NOVEMBER 21, 2025 | OPINION | By Olivia Link
By the time my 15-year-old self was halfway through Homer’s “The Odyssey,” my previously academic annotations had largely been reduced to phrases like “someone should kill him,” “men are evil” and “what if we treated women like people?”
While these scribbles represent the half-baked political instincts of a teenager, they reveal something troubling that I am still thinking about five years later: how, as a marginalized person who enjoys literature, can I read “classic” books that are often predicated on or include offensive and outdated ideas? Is it fair to hold novels from hundreds of years ago to a modern standard of morality? How do we determine the threshold between discrimination that educates and discrimination that renders a text unreadable?
I’d like to begin by saying that here I am discussing books in which sexism is not the primary focus. I am not talking about books like “Lolita,” as only someone who lives under a rock would be surprised to find it problematic.
I am talking about books that are frequently spoken of as being seminal (ha!) must-reads, ones described as cornerstones of literary culture. It is within these pages that I must wrestle with the unexpected slap in the face of a rape scene or a misogynistic trope.
I began reading Stephen King novels in fourth grade—which is perhaps worrisome for other reasons not relevant here—and even then, I knew there was something in the way he writes about women that made me deeply uncomfortable.
The same rang true of “Dracula,” “On the Road,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and most of the Shakespeare I read in high school. Of course, this does not mean I don’t enjoy Kerouac’s genius or Wilde’s wit, but it does make me wonder how this enjoyment is filtered through the lens of my identity.
Setting aside benevolent misogyny, sexist characterizations and an utter lack of “good” representations of women, I would also like to point out the prevalence of rape scenes that add nothing of substance to a story.
There is a particular focus in many classic novels on sexual violence that does little to move the plot along. I cannot help but see this trend as disingenuous at best and fetishistic at worst, depictions of an atrocity handled rather cavalierly by male authors who most likely have rarely experienced sexual assault.
It was in reading Gabriel García Márquez’s famous “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that I decided to write this article. The book had been on my radar for a while—I saw a clip of Pedro Pascal citing it as a favorite—and so, when my librarian grandmother offered me her copy, I made it my next read.
It is, in many ways, a fascinating book, and García Márquez’s prose was wonderfully whimsical, even in translation. However, I couldn’t help but notice the immediate and consistent depictions of sexual violence.
The novel follows the Buendía family across generations. In the second chapter, the lineage begins when patriarch José Arcadio Buendía points a spear at his wife and demands that she remove her chastity garments against her will. Not to be outdone, both of Buendía’s sons continue the trend of less-than-consensual encounters.
The second, José Arcadio, forces himself on his adopted sister, while the younger Colonel Aureliano Buendía becomes obsessed with a nine-year-old and marries her. She later dies at the ripe age of fourteen, presumably by miscarriage.
I tried to look past these events and ignore my disgust because of the story’s redeeming qualities, as well as my aversion to starting a book and not finishing it. I am sad to say that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has been added to the exceptionally short list of books I never finished.
Maybe one day I will return to it, but when I got to what felt like the hundredth vivid rape scene on page 403—where the sole member of the sixth generation of Buendía men impregnates his aunt—I decided I’d had enough.
And so we come to the most important point: personal identity. As a woman, I feel I cannot treat sexual violence lightly: it is all too real for me. I cannot gloss over it in the same way that a male reader perhaps could. This realization forced me to confront my own prejudices as well—if our identities shape everything we consume, how often am I overlooking racism or antisemitism in these same novels?
Ten-year-old me knew that there was something off about the portrayal of Black people in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but I’m not sure that it changed my perception of the book as a whole. Perhaps my crusade against García Márquez was nothing if not hypocritical: how many racist scenes have I brushed off the same way a man might brush off a rape scene?
Upon further reflection, I found the most egregious personal culprit to be Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” Until recently, I probably would have described it as one of my favorite novels, one that cut me to my core and made me realize that I am not alone in feeling like my life is full of rotting opportunities I am too indecisive to seize.
Even now, I see it as a masterpiece, one that wrestled with themes of misogyny and mental illness long before it was acceptable to do so. And yet, for all of Plath’s visionary bravery, the novel falls flat in pushing progressive narratives around race.
In fact, it employs racist language and tropes, leaving me wondering if Plath’s feminism was truly inclusive. The first time I read it, I certainly noticed these episodes of discrimination, but I relegated them to just poor word choices typical of her time period.
This is the exact argument I have seen parroted by men in researching this article: I dismissed it then, and I am dismissing it now.
Yes, it is true that we are all products of our sociocultural norms and surroundings. People becoming politically conscious now have far greater access to educational resources on racism than Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemingway would have.
It is no less true that people have been calling racism out for centuries, and that mere ignorance is not a very good excuse for discriminatory behavior. Holding both of these facts at once, then, how do we proceed? Do we throw out all problematic literature? Do we ignore it for the sake of tradition?
Some activists suggest a heavier curricular emphasis on books written by underrepresented authors, or at least more contemporary ones. While I agree it is time we moved beyond “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and while no one loves Toni Morrison as much as I do, this doesn’t seem to solve the issue.
For one, there is real value to be found in Hemingway and Wilde. There is also the argument that it is important to read these texts and wrestle with the discrimination inside to face our ugly history. In educational settings, I believe a balance between the two is ideal.
For pleasure reading, though, it may not be that simple. It is incredibly frustrating for me to consume something simultaneously brilliant and personally affronting, and although others may not be as sensitive, I know that I will never be able to skim over a rape scene as though it’s nothing.
I also know that the next time I read “The Bell Jar,” I will be wildly uncomfortable with the dissonance between my admiration of Plath and her racist language. Perhaps this discomfort is good, though—identifying with or liking a protagonist who then exhibits problematic behavior forces readers to engage in the moral and intellectual struggle between art and reality, between good and evil.
We are prompted to think critically about authors and their prejudices, calling on us to parse out what is valuable and artistic, and what is destructive and outdated. Enjoying Twain does not make you inherently sexist or racist.
Within reason, we should all be able to like a classic without subscribing to everything in it, and acknowledging the disparity between the two is what makes us thoughtful readers.