Richard Wright? – Sexist! Dostoyevsky? – Anti-Semite! ” So, Brian Morton asks in The New York Times, just how should we read great writers from the past whose moral blind spots offend us?
I read the above piece while underway yesterday – a really good contribution I think to the fiercely debated topic of how to approach literary works written in the historical past. I particularly liked Morton’s time machine analogy! And I was of course immediately alert to the “snob” accusation against Virginia Woolf – one which I happened to use of her a couple of days ago. It seems as a reader I instinctively cope with the “snob” Woolf under the guise of a time-traveler as Morton suggests. Though “snob” is a rather mild description, one could just as well attach the “anti-semite” tag to her also – the stereotypical language she uses of Leonard Woolf and his family, amongst others, would be untenable today. Nor would it be hard to find, from she an icon of women’s literature, some ideas that may today be considered sexist; for even she was not immune to the patriarchal conditioning rooted in the class structures of the society in which she lived. And her ideas on race and intelligence were very much colored by contemporary thinking on social-Darwinism and eugenics popular in her social milieu.