It is impossible to adapt the world to a single set of values. There will always be a wide variety of opinions. One must take that or leave it, like it or not. The options are to block our eyes and ears, or live in a cave.
And yet, the act of trying to force everyone onto a uniform platform is familiar for us here. But what about this current attempt in some Western countries to force the literature of the past to confirm to the opinions of the present?
As it happens, this practice is nothing new. Roald Dahl and his books might have come more intensely under the public eye recently because of their publisher’s attempt to sanitize his language, but there were other similar cases which seem to have escaped the uproar the changes to Dahl’s books have caused.
Six books by Dr. Seuss are no longer published because they contain images said to be racist and insensitive. Cat in the Hat seems to have escaped the ire of the literary mullahs. Enid Blyton’s popular The Magic Faraway Tree series has been edited to cut out the kids having adventures on their own, without adult supervision.
The children’s name in that book have also been changed, Bessie and Fanny to Beth and Frannie, and Jo, the boy to the more valid spelling in current days, Joe, for a boy. As for Rick, he was known as Dick in the original text; his name has been changed for obvious but unnecessary reasons, even though Dick Cheney still retains his name and fails to attract the giggles his name is apparently supposed to.
And then, as Lionel Shriver in The Cut points out that in literature, ‘fat has persistently marked a character as disagreeable. The corpulent John Reed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and a similar Mrs. Van Hopper in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca are both bullies. The rotund Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is wicked. Pudgy and victimized, Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is sympathetic, but also weak and pitiful. So, the prejudice goes way back. And it continues, with for example J. K. Rowling’s Dudley Dursley, Aunt Marge, in Harry Potter who are loathsome, their bellies an outward manifestation of interior defects.
And let’s not forget Umbridge, Crabbe and Goyle.
Once a book is published, it comes into the public domain and ought to be out of the publisher’s hands; he/she should no longer have the right to edit it.
There was Jabba the Hutt, the bad guy in the Star Wars anthology. And ‘Fatty’ the leader of the Five Find Outers by Enid Blyton who was a very good guy, and ‘The Fat Controller’ in Thomas the Tank Engine who was not a bad guy at all. His real name was Sir Topham Hatt. The presence of those particular other names has been criticized, however, for fat shaming, because both of them were corpulent.
Other books have faced that ire, for example the Babar the Elephant series, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, the first because they were said to be a celebration of colonialism, and the second for a stereotyping of Native Americans.
In the C S Monitor, Gay Andrew Dillin reminds us that in the 1980s, Judy Blume, a best-selling writer of children’s books wrote about several subjects that tend to get various reactions, such as homosexuality, the female body, menstruation, racial prejudice, cruelty among peers…etc. And there was her most popular book: ‘Are you there, God? Its me, Margaret.’ The very name suggests an “Uh-Oh! Be careful!”
Blume’s books have come under repeated attack, to which Judy Blume’s response was worth thinking about. She said, ‘”You don’t teach values. Values are there. You absorb them. One doesn’t say, ‘I’m going to teach you these values.’ Children absorb them by watching their parents’ behavior. If your parents say one thing and do another, the values they are teaching their children is by doing, not by saying.”
And that is a most important point.
Once a book is published, it comes into the public domain and ought to be out of the publisher’s hands; he/she should no longer have the right to edit it.
Over the ages, we have had different values, and different ways of expressing ourselves. Words that were once considered acceptable, are no longer so, generally with valid reason. But to pass on these values to our children is the job of parents and teachers, not the job of Penguin House, or Simon and Schuster. Because we and our children belong to a varied group with different ideals and values, even if a book is changed to delete one value and depict another, it would be variously acceptable…or not, to different people in society.
Changing what Dickens or Wilder said is tantamount to attempting to white-wash history. The new edition is not the way Dicken’s spoke, or the way Wilder presented her stories.
It is also important to see the struggles mankind has faced to reach the point it is at now. When the struggle is successful it is useful to know how that success was achieved, to study the methods and analyse them for application to other such issues. When the struggle is ongoing, or has failed then too it is useful to be able to study the process. This is how man learns, starting in childhood.
The treatment and language used by plantation owners when dealing with their slaves, the treatment and language meted out to their workers by feudal lords and rich persons in general in Pakistan is enlightening. We can study it and know how not to behave. As it is enlightening and important to know what the North American States went through to achieve what racial freedom they possess today, and where it still falls short. It helps to know about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. And about the people in Pakistan who have fought injustice, Akhtar Hameed Khan, Parveen Rahman, Asma Jehangir, Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The option is to remain in the dark and for the new generation to imagine that every person in the past grew up exactly as they do now, and had the same values as we are taught in this day…which is how it will be if publishers continue editing books. This is as important as it is to know the struggles our religious figures went through to push through the various reforms they did in their ancient societies.
Words that we disagree with can either be left out when we read out these books to our children. Or…which is better….they can provide a ground for discussion on how it is not right to use such words, or hold those values, and the fact that until people fought against them those words and attitudes were once used and considered acceptable.
Children do not live in a sterilized world, and it is to their detriment if we force them to think they do. They need to learn the meaning of progress, and the different between right and wrong, and also to live with what they cannot change, such as different points of view around them.
