My mum named me Katarina after The Taming of the Shrew. She chooses to take a feminist reading of the play – one in which Kate is a liberated character who, as her final speech reveals, manages to negotiate her own agency from within the confines of marriage. I have asked my mum whether she thinks Shakespeare himself was a feminist, whether he intended to generate the reading she is so passionate about. She responded, “Maybe not. But I love him anyway”.
It used to be a lot easier to know what to think about the classics – texts that were canonised were of high value, and we should appreciate them as such. Analysis of texts that were clearly brilliant didn’t need to be bogged down by questions of how critically their authors had considered their depiction of race, or class, or gender. But, as scholars and educators have come to realise the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the Western literary canon, the roadmap for reading and teaching these texts has become less clear. In particular, the question of how education systems should approach the canon, and how they should reformulate their curricula to account for its serious diversity problem, remains a pressing one.
For some canonical texts and authors, the solution is simple – outdated texts should be replaced with alternatives that are more inclusive, more diverse, and better suited to illustrating relevant issues. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, could easily be replaced in school curricula by works by Richard Wright, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison, all of whom write more interestingly about structural racism in the United States than Harper Lee. Relatedly, a literature class which only teaches novels from the Western canon is unlikely to be a particularly exciting or relatable one. Its pedagogically useful to replace some canonical texts with more diverse ones in order to create curricula that engage and expand students’ interest.
But this approach of removing and replacing canonical texts from curricula works more straightforwardly in some contexts than in others. Not every canonical text has a logical replacement – many are singularly aesthetically brilliant and puzzling, or undeniably historically significant even when they fail to perfectly champion the ideals we have come to recognise as important. What happens when a canonical text is imperfect in some ways, but still valuable in others? I suspect that Shakespeare’s work fits uncontroversially into this camp. How should we approach his dominance in literary curricula?
In instances like these, devotees of the ‘remove and replace’ approach tend to have one of two impulses. The first is to redeem the text and its author – to suggest that, actually, the ‘correct’ reading of a text is a spotlessly progressive one. What Shakespeare intended for us to understand all along – and what critics and teachers of the past have merely failed to see – is really that Katherina is wily and liberated, and Shylock is humanised and mistreated.
The second impulse is to accept fully the political limitations of a text, but to reject its literary value entirely – to suggest that, if a text does not accord with modern morality, it cannot possibly contain any other merit. Shakespeare’s work was clearly influenced by sixteenth century sexism and white supremacy and, as a result, daring to accept its brilliance would merely be an admission of sympathy for Elizabethan morality.
Neither of these impulses reflect entirely accurate views of what makes literature important, nor how it should be taught.
The redemption impulse fails, in many cases, because it is historically incoherent. A second-wave feminist reading of The Taming of the Shrew, for example, is possible and valuable, but is certainly not authoritative. In fact, we can say with absolute certainty that Shakespeare himself was not a second-wave feminist, nor was he explicitly interested in gender theory or critical race theory, because, during his lifetime, none of these frameworks had been conceptualised yet. Construing the classics as straightforwardly empowering is not only a limiting and uninteresting mode of reading the texts themselves – by erasing the reality of historical context, it also contributes to the deification of canonical authors that people find initially problematic.
The rejection view fails too, primarily because the mutual exclusivity of bigotry and aesthetic talent that it professes is a myth. Not every canonical author is as talented as people say – many have been deified unnecessarily or overtaught. But some are genuinely brilliant, and rejecting certain texts altogether risks depriving students of the enrichment and challenge of learning to understand them.
The unfortunate reality is that Shakespeare’s work is neither straightforwardly empowering and morally spotless, nor is it easy to dismiss as worthless or uncompelling.
This double bind is precisely what makes bigotry so unfair. It is unfair that even brilliant and sensitive people can be reductive, prejudiced, and even hateful, and it is unfair that unjust things are seldom easy to extricate from valuable things. Inequality would be a lot easier to rectify if this wasn’t the case. Feeling dismissed by things that otherwise excite or inspire you, or not being able to fully enjoy things that others do because they make you feel small, is a common part of the experiences of women, people of colour, and queer people.
It is difficult to reconcile how an aesthetically sensitive person can fail to be perceptive about particular people, but learning to apprehend that unfairness is an important and productive process. Literature classes are a useful place for that process to begin. Part of learning to love, to analyse, and to understand literature is grappling with how other people seek to represent our experiences, and how those representations make us feel about ourselves. Studying a text does not mean passively imbibing its moral instruction, and classrooms and literary curricula should not operate under the assumption that it does.
We appear determined to sweep unfairness under the rug rather than tackling it head on. Shouldn’t classrooms instead facilitate conversations that allow students to understand unfairness and how to approach it? Shouldn’t students be given space to express their discomfort over the ways their communities have historically been represented? And shouldn’t other students be encouraged to hear their peers’ experiences of unfairness – to consider with their position in relation to it, and to understand the privilege of enjoying texts without frustration? I believe they should.
My purpose here is not to argue that every imperfect canonical text immediately deserves a place on every school curriculum. I do, however, believe that it is important to consider whether our desire to remove texts from curricula is guided, in part, by an unwillingness to confront and sit with the discomfort of acknowledging that we sometimes enjoy things that are unfair to others. We should be mindful, rather than self-congratulatory, about how quickly we jump to erase those difficult conversations.
It’s a good thing that we don’t automatically consider the Western literary canon as gospel anymore, but an awareness of its limitations doesn’t necessitate its automatic rejection. If anything, it gives us an opportunity to discuss them. I like being named Katarina. I am under no illusion that Shakespeare was a perfect feminist but, like my mum, I love him anyway. I recognise that this is not a position that makes perfect political sense, but I’m making my peace with this small hypocrisy – sometimes loving things means loving them anyway. Unfairness exists in many of the things that we consider valuable – I am of the view that we should make room to discuss it.