Criticism
While MacDonald's work was popular with critics at its release, modern reappraisals of the book have been critical of the book's treatment of native Americans. Her treatment of the rural working class "spawned a perception of Washington as a land of eccentric country bumpkins like Ma and Pa Kettle."
Those who defend MacDonald's overall catalog of work counter that these findings are measured against modern cultural standards, and not in the context of American pop culture of the 1940s, when such stereotyping was more widely accepted.
Read more about this topic: The Egg And I
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)