Embrace the power of AND
In the stilly watches of the night - there was that thing where I wake up from a perfectly sound sleep and then take some while to get back to sleep - I was thinking about that panic reaction that Some People have that if you add New Names to Literary Canons or the Historical Record or give them Commemorative Statues this means that the existing names will be wiped out as if written upon sand when the tide comes in.
Rather than that they may be viewed in a different way in a broader context, which may mean that they are no longer quite the unique figures they once were.
What brought this to mind was thinking of - I'm not sure it amounted to a Twitter-storm, perhaps a Twitter-spat - in which somebody was very agitated that putting a statue to Millicent Garrett Fawcett in Parliament Square was the first step to the Pankhursts becoming Unpersons and Forgotten By History.
The Pankhursts? Come on. I think not.
But I am for a narrative which is about, there were lots of women, and a not insignificant number of men, fighting for the suffrage and women's rights and most of those would have been doing that with or without Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia. And we can debate over who had the most effective tactics and so on, but the fact is you need charismatic drama queens AND you need low-key determined types beavering away in committees and badgering government departments and getting small necessary concessions.
See also, thoughts I have probably expressed before re Marie Stopes and the wider birth control movement.
And on the literary canon of Dead White Males, is that actually graven in stone anyway? I apprehend there have been changes over time in who is in or out - during a conversation last week we were wondering whether DH Lawrence was still on university Englit syllabi, and somebody said, well, still on the modernism module at their place - and if they can't stand up to the competition, perhaps they are not so great anyway?
I also think about how many of those now set-in-stone Great Canonical Writers were Up From Nowhere and the Margins in their own day - is this not evidenced by the strained attempts to prove that Shakespeare was not really a grammar-school oik from Warwickshire? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2685824.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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