Balancing the Problematic and the Emblematic in Classic Literature

Previously, I’ve touched on some of the benefits that come from reading classic books in your preferred genre. Sci-fi classics. Fantasy classics. Romance classics. Horror classics. Because society becomes more progressive through time, however, these older books are going to present outdated and obsolete societal views. Some to the point where they do start to lose a level of relevance outside of specific examinations of the time period.
There does come a point where you’re trying to balance the benefits of reading genre classics as a concept and struggling through the books themselves. There’s also the task of sorting out which classics have this balance.
The problem is there’s not a particularly easy answer to this.
There’s a book by Harry Harrison entitled the The Technicolor Time Machine. It is a delightfully dumb book about a producer at a failing film company using a time machine to make a film with real Vikings landing on the east coast of a pro-colonial United States. It came out in 1967, and it tonally reads like it right from the start, with the slightly heightened melodrama and diction that was common to books of the era. It’s also a primary white male cast, something to be expected. Then they say they’re going to bring an Asian American character in as a movie script writer, only Harrison drops the term “Oriental.” It’s jarring from a modern perspective. It happens again with the word “Negro” when a black character joins as co-writer. And it’s all very weird until you dig into the history of racial linguistics.
Stokely Carmichael wouldn’t publicly articulate his reasoning for “black” as the preferred ethnonym until 1966. Up until then, “Negro” was considered by many, if not most, the term du jour. It was intra-community self-referential. Evidenced in the organization The United Negro College Fund. There’s a very similar, if a bit more complex story for the transition between Oriental to Asian American.
So in this case our white writer in 1967 was using the most appropriate terms for the time. When we also consider that these particular characters of color have roughly the same amount of complexity as the white characters (very little), and are treated with general narrative respect, what we see here is a book that’s simply a linguistic product of its time. When you move past that initial shock, you’re not met with a particularly problematic book.
What if we compare this to Plath’s The Bell Jar from 1963? Here we find language that is aggressively racist to black and Asian characters. This leads to a heated internal discussion. Is this racism simply a realistic depiction of a young woman in 1963?
What does history say, though? Because we’re typically very quick to pin everything pre-1970 as a ubiquitously racist cesspit instead of examining the evolution of racism through literature and interviews with real life people.
Showboat, while still full of problems of its own, discussed issues around inter-racial marriage as early as 1926. It’s musical premiere the next year was the first integrated cast on Broadway. I Love Lucy and it’s normalization of interracial marriage ran from 1951-1957. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man brought attention the plight of the black man in 1952. The landmark decision about school integration, Brown vs Board of Education, happened in 1954. Interviews in 1957 surrounding the events of the Little Rock Nine revealed a number of teenagers who were pro school integration. Who favored black kids getting an education. To Kill a Mockingbird, a seminal piece about racial injustice, came out in 1960.
Plenty of books from the 40s-60s don’t have aggressive racism in them. This is often because there aren’t any characters of color to begin with to direct that racism at, but that seems slightly preferred considering the possible alternative.
By 1963, Plath had plenty of access to progressive ideologies about race and race relations. Esther’s level of abject racism was not necessarily the only option available when creating a realistic teenage character of the era. That was a choice that Plath made.
And that becomes the crux of figuring out which genre classics retain their value in relation to their problematic elements. There are other things that do the same things The Bell Jar does from roughly the same era that aren’t dominated by that level of racism. So that ends up being the filtering process: what are you trying to achieve in reading classic literature? Can you achieve that goal without having to bother with the poorly aged problematic elements? Can you properly separate a book that’s truly a product of its time vs being regressive even for its time?