The Importance Of Censorship In The Giver

“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.” -Lois Lowry, American children fiction writer. (The Giver is a social science fiction by Lowry)

Freedom of expression has been enshrined as one of the fundamental rights in constitutions of most of the democratic states of the world. This right is hallmark of an egalitarian democratic state. There cannot be an easy access to this right under a dictatorial regime or monarchy. But under democratic structure, it becomes an imperative feature and censorship or gagging of liberal ideas becomes questionable. Censorship consists of any attempt to suppress information, points of view, or method of expression such as art or literature as anti-social or profane. A human being cannot consider his/her social environment free unless he/she is subject to limitations asfar asfreedom of expression of opinion is concerned. Such condition of existence is not even calmly borne by

Lawrence tries to subvert his society’s notions about sex by writing about the subject in a candid manner. In his essay “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence urged, “I want men and women to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly, through a proper reverence for sex” (13). He endeavoured to sanctify sex and to remove the opposition between the sacred and the profane that had been introduced by Christianity, as he states in the essay“Pornography and Obscenity”: “The Christian religion lost, in Protestantism finally, the togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, and the passions, with the earth and sun and stars”