Please do not polish the statue

By Mareen Usman

Gloria Steinem died last week, and much of the online discourse that followed reached for the same three words. Icon. Pioneer. Trailblazer. When someone has spent a lifetime doing good, we develop this need to polish them until they gleam. The inconvenient bits get buffed away, the contradictions become footnotes, and a person starts to look like a marble statue. There is something reassuring about a spotless legacy. It means we can admire the achievement without having to sit too long with the person who achieved it, what they believed, or the small matter of their being a CIA operative while the US was busy meddling in everyone else’s affairs. The little things. The problem is that this impulse does not stop at people. It extends to what they leave behind: the books, paintings, songs, ideas, and political movements that become inseparable from their names. We like to imagine that we can keep the beautiful parts and simply set the ugly ones aside, as though a legacy were something we could edit without changing its meaning. If you started replacing each plank of wood on a ship, is it even the same ship anymore? If you sand down each uncomfortable bit of a person or institution’s life, at what point have you created something else entirely?

There is something reassuring about a spotless legacy

The same is true of art. Once you sever a work from its artist, its history, and most importantly its context, you are simply rewriting it. What remains might look like the original, but it has been morphed so irreparably that it becomes a bastardized version of what it was. Take Lolita. Lolita is a particularly useful example because its legacy has been repeatedly reshaped by the way we choose to remember it. Its language is beautiful, but its beauty does not exist independently of the disturbing perspective through which it is presented. To ignore that context is not to preserve the novel, but to preserve a distorted version of it. Depiction does not equal endorsement. Interpretation is subjective, but a larger piece of the puzzle is who made it? When? Why? The words on the page have always been the same, but their cultural legacy has changed drastically.  Lolita wasn’t written to glamorize pedophilia, and Vladimir Nabokov never wanted it to be a love story, but it’s become the poster child for romanticizing inappropriate, abusive relationships. That’s part of its legacy.

Similarly, The Hunger Games is returning to our screens in November in the form of a film adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping. When the first book was released, it was a story about class consciousness, fear, dictatorship, freedom, and hope. It was never particularly subtle about any of this, which makes what happened to its legacy all the more interesting. Its political critique has, in some corners of popular culture, been flattened into entertainment, Halloween costumes, TikTok trends. The Mockingjay survives, but the political consciousness does not. It is difficult to remember a book about radical revolution when you are mostly remembering the opulent Capitol fashion and propaganda, but there we are.

The words on the page have always been the same, but their cultural legacy has changed drastically

Perhaps that is why I find the phrase “separate the art from the artist” so unsatisfying. It suggests that art is produced in some sterile vacuum, untouched by the person who made it. It rarely is. A writer’s politics will seep into their work. An artist’s worldview will shape what they choose to depict. Their prejudices and obsessions and contradictions are often precisely what make the work what it is. Sometimes that influence is obvious. Sometimes it takes a little more digging. Either way, it is there. That does not mean the artist gets the final word on their own work. It means that understanding a work requires understanding the circumstances that produced it, and none of this means we should stop reading Lolita, The Bell Jar, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Animal Farm, and countless other foundational texts written by authors with problematic views. Frankly, that would make the world a very boring place. The fact is that worthwhile art does not require a morally spotless creator. In fact, some of the works we value most were made by people whose lives, politics, or beliefs are deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps that is what we should do with uncomfortable legacies: leave them uncomfortable. We do not need to glorify the people who made history, nor do we need to erase what they achieved to acknowledge what they did wrong. We simply need to stop confusing remembrance with reverence.

We simply need to stop confusing remembrance with reverence

Legacy isn’t fine-tuning the gory details until there’s nothing left to object to. It’s remembering the whole thing and resisting the rather human urge to make it prettier than it was.

Image credit: Jay Godwin via Wikimedia Commons