To many Americans, reading is a simple fact of life. We read road signs, skim news headlines, and consume text messages every day. Today, “79% of US adults have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC,” with the bulk of the remaining portion still functionally literate at a low level, or in a language other than English. With such widespread accessibility to literacy in the US, there has been a shocking simultaneous drop in appreciation of literature as a form of radicalism.
Literacy is undeniably linked to education with education, which is more overtly political. Discourse around education’s status as a human right has been around for a long time, as education is a key part of being able to engage in society. Throughout U.S. history, we have seen legislation and policies implemented intended to keep marginalized groups from learning how to read or write. Literacy was gatekept from and criminalized among certain communities as a means of oppression. For instance, between 1740 and 1867, Black Americans, both enslaved and free, were prohibited from learning to read and write. This was done to eliminate the communication that white elites feared would facilitate uprisings, and to more overarchingly maintain the guiding principles of racism that asserted that Black people were intellectually inferior. Without the ability to read, groups are more easily removed from a societal narrative that so strongly relies on communication. In this sense, it is important to recall the obstacles people of color were forced to overcome just for the right to read and write, rather than disregard how powerful literature can be.
So, the intense and meaningful history of literacy in the US is prone to being overlooked. But on top of that, people have begun to forget the importance of the media itself that they consume. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, students across the country have developed attitudes of apathy towards reading, writing, and media literacy. Not only have English and other humanities subjects taken the backburner in education over the recent decades, but media literacy has been largely overlooked for even longer. Media literacy is something we equip in our everyday lives–when looking at anything from news reports to social media posts to movies. Yet it is far too often that Americans opt to ignore the deeper political messages of the items they consume. How often have you heard, or even said yourself, “it’s not that deep” in reference to a piece of media, just to avoid engaging further in intellectual or political discourse? It can be easy, and even enticing at times, to take literature at face value, but this often leaves out a large portion of what makes it so important.
Take, for instance, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (1880). The book is a classic, well-loved for its touching and feminist expressions of domestic life and sisterhood. However, it has a deeper political context than its surface feminist messages. For its time, its portrayal of women as strong independent characters was progressive, but Alcott’s struggle to even get the book published proves the significance of politics in the publishing industry. Many readers focus on the heartwrenching relationship between Laurie and Jo, in which Laurie confesses his love for Jo and is turned down. Alcott never intended to couple these two characters up, despite the amount of chemistry fans over the centuries have claimed they have. As the first volumes of Little Women were being released, Alcott said “girls write to ask who the little women will marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” Nonetheless, Jo does end up marrying another male character toward the end of the completed work. Despite the arguable amount of feminism presented in Little Women, publishers felt that leaving the main character as a “literary spinster” would just be too far. Thus, Alcott was forced to surrender some degree of her artistic integrity just to get her book published. If this does not indicate the power that literature holds, and the extent to which those with social power use it to promote their own agendas, there is little that does.
Stories are not only the livelihood of artists, but also a prominent means of political expression. Those who control a literary narrative, no matter how seemingly insignificant, also influence political attitudes and easily promote suppression of marginalized voices. So yes, it is that deep–every piece of literature either has its own politics or represents the centuries long battle for equal education, literacy, and free speech.
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