.” (Morrison, xi) Morrison’s story, in a sense, imagines the worst possible outcomes of addiction and poverty in a community where there is no respite from pain and heartache.

After reading The Bluest Eye I was compelled to revisit Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) in which the main character, Lutie, feels relentlessly oppressed by unwelcome reactions to her attractive physical appearance – first by the racist white community in which she works as a domestic servant and later by the creepy building superintendent whose glances repeatedly unnerve her. I first read The Street with students in a women’s history class in the early 2000s. Revisiting the book now after completing The Bluest Eye has made the story even more meaningful considering how similar the economic crises that Lutie faced in Petry’s story are to the families portrayed in Morrison’s novel, which takes place thirty years later. 

While the time periods, writing styles, and focus of Morrison’s and Petry’s stories are quite different, each puts the black female experience at the center of a narrative that makes the reader undeniably uncomfortable. From my perspective, censorship of these women’s stories indicates an inclination by external powers (school boards, for example) to somehow “protect” the reader from the characters, rather than an impulse to address systemic social and economic problems that result in the same horrible consequences. 

My brain continues to spin in with thoughts about the two books. Suggestions for my next read? Share comments below!