Ostracising Anna: How Hollywood Reinvented a 19th-century Writer and Turned a Nation against her | Caron Eastgate Dann

Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Caron Eastgate Dann When Anna Leonowens wrote her memoirs about teaching the King of Siam’s family in the 1860s, the country’s government reportedly tried to prevent the book’s distribution. Margaret Landon, whose novel about Leonowens, Anna and the King of Siam, was the basis for the musical The King and I, said that when she lived in Thailand in the 1930s, Leonowens’s books were hidden by those who owned them. Today, some 90 years later, The King and I remains banned in Thailand, though Leonowens’s books are available. Leonowens, however, is branded a liar, a fraud and a sensationalist – not so much because of what she wrote, but because of what others have written about her. Most despised by Thais among Hollywood’s inventions in the film is the idea that there was a romance between the Siamese king and the foreign school teacher. This preposterous scenario was never even hinted at by Leonowens herself in her books. The romance angle is taken further in the latest film, Anna and the King (1999), in which the two are depicted as falling in love. Naturally, this film also was banned in Thailand. Though the story has been adored by generations of film- and theatre-goers, most literary critics have treated Leonowens harshly. This paper will examine how Leonowens has been damned, discredited and disregarded by critics, often for reasons of gender and class rather than content. It will also examine why the film became so popular and how it continues to influence westerners’ views of Thailand more than 50 years after its release, while the books long ago slipped into obscurity. The paper will set the ostracising of Leonowens against the jailing in 2008 of the Australian writer Harry Nicolaides. He was convicted of lèse-majesté in Thailand because a few pages in his novel, Verisimilitude, were considered offensive to the royal family (even though the book had a tiny print run and sold only seven copies). In addition, the paper will look at the banning in Thailand of two recent biographies of the current King of Thailand.