I could argue with this woman all day, but really, this essay was a lot of fun. 5 "Boring" Classics That Are Actually Unhinged. She starts with Moby Dick.
Why It’s Unhinged:
Ahab isn’t a tragic hero. He’s a cult leader. He manipulates his crew into joining his death wish. He knows the whale will kill him. That’s the point. He wants to die destroying the thing that maimed him.
And the whale? The whale is just... a whale. It’s not evil. It’s not symbolic. It’s an animal that defended itself once, and Ahab has projected his entire existential crisis onto it.
She also has a series on "Wholesome" children's books that traumatised entire generations, includes Charlotte's Web, Watership Down, Black Beauty, and others that you gave to your own children.
This bears some relation to my post years ago on Folk Music Vs Rockers. Which is more traumatising, really?
10 comments:
The description of Ahab sounds legit.
IIRC most of Grimm's fairy tales are pretty ... well, grim.
Great Steeleye Span example.
I haven't read a majority of the listed classics, and I gather there's no pressing need to. Given a choice between Dante and Ibsen, I'll go with the guy from Florence every time.
Eep! Watership Down was never meant for children. It's adult "xenofiction," a genre rare enough that nobody knows how to shelve it in bookstores and libraries.
As to how unhinged classics are, just yesterday I saw a video on the mechanics of love-triangles, featuring the remark that the overlap between drama and healthy behavior is very small and consists almost entirely of hugs and apologies.
"Charlotte's Web" traumatized whole generations? How is a bittersweet story about a friendship between a pig and spider supposed to be traumatizing? I think the word traumatize is waaaay overused, and I really enjoyed "Charlotte's Web" as a child.
Well, the pig is in danger of being killed and the spider dies. I suppose that's it. But, given the body counts in action movies and video games, I have to wonder at what age children are supposed to be too tender to hear about death. Or perhaps it's the manner in which death is presented. Unknown bit-parts vanishing in an explosion is one thing. A farewell speech on a deathbed (or a death-web) is quite another.
You might enjoy my comments at her "10 more wholesome" post https://literaryfancy.substack.com/p/10-more-wholesome-childrens-classics. She almost gets to the point of thinking that children should never be sad from a book. I cite examples of it being a good thing.
I wonder what she thinks of The Hobbit, which was written for kids and yet ends as a saga, with a war and a deathbed scene, not to mention what has now become our canonical dragon.
If you want to indicate that a character is evil, naming him "Ahab" is about the least subtle way to do it.
The whale anatomy chapters aren't boring. They are wrong, though. That's the interesting part. Moby Dick emphatically claims that whales are fish, for example.
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