are classics elitist or are you surrounded by elitists?
where i tell you to get a grip and pick up a book
when i was growing up, i was an avid reader. i loved reading usborne books with colourful depictions of scenes from classic stories like romeo and juliet, the snow queen, and rumpelstiltskin. since i was able to read, i continued to develop that skill into reading young adult (ya) novels like divergent by veronica roth and wonder by r.j. palacio. this habit unfortunately did not follow me into my teens.
by that time, i struggled to focus when i was reading because i was simply not interested anymore. the most i read was one book in a year simply because i was not interested in anything that i was reading. i was pointedly more interested (and in hindsight, hyperfixating) on other things like k-pop. it wasn’t just listening to the music or watching their reality shows but it was learning their choreography, organising idol birthday events, and connecting with fellow enthusiasts. that’s all to say that my interest in reading was effectively killed.
what had eventually brought me back to reading was just convincing myself that i was gonna be a reader. that i would eventually pick up a book i was interested in and Read and hopefully pick up another one. i remember constantly telling my friends “i’ll read a book soon,” playing the game of ‘fake it till you make it’ and, i eventually did it!
it was the year of 2022 when i read the yellow wallpaper by charlotte perkins gilman for a uni assignment. it was a short story but it was enough to keep me going to reading other novels like will you stay by norhafsah hamid and an absolutely remarkable thing by hank green. since then, i’ve been reading as much as i’m able to with 37 books read in 2022, 52 in 2023, and most recently 104 books in 2024. my reads range from classics, manga, litfic and some self-help book my university book club was trying to push (i hated it btw).
in the time that i've picked reading back up, i’ve seen booktok rise in popularity and have been subjected to seeing and reading a lot of opinions that i don’t necessarily agree with. some have their merit like reading fanfiction is just as valid as reading any published novel, which i do agree with. however, there has been this particular point of view that has been circulating social media, especially in spaces some would call ‘anti-intellectual’ and that is
classics are elitist to read.
at first, this sounded reasonable but thinking about it for even a second longer started to confuse me. while i understood that its prose could confuse modern contemporary readers and be difficult to understand, i couldn’t understand the angle that classics are inherently inaccessible to the common people. the argument was that some people lack the education to understanding classical texts so much that the common people just cannot read the works of authors like jane austen or charles dickens. therefore, if you are able to read classics, you are some form of an elitist as you are perpetuating the cycle of needing higher education to be able to read classics.
my mother grew up in a kampung (village) with over 10 siblings, received national [public] education like everyone else and had to be the top student in her school to be granted a scholarship to study in the US. when she eventually got to the US, the class that she struggled in the most was classic literature. she told me that she couldn’t make sense of what the professor was trying to tell her and she didn’t see the works the same way the professor did. she had thoughts and opinions about the classics which the professor just brushed off. i had tried telling her that perhaps it was the method of teaching and the attitude of the professor that stopped her from understanding the text. she pushed away my suggestion saying that some people just had a natural aptitude for understanding classic literature, which she didn’t have.
my mother, who is the most hard-working person i know, had conceded trying to understand classics because she believed she didn’t have a certain aptitude. all because of a classic literature class she took in university where her professor was dismissive and perhaps ill-equipped to teach classics to those new to the subject. my mother had received [private] terrtiary education in america but claimed to be unable to understand shakespeare’s works. she was a fine student so why wasn’t she able to understand the texts she was given?
i, on the other hand, was studying locally in a private university as an english student with standards that were frankly quite low. i hated almost all of my non-english classes and was unsatisfied with my introductory english classes — until i had educators who were passionate about english literature. with an educator who told us there were no wrong answers to interpreting literature, giving my class a diverse range of local and international classics, and the freedom to choose the literature we wanted to do our assignments on, i fell in love with classics. i fell in love with classics because of the endless possibilities when it came to interpretation.
if you had told high school me that i would end up being an english literature student in uni, i wouldn’t have believed you. i mean, yea, i signed up for it but did i have the slightest interest of being in love with classics? absolutely not. i definitely had the view that classics were snobbish and that it was just way above me. so to come into my classes with passionate lecturers who prioritised our own understanding and enjoyment had me coming out of university like some kind of book nerd (i love it don’t get me wrong). with different texts, i was spouting out my interpretations with no pushback or argument because we were encouraged to explore what the text could mean to us and know how to justify our interpretations. with classics like kate chopin’s désirée’s baby and the story of an hour, i was giving 21st century southeast asian feminist interpretations. if a classic text has withstood the test of time for hundreds of years, whose to say it can’t withstand one southeast asian’s interpretation of it?
so my questions are,
is it the classics that are elitists or the elitists who are preventing you from reading classics?
is the classics that are at fault or our influenced attitudes towards classics?
the rise of anti-intellectualism online and in our current generation is undeniable. i’ve seen people write against it, fight for it, trying to empathise with it. the bottom line is that we know its there. as observed by many, this has come with the rise of individualism, late-stage capitalism and fascism. anti-intellectualism has become a product of all of these things convincing a lot of people that the world is against them. the answer to the world being against them is Obviously fending for yourself. lock away the information you know so that you can get to the top. ridicule others for daring to think because you yourself can’t think that way and resent that fact.
this is where we see people make claims that you can be such a thing as ‘too woke’, instead of saying it could be an incomplete/inarticulate perspective. the difference is that one is telling someone that their behaviour is undesirable and the other is pointing out what they may be missing. there is this attitude of ‘you are wrong’ instead of ‘i think there could be more to it’. dare i say this comes from individualism, where you don’t feel like you owe others who want to learn an explanation on how they can be better? i do, because it is. its the exact same attitude that elitists employ when they are engaging with people they deem inferior to them.
your enemy is not people making or using new words like ‘mog’, ‘___-maxxing’ or ‘bonkers’. its the people who try to convince you its wrong to speak that way and you’re using language wrong. its the people who try to convince you that there is only one truth to reality as if we all don’t live different lives.
for my mother, it was her professor convincing her through dismissive behaviour that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to understanding classic literature. there simply isn’t. there are only articulate and inarticulate arguments. if someone can prove what they say with textual evidence, it only opens the door to a new perspective. there are no losses to doing this so why do we not let ourselves do it? why do we allow ourselves be limited by influence to remain as we are?
classics are classics because they are about the human condition. even after at least a hundred years, they bypass time and show us that love, identity, family, class and other themes are relevant to us because we are all humans just the same. what is elitist about having to learn from your mistakes because of their consequences on others? emma by jane austen doesn’t think it is. neither does 1995 film clueless. is elitism romeo and juliet’s discussion of baseless rivalry and its consequences? the 1961 and 2021 productions of west side story beg to differ.
classic stories aren’t elitist. its the attitude around it. don’t let these pieces of text written hundreds of years ago intimidate you into thinking that you aren’t as human as the people who wrote them. yea, you may not be able to understand every single word written but do you think classic authors would be able to understand the contemporary fiction you read?
give yourself some grace. let yourself think.
be comfortable with being uncomfortable and don’t let others scare you into believing something isn’t true. if you find yourself unable to understand the text, the internet is there for you. whether it be cliffnotes, litcharts or wise crack’s thug notes (a personal favourite of mine), if you let yourself be curious, there is a whole world ahead of you. there is no crime in wanting to know and in being so curious you do some extra research and maybe even reread the text. learn more about what you like and what you don’t, just like modern works, classics have their own genres. believe me, you’re not gonna get me to read the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde no matter how easy anyone says it is. that’s because i know i prefer classics like the awakening by kate chopin and giovanni’s room by james baldwin and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
free yourself and read what you want. let curiousity drive you and be prepared for the world that awaits you.