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:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)