Shylock, Huckleberry, and Jim: Do They Have a Place in Today's High Schools?

The debate over censorship in high school English classes has been a contentious and protracted one. Two particular staples of high school curricula, The Merchant of Venice and Huckleberry Finn, have long been targeted by those who would censor literature on the basis of ethnic, religious or racial concerns. Although objections to these works have been addressed in numerous forums, including the Quarterly, both warrant further investigation for two reasons. First, in spite of well reasoned defenses of the works, the call to ban them from high schools continues to be heard. Secondly, the most pertinent aspect of the works relative to the censorship question, their literary quality, has not been fully explored. In the following paper I wish to investigate the history of censorship in relation to The Merchant of Venice and Huckleberry Finn, their place in high school English curricula, and how that place can be best realized in the classroom.

Some familiar with Shakespeare's play and Twain's novel might assume that active lobbying against the two works is an exercise confined to past decades. In reality, both The Merchant of Venice and Huckleberry Finn are at this time subjects of censorship campaigns. While the most ubiquitous and celebrated form of censorship in both our high schools and society in general is directed against obscenity, the two foci of this study are invariably cited for their potential to evoke racial, ethnic or religious prejudice. The Merchant of Venice has been censured by the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith on the grounds that it contains characterizations which could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. As early as 1931 the play was eliminated from the high school English programs in Buffalo and Manchester, New York because it was viewed as fostering intolerance (Banned Books 121, 18). More recently, in March of 1980, an ad hoc citizen's review committee in Midland, Michigan recommended that the play be removed from the English curricula of the town's two high schools, labelling it "anti-Semitic and offensive to Jews" (Intellectual Freedom 76). A similar controversy, initiated by a group of concerned parents, occurred in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. This particular incident reflected the emotion and hyperbole common to such disputes; one protester detected a causal link between Shakespeare's work and the European holocaust (Chronicle Journal 4-6).

Huckleberry Finn has suffered under the anti-prejudice rubric as well. Some one hundred years ago, just after its publication, the Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts banned Huckleberry Finn as "trash and suitable only for the slums." In 1905, both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were excluded from the children's room of the Public Library in New York City as "contaminating to ingenuous youth" (Banned Books 49-50). Early negative reviews of Huckleberry Finn, such as that in February of 1885 by literary critic, Robert Bridges, emphasize not the possible racism of the book, but the coarseness and indelicacy of specific scenes such as those depicting Pap's delerium tremens, Huck's contrived murder and the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud (Critical Heritage 126-27). By 1957 the emphasis of the disapprobation had shifted, and in that year New York City dropped Huckleberry Finn from its list of approved books for junior and senior high schools partly due to the frequent use of the term "nigger" and the characterization of Jim (Banned Books 50). The controversy surrounding the racism theme continues today, and according to an article in the New York Times dated January 1, 1984, challenges to the book on this basis have surfaced in Houston; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Fairax County, Virginia; Winnetka, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa, to name a few.

It is critical that teachers, parents and civil libertarians recognize that both The Merchant of Venice and Huckleberry Finn do contain extremely sensitive material. To dismiss the subject of censorship as beneath discussion is to display a myopia not unlike that shown by those who would condemn the books out of hand. Each work must be approached individually. Indeed, the key to presenting the works to today's students is to...