Censorship In Katherine Paterson's Bridge To Terabithia

To Ban or Not to Ban Salman Rushdie once said, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” When Rushdie stated this he was opposing censorship and the banning of books. In today’s society, books can be banned for several reasons such as: explicit content, controversial content, or inappropriate ideas (Banned Books). “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, where as banning is the removal of those materials”(Banned and Challenged). One of the most frequently challenged and banned books around the country is Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (Top Ten). This novel was published 20 years ago, and still continues to be challenged across the United States. For example, in Nebraska,

In the Oskaloosa, Kansas, school district Bridge to Terabithia was challenged and “led to the enactment of a new policy that requires teachers to examine their required material for profanities. Teachers will list each profanity and the number of times it was used in the book, and forward the list to parents, who will be asked to give written permission of their children to read the material.”(Hirsch 102) For example, in Bridge to Terabithia it states, “What are they teaching in that damn school?” (Paterson 14) Although the words “damn” and “hell” are used infrequently throughout the novel, they are not used enough times for the book to be challenged or banned. Karen Hirsch states, “[t]he language the characters use is authentic to the setting and to the characters that Paterson creates” (Hirsch 103). It was a necessity that Paterson had that type of language in the novel because that is how she envisioned it in her mind. Jess, the protagonist, and his dad use the “inappropriate words” infrequently throughout the novel because that is how people talked in that area at the time. These words are merely used; however, many people take them offensive in a child’s book, so it is understandable for people to attempt to challenge it. Yet, the words are not strong enough nor used frequently enough for the novel to be banned or