What do you censor when you’re reading with children? I’m not talking here about banning books, but about those words and phrases that you find you cannot say, and the values they embody.
We’re reading E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet at home right now, the sequel to her Five Children and It, both of them huge favorites of my own in the fourth and fifth grades (as was the final book in the trilogy, The Story of the Amulet). She is so incredibly brilliant about magic, which though often exciting, is never particularly liberating in the ways that one hopes it will be. Instead, her protagonists are perpetually getting themselves into the most awkward situations—become so beautiful as to be unrecognizable to their baby brother, stranded on a rooftop when their wished-for wings have vanished, trapped at home with room full of cats and rats, and a cow and a burglar. In many ways, her books are about limits, and our efforts to transcend them—the limits and boundaries of childhood, and even more particularly, of girlhood and boyhood; of class and propriety; of magic in all its failed grandeur and of reality in all its drabness. And even all these years later, few authors seem to construct sibling squabbles as believable as those in these books, despite the Edwardian language and mores.
So it was with utter confidence that I opened The Phoenix and the Carpet. We’d already enjoyed its immediate predecessor, as well as The Railway Children. And it begins so well—with a bang, quite literally. But then there are servant problems—the cook threatens to leave the household because of the children’s bad behavior, and while Mother is able to placate her initially, the events of the ensuing week test her patience so much that she marches into the nursery to complain of the broken pudding basin, only to discover Anthea and Cyril and Jane and Robert dressing their baby brother for a trip on the magic carpet to a sunny southern shore to cure his whooping cough. In desperation, they include the cook rather than forgo the trip. And when they find themselves transported, they leave the cook at the beach to exploring: “…the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they knew at once, of savages.”
It wasn’t the savageness of the savages that brought me up short. It was the fact the very first one was dark and coppery colored—“just like the chrysanthemums that Father had brought home on Sunday”—and that “The whites of his eyes and the white of his teeth were the only light things about him.” I didn’t read that paragraph out loud. In fact, I selectively edited the entire chapter.
But was that the right thing to do? I worry less in this case about censorship qua censorship and more about the following. My editing was fundamentally dishonest, and allowed us to continue reading a book which was—and is—making me increasingly uncomfortable. And sure enough, things have gone from bad to worse, as displaced countrymen turned to thievery must be sorted out by the children, and dishonest servants must be kept in their place by threats of blackmail leading to the probable loss of their jobs. It is Nesbit’s refusal to critique the hierarchies of race and class that I find so surprising. I remembered from my own childhood her honesty about childhood, and so to be confronted as an adult with her dishonesty about the humanity of her other characters is unnerving. And now there’s nothing I can say to my children because I didn’t even reveal the truth.
I remember a conversation with a friend who didn’t want to read Little House on the Prairie with her daughter because of the racism that is recorded in the book—the fearful conversations about massacres, the repeated expression that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But it seemed to me then as now that Laura Ingalls Wilder took the opportunity to expose the racism of that moment in an honest fashion without endorsing it, and in a way that allows her readers to talk openly about the true consequences and complexity of the homesteading movement. Nesbit is far more complicit in the power structure in this book than I expected, and by editing her to make her more palatable, I am as well. So should we not read her to children at all—relegate her to historical study—in other words, informally ban her? I wish I knew.