Laura Brick
In recent weeks, two very different books, both written in the 1960s, have come under scrutiny; The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) by Judith Kerr, and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee. The former is a children’s book, the latter is read by all age groups.
Last week, Zero Tolerance, a group that aims to end male violence against women attacked The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Rachel Adamson, the co-director of Zero Tolerance, argued that the book promotes gender stereotypes, because the father supposedly ‘saves’ the mother and daughter at the end, and that it encourages violence against women.
This is not the first time this has happened. ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’ are among a growing number of books, films and television series to be ‘cancelled’.
The Tiger Who Came to Tea tells the story of a tiger who rings the doorbell while Sophie and her mother are having tea. He asks them if he can have tea with them, and they say yes. But he eats all the food in the house, drinks all the tea, and, finally, drinks all the water in the tap. After the Tiger has left, Sophie’s father comes back home, and suggests they go and have a meal in the café.
“Why can’t we just accept the book for what it is; a delightful children’s story?”
The feminist group For Women Scotland has rightly ridiculed Zero Tolerance for their comments. “How lovely to know that hungry tigers are now the biggest threat to stay-at-home mothers in Scotland”, a spokeswoman for the group said.
Some have tried to find hidden metaphors in the story. For example, Judith Kerr escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, as her family was Jewish. Some have speculated that the tiger is a metaphor for the Nazis, that took everything away from her. But Kerr herself has denied this. Initially, it was a bedtime story she told her daughter. Kerr said, “I knew it by heart, every word…you watch your child’s face and obviously you leave out bits gradually if they look bored”. Kerr’s instincts for what excites children and what bores them explain why The Tiger Who Came to Tea has been so successful for so long. Children love The Tiger Who Came to Tea in 2021 as much as they did in 1968. Why can’t we just accept the book for what it is; a delightful children’s story?
The criticisms levelled at To Kill a Mockingbird are more valid. Recently, a school in Edinburgh stopped teaching Harper Lee’s classic. The reason they gave was that the novel pushes a ‘white saviour’ narrative. Some American schools have done the same.
To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Alabama in the 1930s. It is told through the eyes of a white child (Scout). A black man (Tom Robinson) is falsely accused of raping a white woman (Mayella Ewell). Scout’s father, Atticus, is a lawyer and he defends Tom Robinson in court.
The claim that it perpetuates a ‘white saviour’ narrative has some legitimacy. The novel is told from a white perspective, and the black characters have no real agency of their own.
“This is what makes the novel so powerful”
But, like The Tiger Who Came to Tea, there is a reason that To Kill a Mockingbird has resonated over many decades. One of the main themes of the book is the destruction of childhood innocence. It explores how children, who are not born racist, react when they discover how cruel the world can be. As Atticus says “only children seem to weep” when they see these injustices. This is what makes the novel so powerful.
Moreover, context must be considered. The book was published in 1960, just four years before the Civil Rights Act was signed. This was a time when black Americans in the Deep South were fighting for their right to be treated equally under the law. But many white people were viscerally opposed to them. The point of characters like Atticus is that most white Southerners were not like him. And perhaps Harper Lee thought that telling the story from a child’s perspective would be the most effective way of getting an anti-racist message across to her readers, many of whom would have been racists.
To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubtedly a product of its time, but that is what makes the novel interesting to study. When Lee wrote the novel, she was writing history as well as fiction. But the book itself is a piece of history. Students should be asked to consider what the limits of having Scout as the narrator are; whether Lee was writing primarily for a white audience, and how the political and social context in which Lee wrote influences her writing. These are questions that students should be asked to think about and debate, and the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird forces us to ask them in itself shows why the novel is worth teaching.
If we continue to judge books and films by today’s standards, there would be very little that could be taught in schools. That is not to say that diversity and inclusivity should not be considered. But it does not have to be ‘either or’. The fact that both books have never gone out of print, and still resonate with people, is why they are considered classics, and stay relevant in today’s world.
Featured image courtesy of Thought Catalog on Unsplash. Image licence can be found here. No changes were made to this image.
