Both Martha Nussbaum and Willie Van Peer offer valuable insights when they elaborate on the ways in which literature allows us as readers to view the world around us more complexly. In Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination Nussbaum posits that a literary education from early childhood onward provides a reader with the tools required to view the people around them as “spacious and deep, with qualitative differences from oneself as well as hidden places worthy of respect”. In a similar vein, Van Peer, in Literature, Imagination and Human Rights asserts that literature creates societal change on a much larger scale, prompting greater discussion about what it means to be human and thereby encouraging encapsulated cultures, that is, people groups with firmly defined and exclusive boundaries, to extend the definition of “human” to peoples they previously excluded.
Both argue that literature prompts people to expand their horizons. Nussbaum even goes so far as to suggest that literature, among not only the arts but also a great many other disciplines, uniquely shapes minds and broadens thought. As an avid reader myself, my first inclination is to agree with them.
However, I struggle to simply accept the claim that literature is the most basic, essential eye-opener. I have two objections to this claim. First, that the language of literature is, in and of itself, a factor in creating and preserving encapsulation. Second, that the open-mindedness purveyed through literature cannot find its solitary source in literature, leaving open the question as to where the writer of a book received the idea that their definition of “human” was limited.
Language, particularly written language, has a limited, though ever increasing, sphere of influence. (I know that language is used by all humans, but the words we use are in and of themselves exclusive). Language itself is a huge factor in encapsulation. The language of literature is exclusive to those who are literate, and often, in the case of the authoritative cannon that Van Peer centers his argument around, exclusive to those with an advanced degree of literacy and access to books.
One of my favourite books is A Room With A View by E.M. Forster. When it comes to whether or not the man was sexist or truly open minded, all bets are off, but he had a lot to say about viewing women as complex individuals at a time when they were not typically seen in so advanced a light. In one of my favourite scenes in the novel, one character is forced, not by literature, but by the words of his fiance as she breaks off their engagement to acknowledge that she is not, perhaps, as different from him as he’d imagined.
“But to Cecil, now that he was about to lose her, she seemed each moment more desirable. He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged. From a Leonardo she had become a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art.”
So how and where did Cecil recieve the wisdom that encouraged him to see Lucy as a human as much as himself? And more interestingly, where did Forster find this notion? Although, by 1908 the idea that women were as human and complex as men was a fairly common concept, it’s source could not exclusively be literature. Something had to have prompted the first writer of a book on the subject to put pen to paper, something that wasn’t simply another book.
I would argue, that literature does not instill in readers the notion that our concept of humanity is limited, but rather that it is one of many things that may awaken us to the knowledge of this limitation, a knowledge which is innate in all of us. Literature, though an effective tool for expanding our horizons, and an enjoyable one at that, is by no means the only method or the best.