The Roald Dahl Controversy

2,428 words

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are to be republished with the text politically corrected.

In the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s antagonist Augustus Gloop, who never stops eating, is not “enormously fat” but just “enormous.”[1] The word “fat” has been removed from every book.[2] The Oompa-Loompas are no longer “tiny,” but merely “small,” nor are they “men,” but “people.” [3] The words “black” and “white” have been removed from all the books; characters no longer turn white with fear, nor does the BFG wear a black cloak.[4]

The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People. The words “crazy” and “mad” have been removed, as has a reference in Esio Trot to tortoises being backward. According to Roald Dahl, it was because tortoises were backward that they could only read words written backwards, hence the book’s title. The new edition just says that they can only understand words written backwards.[5]

In The Witches, a witch might pose as a normal woman by working as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.” In the new version, she might be “a top scientist or running a business.”[6] In the rewrite of Matilda, Matilda reads Jane Austen rather than Rudyard Kipling. An “attractive middle-aged lady” is now a “kindly middle-aged lady.”[7] Miss Trunchbull’s “great horsey face” is now just “her face.”[8] The word “female” itself has been taken out: Miss Trunchbull is no longer a “most formidable female,” but a “most formidable woman.” Mrs. Twit’s “fearful ugliness” has become her “ugliness.” Fantastic Mr. Fox, who originally had sons, now has daughters. In another book, rather than Mummy washing something down the sink, Mummy and Daddy wash it down the sink together.

Dahl’s text has not just been changed; it has been added to. He described the witches as bald under their wigs. This is now followed by: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”[9]

Several articles quoted Salman Rushdie condemning this “absurd censorship.” One quoted Suzanne Nossel of the writers’ group PEN America tweeting that she found the reported changes alarming.[10] Other critics said that the edits amounted to cultural vandalism. Edward Dutton pointed out that “woke meddling” was nothing new.[11] In the 1960s, objections were raised to the gollywogs in Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, who were then replaced by goblins, gollywogs having been smiling black doll-characters who also appeared on jam-jar labels. In Victorian times, Shakespeare’s works were Bowdlerized. Throughout the ages, religious fanatics have destroyed books that disagreed with them. The current fanaticism will only get worse, Dutton said.

Others made no comment on the changes, but wished ill of Dahl’s books or spoke ill of Dahl himself. The children’s author Philip Pullman suggested that Dahl’s books just be allowed to go out of print, as though they were heading this way. A Jewish-sounding literary agent decided that now was the time to say that Dahl had been an unpleasant individual with anti-Semitic views.[12]

The changes were made by Puffin, Dahl’s publishers, in association with the Roald Dahl Story Company. Puffin gave three reasons to justify them.[13] First, the books needed to be “rewritten for a modern audience”; secondly, they were rewritten “to ensure they [could] be enjoyed by all children”; and thirdly, they contained material “deemed offensive, such as references to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.”

These reasons are unconvincing. If it counts against a cultural product that it is not up-to-date, why aren’t all books rewritten every 30 years? Why do art galleries not employ painters to modify the works of Rembrandt for a modern audience? The second reason suggests that certain children could not enjoy Dahl’s books because of the language they contained. Fat children could not enjoy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it described a boy as fat. Will they be able to enjoy it more now that it describes him as enormous? It is pathetic. Thirdly, how could anyone be offended by references to such universal human attributes as sex and race? As for mental health, apparently at one point a character says, “You must be crazy!” The idea that this could be offensive is risible. No examples were given of references to violence that had been softened or deleted — but how can violence in a storybook be any more offensive than in a history book that mentions wars and beheadings? These cannot have been Puffin’s actual reasons.

If the books were deemed offensive, who did the deeming? It was “sensitivity readers,” who are employed to sniff out any trace of political incorrectness in a book and then change or delete it. They can be unfortunate people. Two mentioned by the Daily Mail who worked for an agency called Writing Diversely described themselves thusly: One was a “disabled nonbinary Jewish queer person with ADHD”; the other was a “bisexual genderfluid lightskinned brown Mexican, self-diagnosed autistic as well as with EDS [Ehlers-Danlos syndrome], depression and anxiety.” Puffin got its sensitivity readers from Inclusive Minds, described by a spokesperson as a “collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature.” “Inclusion” and “accessibility” are standard terms of politically-correct obfuscation. It does not redeem Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was presumably inaccessible to fat children, that it includes one. What sensitivity readers are really passionate about is interfering with the works of others.

In The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors, in 2020, a sensitivity reader explained how she had told a translator that a story was “ableist,” which raised the question of whether it could be included in an anthology.[14] It was a misconception, she said, to see an author’s work as sacrosanct, since one might be ethically bound to oppose the propagation of ableist, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or other discriminatory views. The relationship between an author and a translator should be one of equals, she stated — a sufficiently impertinent remark given that translators should be the slaves of authors. Yet in practice, she seemed to think that translators — and presumably also sensitivity readers — should have the greater power, which they could always justify exerting in the name of ethics.

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s My Mirror Tells a Story here.

Sensitivity readers now act as a filter through which books must pass before they can be published. As well as being impertinent, judging from the case of Puffin these people appear to be either so humorless that they can delete a joke around which a whole book turns, or that they are too bone-headed to realize that this is what they have done. Let us look at the ideologies Puffin’s sensitivity readers imposed on Dahls’ books.

Most prominently, they imposed feminism, with its urge to de-sex males or take them out completely, and replace them with females. Thus where men were specified, as in the Oompa Loompas or the Cloud-Men, they became “people.” Where sons were specified, they were replaced by daughters. When a male writer, Kipling, was mentioned, he was replaced by a female writer. The word “female” itself had to go, although feminists illogically don’t mind the word “woman.”

Feminists hate sexual attraction, which is why they sought to get the Sun’s Page-Three girls, grid girls, darts girls, the swimsuit round of the Miss World competition, and the Presidents Club annual fundraising dinner where attractive waitresses served rich, successful men abolished, as they succeeded in doing between 2015 and 2018. In the same period they got an advertisement showing a model in a bikini taken down, as well as a much-loved pre-Raphaelite painting depicting a femme fatale.[15] Here, a woman could not be described as attractive. On the other hand, a woman must not be described as unattractive, either, and so one woman’s face ceased to be horsey while the ugliness of another was reduced. Nor could Puffin’s sensitivity readers resist elbowing their way into Dahl’s text to add an irrelevant defense of women who wear wigs.

Just as much as they hate sexual attraction, feminists hate sex roles whereby the sexes complement each other, as traditionally a wife stayed at home looking after the house and children while her husband went out to provide for the family. Not that women didn’t work as well, but they tended to have fairly lowly jobs, which is why Dahl said that a witch who wanted to go unnoticed among normal women might work as a cashier or a secretary. But in feminism’s fantasy world, such occupations are in no way typical of women. A witch who wants to pass as a normal woman will work as a top scientist or a CEO because that is the kind of position women are generally found in. Nor must any household task be performed only by the wife. Her husband will insist on pouring something down the sink with her.

Apparently Roald Dahl made no offensive references to race, or perhaps any references to it, since if he had done they would have been changed and we would have heard about it. But, unable to contain their anti-racism, Puffin’s sensitivity readers struck the very words “black” and “white” out of his whole corpus in whatever other context he might have used them. This is reminiscent of the way that anti-racists objected to the nursery rhyme “Baa baa black sheep” 35 years ago. What didn’t they like about it? Only that it contained the word “black.” It is bad enough that such people exist. It is worse that they seek to dictate the language that can be used by others.

Egalitarianism is the idea that we are all the same, but because we’re not, we must say we are — which might make us all the same. It takes a voodooish view of language as capable of creating desired realities or removing unwanted ones. Therefore, if fatness is unwanted, it must not be mentioned, which might make it go away. If height is valued, as in the idea of a man who is not only dark and handsome but also tall, a writer who has invented a race of tiny people must not call them tiny. Above all, we must not say that one person is less intelligent than another, and therefore a word that can act as a euphemism for lacking intelligence, namely “backward,” had to be deleted despite the fact that Dahl appears to have said nothing about the intelligence of tortoises. In calling them backward, he was referring to their slowness of movement. Again, with the politically correct, we are dealing with moronity.

Mental illnessism is an ideology that attaches status to being mentally ill in a firm rejection of the stigma that used to go along with this. The more psychiatric diagnoses a person has, the more interesting they are supposed to be, as seen in the proud self-descriptions of Writing Diversely’s sensitivity readers. But what we must never say about the mentally ill, including those who insist that this is the condition they are in, is that they are mad or crazy, and so these words had to be taken out of Dahl’s books even though he seems only to have used them in such expressions as “You must be crazy!” or “Are you mad?”

If Puffin’s given reasons for changing Dahl’s books were too poor to be its actual ones, why did it really change them? It did it out sheer hatred of the books as valued cultural products. The same urge to attack and destroy is seen in every similar case, as when in 2022 the BBC broadcast an “updated” dramatization of Oliver Twist in which Oliver Twist was a Nigerian,[16] as well as put out a series for children where the Artful Dodger was an Indian girl and two of Fagin’s other boys were non-white.[17] It made a male character in an adaptation of Watership Down female, and broadcast a dramatization of The Outsider in which the title character was a lesbian. In the original film of Lord of the Flies, the cast were boys, as in the book; in a later adaptation, they were girls. In a 2005 film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children white, again as in the book; in a 2021 stage production, they were black.

Today, when the idea of fidelity to a source is forgotten, those intent on the destruction of white culture use the ideologies of political correctness to take the essential character out of any classic novel. The only new thing about the Roald Dahl case is that instead of merely misrepresenting a source, they have changed the source itself.

Nor must we ignore the media’s hypocrisy, who for decades have been the main purveyors of political correctness. Only when Roald Dahl’s books are changed, which our journalists must have especially loved as children, do they make a fuss.

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Notes

[1] Guardian, Feb. 20, 2023, “Roald Dahl rewrites: edited language in books criticised as ‘absurd censorship’.”

[2] inews, Feb. 20, 2023, “Roald Dahl rewrites explained: Why changes to author’s books have sparked a censorship row.”

[3] LIVE TV, Feb. 20, 2023, “Roald Dahl’s children books ‘removed’ ‘offensive words’ like crazy and mad: Here’s why.”

[4] inews, Feb. 20, 2023, op cit.

[5] MailOnline, Feb. 18, 2023, “Augustus Gloop can’t be ‘fat’, the (gender neutral) Oompa-Loompas aren’t ‘small’ and even the BFG’s gone PC: ‘Woke’ publishing censors REWRITE Roald Dahl’s classic books for new editions that remove all language snowflakes might find ‘offensive’.”

[6] Guardian, Feb. 20, 2023, op cit.

[7] Dr. Edward Dutton: The Jolly Heretic, Feb. 21, 2023, “The witches have won! Roald Dahl Is puritanically censored!”

[8] MailOnline, Feb. 18, 2023, op cit.

[9] Ibid.

[10] inews, Feb. 20, 2023, op cit. `

[11] Dr. Edward Dutton: The Jolly Heretic, Feb. 21, 2023, “The witches have won! Roald Dahl Is puritanically censored!”

[12] The literary agent was Jonny Geller. Presumably Geller, like Gellner, is a Jewish name. “Jonny” without an “h” suggests that Geller’s first name is Jonathan, also a Jewish one. Just from his comment, one might guess that he was Jewish. Many go-betweens, such as literary agents, are Jews. How was Dahl anti-Semitic? He once referred in an interview to “powerful American Jewish bankers” and said: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. Maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.” Geller displayed just this lack of generosity.

[13] BristolLive, Feb. 21, 2023, “Race, weight and gender stripped out of Roald Dahl books to avoid offence.”

[14] Spring 2020 issue. The sensitivity reader was Khairani Barokka.

[15] The advertisement was for Protein World. The painting was Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by J. W. Waterhouse, which was taken down by the Manchester art gallery.

[16] BBC, Dec. 10, 2022. “Oliver: Lagos to London.”

[17] History Debunked, Feb. 5, 2022, “The BBC vision of a multi-ethnic Victorian London loses all touch with reality.”