The Corruption of Children's Literature (Even in Catholic Schools)
My husband and I have long realized the importance of literature in the lives of children, and have endeavored to provide our children with a good assortment of entertaining stories which are challenging intellectually and appropriate to their age level. For quite a few years we have seen the need to monitor books they check out of the public library. In addition to books which are obviously harmful, such as Judy Blume's novels, apparently innocuous stories such as teen romances can foster a premature interest in dating and romantic involvement. Science fiction often creates an atmosphere that is implicitly pagan — for example, Anne McCaffrey's young adult volumes (her works for adults have explicitly objectionable themes). Too much reading that is totally accepting of our culture can subtly influence our young.
We felt comfortable on our charted course when one day one of our daughters handed us her seventh-grade reading list. She, as all our children, attends a Catholic school. A quick glance through the list of around 75 books revealed that we would have to help her in the selection process. The descriptions of some books referred to child abuse, sorcery, and other questionable subjects.
What began as a perusal of the reading list dragged on for months as I spent hours in the library trying to find nine books suitable for our daughter's monthly reports. I wrote a letter to the teacher voicing my concerns but received no response. Three years later, our youngest daughter brought home the same list. A number of titles on the list had made their way into the school library, and my daughter brought them home, wanting to know why she couldn't read many of them. She also checked out books for pleasure from the public library which had to be reviewed. Thus began a more intense study of dozens of children's and young adult novels.
I shared information about books on the school reading list with several other parents who joined me in sending letters to the principal, pastor, and school advisory board. To date the situation has not changed. Perhaps our school professionals are influenced by the commendations many of the books have received from the American Library Association and other secular groups. Or it may be that in today's permissive society even Catholics see censorship as a greater scandal than the risk of corrupting Christ's little ones.
The objectionable books discussed below are commonly found in public libraries and, regrettably, in many Catholic school libraries. Indeed, most of the titles come from our parish school's reading lists. All offend against Christian values, with acceptance of unchastity, prominence of New Age themes, presentation of feminism to the detriment of male role models, episodes of abusive behavior, and depletion of the child as a more reliable interpreter of reality and a better decisionmaker than adults.
Some books seem designed to promote sexual activity. For example, in the popular Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney, Janie, a high school sophomore, begins to date a senior named Reeve. Her sexual awakening proceeds apace, with landmark stages described: "She could touch him in places she had never touched another human being." They end up at a motel, but it is too seedy for Janie, so they defer to another time: "They both knew if he had gone to a different sort of place, with a safer, richer, cleaner feeling, they could have. Would have." Before moving on, they kiss, a kiss described too erotically to quote here. When Janie's friend Sarah-Charlotte queries her about her relationship with Reeve, asking "Did you go all the way with Reeve or not?," Janie ponders: "They had come close. All that they had done she had loved. Would always cherish. Would never describe to Sarah-Charlotte." In the sequel. Whatever Happened to Janie?, we get some insight into the workings of Reeve's mind: "Not that being with Janie was ever a mind-thing. It was a body-thing. Thinking about his body and her body was so intoxicating...." The intrusion of the sexual element, which is not essential to the plot, could serve to entice young adolescents into sexual activity. The descriptions of heightened emotions offer further enticement, particularly to girls (and these are girls' books) who are vulnerable to premature emotional involvement.
It is in fact very common to find unchaste behavior in books for middle-school children. It is unusual to find young adult literature without it. Indeed, parents now have to watch out for homosexual themes. I was surprised when my daughter brought home Ruby by Rosa Guy, which she found in the young adult section of the local public library (which has several copies of the novel). "An intensely committed novel talking directly to teenagers..." the blurb informed me, but committed to what? To Ruby's right to her lesbian affair with Daphne? To the distressing lack of respect, indeed the verbal abuse, found in some of the dialogue? To the incredibly foul language (beyond the usual four-letter words)?
As in novels, movies, and television shows aimed at adults, the inevitable accompaniment to sex is violence, and there is no want of violence in children's and young adult literature. My child was required to read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton during the summer before seventh grade. Advertised on the back cover as a "nightmare of violence," the book lived up to its billing with an attempted murder of one teen by another, a bloody gang fight, and the shooting to death of a gun-brandishing youth by the police. Although the book gives a sensitive description of life on the wrong side of the tracks, I thought it inappropriate for our 12-year-old and did not permit her to read it.
It is the nearness of violence to the adolescent that is objectionable in this and a multitude of other works for young people. There is a big difference between reading about mishaps in the more or less remote world of adults and encountering vivid portrayals of violence perpetrated by contemporary youths, or by members of adolescents' families, as in Richard Peck's Father Figure, where the suicide of the mother is described graphically and at length. As with books presenting unchastity, a barrier is broken and the child's mind is invaded by a cruelty he may not have the resources to deal with.
Another way in which children's literature mirrors the corrupt adult world is the promotion of an unhealthy brand of feminism. The pattern I see so regularly in recent young people's literature, that I call it a norm, is that boys do not in any way overpower girls. Many science fiction and fantasy novels feature queens or other female rulers with males clearly in the consort role, and females with special magical powers (e.g., Terry Brooks's Shannara series and Anne McCaffrey's works).
Students selecting books from school or public libraries run the risk of encountering gender feminism or even the notion that the biological differences between the two sexes are meaningless. In a very popular book by Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons, baby dragons are able to choose whether they will be male or female — exactly what many modern activists advocate, since they conceive of gender as a social concept to be deconstructed and reinvented. In Dealing with Dragons, moreover, male dragons have two horns while females have three. Ironically, feminism rejects the feminine and seeks an exaggerated masculine ideal.
Male and female are not the only concepts to be blurred and interchanged in modern juvenile novels. The idea of parents exercising authority over children, exhibiting maturity and knowledge (if not wisdom) about life, as fundamentally trustworthy, is not the norm. Children are often depicted as possessing more insight than adults, as making better decisions. In One-Eyed Cat by Paula Fox, a boy's mother explains to him why she abandoned him for a period, living by herself and eating candy. Her reason was that she felt oppressed by the goodness of her minister husband, a kind, charitable Christian. This confession on the part of the mother helps the boy to come to terms with his own willful disobedience, as empty psychologizing trumps Christian virtue.
Perhaps the most damaging portraits of adults are those that present parents as ineffectual, like in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by a writer named Avi. Charlotte's mother and father book passage for the teenaged girl on a transatlantic ship, but she dons men's clothes and works as a sailor. Her parents find her diary of the cross-dressing adventure. Horrified by what they think is her fevered imagination, they give her pious tracts to read, and she pretends to be edified. Later, she slips out to join her ship on another voyage. The message is that it is the child who has wisdom and experience, who can see through pietistic Christianity.
Are there any families portrayed positively in modern children's fiction? Oh yes, but they are not as frequently encountered as dysfunctional families, and they tend to be African-American or Jewish. Perhaps this is because to portray these and a few other minorities (Asian, American Indian) is in and of itself to offer incense to one of the deities of the modern secular humanist, multiculturalism. Also, both African-Americans and Jews are regarded, for different reasons, as being above reproach by the cultural elite, hence the tendency to represent their family life in a more positive way in juvenile novels. In addition, it will be readily acknowledged that these ethnic groups offer rich material with which to capture young audiences — slavery, the Holocaust, cultural differences.
However, even the black Protestant home is not always a safe bastion for Christianity. In Come a Stranger by Cynthia Voight, Mina, the daughter of a minister, finds a romantic interest near the end of the book, and the young man brings up the subject of religion:
"I'm an atheist," Dexter told her. "Do you mind?"
"It's up to God to mind about that," Mina said. "It's none of my business."
Thus young people are presented an image of a girl from a committed Christian family treating faith as unimportant and subjectivizing religious belief.
It's all relative, there are no absolutes — except anti-Catholicism. There may be a mainstream young people's book published within the past couple of decades that depicts Catholicism favorably, but I have not seen it. The girl narrator in the novel Year of Impossible Goodbyes by Sook Nyul Choi has been raised a Catholic. Her sister is a nun. Yet in times of distress she turns to the Buddha of her grandfather: She wants to meditate like her grandfather and experience peace, and she thinks the Buddha's spirit is inside her. Later in the book she rejects Catholicism: "I didn't even like Mother's God." She isn't sure whether her mother will be with Buddha or her "Catholic God" when she dies. At best, this promotes religious indifferentism. I would have no objection to a book showing Buddhism practiced by Buddhists, but not by Catholics!
The trashing of Catholicism is complete in Small Town Girl by Ellen Cooney. The protagonist, a Catholic school girl, caricatures nuns. For example, one nun warns against the evil of Communism: "'At this very minute the odious Red menace is plotting to grind away at the very foundations of our great Democracy to destroy you and me and the government....'" The girl is obsessed with purgatory and hell and racking up years of indulgences. Needless to say, the theology of indulgences is inaccurately presented. Ladies praying in church are "a pewful of old women muttering into their rosary beads." When the girl goes to confession, she is afraid the priest will abuse her: "he'll come out of his seat and he'll put his fat hairy arms around me and I'll smell his mouth, his old stale mouth...." The priest, who calls her "girlie" repeatedly, asks her inappropriately if she is guilty of "touchin' yerself where ye oughtn't." The nuns are portrayed as fixated on purity — and as bumbling.
Given that the writers and publishers of much of children's literature obviously want to dethrone Christian and especially Catholic values, what values do they propose? As we have seen, freedom of every kind for the child is of utmost concern. Sexual expression, independence from parents, release from traditional views of the roles of the sexes, and freethinking in matters of religion are all part of the secular humanist creed in which our young ones are indoctrinated as they select books for school reports and entertainment. These freedoms negate the moral heritage of the West. The substituted pseudoheritage is inherently atheistic (God and religion tend to have no absolute place, are distorted, or mocked), involves a rejection of the natural law (by accepting sex outside marriage and, in some cases, abortion and homosexuality), and rejects the place of parents and in particular fathers, who are rarely presented as the head of the family.
Positive values offered tend to be New Agey. A number of stories feature ghosts, sorcery, games which become real, and pagan practices. Here one must distinguish between innocent forms of magic that have always been a part of the repertory (e.g., fairy tales and C. S. Lewis's Narnia series) and the new magic. In one of the popular Shannara books by Terry Brooks, found in young adult collections, forms of magic used include channeling and ESP. Susan Cooper in the aptly entitled The Dark Is Rising strips Christmas of every Christian element, transforming it into a pagan celebration of magic and enchantment.
Orthodox Catholic writer Michael D. O'Brien, in A Landscape with Dragons: Christian and Pagan Imagination in Children's Literature (Ignatius), contrasts fairy tales and modern fables. The former, for all the phantasmagoric elements and suspension of the laws of nature, uphold the moral order. Modern tales present magic as a kind of power, as Gnostic knowledge. O'Brien comments:
It is tragic that authentic literature is slowly disappearing from public and school libraries, and being replaced by a tidal wave of children's books written by people who appear to have been convinced by cultic psychology, or at least to be converted in part or whole by the neo-pagan cosmos....
In the new juvenile literature there is a relentless preoccupation with spiritual powers, with the occult, with perceptions of good and evil that seem blurred and at times downright inverted.
Fair is foul and foul is fair, as Macbeth's witches chanted. This reversal of values can lead only to the disintegration of the human person, as his rational structure is undermined. The goodness and supremacy of God, the authenticity of revealed religion, the trustworthiness of parents, the sanctity of the marriage bond and of life, and the innate value and complementarity of the sexes are part of a worldview required for the spiritual and psychological integrity of the child. Children who do not cherish the Word as it has been articulated since the dawn of Revelation and particularly in the last 2,000 years will venerate the anti-Word, whose message is presented with increasing force.
St. Paul in his letter to the Romans describes idolatry and its evil consequences: "They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images representing mortal man, birds, beasts, and snakes. In consequence, God delivered them up in their lusts to unclean practices.... They did not see fit to acknowledge God, so God delivered them up to their own depraved sense to do what is unseemly" (Rom. 1:23-28). Or, as another passage of Scripture puts it, the dragon keeps vigil, working to intensify this degradation, always ready to devour the child of the woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12:4).
Inez Fitzgerald Storck is a stay-at-home mother of four in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
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