When Prince of Egypt came out in 1998, I made sure my mom knew how much I liked the music. I was 11. And look: I loved the music. I was given the soundtrack for Christmas and I proceeded to listen to it nonstop. This is how I’ve always been with songs, games, and more. I am not usefully obsessive, just conspicuously so. I paused my favorite number, “The 10 Plagues,” the day I left for summer camp.1 When I came home a week or two later, I found the CD still on pause. I resumed listening right where I left off, as if my time in the mountains—riding horses, rock climbing, fire-side worship—was a skip on the album. “I send the thunder from the sky!”—summer camp—“I send the fire raining down!”
I still get caught in these tracks, these loops, of attention. I recently discovered Dave Malloy’s 2012 musical, Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, and it’s taken over the soundtrack to my life. Before that it was multiple Sondheim cast recordings, and just to prove I am not actually bound and gagged by Broadway, before Sondheim it was the best indie-rock(ish) album of my adulthood, mewithoutYou’s Pale Horses.
Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 is based on about 70 pages of War and Peace. It is a stellar adaptation, the lyrics often verbatim from Louise and Aylmer Maude’s English translation.2 Some of Malloy’s experiments in the first half fall a little flat for me, and there’s a stream-of-consciousness energy to all of the music that can feel, at times, as if ideas are being splattered against the score without much care. It doesn’t matter: I am enthralled.
And so, for better or worse, is my daughter. We listen on the way to pre-school, on the way home, at home, and generally anywhere we can drive her mother crazy. My middle kiddo likes to do anything his sister does, so he joins us in singing about war, peace, and Natasha’s love life. This practice is how my five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son learned the word “slut.”
Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is a wonderful exercise in dispelling the sometimes sloppy way we conflate “adult” with “overtly profane and/or obscene.” Not unlike its source material—or honestly, not unlike movies from the 40s and 50s—The Great Comet is a model of current FCC predilections. Minimal to no cursing, no outright violence, no sex scenes (or even direct talk of sex!). But the themes and preoccupations of the story are illegible without understanding sex, to say nothing of grief or pining or duty to one’s family; or war, actually, which is what my daughter has asked about most.
The one glaring exception, from a pre-school perspective at least, is that “slut” is spotlighted in the opening number. Worse, the song is a cumulative mnemonic, like when you learn everyone’s name in a large group setting by repeating all the names that came before your own. So, for example:
“Marya is old-school
Sonya is good
Natasha is young
And Andrey isn’t here”
And how does it introduce Hélène, the sister of the lecherous Anatole? Well, “Hélène is a slut.” Let’s make sure we don’t forget that. “Hélène,” remember, “is a slut.” And you know what? Let’s do it one last time for all the pre-schoolers in the back: “Hélène is a slut!”
I have no compunction in sharing that I have tried to turn the volume down whenever the word appears. Does this highlight the word, and inspire my daughter to ask why I am turning the volume down and what, exactly, Hélène is announcing about herself?
Yes. Every time.
My daughter, like a lot of kids (especially pre-literate kids), has a wonderful memory. The other week we were playing with puppets, and I suggested she sing a song. She chose “Let It Go,” of course, almost certainly to spite me and belittle me and remind me that Disney, no matter how you resist the worst of its excretions, cannot be overcome. And also because she loves the music. My point is that she sang “The snow glows white” to “The cold never bothered me anyway” without missing a line. The verses, the choruses, the bridge, all recited without flaw.
Given this aptitude, yes, I think a cumulative song designed to embed itself in your memory has probably forced “slut” into her mind. In my imagination, there are two reactions to this predicament. The first belongs to people who’d recoil at the thought of “slut” tripping off of a pre-schooler’s tongue. That’s more or less how I feel. (Though the potential for humor remains compelling!) I can also imagine others slapping me upside the head with my own privilege, the impossibly good circumstances of my life that have led to me worrying about a word in a song that will not change the course of my children’s life even one iota. Probably.
The latter group aren’t serious thinkers, of course.3 They’ve been trained to see almost all questions of propriety, especially the petty ones, as epiphenomena of forces so large they’re inherently pointless regarding the acute issue at hand. I have privilege. Great! What do I do about my daughter learning, much less saying, the word “slut”? Doing nothing is still a choice, even if you might argue it’s not a cop out. The question can be shrugged away, in other words, but a moral, and parental, position has still been staked out. Daughters, and sons, learning “slut” at an age when they are almost predestined to misuse it, possibly humorously, possibly hurtfully, doesn’t matter. Or it does.
The former imaginary group, who might be aghast that I even allowed the word to cross the thresholds of our speakers, I take more seriously only because some of them raised me. As a community in my actual life, I’ve found them less insane than the people who think protecting young children (again, my oldest is five) from their own undeveloped judgment is some kind of internalized fascism. At minimum, there’s no reason my children need to know the word “slut,” and I’ll continue to squash its presence as strategically, and lovingly, as I can.
In other words, I am acting as a sensitivity reader for my offspring. (Aha! A twist you probably didn’t see coming!) If you don’t know, a sensitivity reader is a kind of adjunct editor who evaluates works of fiction for publishers from an entirely censorial point of view. Since most novels are fungible entertainments meant to sell enough books to keep a publisher in business, it makes sense to keep kowtowing to the consumer. It’s wrong and silly, but as an outgrowth of profit at any cost, bowdlerizing—or lobotomizing—a novel has a long and storied tradition, especially when most commercial novelists are already operating under this same logic.
All the same, sensitivity readers are nothing more nor less than censors. It’s a position built entirely around ensuring purity of politics and which, conceptually, is indistinguishable from government censors across various totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. I know this has been a hobbyhorse of mine lately, but I bring it up again because, as with The Great Comet of 1812, I’ve been reading Roald Dahl to my children and find myself skipping some of the same phrases that sensitivity readers probably keep flagging. It’s possible I’m even pickier since I avoid moments when Dahl’s just plain mean in addition to ones in which he might be considered crude or sexist.
In short, the reason sensitivity readers are employed—beyond the usual suckerfish phenomenon of too many smart English majors attaching themselves to whatever institution is lumbering across their visage, rather than work a normal job4—is because the instincts they are helping industrialize make sense. There is a debate to be had about what we do and don’t standardize in children’s literature. Overreactive parents might keep trying to ban books for all the wrong reasons, for example, but school and public libraries have created distinct youth, teen, and adult collections from time immemorial. Everyone agrees distinctions must be made, lines drawn, materials cordoned off as a default, however permeable such cordons might remain in the name of other, equally pressing values.
The entire scandal of sensitivity readers, though, is that they hijack judgment from its proper channels.5 Their job is not to ensure that the books which children and their adults peruse are engaging, much less artful, which is the healthy function of a publishing house. Their job is to ensure that you and your children, to say nothing of teachers or librarians or the authors and editors who actually care about literature, think as little as possible about anything at all.
Personally, I preferred when this played out within evangelical households and concerned the stakes of one’s mortal soul. That the fear-based reasoning of Focus on the Family is now the predominant moral vision of so many gatekeepers of literature—if from an inverted political and issues-based standpoint—won’t stand the test of time, I think. But to keep pretending that the impulse of the living room should be scaled and outsourced to a corporate setting is a mistake our society keeps promoting.
There are endless addenda I’d like to append to everything I just wrote, but suffice to say: corporate censorship is bad precisely because, being inspired by private judgment, it hopes to pre-empt your judgment, and mine, and even that of the novelists whose work publishing houses are meant to champion, not expurgate.
As for my daughter and The Great Comet of 1812, we listened to it this morning. For anyone who needs to be shoved off the fence in its favor, or shoved away depending on your tastes, it stars Josh Groban. Yes, that Josh Groban. It’s the best he’s ever sounded, and Denée Benton as Natasha is revelatory.
Reading:
Highlights from recent or in-progress books I’ve been reading with my children that don’t include even the implication of “slut.” So far, at least.
Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren (which we have read several times at this point, and love)
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Our Fort by Marie Dorléans (a picture book my older son is transfixed by)
I love you all.
For those keeping track: I received the CD for Christmas and was still entombed in its sound come the summer.
For anyone always fretting about W&P translations (there are dozens of us! maybe!), I think this essay by Norton’s go-to Dostoevsky translator (and sometime translator for Tolstoy, as well), is really good. I think it was published in the New England Review at some point. Spoiler: he thinks the Pevear and Volokhonsky is best.
I’m sure I’ve been a party to this too many times, myself. In fact, both reactions I describe are my own, or are at least caricatures of my ambivalence.
This could never, ahem, apply—or, I insist that, well in brief, you could never call a public library such an institution! Obviously!
By far the worse, and less complicated, sin is that we have sensitivity readers for adult fiction, and that they keep trying to edit P.G. Wodehouse (for instance).