If we don't mention them maybe they'll go away.

[marshtide]

I'm perpetually amazed by the things people don't mention about books and authors. I know that for a great many years I had an impression of Virginia Woolf as some Classic Author who probably wrote very dry and dull things which no-one really liked but literary snobs claimed to. This can probably partly be blamed on the uneasy interaction between my mother's literary taste and my aunt's literary taste (the latter being rather more self-consciously high-brow than the former and clashes between the two being fairly common), which left me confused about a lot of books, really.

But also: no-one ever mentioned what they were about. If they did, they left things out. Things that I would have been interested in knowing, even quite a few years ago! Things like "Orlando is about the construction of gender" or "Mrs Dalloway is partly about sexuality, actually."

A lot of people - really a lot! - told me throughout my teens that I should read The Colour Purple, which I think was described as "about race" or possibly as "important" without elaboration. (Where to even start with this one...)

These are just the ones I can remember fastest. You've probably got more.

Do we just not mention the queer stuff? Is it not the done thing in polite conversation? Because really...

(Apropos of: thinking some more about Emma Donoghue's Inseparables - still recommended - and also suddenly remembering that I started reading Virginia Woolf finally because a few years ago Val said that she was a really good writer and also that there was stuff to be had on the gender and sexuality front there. And that I had this oh my god I had no idea moment.)

...and I'm going to go to class right now (and am totally going "oh my god and my teacher will have looked at my practice paper over the weekend and I know I spelt that one word wrong oh my god!" because I am ridiculous) so you get left with this mess of half-thoughts. Have fun!

Comments

[cimorene]

In the US we have to learn a lot, A LOT, about Emily Dickinson, but nobody ever tells you that she was a lesbian. Like, we know. There are letters!

[annotated_em]

I think you put your finger on it, actually: we don't talk about queer stuff, not openly. We might hint at it, if we feel particularly daring, but to come out and say it--that's just not done.

And I think there's a sense of "You can't accuse people of that!" that goes along with it, especially for those people who (by our standards) were not out and proud--if it's possible to claim that a figure was passing as straight, then it's possible to just go ahead and claim that figure as a straight person. So by just not talking about queer things, we cloak queer figures in a quasi-heterosexual patina that then gets assumed to be genuine, and yeah. It's depressing.

[laughingrat]

Oh yeah, people totally erase that stuff. Funny, really. Except not.

[branchandroot]

I swear this is the truth: I have known people who /didn't realize/ The Color Purple was basically about sexual awakening as a lesbian and far-out healing lesbian sex. They just... didn't get it. Didn't see it. I think they actually /blanked/ those passages, which is a trick considering how much of the book that is. To this day I am deeply puzzled by this, with a side order of infuriated.

[silveradept]

Most of the queerness just gets erased, because you study Classical Authors in high school and if someone might have been queer, the thundering herd of religious and other conservative parents and/or staffers will scream "INDOCTRINATION OF CHILDRENS IN THE SINFUL HOMOSEXUAL LIFESTYLE!"

Unless it's Whitman. Whitman can be as queer as he likes, because he's sort of the Token Queer Classical Author.

In college, however, you can talk about those things, but by then most people have been turned off of the Serious Classical Authors because they were treated as such with boring literary themes and books that were designed to squeeze any enjoyment of reading you might have.

It's like trying to get people interested in Shakespeare. Most of his comedies are full of rude jokes, Jew-baiting, sexual references, murder, revenge, and more than a few insult duels. But most people can't make it past the language to get to it, because they haven't been taught how to read it to see them. Hamlet is a tragedy, but there are sex jokes everywhere, and not just with the gravediggers.

[chairman_wow]

Haha, I pretty much have Virginia Woolf filed under "Classic Author" in my head, as well. (Never read anything of hers.) I think it's because her books get the same sort of This Is A Classic Work Of Great Ficiton covers as Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novels and so on. I guess I should remedy that sometime, then. >____>

[dancing_moon]

Orlando I have always heard of as "fantastic tale with gender-changing main character" but otoh, I've hung around a lot on the edge of queer/feminist aware and/or studying circles... My very first exposure to Virginia Woolf was through the ads for the musical (or is it a play?) Vem är rädd för Virginia Woolf? (Who's afraid of VW?) which was staged in Stockholm when I was a kid. So, I've always pictured her as a "feminist classic author" when I encountered her again because, err, that's what I imagined her to be due to the name of the play.

And then I read A room of ones own and realized that she was Pretty Damn Snarky, which was a nice discovery.