"Censorship in Children's Literature", Para.doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 2.3-4 (1996), and: What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America (review)

The issue of Para.doxa which is largely devoted to “Censorship in Children’s Literature” is a collection of essays that addresses this disturbing phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. We have analyses of censorship in countries other than the United States and Canada as the overriding concentration, including articles analyzing censorship in Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, Australia, and the former Soviet Union. It seems that the censors operating in all these cultures presume that the child’s mind can be molded by what he or she reads (thus a target for propaganda) and that children are innocent and should be protected. In totalitarian countries (such as the former GDR), official censoring by the state evolved into authors’ self-censorship, writing according to a master plot that promoted state ideology. Authors’ freedom of expression or resistance was sometimes delivered by means of coded, or Aesopian language that demanded the reader hunt for ulterior meanings; an entertaining children’s fantasy story might have been conceived by a writer and interpreted by specific readers as a pointed social satire against the government. Such coded language was also employed by M. E. Kerr, who only recently acknowledged her lesbianism, but who had written routinely about homosexuality and homophobia in more metaphoric terms as in her novel Little, Little, ostensibly about “perfectly formed” dwarfs. Three more articles describe how the children’s writers Lois Lowry, Gillian Rubinstein, and Erik Haugaard admit to self-censorship at times, either to please market demands or to avoid attacks from censors, especially if they have been burned once before. Additionally, there is an essay explaining how Western European censorship is derived from the Bible, as Eve was censored for eating from the tree of knowledge. The Bible serves to buttress patriarchal authority and as such is a form of “systemic censorship” (323). Other articles focus on one text, such as Tom Sawyer or Haroun and the Sea of Stories, or The Secret Garden and two of its film adaptations. Co-editor Hamida Bosmajian’s introductory essay is especially thoughtful, distilling the arguments of censors representing the conservative right as the perception of current public education as a challenge to parental (i.e., divine) authority. As Haugaard states, censorship in western democracies is “produced by righteousness, by firm beliefs that allow no questioning” (330). This issue of Para.doxa is a meaningful contribution to the ongoing concerns of censorship in children’s literature, primarily for its discussion of ideological issues that presents censorship as a global problem that stems from and supports totalitarian control over the minds of all children.

I have two criticisms: one minor and one that embraces the essence of children’s literature. The first concern is the arrangement of the articles that sometimes impedes the flow of reading. Co-editor Alleen Pace Nilsen claims that they “group[ed] all the articles thematically beginning with those that treated general issues and theoretical questions, followed by papers that presented international histories and observations, concluding with articles on books for older readers” (312). Although most of the essays describing censorship outside of North America are grouped in the middle, the four articles detailing specific authors’ self-censorship are not presented as a unit: Haugaard and Rubinstein appear as the fourth and fifth essays, but Lowry and Kerr are placed as twenty-first and twenty-fourth, respectively (out of twenty-six essays altogether). And I would have liked a closure of the censorship section before jumping into Ursula Le Guin and Dorothy Sayers. With the Le Guin essays, I thought I was reading a highly disguised text discussing censorship in a way that I simply couldn’t decipher—until I looked back at the table of contents to see...