Although the term "whitewashing" is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Rowling's revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)Ībsurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it - and catching hell. What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people's characters - and that's the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself - then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character's race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read. The "gay-late" story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. But the researchers also found that readers of the "gay-late" story showed "significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals" than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character.
Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren't told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. In each case, the readers' "experience-taking" - the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story's protagonist - was measured. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn't revealed until near the end. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In one version, the character was straight. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. Still, this is part of science's job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge - if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.Ī far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item.
Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, "The Sorrows of Young Werther," inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. The suggestibility of readers isn't news. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later. The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models.
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