Censorship and trigger warnings: Gatekeeping an authentic response to literature

With Scott's "Ivanhoe" being the latest casualty of modernity's moral pomposity, Anna Keenan shows us the unintended consequences of trigger warnings

Trigger warnings are no longer surprising. The incessant drive for complete safety at university is something we know all too well by now. With every passing week, there’s another classic that receives the red-pen treatment for the acute danger it poses to our brittle young students. The latest to receive this honour is Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Published in 1819 and set shortly after the Third Crusade in the late twelfth century, it should come as no surprise that this historical epic doesn’t accurately depict our modern social mores. However, academics at the University of Warwick seem unable to contextualise this incongruence or, at least, believe it would be remiss of them not to give students a banal heads-up that the obvious culprits, racism and sexism, are littered throughout the text.

Last year, The Times reported that “Ten universities, including three from the Russell Group, have withdrawn books from course study lists, or made them optional, in case they cause students harm.”  For students, this bureaucratic meddling understandably warrants a disgruntled shrug of the shoulders, or a “sounds about right” head shake of disapproval. After all, campuses today are brimming with well-being support, safe spaces, and student-led curriculum change, seemingly at the expense of academic sincerity.

What these removals and silly warnings really deserve, however, is to be met with fury. The message it sends is clear: you students are vulnerable, and we the universities will protect you from the big bad world. Nothing should be more of an insult to people who have signed up to rigorously study the greatest literary creations, no matter how unsettling their findings may be.

Victims of this axing include Colson Whitehead’s 2017 The Underground Railroad due to graphic depictions of slavery and August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie for discussions of suicide. In this act of censorship in which the supposedly challenging nature of such content is sufficient justification, the student becomes a bystander in the debates around literature. Academics have taken it upon themselves to sanitise the potency, the risk, of literature by preventing students from engaging with it themselves. For the greater good, they say, for their own safety, surely it’s better to keep them at a distance from material that might be anything less than a walk in the park.

Unfortunately, this censorship strikes us as completely unsurprising and trigger warnings are the precursor to this disturbing development. The Times also found that more than 1000 texts in undergraduate courses have been given trigger warnings. Originally used to alert students to content or imagery that may invoke trauma responses, their usage has been gradually expanded across syllabi to cover things as simple as “blood”, “symbols of evil” and “pain”. This is a classic case of the slippery slope and not in its fallacious form: experts feel increasingly obliged to adopt infantilising safety-conscious interventions to soften the blow of uncomfortable content, quickly plummeting us to the point of casting off texts entirely.

This institutionalised risk aversion inhibits students from engaging with literature authentically. Both the removal of texts and trigger warnings represent a creeping infringement on independent thought. By pre-empting an emotional response, an individual’s natural reaction is warped by the assumption of what ought to cause distress. And, through safeguarding adults against an infinite possibility of grievances, not only are they told that they are vulnerable to the ubiquitous threats of life but also that their first encounter with a piece of literature should be tainted by the haze of fear. This excessive branding of texts with flashing warning signs retunes a student’s mind to be more sensitive to troubling content, limiting their ability to enjoy a spontaneous and unregulated response.

Another issue with trigger warnings is that with students’ perspectives subtly clouded, they are primed for certain interpretations. For example, the University of Aberdeen has updated its trigger warnings for Beowulf, adding one warning for “ableism”. Some scholars have argued that able-bodied Beowulf is equated with goodness and heroism, whereas his disabled, “infirm” (“unhælu” in Old English) monster enemy Grendel is equated with terror and immorality. Evidently, the warning is based on scholarly criticism; before even reading the text, students are inculcated into a particular literary perspective, and their ability to think about it freely is eroded.

Strangely, in this new paradigm literature is taken literally. Subsequently, any unsavoury element must be assessed according to the reader’s lived experience rather than what the author is communicating about the world at large or the human condition. In this dynamic, the reader’s feelings (not the characters’ or author’s) assume priority when engaging with a text, such that it becomes a mirror of themselves. Instead of challenging the reader’s worldview and experiences it abruptly meets them where they already are, suggesting that vulnerability should be their first point of access to a text.

So: your course has removed texts and added a plethora of trigger warnings to help you in your self-care routine, the experts have hazard-checked it for you and held your hand to mitigate the impact as you descend into the murky depths of literature and life’s uncomfortable truths; furious yet? Good.

These chilling campus developments suggest that discomfort need not be an integral, necessary, and exhilarating part of engaging with literature. Ironically, it is the unpredictability of trauma response that renders catch-all trigger warnings and blanket bans a futile method of precaution—there is no telling how individuals will respond to literature. But it is the unexpected mess, unplanned shock, and complex revelations that take you into an unknown world and frees you from the prison of your own experiences. Neither of which can nor should be predicted.

Anna Keenan is a Free Speech Champion from Nottingham. She is studying history of art and English literature at the University of Glasgow and will be spending this semester in Amsterdam singing Jacques Brel.