The Review: On Freud, Shakespeare, and Other Toxic Baddies

Part 3 of a series on the canon wars then and now. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Last week I wrote about the postponement of the 1995 Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress, an episode I found myself wanting to learn more about. I asked Michael Roth, the curator of the show and now president of Wesleyan University, how he felt about the protests against it, which had been launched by a variegated crew of feminists, psychiatrists hostile to what they saw as the Freud establishment, and intellectuals from various backgrounds who had become part of a then-burgeoning anti-Freud movement. “When the shit hit the fan,” Roth told me, “I was pretty shocked.” The best contemporaneous account of the event is Margaret Talbot’s 1998 New York Times Magazine feature “[The Museum Show Has an Ego Disorder]( (On one important detail, Roth differs from Talbot. Talbot ultimately endorsed the LOC’s claim that the Freud show was postponed not for political but for budgetary reasons. Roth demurred. “The reason they postponed the show,” he told me, “is because they were scared to death.”) Talbot saw the incident as continuous with a series of high-profile controversies over museum shows, including the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Enola Gay exhibit, “drastically altered” in response to complaints from American veterans that it was insufficiently patriotic, and a Library of Congress exhibition on “The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation,” canceled after Black library staffers protested. But the Freud postponement, Roth told me, doesn’t fit into the “current ideological boxes — and that’s because Freud doesn’t.” Some of the ambient circumstances, though, are familiar. “Cultural institutions at that time were scared to death of controversy,” Roth said. Perhaps even more familiarly, such institutions were under a great deal of pressure to pronounce moral judgment on the objects of their attention. “Some people,” Roth told Talbot, “wanted an exhibit that said that Freud was wrong, that he was a bad person, that, as one critic put it, we should have the moral courage to condemn him.” That impulse struck him as incompatible with the practice of intellectual history: “Historians don’t talk that way. It’s almost hubris to talk that way.” But in the 1990s, many people did. SPONSOR CONTENT | The University of Sydney [The wonders of plasma technologies for an aging population]( The attitude Roth rejected was exemplary of what John Guillory, in 1993, called a “fall into moralism,” though depending on your politics it might seem a fortunate fall. It did not seem so to Guillory. “The reversion to moralism,” Guillory writes, “is determined by the equation of text-selection with value-selection. For this reason much of what passes for political analysis of historically canonical works is nothing more than the passing of moral judgment on them. The critique of the canon moves quickly to reassert absolute notions of good and evil.” But by 2000 or so, that sort of moralism had lost its dominance. It never went away, but neither did it command the field. In the last few years, that seems to have changed. Scholars fret earnestly over the harm the works they teach might do to students. In an [appearance]( on the NPR podcast Code Switch, for instance, the Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson identified what she called “three toxic plays that resist rehabilitation": The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew. They stand accused, respectively, of “deep anti-Semitism,” “deep racism,” and “deep misogyny.” When asked whether, in her view, high-school students should read Merchant, Thompson was blunt: “No.” “You feel,” she said, “more secure in your anti-Semitism after seeing this play.” (I don’t find this true of myself, but I can’t speak for Thompson.) No one would pretend that The Merchant of Venice can be taught today without paying some attention to the history of European and English anti-Semitism. But one could feel that refusing to perform Merchant smacks of the Manichaeism Guillory identifies as a hallmark of moralism. And a skeptic might detect, in contemporary anxieties around Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism, something of the condescension toward the past Guillory sees in much political judgment of canonical works. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right?” Thompson says. “He’s universally good for you. When, in fact, he’s writing from the vantage point of the 16th and 17th century.” Thompson is surely right that Shakespeare is not like spinach. For that reason, the question of whether he’s “good for you” may not be the most salient one. This is the third of a three-part series on the canon wars. See parts [one]( and [two](. Read Margaret Talbot’s 1998 essay on the Freud exhibit [here](. And check out Ayanna Thompson on Code Switch [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [What Was Deconstruction?]( By Timothy Brennan [STORY IMAGE]( Academics fell for Derrida’s charisma, but his school of thought wasn’t what we thought it was. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Diversity Statements Are Still in Legal Peril]( By Brian Leiter [STORY IMAGE]( Most are administratively imposed, and academic freedom thus affords them little protection. 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