Stories from the past that are still relevant today

Nowadays, there is a common trend of retiring old books in favour of new, shiny paperbacks. In a world where we can pick up a book and devour it in a couple of hours, whisking us away quickly to a fantastical world but bringing us back in time for tea, it’s difficult to rationalise poring over classic novels unless our degrees require us to. There seems to be too little time in the day to wade through stilted dialogue and outdated language, especially when the stories they convey don’t seem relevant to our day-to-day lives. When you’re contending with student loans, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the incredibly rich yet painstakingly awkward characters parading around with monologues about how hard they have it. 

However, some stories seem to continue to carry over into modern day. For example, books about women and how they are constrained by society seem to never cease to be relevant. 

Even a century and a half after it was written, Little Women, which explores female identity within the constraints of a patriarchal society, continues to be relevant to the modern day. Although written for girls, people of all ages seem to fall in love again and again with the characters, especially boyish Jo’s rejection of society’s expectations – perhaps because it continues to hold a mirror up to women’s experiences. The story of four sisters’ transition from girlhood to womanhood is considered a classic novel. Yet, the themes of family, poverty, and society are so transferrable that it has been adapted into another film this Christmas. 

In the light of the #MeToo movement, Streetcar holds up a mirror to the complexities of sexual abuse and how it can take its toll on the victim

Turning to the stage, the play A Streetcar Named Desire also explores how women suffer under patriarchy. Partially based on the writer’s sister, Streetcar follows a 20th Century woman’s struggle with mental illness, which is only made worse by the mistreatment from her brother-in-law. In the light of the #MeToo movement, Streetcar holds up a mirror to the complexities of sexual abuse and how it can take its toll on the victim. At the end of the play, when Blanche is willingly taken away to a psychiatric hospital, she is a shadow of her former self and has been stripped of her own female identity. 

Running parallel to this are the stories such as Sylvia Plath’s much-acclaimed The Bell Jar, which explores her own semi-autobiographical struggle with depression that culminated in her early death. Plath often wrote about. Her struggles with mental health appear usually in her confessional poetry, and one poem in particular (‘Lady Lazarus’) focuses on how the suffering of women is a source of gruesome entertainment for society. This draws a stark comparison to performing in a circus. Perhaps what these stories about mental health highlight the most is how easy it is to crack under the stress of modern life, when expectations are high and everyone else seems to be doing fantastically well. Both take place after the ‘roaring twenties’ when wealth was aplenty and people pursued the American Dream or equivalent in search of success. Even half a century after Plath’s death, mental illness still seems to dominate our body politic and her story of a successful young woman crumbling under the pressure of society is far from being irrelevant. 

One important moral to draw from this literature as we enter the new decade, is that this isn’t the first time that our society has faced the challenges it does today

Stories like Dracula by Bram Stoker  can hardly be seen as irrelevant in a world where refugees are turned away and socially constructed borders are valued above the lives of other people. Neither can other gothic novels, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, which explores the nature of the true self and the immorality of following a path of desire. Comparisons can easily be drawn between Dorian Gray and some of the richest people in the modern era, as their corruption is hidden from the public eye and they exploit others for their own benefit. It’s unclear whether the morals of gothic literature translate so well into modern society because they are well-written or because, despite our efforts, society hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. 

One important moral to draw from this literature as we enter the new decade, is that this isn’t the first time that our society has faced the challenges it does today. Many 19th century writers used their writing to express their anxieties in anticipation of the “fin de siècle”, or the end of the century. Due to the rapid changes caused by industrialisation, many people also anticipated that this would mean the end of the world as we knew it. So, as we face a new era of unknowns and uncertainties, it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a book from the past and recognise that people have always felt anxieties about the future, and so it’s not just us.