by Mary Cappelli, MFA, JD, PhD

Recently at my very liberal high school in West Los Angeles, I was called into the Administration because a student complained about the use of derogatory descriptions of the Congolese people in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I defended my choice by explaining I teach the text as a harsh critique of white progress and white exploitation. I further explained that the text was being read in conversation with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in order to interrogate colonization and the scramble for Africa.  It didn’t matter. Some 17-year-old AP Literature student and his pesky parents were upset and didn’t want their child or other students for that matter to be exposed to the “inherently racist” content in both texts.

Conrad and Achebe weren’t the only writers under siege this semester. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was challenged for its homosexuality and graphic rape scene; J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, for its profanity; Andrew Marvel’s Poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” for its sexual seduction.

I’ve been teaching English at both the high school and college level for 25 years without ever having a text challenged because a student was emotionally triggered by its content. I’m sure along the way some students at some point felt some unease when reading emotionally difficult material, but no one ever complained. Certainly, no one ever ran off to the administrator’s office to have a text censored.

Times have changed and a new parenting style exists that wants to coddle and shelter students from the unpleasantries of human existence; however, by doing so we also shelter a generation from the wisdom that life is not always easy and the tools to face life’s challenges.

Life itself has triggers – it is the duty of literature to trigger a human response to life’s complexities. Likewise, it is a reader’s duty to be triggered and to feel the trials and tribulations of a book’s characters.  The reader and the text have a mutual duty—to be human in all its gore and glory.

To satisfy the Administrative mandate of my English Department (yet acutely aware of the rumblings of danger when democracy begins to censor itself) I offer (under duress) a list of trigger warnings for my Fall Semester course content.

(Note these texts, unlike the others mentioned herein, missed the moralizing gaze of the parents.

Trigger Warnings

Oedipus Rex. Sophocles (429 BC).  PARENTS BEWARE. Makes Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings seemed tamed compare to this. Sexual content: Incest and patricide. May encourage a disturbed reader with some sicko Oedipal Complex to kill his father and f*ck his mother and vice versa. It gets worse.  He even pumps out a few kids out of the same womb he came out of.  Stupid mother doesn’t recognize her own son who has ankle scars from the physical abuse she laid on him earlier in life. Subversive elements: It’s where we get the hackneyed term mother f*cker. Remember Freud’s Oedipal Complex, right? Any good teacher worth her pint in retirement benefits will point this out to her high schoolers.  Mother F*cker! Violence: child abuse, stabbing out of eyes, and road rage.

The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer (1392). Parents might have read this in Middle English back in the day and probably never understood a thing. In one of the tales, The Wife of Bath tells us of a knight who upon returning from the Christian Crusades sees a young lass in the field and (trigger warning) rapes her. Yes, rapes! Rather than condemnation, the king hands over the sentence to the queen who gives the knight the opportunity to make amends if he can find the answer to what it is that women most desire.  (It’s not being raped, by the way.) Don’t worry, parents. Even if read in modern English, most, if not all of this text, will go over the head of today’s Instagram readers.  Chaucer wants us to laugh at the gap between idealism and reality, laugh at the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, laugh at women like Alisoun who has five husbands and enjoys traveling the world. This is where we get the Bravo Wink when we are supposed to laugh at the gap of how people portray themselves to the world and what they really are like when the camera’s off like in the Real Housewives Reality TV series. If you think Andy Cohen’s world is raunchy, this is worse!

Hamlet. William Shakespeare (1599). Severe Trigger Warning: Sexual Content:  We all know that Oedipus was f*cked up for f*cking his mother, well… guess what?  The forlorn Prince Hamlet sexually roughens up his mother Gertrude, and probably would fuck her, if he could. Something is stopping him like his Father’s ghost who was murdered by his Uncle Claudius. Violence: It’s a tragedy, parents so assume everyone is dead at the end of the play. Mental Issues: Beware. Young Hamlet is overly sensitive, and his parents tell him TO GET OVER IT, basically stop being a girly man and toughen up! Oh yeah…Ophelia commits suicide. This anti-Snowflake parent style might be offensive to both parents and students who are used to being coddled. One good lesson for today’s generation: “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In other words, stop being a damn narcissist and drowning in your pity puddles.

Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller (1949). Trigger Warning for all modern snowflake families whose kids are as f*cked up as the Loman family. Willy and his wife Linda (who sits in the background darning her old lady hosiery and making lousy American cheese sandwiches for her cheating husband) are failures as parents. Willy wants Swiss cheese, BTF, Linda! Neither fucked up parents bother to discipline their kids Biff and Happy nor do they ever follow through on teaching their kids how to be contributing members of society.  Like many parents, they are losers. Trigger warnings: suicide, adultery, abuse, cheating.  This is the only book out of seven titles that my AP Literature class claimed they ever read this semester—maybe the dysfunctional family resonates with them.

Frankenstein. Mary Shelley (1818). Trigger Warning for bad parents and the monsters they create. This tale might resonate with you on a personal level. Here, we have a mama’s boy whose mother adopted Elizabeth a playmate/wife for his son.  Poor Victor Frankenstein agrees to marry the girl on his mother’s deathbed. It gets better. Victor is more interested in playing God, hanging out with Henry and birthing his own offspring.  So, he studies with the best of them and begets a creature so ugly that as soon as it’s born, he runs away from it. (Kind of like what some of you have done with your Lil’ monsters.) Oh, there’s lots of other stuff besides parental abandonment that might trigger other psycho-social-racial triggers like child murder, Islamophobia, Xenophobia, and every other phobia you can think of. The big idea of this text is that men left to their own devices will choose personal glory over everything else. A wee bit like Willy Loman, but worse.

So, now that we have scrapped my College Board-approved syllabus of classic texts, that might harm your sensitivities, I recommend scrapping AP English Literature from your schedule altogether.

An interdisciplinary ethnographer, Mary Louisa Cappelli is a graduate of USC, UCLA, and Loyola Law school. She previously taught in the Interdisciplinary Program at Emerson College and engages in participatory action research and legislative advocacy in the Americas.