lux-obscura:

alexandrareadsthings:

stop telling girls interested in lit that they need to read these great american classics by violent misogynists in order for their opinions to be valid or for their minds to be developed

I literally didn’t realise, until I was a grown-ass adult and then some, that the reason I hated “The Canon” was NOT because I was stupid, poorly read, or anything to do with me: It was because every book in “The Classical Literary Canon” was written by a white guy navel-gazing about HOW HARD his life was and how he needed to go one some SPIRITUAL JOURNEY to find ENLIGHTENMENT but instead he wrote a book about some guy doing all the stuff he wished he could do. While standing on the backs of women the entire time.

My 12th Grade AP Lit teacher gave me a copy of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins-Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and that was the first inkling I had that maybe I could RELATE to literature instead of just enduring it.

Down with white cis male literary canon. We want stories we can relate to, not stories that tear us down.