Censorship on a Wrinkle in Term Paper

This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can." (L'Engle)

Nancy-Lou Patterson notices that A Wrinkle in Time is, in its structure and meaning, a Christian fantasy:

In LEngle's works, as in the works of other Christian fantasists, the narrative gains its dynamism from the creative and attractive powers of the good characters. There is a dialectic in Christian literature in which the meeting of good and evil results in more and better good. The plot is always precisely this, that the corruption of the good created world by the forces of antibeing proves to be a felix culpa, a happy fault, whereby the action of God brings a new good, a new creation, even out of evil." (Bloom, 73)

This was the most powerful reason that led to the banishing of the book, because it was structured as a Christian fantasy, blending science and religion to convey its main meaning about the opposition good and evil.

L' Engle herself also talks about the difficulties she encountered when publishing the book, and she intimates that, in all probability, the ideas she put forth in the book about evil, and the nature of science and religion were not accepted because they were ahead of the time when the book appeared, in 1962, and were not common in children's books:

Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time" had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books."

Another reason that L'Engle identifies for the problems she had with publishing A Wrinkle in Time has feminist connotations: it is a science fiction book who has a female protagonist in its center.

Also, Herbert Foestrel mentions in his chronicle of banned books an instance for one of the challenges brought against A Wrinkle in Time:

When a fifth-grade student at Mountain View Elementary School in Newton, North Carolina, brought home A Wrinkle in Time as an assignment for an academically gifted class, she told her father, Ed Palmer, that she didn't like the book. After Palmer complained to school officials, teachers allowed the girl to read an alternative assignment. But Palmer wanted the book pulled from all school libraries. On January 29, 1996, he told the school board that A Wrinkle in Time was inappropriate for fifth grade because it makes references to the occult, witchcraft, and mysticism." (Foestrel, 260)

Thus, among the main reasons for banishing L'Engle's book, were its inappropriateness for children because of its mystical implications, its feminist content, and perhaps its being considered too challenging and possibly influential, all these motivated in their turn by the time at which it appeared, at the beginning of the sixties.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Women Writers of Children's Literature. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998

Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002

L'Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1962

Special Message from Madeleine L'Engle. http://www.powells.com/biblio/0440498058

Lundin, Anne. Constructing the Cannon for Children's Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers.

New York: Routledge, 2004

Madeleine L' Engle. A Special Message from….....