Download Moral Criticism for Students

Moral Criticism for Students:
Probing the Moral and
Ethical Dimensions of Literature By Tim
Gillespie
The highest purpose of the writer is to create beauty indivisible from morality.
—Bernard Malamud
An Overview
From ancient times to today, humans have considered the cultivation of positive morals
to be one of literatureʼs primary purposes.
The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop wrote fables with direct moral lessons tacked on to
the end. The Roman poet Horace said that literature should combine “the sweet and the
useful,” mixing pleasure at reading with moral instruction. A best-selling recent American
book, William Bennettʼs The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories,
promoted the idea that literature is to be judged by its capacity to instruct, to inspire, and
to promote positive moral values.
However, the way literature interacts with moral values is not always so simple as an
explicit Aesopʼs fable moral. Literature is more of an experiential art form than a preachy
one. Authors dramatize moral dilemmas so readers virtually experience the moral
quandary of a protagonist, perhaps even waver and feel the temptation of an evil act or
understand in a marrowbone the claims of competing values. Through literature we can
see dramatized variations of questions with which humans have struggled for centuries:
What is honorable behavior, particularly in complex and ambiguous situations? How is
justice achieved? Why does evil exist, and how do we face it? How does a relationship
with a god interact with matters of good and evil? How do we resolve differences
between our personal values and our societyʼs mores, especially when they clash? How
does altruism interact with self-interest? How do we experience love in respectful and
ethical ways? What is our responsibility to our tribe, and how large is our tribe? These
are universal moral questions whose answers are played out in different ways in different
cultures and times but whose asking is a characteristic of much serious literature.
Thinkers in this tradition will assert that the way the exploration of these questions is
conducted in a work must be the measure of its ultimate value. From this point of
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.CD 89
view, then, what matters most about The Scarlet Letter is not its writing style but the
effectiveness of its moral exploration of the costs of unconfessed sin on a human soul.
This perspective is a time-honored belief about what literature should do and what a
writerʼs primary responsibility is: to provoke moral thought and promote positive moral
values in readers.
Benefits of Moral Criticism
Throughout the history of writing, narrative art has been engaged in presenting complex
moral dilemmas. Or, as American writer Robert Stone has expressed it, “I believe that it
is impossible for any novelist to find a subject other than the transitory nature of moral
perception. The most important thing about people is the difficulty they have in
identifying and acting upon whatʼs right” (1988, 75).
Which should Antigone obey—the authority of her uncle King Creon or the dictates of
her own religious conscience? Should Huck Finn give up his friend Jim as his slaveowning society demands or shelter Jim and risk what he has been told will be eternal
damnation?
A moral approach acknowledges the centrality of this kind of moral problem-posing in
literature. In fact, we often call the central moral questions at issue in a piece of literature
its themes.
Readers can fruitfully interrogate a text from this point of view: Has the author met the
obligation to explore moral issues? What are the moral and ethical issues being explored
in this text; that is, what are the workʼs main themes—and how thoroughly, fairly, and
realistically are they presented? What are the lessons being taught, explicitly or
otherwise? Do these moral dilemmas have any resonance in our own lives?
Thinking about literature in such terms gives us a chance to think about what it means to
be a moral human being.
Limitations and Critiques of Moral Criticism
Plenty of critics point to dangers inherent in applying moral values to the evaluation of
literature.
One danger is the application of this simplistic formula: works of literature that portray
positive morals are good and works that donʼt are bad.
This is a long-standing attitude. The Italian poet Dante (1265–1321), for example,
believed that reading about forbidden love like that between Lancelot and Guinevere in
the tales of King Arthur would lead to immoral behavior and that a poetʼs job was to
capture the image of model figures in action rather than sinners. The Puritans in
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.
CD 90
Elizabethan England, constantly pressing to shut down the theaters, seemed convinced
that playgoers viewing the sight of evildoing on stage would be compelled in response to
go out into the reeking streets of London and commit some more.
This idea that literature is moral and good if it portrays morally correct behavior and
immoral and bad if it portrays morally corrupt behavior has thus been with us a long time.
We see censors from antiquity to our own time attempting to ban what they see as
“immoral” texts. The American Library Associationʼs list of the 100 most frequently
challenged library books includes long-standing classics (Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Brave
New World, Native Son, To Kill a Mockingbird), a rich collection of Nobel Prize winnersʼ
novels (John Steinbeckʼs Of Mice and Men, William Goldingʼs Lord of the Flies, and
numerous works by Toni Morrison), popular American works of the last fifty years
(Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Slaughterhouse-Five), and an extensive list of well-known books for younger readers
(Bridge to Terabithia, The Chocolate War, A Day No Pigs Would Die, Flowers for
Algernon, The Giver, the Goosebumps series, James and the Giant Peach, Julie of the
Wolves, A Light in the Attic, My Brother Sam Is Dead, The Outsiders, The Pigman, A
Wrinkle in Time, most books in the Harry Potter series, and, perhaps most inexplicably
of all, Whereʼs Waldo?). Most of these books are challenged on moral grounds, leading
many folks to equate moral criticism with censorship.
Besides this censoring impulse, a second critique of a moral approach is that it too often
promotes preachy literature. The word that is traditionally used to characterize such work
is didactic, taken from the Greek “to teach.” In contemporary usage, didacticism is most
often used to describe literature that hammers a reader over the head with its moral
lesson. Such lecturing is merely annoying to some readers, but others feel it can lead to
artistic phoniness, such as novelist Stephen Crane, who said, “Preaching is fatal to art in
literature.”
At its extreme, didactic art can be downright damaging. Dictators often adopt a
strenuously “moral” point of view about literature. From Hitler to Stalin to the ayatollahs
who condemned English writer Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy, authoritarians
are quick to label anything they donʼt like as “immoral” and to alter, censor, ban, or
destroy it. The art produced in Third Reich Germany expressed that regimeʼs “moral”
values; much of it was nationalistic, Nazi-serving, anti-Semitic, and sentimental junk.
This is preachy art at its worst, and we have a common name for it: propaganda.
In these and other ways, moral criticism has been challenged.
An Issue to Consider: Moral Judgments of Literary Art
So how might we assess the value of a work of literature on moral terms? Thereʼs a
long-standing notion that art should present only exemplary behavior so as not to lower
the moral standards of those who see it. The sympathy of an audience
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.
CD 91
should never be roused for wrongdoing, according to this viewpoint, so a work of writing
should not portray evil as attractive or without consequence. Noble people should act
nobly and be rewarded for it, and evildoers should be punished.
However, most lasting literature is far more complex. Heroes in our most durable texts—
Homerʼs Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek tragedies, the tales of the noble knights of King
Arthurʼs round table—often have serious flaws, moments of moral failing, and
temptations to which they succumb. Even the Old and New Testaments of the Bible
show great heroes and leaders at times acting despicably—Jacob deceiving his father,
Solomon practicing idolatry, Peter lying and denying his relationship with Jesus, and
King David, as one religious student said, “breaking almost all Ten Commandments
single-handedly”—but few would call the Bible immoral. Likewise, much literature seems
more committed to presenting moral complexity rather than moral certainty. Therefore,
judging a work of writing on moral grounds is usually not so simple a matter as judging
the isolated moral behaviors of characters.
So, what other standards might we use to judge literary works from a moral point of
view? Letʼs look at two intriguing moral standards that different thinkers have proposed,
the first having to do with the overall presentation of a text and the second having to do
with fictional characters.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle offered some insights into the first standard. He said we
canʼt judge a play on single events or behaviors within it but must look at the context of
the whole work for how it dramatically demonstrates complex moral dilemmas and
consequences. Moral decisions are often made in difficult, complicated, and ambiguous
circumstances. One of literatureʼs strengths is the way it can present for the examination
of readers knotty moral situations and the way fictional characters deal with them, thus
becoming a sort of laboratory for ethical experimentation. But the experiment has to be
fairly rendered. Any story that has a solution that is too easy and neatly tied up, an
argument that is too one sided or didactic, or a plot that is too clichéd risks
oversimplifying the complexity of acting morally in the world.
Contemporary American novelist and essayist Annie Dillard discusses sentimentality in
moral terms in her 1982 book Living by Fiction. Bad writing, Dillard says, attempts to
force stock emotions on us. For example, creating a fiction about a beloved teenage
character who inexplicably gets a terminal disease is a sure way for a writer to elicit
emotion; the death of a youth is one of lifeʼs saddest events. But just penning such a
tear- jerking story does not mean that a writer is teaching us anything. Dillard says that
for a writerʼs interpretations of the world to be as valuable as possible, the writer must
include more of lifeʼs moral complications. If the dying teenager acts selfishly or angrily
about her situation and tries the patience of others or alienates them in her honesty, or if
her best friend cannot deal with mortality and never comes to see her, or if her boyfriend
in his confusion cheats on her, or if the dying teenagerʼs father cannot cope and
abandons his family, then we are being asked to confront life in its full moral complexity.
Narratives with solutions that are too tidy, outcomes too predictable, and plots too
stereotyped do not meet these standards. Sentimental plots oversimplify lifeʼs complex
moral demands.
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.
CD 92
In addition, well-regarded novels are often multivocal, allowing us access to the visions
of many characters. Ambitious novelists—from Charles Dickens in his social novels
through William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury to more contemporary authors such
as Barbara Kingsolver in Poisonwood Bible, and Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club—are in
the habit of presenting multiple voices, working to portray situations from many
viewpoints. In most of these works, readers are asked to understand situations from
different charactersʼ perspectives. No position is silenced or dehumanized. This does not
mean that great artists donʼt take moral positions. Rather, it means that great texts often
suspend our judgments during the course of the work by presenting many options.
Readers are thereby forced to consider and reconsider how to apply values in the most
complex of ethical situations. Great literature can expand the moral range of readers by
its openness to multiple perspectives.
So one standard for judging literature on a moral basis is to assess the overall
presentation. We can ask: Is the story so predictable, clichéd, or sentimental that nothing
can be learned? Is the story so stuck in its good-guy vs. bad-guy rut that we can easily
dismiss and externalize the evil, so cut-and-dried that we canʼt ever see part of ourselves
in the bad guy? Do all points of view and characters on different sides get a fair voice?
These are the kinds of questions moral criticism can raise.
A second and somewhat related standard for thinking about the moral value of a story is
to consider its portrayal of fictional characters and our capacity to empathize with them.
In his 1821 A Defence of Poetry, English poet Percy Shelley proposed the idea that
imagination is the well-spring of compassion: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many
others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination” (1904, 34). Such a moral imagination is our
ability to try to understand another, to make a good faith effort to inhabit anotherʼs
viewpoint— even someone quite unlike us. This idea of putting ourselves empathetically
into othersʼ shoes, of trying to see others as they might see themselves, is at the heart of
many of the worldʼs great ethical formulations, such as the biblical Golden Rule.
Literature, Shelley believed, offers us a particularly rich chance to practice that moral
projection.
This idea of the cultivation of an empathetic imagination has plenty of contemporary
champions. One is Harvard professor, psychiatrist, and prize-winning writer Robert
Coles, as particularly expressed in his wonderful 1990 book The Call of Stories:
Teaching and the Moral Imagination. For years Coles taught the most popular
undergraduate course at Harvard, the Literature of Social Reflection, as well as courses
on ethics at Harvardʼs medical, law, education, and business schools. Based on his
belief that we learn our most lasting moral lessons through stories, Coles made works of
literature the center of his curriculum in all these classes. Stories give us insight not only
into our own moral struggles and questions, Coles said, they also ask us to enter the
lives of others. In like fashion, American philosopher Martha Nussbaum from the
University of Chicago teaches
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.
CD 93
a course called Law and Literature at the University of Chicago Law School, having her
students—future attorneys, judges, and corporate and civic leaders—read novels to gain
empathy for other humans: for the poor and downtrodden through Charles Dickensʼs
Hard Times, for homosexuals through E. M. Forsterʼs Maurice, for racial minorities
through Richard Wrightʼs Native Son.
From this point of view, then, one way to judge the moral quality of a work of fiction is to
assess the extent to which it welcomes readers to empathize with its characters— and
how accurately and fully it portrays those characters, because we canʼt learn to inhabit
othersʼ perspectives if the characters in books arenʼt complicated “real people” but are
mere symbols, stereotypes, or foils.
Or, as Ernest Hemingway said, a writerʼs responsibility is to know his characters so well
he could tell what theyʼd carry in their pockets. To reach greatness, writers must make
the effort to see into other peopleʼs pockets and minds—even people unlike them, even
people they dislike. They must go so far as to exercise the bravest act of moral
imagination—to imagine what circumstances might make them behave as their enemies
behave. The attempt to understand characters who commit despicable acts— F. Scott
Fitzgeraldʼs Gatsby, for example, or Raskolnikov in Fyodor Doestoevskyʼs Crime and
Punishment, Humbert Humbert in Nabokovʼs Lolita, or Cholly Breedlove in Toni
Morrisonʼs The Bluest Eye—may stretch our sympathies to the breaking point, but is a
characteristic of some of the greatest writers. Denying the existence of evil in
sympathetic characters makes it harder to address evil as it actually occurs in the world.
People are, after all, full of contradictions. Bad people do good things and good people
do bad things. All of us have flaws, sometimes fatal ones. All of us act sometimes as we
know we shouldnʼt. Rich literature acknowledges these hard truths.
The American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) came at this idea from a different
angle. Human evil and cruelty, Rorty says, grow like a cancer from generalized
descriptions that cast “others” as something different and less complicated than “us.”
Poets and novelists, he says, help us see others in their unique, singular individuality
rather than as members of some undifferentiated group of weird others. A lack of
curiosity about others makes it easier for us to humiliate them, but great writers pique
our curiosity and draw us closer to others. They offer concrete details and sharply etched
images of human suffering that make it impossible for us to look away. In all these ways,
literary artists are essential for moral progress.
Here is where moral criticism intersects with one of the deepest pleasures and values of
reading fiction—the chance to be someone else for a while. The protagonist of a novel or
story or play that captures us may be a different gender, race, social class, age, sexual
orientation, religion, or nationality than we are, and from a place weʼve never been and a
time period weʼve never experienced. But by the power of the human imagination—of
both writer and reader—the story can help us escape the boundaries of our own narrow
circumstances, plunge us into another world and consciousness, and cultivate the
healthy exercise of identification. We get to have an intimate experience with a stranger.
We
Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts by Tim Gillespie. Copyright © 2010. Stenhouse
Publishers.
CD 94
get to experience anotherʼs dilemma. We recognize unmistakable aspects of ourselves
staring back at us from the portrait of a stranger. The compelling story thus makes us
more tolerant of differences while simultaneously confirming our common humanity.
In sum, moral criticism can do more than mere tut-tutting about the literary portrayal of
bad acts. Its critical standards invite us to ask whether the world created by a writer is as
complicated and multidimensional as our actual world, and if the characters created by a
writer are as complex and uncategorizable as real people. It recognizes a connection
between moral judgments about literature and a moral life. As bad writing is
characterized by shallow representations and stereotyped characters, bad behavior is
characterized by shallow treatment and stereotyping of others. By such insights does
moral criticism seek to make readers both more discerning thinkers and more
responsible citizens.
To Sum Up
A moral perspective can offer readers critical questions and directions beyond the
merely censorious or preachy: Does a work enlarge our moral imagination? Has the
author given the full context for a moral dilemma, presenting a story in its full scope with
all its contradictions and complexities? Are characters treated fairly? Are they
complicated and fully dimensional? Has the writer avoided stereotypes? Does the work
help us to understand others more deeply, to connect with people and perspectives,
places and times unlike our own? In helping us lose ourselves in anotherʼs story, does
the work help us find ourselves?
With such questions, readers and critics can confront the moral dimensions of literature.