ENGL 4310

Censorship seems to be the topic of the school year for me and I have discussed at length in several of my classes whether or not the “obscene” has any purpose. In her letter to Seymour Lawrence on page 499 Porter opens the letter with, “I am in a low frame of mind because I have just been called a “thoroughly vile woman” by a man who signs himself Marc T. Greene, American Foreign Correspondent—perfect stranger to me, from Thomaston Maine.” She continues, “He took frenzied offence to only one phrase, really” and bitterly jests that “by now no doubt he has cancelled his subscription if he had one to the Atlantic.” I am not sure what phrase Marc T. Greene was offended by, but as Porter says we can be left “to guess which one.” She writes that Mark Twain dealt with similar criticism when he was advised to “take that swearing out.”
So, why do writers put in material that is bound to offend the Marc T. Greenes of the world? I’ve been wondering about this for several months now. I think the “obscene” serves a purpose in literature primarily to round out a character’s or plot’s development and/or to teach a moral lesson. I was happy to read that Porter seemed to feel the same way. She writes, “It is offensive, spoken by an offensive character, and I meant it to be so” and “I write of the base aspects of human character out of loathing of it, really—yet it is there, all mixed in with the good and the desirable: I have some very good people on my boat as you’ll see, and some utterly wicked ones, but mostly a mixture of frailty and virtues of one kind or another.” How is it possible for a writer to create realistically human characters, flaws, sins and all, without actually presenting the flaws and sins? What lessons can we hope to garner, what new insights can we hope to gain about ourselves, if we only read about good people doing good things? To me, such stories, if they really exist, would be boring, unrealistic and preachy, although Porter acknowledges, “some very great writers have got along nicely with not a bawdy scene or crooked word.” On the flip side, Porter also writes that there are some writers that “know nothing else” other than baseness and obscenity. Such stories are equally unrealistic and boring, and often move themselves into the ridiculous. Obscenity just for the sake of obscenity.
A careful balance between the two extremes makes an interesting story, one that people can connect with and learn from. Porter is of course a master at that balance and understood the purpose. In true stick-to-your-guns Porter fashion she writes, “I think I shall just have to go on the way I’m going, and take a chance on shocking certain people—who I believe do go on thinking of literature as one thing and life as quite another, and I have got the two so identified in my mind, I wouldn’t know how to separate them.” It is fortunate for us that she felt that way. After all, Porter just wouldn’t be as interesting without the occasional murder, adultery, and child abuse.