Fair For Its Day / Literature

• Around the World in 80 Days: The book's protagonist, an Englishman, falls in love with and marries an Indian princess. Although Verne describes her as fair-skinned and notes that her English is perfect, most likely as an excuse to make the pairing more acceptable to his 19th century audience, featuring an interracial marriage at all is still progressive for its time period.
• Bret King Mysteries: While Bret's Mexican and Navajo friends Benny and Ace (particularly the former) are a bit stereotypical, they are both heroic, developed characters. Throughout the series, Mexican and Navajo culture are portrayed as distinct from white American society, but are portrayed with a decent amount of dignity, seriousness and accuracy.
• Cudjo's Cave is a powerful and nuanced antislavery and anti-Confederacy tale that is far ahead of its time in condemning the attitudes behind secession and having the non-stereotypical Pomp be an assertive and powerful black man who fights back against white abusers, acts as an authority figure to several of his white abolitionist allies, and survives, but the native African Cudjo is the subject of some Condescending Compassion, even from Pomp, for his tribal religious beliefs, and fails to survive the book.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is now considered to be a heavily dated book. Its main character has Hollywood Autism, with little resemblance to the real condition. At the time it was written, however, such a sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of a person with autism was revolutionary and almost unheard-of.
• In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri shows a surprisingly progressive (for the time) view on homosexuals: he does condemn the sin theologically by putting unrepentant sodomites in Hell, but treats individual characters with humanity, sympathy, respect and, in the case of his former teacher, Brunetto Latini, even affection. In Purgatory, repenting lustful souls share the same fate whether heterosexual or homosexual, just walking in opposite directions, with no extra punishment for the repentant sodomites.
• H. Rider Haggard's 19th century stories about his Great White Hunter Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, etc.) have a number of Unfortunate Implications and the occasional racist overtone, but actually try hard not to be racist. The second book, Allan Quatermain, even opens with an anti-racist essay by Quatermain. This does not make the books politically correct, mind you, and there's still a little accidental racism, but Haggard really does try, and his books are notable for lacking the nastier stereotypes of black people, having many strong black characters and a sympathetic interracial romance. Admittedly, they're Star-Crossed Lovers, but Quatermain notes that the problems they face are largely circumstantial, and maybe one day such love may be quite acceptable. A notable quote from King Solomon's Mines has Quatermain talk about gentlemen:
  "What is a gentleman? I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers — no, I'll scratch that word "niggers" out, for I don't like it. I've known natives who are, and so you'll say, Harry, my boy, before you're done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain't."
• Rudyard Kipling rejected the notion that white people were inherently superior to non-white people. He believed that non-white people were no less capable of nobility, morality, and kindness. However, he also believed that non-whites needed the guidance of white people to better themselves, with his definition of "better" being English culture. This was a fairly common belief at the time argued by many people who rejected racism but supported British imperialism.
  • White Man's Burden has inspired a great deal of argument over what the intended message was. If read as a straight defense of imperialism, it still states that whites attained the pinnacle of civilization through chance rather than racial superiority. Therefore, non-white people can be civilized and shouldn't be excluded or abused. This would be culturally supremacist, but not actually racist. Some people insist that the poem is a parody of imperialism, refuting it altogether.
  • Several other of Kipling's poems — "Jobson's Amen" and "We and They" — are rather scathing towards the attitude that British are intrinsically superior to native people.
  • "Fuzzy-Wuzzy", which refers to the Beja by the rather unfortunate epithet of, well, "Fuzzy-Wuzzy", nevertheless acknowledges "yo're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first-class fightin' man".
  • Gunga Din, which has the titular Indian water-carrier — viewed as lower than dirt by the British soldiers, including the narrator — end up performing a Tear Jerker of a Heroic Sacrifice to save the narrator. By the end, the soldiers' racism and Gunga Din's heroism end up as a huge subversion of the then-popular Mighty Whitey trope.
    You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
  • The 1939 Film of the Book portrays the Indian antagonists fairly sympathetically, simply fighting to get the British out. As the Indian leader notes, "our civilization was great while Englishmen lived in caves and painted their faces blue."
• Uncle Tom's Cabin is an example in regard to Unfortunate Implications — the black characters are caricatures, but they're at least treated as human beings, and the whole point of the novel is to condemn slavery. When released, the novel outraged the Southerners, and a genre was created to respond to it. Over the years, supporters of slavery created In Name Only adaptions of the story that used the worst of the blackface caricatures. It was these characterizations that stuck in the public's consciousness and gave rise to the concept of the "Uncle Tom" (the black man who was subservient to white people and was seen as a "sell out" to his own race). The book's Uncle Tom character was anything but the stereotype: he was killed for defying his owner to help other slaves.
• Unlike other examples here, the "for its day" part in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn't merely a comparatively positive portrayal that was nonetheless unfortunately marred; the caricatures in the book were part of a conscious subversion of such portrayals, as they reflect how black people look through the eyes of a racist child; as the book progresses, and Huck wises up, the black characters become less and less cartoonish. Much is made of Jim's many humorously absurd superstitions, but his suspicions are frequently vindicated, and many white characters believe things just as preposterous if not more so. As is requisite for any complex and well-rounded character, Jim has flaws and virtues like a real human being. While superstitious, he's also determined, clear-sighted, compassionate, and has strong moral convictions, as seen with his love for his family and his protective instincts towards Huck. Strangely, this makes the book fall into an odd position, with its invocation of N-Word Privileges causing more trouble than books that are legitimately prejudiced. The N-bomb was part of common parlance for the impoverished, backwards southerners depicted in the novel, so it's not like Twain's misrepresenting reality.
• Dracula often gets critiqued for its usage of Sex Signals Death and treating it like independent women are deserving of death, since Lucy, who had three suitors, is one of the two main characters to die in the novel, while Mina, who's Happily Married, survives. In the actual book, Lucy has no ambitions beyond marrying a man she loves, and she has so many suitors because she's pure and innocent. Her letters to Mina makes it clear that she feels horrible for having declined proposals from two of them, meaning that she did not have a relationship with several men at once. Her death is treated as nothing short of a tragedy, and since she died before her wedding, she was most likely a virgin. Mina, on the other hand, married in the course of the story, and figured out most of the Count's plots on her own using Jonathan's journal (with some help from Van Helsing).
• God-Emperor of Dune: Duncan Idaho says some shockingly homophobic things that definitely echo Frank Herbert’s own views on the subject (Duncan is outright disgusted that the Fish Speakers are lesbians). But despite that, they’re portrayed as a relic of the era when the original Duncan lived, with the present view being that same-sex relationships are unusual but nothing to get upset about.
• Robert A. Heinlein
  • Heinlein was given the outline for his novel Sixth Column by the racist but influential sci-fi editor John W. Campbell. He disliked the racism in the story, so he "fixed" it. Unfortunately, while it was fair for its day for having a "good guy" be Asian, it still contains enough racism to make you cringe today. He considered the story an Old Shame. His Farnham's Freehold lacks the excuse of being someone else's outline, but it tends to be more Unfortunate Implications. In his other works, the Unfortunate Implications are dialed down or absent (e.g. the narrator of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is explicitly multiracial, and the narrator of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is half black).
  • Tunnel in the Sky is also on the receiving end of this. While it seems ridiculously 1950sish at times — like boys and girls not being allowed to go out hunting together, or girls' obsession with getting married — it would have actually been pretty radical by the standards of the time, with strong female characters, including a military corps made up of women in combat roles — something that we're only just now, in the 21st century, accepting. One of the strong characters is a black woman. It's also notable for depicting a society where race is not something considered important, resulting in nobody in-universe seeing anything particularly noteworthy about the protagonist being black.
    • While his family also being followers of a Middle Eastern religion.
  • The hero of Starship Troopers is revealed to be Filipino (in almost the last sentence of the novel, but it still probably raised eyebrows just the same), and the heroine of Podkayne of Mars is part Maori.
  • In Space Cadet (Heinlein), one of the cadets accuses his classmates of being racist. They protest they don't have any negative feelings about one of their officers, who is black. "Don't be silly " is the reply; they don't have such feelings about their officer, who is, after all, human. He's talking about Venusians.
  • Heinlein was born in 1907 in Missouri, so he was definitely a radical progressive given his upbringing. Even so, he didn't escape all of it, and still espoused the racist lie of "The Lost Cause", which among other things said that slavery was good for black people and that freeing them was bad because they're naturally violent and don't deserve freedom. Heinlein's progressive attitudes softened that to them not being ready for freedom, as shown in Double Star with the quote "A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!" In other words, if black people were enslaved, it's because they deserved it, and the North was wrong to free them after the war.
  • While Heinlein's female characters were generally strong, and three-dimensional in their characterization, by the standards of mid-20th Century writers, there was still a fair bit of sexism baked into them. Most of Heinlein's female characters find happiness through marriage, and can be very dependant on the story's male lead. He stated many times in his works that men and women are different psychologically, and that there's nothing wrong with that. Considering he wrote most of his works prior to Second Wave Feminism, his female characters can be astonishingly progessive. Still, it's jarring in Time Enough for Love when every female character who encounters Lazarus Long considers herself a failure as a woman when he rejects her sexual advances.
• The Kouroukan Fouga may seem somehow reactionary today, but for its time, it was a revolutionary document and the first full-fledged constitution of a federation, five centuries and a half before the US got one.
• "The Little Black Boy" from William Blake's Songs of Innocence is a statement against racism, in which the little black boy begins by noting that Dark Is Not Evil, and then saying that when all are dead and gone to Heaven, their "clouds" of white and black will be lifted and they will all be alike.
• A non-fiction example is the first volume of The Story of Civilization, the best general history series of the 20th century. The first volume was published in 1934, and is about the origins of civilization, and the author goes out of his way in the preface to apologize for the various stupid mistakes and simplifications he makes. He also makes the point that most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice; moreover, he flat-out states that civilization has nothing to do with racial qualities. Then he goes on to call Aborigines and Africans savages (right after saying we shouldn't use the word savage), gives a now incredibly antiquated overview of neolithic life, and talks about how the loose morals of various civilizations led to their destruction.
• Like most of the protagonists of 'boy's own' British adventure novels of the early twentieth century, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps reads as being quite racist and jingoistic to a modern reader; however, when compared to his peers (such as "Bulldog" Drummond), protagonist Richard Hannay is notable for actually being quite open-minded and empathetic towards many of the traditionally stereotyped groups of the literature of the period (such as Germans, pacifists, Jews, etc), and frequently avoids demonizing them. A lot has been made of the racial slurs against Jews in the first chapter of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but a more careful reading shows that they are all made by one paranoid and unbalanced character. In Real Life, Buchan supported Zionism to the extent that at the outbreak of World War II, he featured on Hitler's death list of pro-Semitic persons.
  • Greenmantle, the second Richard Hannay novel, is noteworthy for treating its German villains with a degree of sympathy and respect, quite surprising given that the book was written during World War I. Even Kaiser Wilhelm makes a brief cameo, coming off as a decent man manipulated by his subordinates into starting the war.
• Heavily subverted in the Nevil Shute novel Ruined City, whose protagonist gives a modern reader the distinct impression that he would not be anywhere near so upset about his wife's infidelity save for the fact that she's chosen to conduct it with an Arab. But by the time you find this out, said protagonist already looks several kinds of jerkass for completely unrelated reasons, whereas the Arab comes over rather more sympathetically.
• The story "The Jewish Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen, with its message that Christianity is just better than Judaism and its protagonist who just wants to convert to Christianity, is insensitive at best by modern standards. But for its time, it is fairly tolerant: Sarah goes to Heaven, without even having to be baptized.
• Parzival features a half-white, half-Moor brother of the main character called Feirefiz. While the author, Wolfram von Eschenbach, claimed that Feirefiz would have skin that alternated black-and-white because of this (like a magpie), Feirefiz is treated much more decently than most other pagans in Arthurian Legend — he gets baptized, sees the Holy Grail, marries the Grail-maiden, and goes back home to a happy ending.
• Orlando Furioso: The Moorish knight Sacripant, who is, to some extent, the story's Chew Toy, but is also probably the only genuinely decent person around. It's also worth noting that he gets a happy ending (although it involves converting to Christianity), while Orlando does not: Angelica's Character Development from Rich Bitch to caring human being involves her choosing Sacripant over Orlando.
• Growltiger's Last Stand from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats uses the CH word to refer to the Siamese at one point. Howsoever, they are undeniably the heroes, and their defeat of the evil Growltiger is a Moment of Awesome.
• Robert E. Howard:
  • While Howard was unfortunately racist (although less hysterically than his friend Lovecraft), he managed to write a few reasonably well-rounded black characters in the Solomon Kane series, not least of which is N'Longa, who is not only a native African, but also a powerful witch-doctor. His tone when referring to African natives is condescending, and he does use the nasty stereotypes a lot, but definitely not exclusively, which would have been par for the course.
  • Howard wrote many stereotypical Damsel in Distress characters (usually at the insistence of his publishers -- it let artist Margaret Brundage paint sexy girls for the covers), he also managed to create several strong female characters — Belit, Velaria, and Red Sonya in particular. Not to mention Dark Agnes de Chastillion, who could easily be considered one of the first Feminist Fantasy-characters.
  • The stories of Conan the Barbarian were remarkably diverse in terms of race for the 1930s era (just look at this map from the Hyboria Age◊), with many non-white characters who were both Conan's allies and enemies.
  • There are plenty of dark-skinned savages in Howard's stories, but it also important to remember that to Howard's mind, savagery is a good thing; all civilization does is make people corruptible, weak and complacent, whereas the savage is forced to be strong, sharp and clever.
• Arthur C. Clarke's original version of Childhood's End (1954) was extremely fair for its time, but slips up describing the Utopia: "The convenient word "nigger" was no longer tabu in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone." Cringe-inducing, along with the use of 'negro', but ameliorated by the black Jan Rodricks's adventuring & subsequent appearance at the end as the last man.
• Isaac of York in Ivanhoe is uncomfortably close to a Greedy Jew for some modern readers. He's a wealthy and cautious Jewish moneylender who really likes his wealth. Although at least one of the epigraphs from a chapter involving his character is taken from The Merchant of Venice, Isaac is actually one of the good guys. In contrast to Shylock, he repeatedly states that he loves his daughter more than all his wealth. The persecution he suffers at the hands of the Christian villains is always characterized as unjust. The heroes always treat him and his daughter fairly, and Isaac, in turn, is quite capable of generosity. His greed is clearly an endearing character flaw rather than the core of his being.
• Machiavelli's The Prince certainly qualifies. These days, it's largely considered a manual for puppy kicking, and only the most cynical dictator or greasy politician would follow it. When it was written, it was basic pragmatism and somewhat hopeful. A small minority of critics go so far as to label the whole thing a satire.
  Further, he ought to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles at convenient seasons of the year; and as every city is divided into guilds or into societies, he ought to hold such bodies in esteem, and associate with them sometimes, and show himself an example of courtesy and liberality; nevertheless, always maintaining the majesty of his rank, for this he must never consent to abate in anything.
• Julian Tuwim's Murzynek Bambo (literal translation: Bambo the little Negro) was a 1930s Polish poem for kids which was meant to teach tolerance by showing that Bambo may be black and live in Africa, but he's still the same boy as you and me, sometimes misbehaving but being a good guy after all, who loves his mom and gets good grades at school. Today it is often seen as extremely insulting and racist, mainly because it shows Bambo doing things other little boys around the world do, like climbing a (palm) tree or refusing to take a bath.
• R.A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt not only set off loads of cliches, but it portrayed a character who was a member of an "Evil" race (ordinarily just villainous mooks) as a person. However, these days others point out that in-universe, almost every other drow are Always Chaotic Evil xenophobes, and Drizzt simply not being that way makes him come off as either "One of the good ones", or implying that it's the Drow culture that's bad - both sentiments are considered quite racist during The New '20s.
• Struwwelpeter from Germany features a very 19th century outlook on family life and children's obedience, marked by its infamous spurts of grotesque violence and Dark Humour (Fingore and repeated Death of a Child, to name just a few). But it features the often-forgotten story of the Inky Boys: Three kids who tease a black boy for being black, and then get their just desserts when St Nikolas dips them into a big vat of ink. When they continue to tease the boy, they just come off as the ridiculous racists they are. The black boy is called a "moor" by the narrator, which would be considered offensive today, but was very much a descriptive term back then. As you can see, the story isn't exactly pro-racism.
• German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote in his non-fiction book The Decline of the West that every major culture is not understandable from the POV of most other major cultures. Which he claimed was the case with westerners and Jews, too. Now, note he wrote this during a time when antisemites would spread the craziest conspiracy theories about the eeeevul Jews. And in another work, he criticized German antisemitism, pointing out that the Brits didn't mind that Benjamin Disraeli was Jewish, and only cared that he was a competent prime minister. And in yet another work, he wrote how real men don't care for the race of their women, and only choose whomever is the right mother for their kids — and may even prefer women of another race. And finally, he pointed out how in South Africa, black and white miners worked in the same mine, but the white miner was paid 2 shillings per hour for 8 hours of work per day, while the black one (though Spengler used the word "kaffer", which he likely didn't know is considered very offensive) worked 12 hours for 1 shilling (per day, not per hour).
• The early Tom Swift (1910) novels are an interesting case. In the books, the few times characters (even the villain) reference the black friend, Eradicate's, race, he is called "black", which is more than fair for its day in books written over twice as close to the days of legal slavery than to today. Unfortunately, the narrator calls him everything short of the n-word in the first book when he is in a chapter for a long time, apparently to avoid redundancy. Also, Eradicate is implied to be rather lazy, which is jarring simply because he seems to spend all of his waking day looking for work, whereas a white character living as a hobo also plays a prominent part in the book, but without implications of laziness. That said, Eradicate also saves Tom from very dangerous situations multiple times, so Mighty Whitey is averted, despite Tom fixing his stuff often (which Tom also does with most of the secondary white characters as well).
• Live and Let Die was Ian Fleming's second 007 novel (1954) — while the book's narrative and the black dialect Bond hears in Harlem read pretty cringe-worthy, he observes they're interested in the same things as everyone else, and is glad "they're not genteel about it". One of Mister Big's mooks is instructed to hurt Leiter "considerably", but has bonded with him over their mutual love of jazz. He hurts him just a little and apologizes, as he doesn't dare cross his boss. Mister Big himself notes that black people have made major contributions to many human endeavors, and aims to be the first black super-criminal.
  • During Bond's initial briefing, even M (not a character noted for tolerance or open-mindedness) says that Mr. Big or someone like him was inevitable. "The Negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions — scientists, doctors, writers. It's about time they turned out a great criminal. After all, there are 250,000,000 of them in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They've got plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow's taught one of them the technique."
• The Land of Oz series by L. Frank Baum makes it difficult to realize that it was written more than a hundred years ago when you consider how many women are in positions of power, how many different personalities and mannerisms come with each woman, there was an all-female revolt against the Emerald City, the entire Land of Oz itself is ruled by a woman, and how little cultural quips such as women being delegated to being inside the home are mercilessly shunned by eponymous characters. It's about as quietly feminist a fantasy world as it gets, and it was written in a time nearly two decades before the United States granted women the right to vote. Though at the same time, one doesn't have to read too carefully to spot some pretty ridiculous (by today's standards) stereotypes. For instance, the soldiers of that all-female revolt use knitting needles as their weapon of choice, and they conquer the Emerald City because the army (which is only one old man) would never dare harm a lady. Also, when the leader of the revolt, Jinjur, is expelled from her throne, she laments that she now has to go back home and milk cows. Still, Jinjur is expelled by the all-female army of real soldiers fielded by Glinda the Good, and replaced on the throne by another woman, Queen Ozma. So it's not exactly The Patriarchy Strikes Back. Baum was a suffragist himself (in fact his mother-in-law was feminist and suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose views were even more radical than that of most women's rights activists at the time, which he channeled into his work).
• To Kill a Mockingbird has been criticized for the use of racial epithets (even by the good guys) and for not developing black characters completely enough, and Atticus for not being as completely accepting of African-Americans as some people would like — but considering that it's set in the 1930s, just the fact that he forbids his children from using the word "nigger" and honestly argues Tom Robinson's case in court even knowing that he can't win (as well as the fact that he actually almost does win) is quite a thing in itself.
• Italian author Emilio Salgari was revolutionary for late 19th century-early 20th century Italy, as he would have female heroines and invariably portray colonialism as the result of either greed or well-intentioned ignorance and often took the parts of the indigenous people in his novels, openly stating they had any right to oppose forced Europeanization (and putting the blame for the Indian Mutiny of 1859 firmly on the East India Company for walking over Indian customs). On the other hand, modern audiences will cringe a little at his characters, considering the various races of mankind and assuming that a determinate character is brave or a coward due to his origins, or the implied superiority of then-current European civilization (keyword current: he states that many past non-European civilizations were on par or superior to the European one of their time, and that the European superiority is due to non-European decadence and mixing foolish customs to more civilized ones). He also considered smoking a healthy habit.
• The Silence of the Lambs centered on a Creepy Crossdresser serial killer who murders and skins women to make himself a woman suit. However, both the book and the film try to distinguish between real transgender people and the villain, who only thinks he's transgender due to his own self-hatred, and go out of their way to point out that most transgender people are normal, decent people who have no unusual inclination towards violence. The doctor Crawford goes to for help finding Buffalo Bill gives a passionate speech about how trans people are just people who deserve gender-affirming care (although that's not what he calls it), and associating the clinic with Buffalo Bill will set back their advocacy for trans acceptance by years. One of the ways Lecter suggests for finding a description or photograph of the killer is to look at people who both faked their identity, and were turned down for gender-affirming care for psychological reasons; the former because a criminal record for almost anything (besides, well, charges based upon them cross-dressing) disqualifies the applicant (and both Lecter and the FBI agree that Buffalo Bill almost certainly had one), and the latter because, well, there was no way that anyone as disturbed as Buffalo Bill was going to pass a psychological test of any kind (and even if he weren't disturbed, wouldn't register as actually trans per the test's terms). They all use outdated language and take a more medical view than most people nowadays would do, but they're sincere.
• Robinson Crusoe can leave a bad taste in readers' mouths due to Friday being happy to be Crusoe's slave and Robinson subsequently "Europeanizing" him, as well as never letting you forget that Friday is Crusoe's inferior. However, in the days when Carib Indians were considered devil-worshipping cannibals, Friday being described as brave, loyal, and a better Christian than Crusoe himself is a huge improvement by the standards of 1719. Robinson also mentions that while the cannibals do eat people and kill their captives, it's not really their fault, as it is only in their culture to do these things, and that his own more civilized nation has also committed atrocities.
• Several examples from British statesman Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son:
  • With regards to the Crusades, he wrote that the Christians attacked the Muslims to take land that was rightfully theirs.
  • About fox-hunting: "The poor beasts are here pursued and run down by much greater beasts than themselves".
• H. P. Lovecraft very rarely gave any female characters important roles in his stories, but his thoughts on women's rights were actually quite progressive for his time. Whenever women do show up in his stories, it's a very minor supporting role at best. That said, in The Shadow Out of Time, the narrator describes his ex-wife, who after he apparently went mad (in actuality, his body had been swapped with an alien from the past) actually takes action and gets the rest of her family as far away from her now-abusive husband as possible. There is also talk of strong-willed and intelligent mothers (such as that of Arthur Jermyn), and one or two memorable female antagonists. In fact the only reasons he didn't write them more often was due to his own lack of self confidence in writing female characters. This is also quite impressive compared to some of the other mythos writers of the time, some of whom did not write women at all. In contrast, his views on race were bad even by 1930s standards.
• Lady in Waiting by Jackie Kendall and Debby Jones, a 1995 Christian self-help book, may seem overall backwards in expecting single women to do so much service. However, some parts of it are actually rather progressive. One single woman is encouraged to pursue a doctoral degree — sadly, some religious leaders and denominations still discouraged women's advanced education at the time, stating that a woman did not need it since motherhood was a woman's true calling. Another part states that a spiritually beautiful woman is interesting and has goals for herself — encouraging goals other than motherhood. And just the fact that the book implies that the women reading it want to find husbands because they want romantic love and adult companionship (as compared to just seeing marriage as the way to achieving their one and only ultimate goal of having children) may seem actually revolutionary. Overall, just the fact that the book acknowledges that women could or would possibly want something in their lives other than to become mothers goes against what some groups believe.
• The Sherlock Holmes stories feature various racist stereotypes common to the era of the 1870s to the 1890s, but there is a hint of Writer on Board in the way Holmes, Watson, and the women in the series express, to different degrees, distaste for the way divorce laws were slanted against women. Holmes also lampshades, a century-plus ago, the "American fascination with guns". There's also one story in which members of the Ku Klux Klan appear as villains (at a time when the Klan were tolerated by a disturbing number of people in polite society), and Holmes' reaction to them is one of seething contempt. He also shows interracial marriage favorably in one story, written at a time when it was illegal and widely taboo, with a woman having to hide her mixed race child due to this (her new husband, who is white, accepts her child, though). Also, the one woman Holmes truly respects as his intellectual equal (because she managed to outsmart him) has a habit of running around London in male disguise, because that makes it easier to go wherever she wants to go. And Holmes himself dresses up like an old woman once or twice for spying purposes, which is shocking to Watson, but not really presented as morally wrong to the reader.
  • There's also a lesser-known non-Holmes mystery short story by Arthur Conan Doyle with the title The Man With The Watches, which is remarkably gay-positive or at least advocating for tolerance. Alright, the narrator is a homophobic / transphobic jerk, the story still ends in tragedy, and the gay couple are criminals (card sharps) willing to use violence, but the narrative supports the reading that the tragedy wouldn't have happened if the narrator hadn't been such a bigoted bully, and the surviving partner of the pair (who'd been presented as a "seducer of the innocent" by the narrator up to that point) is explicitly shown to not be evil or inhuman in the end, with the narrator even bonding with him a little over their shared grief. And for a straight, mainstream author in the Victorian era, writing this story for the family-friendly, middle-class The Strand magazine, a story that not only shows the "love that dare not speak its name" in fairly unmistakable ways at all, but also invites the reader to sympathize with the gay characters, is pretty amazing already.
• The Nero Wolfe stories, particularly those written fairly early on, often have sympathetic characters expressing some casually racist and misogynistic views. However, Rex Stout was a fairly progressive guy for his time, and just as frequently lampoons these same views by showing them to be ludicrous, damaging, and evil. Wolfe himself, while unquestionably holding several old-fashioned and misogynistic views, seems to find these types of prejudice absurd, and usually treats everyone he encounters with an equal amount of respect. One also gets the sense in reading the stories as they progress over time that Stout often comes to find several of his earlier views embarrassing or shameful and makes a conscious effort to try and repudiate them in later stories.
  • A notable example is the 1938 novel Too Many Cooks, which is set at an exclusive restaurant/resort in West Virginia with a large number of black people working as the service staff. Derogatory terms and condescending attitudes towards African-Americans are thrown about with an abandon the modern reader may find disconcerting, but the ultimate point of the novel is that these attitudes are foolish; Wolfe makes a significant breakthrough in the case simply by gathering the service staff together, treating them with genuine respect, and appealing to their sense of decency and equity.
• The original Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories started back in 1927 had a lot of offensive stereotypes, and the unfortunate habit of referring to a large number of the villains as "dark," "swarthy," and "foreign" - but many stereotypical characters were supposed to be the good guys. Both series began to undergo heavy rewrites in the 1960s; at least one scholarly article wondered whether or not this was a good thing, since rather than make minority characters more complex and three-dimensional, they just got rid of them entirely, whitewashing the entire series, leaving some scholars to say, "Sure they were offensive, but at least they were there."
• The Lord of the Rings: While they are not humans, the orcs are often referred to as dark and swarthy while the heroic elves are usually described as fair or light-skinned. Also most of the humans who are fighting for Morgoth and Sauron are Eastern and described as sallow-skinned or swarthy. Tolkien was actually quite progressive for his day, but such descriptions might make some readers cringe today. However Tolkien at least implies that those fighting for Sauron aren't really evil but misguided and lied to. When Sam sees the body of a man who fought for Sauron he even wonders whether he was really evil and whether he would have preferred to stay at home. And in an Unbuilt Trope of Always Chaotic Evil it is claimed the Orcs are really acting out of fear and a cruel culture. Tolkien specifically said that all races participated in the Last Alliance, which means there were some Orcs fighting against Sauron, and some people who were not orcs fought for Sauron. In fact, Tolkien never actually settled on an origin story for the orcs, and was in the process of developing a third version when he died, because of a moral and theological objection to what we now call Always Chaotic Evil.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is a multidimensional example of this.
  • Racism: While Alexandre Dumas was a man of color, and his portrayal of people of various races and cultures was extremely advanced for the mid-1800s and the two slave characters in the book are usually treated extremely kindly and respectfully by their master, the main character is still a slaveowner, and some of the commentary on Arabic culture can leave a bad taste in modern readers' mouths.
  • Sexism:
    • Dantes seems to blame Mercedes for marrying Fernand and consider it an act of unfaithfulness. However, Mercedes defends herself by reminding him that Fernand was her closest and oldest friend and her emotional support after Dantes was imprisoned, and she had no way of knowing that Fernand was behind it. The Count later tells her that he doesn't begrudge her anything. Additionally, many of the women in the story, even if they aren't necessarily the nicest people, are independent, well-rounded characters.
    • The character Haydee is also an example. Yes, she is stereotypically quiet and submissive, yes, she is a foreign slave who is happy to be so — but she also gets a chapter or so devoted to recounting her backstory, and another showing how she testified in court to get her revenge against the man who killed her father and sold her mother into slavery.
  • Homophobia: The lesbian Eugenie Danglars is portrayed as an extremely cold, standoffish, even morally ambiguous person. However, she is also a more-or-less openly gay character in a time period when homosexuality was something of a taboo, and she and her lover Louise d'Armilly are still portrayed as fairly good people compared to many of the other characters in the novel. It also completely averts the Bury Your Gays trope, as Eugenie and Louise successfully run off together to be artists, escaping their disapproving families and presumably going on to live happy lives, becoming the only characters in the novel who get a happy ending through their own agency, instead of the Count's intervention.
• Heart of Darkness can seem quaint and uncomfortable to modern audiences, but Joseph Conrad was one of the only people writing criticism of the atrocities going on in the Belgian Congo. Even if the book contains some Africans depicted as cannibals, or violent hunters, or Noble Savages, Conrad's sheer indignation as he writes about the labor camps and their brutal European overseers bleeds through and is hard to argue against.
• Can be seen in much of C.S. Lewis's work. While some of his views on gender roles, race, and sexuality may seem outdated now, he almost always did his best to treat these subjects even-handedly and with more sympathy than many readers now give him credit for. He was actually fairly progressive for his day (and still is compared to some mainline Christian writers).
  • The Calormenes may seem like offensive stereotypes of Middle Easterners, worshipping a God who turns out to be a demon who can't accept anything good. However it's shown that there are still good Calormenes; Emeth for example is able to get into Aslan's Country because he was devout to his religion even though he wasn't worshipping Aslan. Aslan even says anybody who does good is really doing it in his name without knowing it.
  • Although the main character of The Horse and His Boy was a "White Narnian", his companion Aravis, an intelligent and brave girl, was fully Calormen. At the end of the book it is said that Aravis ends up marrying Shasta, and hence joining the royal family of Archenland. Their interracial royal marriage is shown as a happy ending.
• The 19th century Philip Meadows Taylor novel Seeta is typically imperialistic, treating Christianity and British culture as inherently superior to Hinduism and Indian culture. However, it sympathetically portrays a mixed-race marriage between an Englishman and an Indian woman who learns to accept British values. The story paints a picture where all races are equal and the only thing lacking in non-white populations is the right culture, which can be learned. While it all serves as a justification for colonial expansion of the British Empire, it's a very progressive take on the subject.
• The works of Harold Bell Wright (an author in the early 1900s) exclusively portray women as either one-note embodiments of purity or immoral sluts trying to corrupt the protagonists. However, his female characters often do masculine things such as horseback riding, bushcraft and carrying a gun. They are praised for doing these things, and when Sybil ^note The protagonist of The Eyes of the World threatens to shoot James Rutlidge, it is treated as a Moment of Awesome. At least Wright's heroines were allowed to be strong in some ways - a lot of the era's other female characters weren't.
• In the Doctor Dolittle stories, Prince Bumpo and his parents were pretty progressive for their time period. The king was given a legitimate reason to be angry with and not trust white people (the last ones who showed up before Dr. Dolittle were shown great hospitality and responded by digging up the ground for gold, shooting elephants for their ivory, and leaving without even thanking the king) and Bumpo, despite being portrayed as a bit foolish, was still a good-hearted man. He joins Dr. Doolittle for a later adventure and the narrator (a schoolboy who is also coming along) is amazed that Bumpo treats him as a friend, since Bumpo is an adult and a prince.
• While The Well of Loneliness does use the old-fashioned theory of 'sexual inversion' to explain the protagonist's homosexuality, which seems to imply that all lesbians are by nature masculine, it was still very radical for its time for using this biological theory of homosexuality to claim that homosexual love is just as natural as heterosexual love, and should be accepted by society. Its message was so shocking for the time that it was famously banned for 'obscenity'.
• The Brazilian book series Sítio do Picapau Amarelo has been accused of racism for depicting black characters and its not helped that the language used to describe them is painfully dated. On the other hand, said black characters are never depicted in anything other than a positive light with Aunt Anastasia and Uncle Barnabe being shown as very wise and intelligent. Other than race issues, the series's most well-known character Emilia, was also a very headstrong and independent little girl/ragdoll which stood out in early 1900s.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder thought it was very important, when writing Little House on the Prairie, to represent the "good Indians" that argued that the other tribes should not kill the white settlers.^note Leaving beside the Unfortunate Implications of this needing to be represented... To this end, she did some research on the subject, and wrote in Soldat du Chene, allegedly the chief of the Osage at the time. Unfortunately, this was probably not the man's actual name, because the book she got it from was wrong.
• In A Confederacy of Dunces, the Camp Gay Dorian and Jive Turkey Burma came come across as somewhat as bigoted caricatures to modern readers. But Burma is clearly portrayed as a victim of Police Brutality and one of the few characters to be both sane and decent, while Dorian is never portrayed as a villain and is clearly the better man compared to Ignatius. And speaking of Ignatius, the ultra-conservative, Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist's bizarre mixture of contempt and condescension towards homosexuals and black people is very clearly portrayed as one of his many, many grotesque flaws.
• Giovanni Boccaccio's opus The Decameron is remarkably even-handed with its treatment of Jews for a 14th century Christian text.
  • The second story of the first day portrays Christianity as the true religion and ends with its Jewish main character's conversion, but through the course of the text it characterizes Abraham as an honest and learned man with a Christian best friend. It also contrasts Abraham's noble qualities with the corruption of the clergy of Rome.
  • The third story of the first day goes a step further by asserting that Judaism is just as valid as Islam and Christianity. In a dialogue between Saladin and Melchizedek the Jew, who is miserly but also wise, Saladin tries to trap Melchizedek by asking him which of the three Laws (Christianity, Islam or Judaism) is the true faith. Melchizedek tells a parable through which he asserts that adherents of all three religions can never know if theirs is the true one in spite of their faith, and Saladin sees the wisdom of this.
• Leslie Charteris's The Saint novels were almost astonishingly forward-thinking in their heyday of the thirties to sixties. In particular, it avoids most of the racism of contemporary English adventure stories, probably because Charteris was himself Asian-European. There are only a few times heroic characters use racial slurs, and it's pointedly noted as an unfortunate consequence of their upbringing that they haven't quite shaken, rather than a matter of particular conviction. As far as sexism goes, Charteris has the common habit of the time of referring to young women as "girls." Much more significantly, Patricia Holm, Simon Templar's lover, is portrayed as a competent, intelligent and eager companion, the antithesis of the traditional Damsel in Distress; furthermore, the two are pictured contentedly cohabiting without being married. The books still have issues with regional stereotyping and the like, but even here, compared to, say, Bulldog Drummond...
• The Glass Inferno, one of the two books that formed the basis for the movie The Towering Inferno, has a major character of a gay man who is co-owner of an interior design business. He catches a trespasser trying to steal from him, and realizes the young man is just a junkie suffering from withdrawal, stealing to get money for his habit. The junkie, recognizing the man is gay, explicitly offers to let him perform a sexual act for $20, stating he's done it before and has let other men sodomize him. The businessman informs him "I don't want you." and decides to just let him go. Returning to a pile of unpaid and unpayable bills, he decides to burn down his failing business for the insurance, but then realizes this wouldn't be fair to his business partner and lover, Larry. Putting the fire out, he realizes he is now really ruined, plus his unthinking betrayal of his partner. He notices a burning smell that is not related to this fire, but is a completely unrelated one in a building corridor supply closet. Perfect! It will destroy his business and all the evidence of what he tried to do. All he has to do is nothing, just let the fire take its course. However, he realizes he can't just say nothing and leave the other people in the building without warning. So he calls security, reports the fire, and is told to take the stairs. The fire has already affected one of the stairwells, but the other one is impassible except to go up. He later helps other people get to the roof, and is reunited with Larry. The character is an ordinary, flawed man, who is in a committed relationship, it just happens to be with someone of the same sex, and the book, written in 1974, treats it as nothing special, just as most people would do now.
• Dancing Aztecs: The books isn't free of stereotypes, and Jerry, Frank and Floyd all use a few slurs, but the various minority characters are well-developed, and the racism is portrayed as relatively silly, unenlightened, and not really personal, with part of Jerry's character development coming from how the treasure hunt exposes him to how these different kinds of people can live different, happy lives than the one he's taken for granted for so long. And then there's the fact that Westlake (who was of Irish descent) also pokes a little fun at Irish stereotypes in the book.
• Somebody Owes Me Money: Matt not minding that his friend Jerry is probably attracted to men in 1969 is decently progressive. The way that acceptance is implicitly dependent on Jerry only acting on those feelings out of sight of his poker buddies is more controversial.
• Lilith's Brood (also known as Xenogenesis) was written during a time when the idea of more than two genders seemed like the province of science fiction. The series' cornerstone and insistence upon the idea that it's perfectly normal for there to be more than two genders has aged remarkably well. The main jarring discrepancy is Butler landing on the ooloi using "it" pronouns, when real-world people have (mostly) settled on "they" pronouns.
• A Danny Dunn book, Danny Dunn on a Desert Island features a rather cringe-worthy depiction of a Pacific Islander tribe and chief, including the use of some infantilizing language; however, the story completely subverts the trope of Pacific Islanders as savage cannibals, the way they were commonly portrayed in contemporary works.
• Little Women has been criticized by some modern feminists for the fact that tomboy Jo's character arc largely consists of her learning to be less wild and ambitious and more nurturing and feminine, that she ends the story as a wife and mother despite initially not having wanted ever to marry, and that the model of ideal womanhood the book's Aesops promote constantly glorifies modesty, sacrifices, and "living for others." At the same time, to this day it's celebrated for revolving around four dimensional, flawed yet likable and relatable young heroines, for its sympathetic portrayal of Jo's tomboyishness and her struggle for independence and success as a writer, for having her reject the proposal of the boy whom everyone (including readers) expected her to marry and choose another man on her own terms, and for never having her entirely lose her scrappy personality, unlike the tomboy heroines in other 19th century children's books who tended to be more thoroughly punished and tamed into conventional ladies.
• It: The book features a gay couple that is stereotypically effeminate. However, the book also features the local small town sheriff defending them against persecution and homophobia, which was a pretty radical message when the book was published in the 1980s.
• The Jungle was a highly progressive novel, even though it very clearly came from an old social context. A notable example was when Marija resorted to prostitution. Her generalizations about sex work are outdated, claiming that prostitutes are all victims, and that no one would choose this life if she had any alternative, particularly considering that it involved sleeping with men of different races. Still, the overall message is that condemnation of sex workers is both unfair and ignorant, and that's cruel to shame women for their decisions, particularly when you don't know their history or what's brought them to this point.
• The Shadow: While the pulps often reflected the stereotypes of its day, it was a policy of long-time editor John Nanovic to constantly chip away at these elements in the magazine's stories. The Shadow would be notable for having African-American, Jewish, and Chinese-American characters who were useful and often crucial parts of The Shadow's team. Nanovic also instituted two important rules. First, outside of plot-relevant needs, the main villain had to be a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant — "Fu-Manchu"-style villains or other ethnic Big Bads were, by and large, out (though Shiwan Khan was a major exception to this rule). Second, he dogged series author Walter B. Gibson to drop the "Asian Speekee Engrish" Chinese characters, encouraging him to introduce Dr. Roy Tam (who spoke perfect English) and to soften the dialect of other Chinese characters.
• This is done both deliberately and not in Horatio Hornblower. Hornblower empathizes with impressed sailors, hates invoking A Taste of the Lash, and is disturbed by the brutality of war, but while the reader recognizes his worldview as ahead of its time, he believes it to be a weakness and tries to hide it. The Hornblower books were written from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, and it shows in the portrayal of most characters who aren't white and British—which results in an interesting phenomenon where the older Hornblower, written earlier, is less modern than his younger self, written later, as Forester brought Hornblower's character in line with changing contemporary attitudes. For example, Captain Hornblower in 1938 refuses to accept any black sailors on his crew during a press, but Lieutenant Hornblower in 1952 lets slip his respect for the Haitian Revolution.
• Treasure Island: Today, Long John Silver (who is famously one-legged) and Blind Pew are held up as prime examples of the Evil Cripple trope. When the book was written, the idea that people with disabilities could do anything other than live off the charity of their surroundings was revolutionary, and both Silver and Pew are intelligent, driven, able to command absolute loyalty from their followers, genuinely intimidating and quite physically capable in spite of their respective disabilities.
• Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald-Mage Trilogy has its lead character, Vanyel Ashkevron, suffering a great extremity of Gayngst and has a few confident statements to the tune that gay men are inherently Camp Gay from a young age. It also ends with a particular case of Bury Your Gays where the gays in question Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence on dying and pretty much become angels. The degree of anguish Vanyel suffers can read as overwrought these days, and that he has to make nice with a father who believes All Gays Are Pedophiles can cause a wince. There's also some No Bisexuals going on. However! The first book of the trilogy came out in 1989 and Vanyel is both definitely attracted to men and tremendously, unquestionably sympathetic and heroic. For its day it was incredibly progressive and even today, when LGBT Representation in Media is far more commonplace, it can resound.
  • Some of her earlier stories in the same continuity, Heralds of Valdemar, feature the asexual Tarma. Tarma is asexual because she gave up that part of herself in a ritual so that she could pursue revenge on the bandits who raped her and killed her clan, and becoming asexual gives her a sense of armor against the pain - it encourages the misconception that asexuality is the result of sexual trauma. However, the first story starring Tarma was published in 1987 and there are plenty of good aspects too. She never feels incomplete or like she should change herself back, and her extremely close relationship with Kethry is also a very nice queerplatonic partnership.

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