Old White Men, Still Running the Bookshelf
The idea of the Western canon is outdated and has been used as a form of historical control. It is indisputable that figures such as Homer and Shakespeare have shaped literature, and nobody needs to pretend they weren’t brilliant in order to question the system that made them untouchable. The problem is that when we look at the people we have collectively decided are the literary “greats”, they are overwhelmingly white and male. English as an educational subject is now dominated by women, yet the literature we are taught is still dominated by men. I have never been taught a book within education that was solely written by a woman. I have spent years being taught what men thought about love, power, women, sex, morality and human nature, but never been required to study a novel in which a woman was given the same authority to tell me what she thought about any of it.
For a subject that claims to explore human experience, we have been very comfortable letting one half of humanity do most of the talking.
The Western canon is meant to represent the literature, music, philosophy and art most cherished by the Western world, the works we call “classics” and pass from one generation to another. Many of those classics are brilliant, but brilliance isn’t the issue. The issue is how such a narrow demographic came to represent greatness itself. One popular list of eighty classic authors, spanning from 2000 BCE to the present day, contains only five women, all of them white. There is no definitive version of the canon, but that almost makes the pattern worse. However we reconstruct this collection of supposedly essential voices, we keep ending up with the same people.
I don’t believe white men happened to possess most of the world’s literary genius. I believe they possessed most of the power to decide what genius looked like.
For centuries, men controlled education, universities, publishing, money and the institutions that decided which work was worth preserving. Women were denied access to those spaces and then their absence from them became part of the evidence for male intellectual superiority. The arrogance of that is staggering. Build a society in which women cannot compete with men on equal terms, preserve the work produced by the people you did allow to compete, and then spend the next few centuries pointing at the result as proof that the men were better. Women didn’t fail to produce enough greatness. The people defining greatness weren’t interested in looking for it in women.
Race makes the same problem impossible to ignore. The Western canon was formed alongside empire and colonialism, in societies where white European voices had an authority denied to the people they colonised. Yet we inherited the resulting collection of work and called it universal. White male experience was allowed to become human experience, while everybody else became a category: women’s writing, Black writing, postcolonial writing. The white man needed no label because he was allowed to be the default.
Even the language we use tells us something; John Locke is the “father of liberalism”. Daniel Defoe is the “father of the English novel”. Spenser becomes important enough to have a poetic form named after him! Western intellectual history is packed with fathers, founders and great men, and we are taught the titles so often that eventually they stop sounding like opinions and start sounding like facts. Then you look at the men themselves.
Locke’s connections with colonialism and slavery make his position as a great philosopher of liberty worth questioning. Defoe had financial connections with the Royal African Company. Edmund Spenser was involved in the English colonisation of Ireland and advocated horrific treatment of the Irish population. Hume and Kant wrote racist theories while producing work that would later be celebrated for its contribution to our understanding of reason, morality and humanity. We are expected to separate the work from the man when the man becomes inconvenient, yet for centuries the greatness of the work has been used to elevate the man. We can’t have it both ways.
The response is usually that they were “products of their time”. I find that argument frustrating because it silently erases everyone from their time who disagreed with them. People opposed slavery while slavery existed and women knew they were being denied rights while those rights were being denied. People being colonised did not think colonialism was acceptable because it happened before 1900. “It was normal at the time” depends very heavily on whose version of normal we choose to listen to.
This is why I don’t want these men removed from literature. In fact, I want the opposite… I want us to stop protecting them from their own histories. Teach the brilliant work and teach the racism, as well as the philosophy of liberty and then ask who was excluded from that liberty. Teach the poetry and the colonialism. If their ideas are strong enough to have survived for centuries, then surely they can survive being questioned by a classroom of teenage girls.
But maybe that is part of the problem with the canon. We have been encouraged to approach these men with reverence when literature should invite argument. I don’t owe a writer admiration because generations of people before me admired him. I can recognise his skill without accepting his worldview, and I can question why his voice has been amplified for centuries while another person’s disappeared.
The imbalance becomes harder to justify when we look at literature now. Women succeed academically, dominate English classrooms and are hugely significant within contemporary writing and publishing, but the traditional history of literary greatness still looks male. The old explanation, that women simply didn’t produce enough important literature, becomes harder to maintain once women are finally given something approaching equal access and immediately become impossible to ignore.
As women become more visible within literature, literature associated with women becomes easier to dismiss. Books written by women are separated into “women’s fiction”; stories centred on women’s lives are treated as female stories rather than human ones. A male protagonist can represent humanity, but a female protagonist is representing women. Men have been allowed to write themselves and call it universal for centuries.
This is the part I want to change. I don’t want to replace every white male writer with a woman or a non-white writer and announce that is problem solved. I want to stop pretending the existing hierarchy was neutral in the first place. Keep the classics that deserve to be classics, but stop using the word “classic” as a shield against criticism. Put writers who were previously excluded into the centre of the discussion, and let them challenge the narrow version of humanity we inherited.
Most of all, stop teaching the canon as though greatness simply rose naturally to the surface and these men happened to float with ease there.
Of course the canon is full of old white men. They were always the ones holding the pen.
