Inflammatory pages

While perusing the homepage of one of my favorite comic artists, Joseph Linsner (creator of Dawn, for those unaware), i found a rather interesting print published on the main page …

… what was most interesting about this print wasn’t so much the image itself, but rather the quoted inscription beneath it:

 "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that shows the world its own shame" – Oscar Wilde

Thinking back through my studies in literature, I can only openly recall one book which blatantly served this effect (I know there are others, but at 4 AM, my brain rebels against their attempted recollection)–Arthur Miller’s 1953 writing of The Crucible, which served as an allusionary belittlement of society’s actions during the Salem Witch Hunts of 1692, but also as an historical echo to undertonally backhand the crusade against alleged communists which had been started by Senator McCarthy.

If Oscar Wilde is correct about society’s view of books, and if our views on literature are so easily affected by the things we are influenced to feel, should our society perhaps take a closer look at the things we deem to be ‘shameful’, and alter those things to cast a different light? Is it possible to walk a line between projecting a novelist’s thoughts onto ourselves , but not onto others–can people use their feelings towards literature as a mirror to themselves, but not as a masked expectation of what they desire to see in others?