Recently it was announced that the novels of Roald Dahl, the notoriously bigoted but gifted and enduringly popular children’s author, had been edited to eliminate words, phrases and sentiments that readers might find upsetting.
Novels such as The Witches, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach have been cleansed of negative references to a character’s appearance, race or gender. “Enormously fat” had been changed to “enormous”, “mothers” and “fathers” to the more gender-neutral “parents”. The adjective “black” was eliminated, even in reference to objects. Jokes were explained, passages modified to assure the reader that Dahl’s snarky humor was all in good fun.
Dahl died in 1990. The changes were made by his estate in partnership with Inclusive Minds, an organization that promotes diversity in books for children. Plans were made to market the doctored books as providing a more reader-friendly experience. Parents could replace their “nasty” old copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with a “nicer” edition.
Just to be clear: I think it’s wrong to rewrite the words of an author, living or dead, without the author’s permission. Writers work hard to get their sentences right. Maybe Dahl preferred the sound of “enormously fat” to the sound of “enormous”. Writers are grateful when a friend or an editor spots factual mistakes, repetitions, typos. There’s a great quote from Isaac Babel: words go into hiding on the page and you can no longer see them.
Suggestions for improvement are welcome, in a book’s larval stage. But going in there and mucking around without permission should be the eighth deadly sin. Not to compare The BFG with Michelangelo’s masterpiece, but rewriting Dahl, after his death, is a minimalist version of painting clothes on the bodies in the Sistine chapel.
If the writer has used language that has, for all the right reasons, gone out of use, it’s important to tell young readers that people used to say things and think about other people in ways that were wrong. We no longer use those words, we no longer subscribe to those stereotypes. If Dahl says a character is ugly, it’s a teachable moment. By the time kids are old enough to read these books, they have probably heard the word ugly, possibly even said it. We can talk about the word and its uses (oil spills are ugly, right?) and the pain it can inflict. But should we pretend the word never existed?
Let’s not ask if “enormous” is really less hurtful than “fat”. Is it less cruel for the schoolyard bullies to call a child enormous? Let’s ignore the question of whether a child will become a bully, a misogynist, a racist or a serial killer after reading a Roald Dahl novel. If I were looking for where trouble starts, I’d check the families before the bookshelves.
Oh, and let’s not ask what children actually like. Lately, in our town, the first-graders were begging to go see the horror film M3GAN. Children aren’t stupid. They know when something seems preachy and false. They can spot a euphemism miles away. One reason they enjoy Dahl’s novels is because they are subversive, siding with the kids in that primal rebellion: the children versus the grownups.
A sentence was added to The Witches – who are revealed to be bald beneath their wigs – explaining that there are many reasons why a woman might wear a wig, and that it’s not a bad thing. It’s the kind of sentence that loses readers. When you’re reading to a group of kids, you can watch their attention drift away and never come back.
And where will all this end? If children are traumatized by the word ugly, how will they feel at the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, when the little girl gets her feet chopped off as the only cure for obsessive dancing? What about the fairy tales or myths in which children are cooked and served to their unsuspecting parents? Let’s change the ethnicity of Shylock, of Oliver Twist. Othello will be tricky. Those axe murders of the old women in Crime and Punishment might need another look.
Disney has rewritten fairy tales and children’s classics, rarely for the better. But we expect the film to diverge from the original. The book is still the book – or should be.
(Full disclosure: I’ve watched the 1996 film version of Matilda probably 15 times, with two generations of kids. It is one of my favorite films. I also liked the musical.)
Fortunately, the announcement of the Dahl revision generated considerable heat from some of the writer’s notable fans – among them British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The plan was reworked, and the books will continue to be available in the familiar versions, bad words and all. Cue the sigh of relief. A plot to saddle an author with an unwanted co-author has been foiled. For now.
What was behind it, anyway? Several writers, among them Christian Lorentzen and Lincoln Michel, have pointed to that rarest of motives: money. The tidying up of Dahl’s work was a kind of rebranding, a marketing ploy designed to protect valuable intellectual property, and a wise move for Netflix, which has acquired the rights to Dahl’s work. That seems likely, but there is also the fact that someone recognized a market for the retrofitted model, a demographic likely to spring for the “healthier” product.
Perhaps this seems too far a reach. But it’s occurred to me that this kind of revision – rewriting a published work to reflect and enforce certain assumptions about what young people should be protected from – mirrors, in many ways, the educational theories of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and the extreme right.
Although far apart on the political spectrum, both groups of censors – let’s call them that – pursue tighter control over what kids read, often at the expense of truth. Both are attempting to edit and revise history. With their animosity toward critical race theory, the hard right would essentially like to deny that slavery existed. No reason to feel guilty! The changes that almost altered Dahl novels would have had young readers believing that people never said fat or ugly. People were always kindly and nice, just as they are today.
We don’t want our children and grandchildren exposed, before they need to be, to the horrors of the not-nice world. But we also don’t want them to get accustomed to being lied to. Why not trust our kids with the truth?
Roald Dahl wrote books powered by imagination and wit, alive with characters who stay with us. That’s why he’s still read with such pleasure. Like most of us, he was far from perfect. But he had stories he wanted to tell us, novels he labored to write in his own words and in his own particular way.
Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
