Growing up in a deeply patriarchal family in the far-flung suburbs of the world's most isolated city, I depended on books for imaginative escape. In the early years of primary school my literary diet largely consisted of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. It was the 1990s, but you wouldn't have thought it.
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Nevertheless, time passed. I learned of Dahl's antisemitism. I read former Playschool presenter Trisha Goddard's autobiography, which describes how Enid Blyton's depiction of gollywogs contributed to the racism she experienced in the playground. #MeToo happened, sharpening my awareness of the sexism I had spent my life swimming in. Like the gender inequality that underpinned my upbringing, I now regard Dahl and Blyton, among others, as outdated relics.
Consequently, upon hearing Puffin was reissuing Dahl's novels with "inclusive" edits, my first reaction was bafflement. Why spend energy trying to maintain the relevance of a misogynistic, racist, imperialist author? Is this even possible? Wouldn't editorial endeavours be better spent publishing new works of children's literature by diverse authors?
I was further perplexed when I learnt of the changes themselves. Some are understandable (for example, in Matilda, a threat to "knock her flat" has become "give her a right talking to"). Some sound ham-fisted (such as in Witches, which softens the depiction of the witches as bald beneath their wigs: "There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.").
And some are unfathomable. I can't comprehend, for example, why Puffin has chosen to depict the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as gender-neutral, when surely the more pressing issue is that Dahl originally drew them as racist caricatures of enslaved African pygmies.
This scattergun approach reveals the edits are little more than opportunistic window-dressing attempting to disguise a shameless money grab as a commitment to inclusivity. More problematically, it creates a false image of Dahl which hampers our ability to see both the work and the man clearly.
Indeed, Puffin's reissue is the latest development in a campaign by the Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to Dahl's work, and its partners, to stave off the perennial threat of public opinion turning against him.
There is plenty for them to worry about. Following Dahl's death in 1990, the Washington Post's obituary acknowledged how the "best critics maintain that his books are larded with gratuitous violence, bigotry, sexism, vulgarity, greed and all manner of foulness". Meanwhile, some contemporary commentators identify the nastiness of Dahl's stories as one of its chief appeals, as Gaby Hinsliff observes in the Guardian, "the range of things he can be nasty about is narrowing".
This is compounded by the nastiness of the author himself. Dahl's misogyny and prejudice have been public knowledge for decades. In a notorious 1983 interview with the New Statesman, Dahl bluntly expressed his repugnant and nonsensical views about Jews, stating: "Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."
It was largely because of such opinions that in 2018, the Royal Mint abandoned plans to produce a commemorative coin in his honour. In 2020, Dahl's family and the Roald Dahl Story Company apologised for his antisemitism, but in the manner of a politician's non-denial denial. The family acknowledged "the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements". However, they also said "[t]hose prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations" - as though their intimacy with the author somehow precluded them from being acquainted with his unabashed bigotry and misogyny.
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In 2021, against the backdrop of this public tussle over Dahl's reputation, the company and Netflix announced they were "joining forces to bring some of the world's most loved stories to current and future fans in creative new ways", anticipating this would include "animated and live-action films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theatre, consumer products and more".
This deal gives rise to a renewed commercial imperative to maximise Dahl's public palatability. Both partners seem to have anticipated potential blowback, as their statement continued: "As we bring these timeless tales to more audiences in new formats, we're committed to maintaining their unique spirit and their universal themes of surprise and kindness, while also sprinkling some fresh magic into the mix."
The obvious point to be made here is that if Dahl's work were truly timeless, it would not need "fresh magic" - whatever that is.
But there is also a distinction to be made between adaptation, which is what Netflix produces, and the revision of original texts. The former is in conversation with the original, but it is also a work of art in its own right and will therefore reflect the context in which it is produced.
Puffin's intervention, conversely, is premised on a contradictory notion of timelessness as an active process of updating a work while obscuring its original context. As PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel cautioned in a lengthy Twitter thread, "[i]f we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society".
Given Nossel's warning, how should we read Dahl today? Puffin's more conservative critics argue that nothing needs to change - neither the texts, nor our views.
Laura Hackett, deputy literary editor of London's Sunday Times newspaper, wrote: "The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they've carried out on some of the finest children's literature in Britain," and advised she will "be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl's stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colourful glory."
Brendan O'Neill goes further, blustering in the Spectator that "Dahl is being well and truly Ministry of Truthed" and that sensitivity readers are really censors undertaking a "Stalinist correction of wrongspeak".
These assertions conveniently ignore the fact that Dahl's work was regarded as racist in his own lifetime, to the extent that he agreed to modify his depiction of Oompa Loompas by transforming them from slaves to "little fantasy creatures" for a 1973 reissue of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Furthermore, they overlook the need for diverse representation in children's literature (and in publishing more broadly) that has been advocated by minority groups in recent years, and are blind to how their defence of Dahl leaves less space for contemporary, diverse authors.
Surely the most ethical approach is that if parents want their children to become acquainted with the BFG or George and his marvellous medicine, they should also be prepared to explain to their children why aspects of his work are problematic. Or, as Philip Pullman told BBC Radio 4: "If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print. Read all these [other] wonderful authors who are writing today, who don't get as much of a look-in because of the massive commercial gravity of people like Roald Dahl."
- Amy Walters is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the ANU
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