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Treason Our Text by Lillian Robinson
In the 1983 work Treason Our Text Lillian Robinson says: “the elements of the literary canon are simply absorbed by students without any real thought about it.” But with every new year, more college students are questioning the canon. Many feel ready to challenge the canon and push for much needed changes.
In the traditional high school English canon I know and grew up with there were very few women taught. It was the same five or six women year after year: Dickenson, Woolf, Austin et al.
In 1994 I took two quarters of the British literature survey courses to find out to my great surprise that the only English woman writer worth learning about in a class lecture is Virginia Woolf.
Change in the canon just isn’t happening fast enough. It rarely trickles down to high-school and Jr. High. So what happens if you don’t attend college? Would you even know that many women authors exist and have always existed? Only if you read for yourself, outside of school requirements.
I agree with Robinson that “the male authored canon contributes to the body of information, stereotype, inference, and surmise about the female sex that is generally in the culture” (117). What women are, what they care about, what they need, how they behave — is all determined by male thought. Women may read it and know it’s incorrect, but men…
