0. time to do a thread about that timeless high school classic about British schoolboys Jack, Ralph, and P-something-or-other who wind up stranded on a tropical island with no adult supervision!

i'm talking, of course, about The Coral Island, by RM Ballantyne

1. RM Ballantyne published The Coral Island in 1857 and it has never been out of print. it tells the story of three British lads — Jack Martin, Ralph Rover, and Peterkin Gay — who get shipwrecked in Polynesia and have a Grand Old Time of it

2. they get to have some Adventures with pirates (bad) and missionaries (good), and also some run-ins with racist caricatures of indigenous Polynesians. a big takeaway from the book is that British Culture Is Inherently Superior And British Imperialism Is Super Good For Everybody

3. now, if you know *literally anything* about British Imperialism or Christian missionary work, you might be like "both of those things are terrible, actually, and a book justifying them sounds deeply fucked up???" and! you would not be wrong nor alone in thinking this

4. William Golding, in 1954, was like "u kno what? this is Extremely Bullshit", and wrote a book Very Pointedly tearing The Coral Island to shreds. that book is called L-rd of the Flies and you might have heard of it

5. Golding isn't subtle about this! he calls three of his main characters Jack Merridew, Ralph, and Piggy, and he literally goes so far as to have the naval officer who finds the boys at the end be like "ah, this is like: THE CORAL ISLAND!". like, really, hard to be more obvious

6. and read against The Coral Island, L-rd of the Flies is p pointedly saying "far from being The Pinnacle of Humanity™, white British masculinity is a toxic nightmare machine that will consume literal paradise and make it Hell if given half a chance"

7. like L-rd of the Flies is v transparently pushing back against The Coral Island and its ilk and saying "British ppl traipsing around the tropics isn't some ~idyllic civilizing good~, it's a traumatic nightmare horror show"; the white Britishness *is* important

8. but white Britishness is also . . . generally unmarked in the US school system, and so when i was going thru high school, L-rd of the Flies wasn't taught against The Coral Island; no one even mentioned The Coral Island. L-rd of the Flies was taught as being About Human Nature

9. (because that's what happens to unmarked categories: they're taken, in mainstream spaces, as being universal instead of particular.)

10. my understanding is that this is pretty common in US high schools these days, which sets up this *super* surreal discourse cycle, a discourse cycle that i've seen play out *multiple* different times across at least two different social media platforms

11. it's a cycle where basically someone is like "ugh, i can't believe Golding actually thought All Humans are like the ones he depicted in L-rd of the Flies; *obviously* if you drop a bunch of white men steeped in the Most Toxic White Masculinity on an island,...

12. ...it's all gonna go to shit, but that's just showing that Toxic White Masculinity is a problem, not that human nature is a problem!!!", and then a bunch of people are like "yeah!!! other demographics would've behaved totally differently! human nature is fundamentally [X]!!"

13. and then (usually, but not always!), someone brings up The Coral Island and is like "uh, actually, Golding would . . . probably have agreed with y'all? L-rd of the Flies was . . . meant as a critique of the idea that White Men Are The Best™?"

14. and it's just . . . Weird, to see this text taken out of its original context and kind of doubly misread, with the second reading somehow folding over on itself such that the takeaway is *what* was originally intended only with the assumption that it was *not* intended

15. and i don't think this is really a problem with individuals! if you don't know The Coral Island (and, honestly, why would you?), there's no way you would know that L-rd of the Flies is pushing back against it so specifically, and if your high school English teacher...

16. ...is like "what is this book saying about human nature? do you agree?", then yeah, it's hard to fault you for thinking that Golding was just another white man thinking that his experience of white masculinity equals True Humanity and push against that

17. so i don't really know how we solve this (beyond like, teach this book better? teach different books?), but it remains *wild* to me to see so many people saying Golding *unintentionally* makes the *very* critique of white British masculinity he was *intentionally* making

18. anyway, we seem to be doing that Discourse Cycle on Twitter right now, and i have nothing to say that hasn't been said better by others more qualified about The Thing that kicked off the cycle, but i did want to tweet this because if i see one more person saying...

19. ..."see, this just goes to show that L-rd of the Flies is just about how *white British men* would behave on an island!" as tho that is not the driving energy of the vicious critique at the heart of that book, i am going to scream

20. yes! you are right! that is *exactly* what L-rd of the Flies is about! that is exactly the point! you nailed it in one! i am sorry that this book was taught to you otherwise, because i think that does a disservice to the text!

21. i'm not even that invested in this book, i just get so stressed out seeing this play out over and over and over again, and i know it's just going to happen again in like, seven months or w/e, but hopefully writing this thread will at least make me feel a little better

~fin~