The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [41]
Let me offer two contrasting examples: the graphic novel and the well-made play.
Low and High
The graphic novel is a descendant of the much maligned comic book, a genre so ubiquitous and so reviled in the 1940s and ’50s that the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on the subject, and an alarmed industry moved toward self-censorship by adopting a Comics Code banning words like terror and zombie and decreeing that all criminals must be punished. (Unlike, we might note, all criminals in literature …) The catalyst, or we might say the reagent, for these hearings was a book called Seduction of the Innocent (1954) by the German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham, who had previously published the essay “The Psychopathology of Comic Books” in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, complained of hidden sexual themes, perversion, violence, and morbidity in the comic books of the era, and urged that comics be prohibited to children under the age of fifteen.
“What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?”1 Some of Wertham’s most derided observations, like the gay themes he detected in Batman & Robin, and the dominatrix image of Wonder Woman, are now, minus the moral disapproval, commonplaces of critical interpretation. I was interested by his strong reaction to the publication of Macbeth in comic book form—a mode that is now familiar but at the time provoked Wertham’s disapproval and also, as he notes, that of a distinguished American drama critic:
Another important feature of a crime comic book [Wertham wrote] is the first page of the first story, which often gives the child the clue to the thrill of violence that is to be its chief attraction. This is a psychological fact that all sorts of children have pointed out to me. Macbeth in comic book form is an example. On the first page the statement is made: “Amazing as the tale may seem, the author gathered it from true accounts”—the typical crime comic book formula, of course. The first balloon has the words spoken by a young woman (Lady Macbeth): “Smear the sleeping servants with BLOOD!”
To the child who looks at the first page “to see what’s in it,” this gives the strongest suggestion. And it gives the whole comic book the appeal of a crime comic book. As for the content of this Macbeth, John Mason Brown, the well-known critic, expressed it in the Saturday Review of Literature: “To rob a supreme dramatist of the form at which he excelled is mayhem plus murder in the first degree … although the tale is murderous and gory, it never rises beyond cheap horror … What is left is not a tragedy. It is trashcan stuff.”2
“Trashcan stuff” is very like what the detractors of Renaissance drama had to say about the literary merit of the entire genre in Shakespeare’s time, and of course Macbeth as a play is violent, bloody, and based on true accounts. That has long been part of its appeal to audiences—in addition to, or sometimes despite, Shakespeare’s language. But it’s the novelization aspect, the transformation of the play into another form and other words, that the drama critic finds most offensive.
Such translations of the plays into a form that might appeal to children have been popular at least since Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales from Shakespeare, although the Lambs stay much closer to Shakespeare’s language: in their tale of Macbeth, we read that “she took his dagger, with purpose to stain the cheeks of the grooms with blood, to make it seem their guilt,” and that “the proofs against the grooms (the dagger being produced against them and their faces smeared with blood) were sufficiently strong.”3) For Wertham, a psychiatrist who served as an expert witness in numerous medico-legal cases, the chief issue is the danger he thought sex and sensationalism posed for children