Propaganda in Popular Fiction

Aug 2, 2006 by Naomi.

Reading is a compulsion for me. I cannot come across those symbols we call letters without reading. Even while walking my very young grandchildren, we stopped to puzzle letters on round iron manhole covers in the street — water. sewer. ironworks — and the manufacturer’s name often imprinted in durable raised letters for posterity.

All printed words are a source of information and it struck me when reading a popular novel of the seventies in the wake of the Roe v Wade decision on women’s right to abortion. In the first printing the story goes — a not too young unmarried woman’s birth control failed and she found herself pregnant. She discussed the problem with an understanding father who listened to her admit that she wanted to keep the child, for good reasons. The stud was willing to marry her or pay for an abortion. It was a fair discussion where a decision would be made later.

However in a later extended version of the book, father said abortion was too clean a name, it was outright infanticide, pure and simple. But the morality issue was put on the mother who was taught morality was based on The Right to Life, — had been the basis of Western morality for two thousand years.

How many readers let that influence actions they took can never be ascertained. Am I the only one to look at it as politics? Maybe. The author went on to pull the plug on a brain dead hit and run victim, killed babies and children of every age with an ongoing disease throughout the story. No matter. The point was made early on in the very well developed story.

My point is that in my fiction writing I want to craft characters as well as well-read author’s characters are crafted to get my political views across. It is an effective way to propagandize.

Isn’t that what words are all about?

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