My happy place is books. It has been for a long time. As a creative writing major, depending on the teacher and the class (more so the teacher), English classrooms are also my happy place. But as I get further into my education, and especially now that I’ve entered college, I find it harder to make this true. More classmates, sometimes even the professor, believes that certain pieces of literature are more important and/or better than other pieces, and if you don’t agree with them, you don’t belong in that classroom.
Gatekeeping isn’t a new concept―though it’s a word I didn’t know until I got to college. Gatekeeping is the way in which a person or group of people limit access to something. I didn’t realize how gate kept literature was until last year during spring quarter. There have been times that I have said I’m not familiar with an author or a book that’s being discussed, and suddenly I’m an outsider. My peers and sometimes even my professors make me feel like I don’t belong in the space because I hadn’t read, oh, I don’t know, Faulkner before.
Here’s the truth: I would rather reread the Twilight series for the ninth time rather than struggle through any of Faulkner’s work. It doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t elicit any emotions, and quite honestly, I think it’s boring. This isn’t meant to be an attack against Faulkner, but an attack against the gatekeepers. People can and should love whatever book or author they want, and hopefully, they find something they enjoy. However, because a very select group of people have become the “classics,” to say you don’t like or don’t understand them immediately ostracizes you in an English classroom. Making someone feel like they don’t belong in a space because they haven’t read as much as you or they read books other than the “classics” doesn’t encourage them to start reading the “classics.” The way I see it, if I haven’t read something yet, that means I can experience it for the first time. Two years ago, when I read the Harry Potter series for the first time, I was originally met with, “I can’t believe you’ve never read Harry Potter before!” and then some light teasing about being a Twilight kid. By the time I got to the fourth or fifth book, it changed. Suddenly people were saying, “I wish I could read it for the first time again.” And I think that’s the attitude we should take towards people who haven’t read the “classics”—it’s amazing that they’re experiencing something new, not disappointing that they’ve never read it before.
Another massive problem in literature is who counts as a classic novelist. Usually, it’s wealthy or well-off, old, dead white men who wrote about their own experiences. I can’t relate to them. And based on what I have read, I don’t want to relate to them. Their experiences have created a “norm” in literature (and life) and the truth of the matter is, the average person can’t relate or empathize with these experiences. We never talk about Zora Neale Hurston or Nicola Yoon or Leslie Feinberg (if you don’t know who they are, that’s okay! I didn’t know who two of them were until I read them in a somewhat nontraditional English classroom, and I liked them. That’s the only reason I’m bringing them up). The world is not made up of only wealthy white men. The world is made up of black, brown, white, mixed, straight, gay, bisexual, wealthy, poor, middle-class women, men, gender-fluid, non-binary people. And that’s beautiful. The literature we read, especially in “American” literature classrooms, should reflect this diversity. America does not mean “white,” so the books taught in American literature classrooms should reflect that. I have been lucky enough to have some amazing high school English teachers and English/creative writing professors who understand this and teach accordingly. Unfortunately, most of these teachers/professors have still made me and other students feel inadequate for not knowing names that have been taught for years. And I don’t want to say, “Who cares about Shakespeare?” because I know some people do care, and I don’t want to attack anyone for enjoying any type of literature. But I’ve been taught Shakespeare since freshman year of high school (that was seven years ago) and there’s really only so much one can learn about Shakespeare at an introductory level. I’ve never taken and don’t plan to take a Shakespeare class, so I hear the same thing every year I have to study him, and read the same four plays over and over again. I love learning. I love the challenge of reflecting and wrestling with new concepts. When we limit ourselves to only studying the “classics,” at some point, we stop allowing ourselves to be challenged.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is one of the most influential pieces of literature I have ever read. I read it for the first time my senior year of high school, and saw myself in Cath. And this wasn’t, “Oh hey, I have anxiety too!” but it was me. I was Cath the first time I read Fangirl. I saw how my relationship with my brother reflected her relationship with her sister, and how my relationship with my friends reflected her relationship with her friends. It felt like Rowell had followed me around for about a year, predicted what my college experience might be like if I didn’t do something to help my anxiety, and wrote it. And I loved that. It helped me learn so much about myself and grow before I came to college. I read it again my freshman and sophomore years of college and was ecstatic to see that while I am still Cath, I’m Cath towards the end of the story, where she’s come to terms with her anxiety, rather than Cath at the beginning. I will never study this work in an English classroom, which is unfortunate, because there is so much to study: anxiety and depression in college students, relationships at home and in college, the impact fanfiction has on the life of an individual and the entirety of popular media. An incredibly rich conversation could be had based on this book, but because young adult literature and fanfiction are considered “juvenile,” I won’t see it studied in my happy place. I hope someday it is, but I am not naïve enough to think this can change in my two remaining college years.
There isn’t an immediate, widespread fix I have for the issue of gatekeeping literature, but this is what I have been doing to help: I admit when I don’t know something. Instead of nodding along when an author I’ve never read or never heard of is mentioned, I ask what they’ve written, and if it sounds interesting, I’ll write down their names. I have a huge list of people and specific books I want to read from doing this. I’ve found that this has encouraged some of my peers to admit that they don’t know either. And it’s incredibly comforting (and validating) to know you’re not the only one who doesn’t know. There are literally millions of books (130 million, to be exact) in the world, so how could one person possibly know every single author, genre, title, etc? We can’t! But you know what we can do? Read. Read as much as we want, of whatever we want. Maybe then, someday, we can talk about our favorite books, the ones that reflect us and hold a special place in our hearts, in an English classroom and not have to worry about being considered inadequate, or juvenile, or uneducated.