Rereading Roald Dahl

Content: Spoilers for Matilda. Lots of offensive bits of old books, lots of body image stuff.

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I try not to follow Minor Things The Internet Is Angry About, but I’m interested in the uproar about new editions of Roald Dahl novels that alter or redact some bits. He was my favorite author as a child, and I’ve been reading his books out loud to my kids. With some books I do quite a bit of omission on the fly as I read, so the new edited versions are actually quite a bit less altered than some of my versions.

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Editing novels to be less offensive has a long history. Oliver Twist has some very hateable villains, but only one (Fagin) is constantly referred to by ethnicity: 274 references to him as “the Jew”.  In 1863 a Jewish woman whose family bought a house from Charles Dickens wrote to complain that the character “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.” Dickens initially argued back but was eventually persuaded, and halted printing of the book to change the references to Fagin that hadn’t yet been set in type.

Dahl made some changes of this kind during his life. In the original 1964 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Oompa Loompas were African pygmies. After complaints from the NAACP, they were changed to orange people with green hair for the 1971 movie. In the 1973 edition of the book Dahl changed the text to have Oompa Loompas be white-skinned people from the jungles of Loompaland instead of from Africa. (They still do a lot of “hopping and dancing about and beating wildly upon a number of very small drums” and are paid in cacao beans).

When I read the book to my kids I couldn’t quite stomach Willy Wonka’s delighted description of the factory workers, whatever their skin color: “I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely. They are wonderful workers. They all speak English now. They love dancing and music. They are always making up songs.”

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We just finished reading Matilda, which contrasts Mrs. Wormwood (the silly, vain woman), Miss Trunchbull (the cruel, butch woman), and Miss Honey (the kind, ideal woman).

Here’s the vapid Mrs. Wormwood: “She was a large woman whose hair was dyed platinum blonde except where you could see the mousy-brown bits growing out from the roots. She wore heavy makeup and she had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appears to be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out.”

Meanwhile the angelic schoolteacher Miss Honey “had a lovely pale oval madonna face with blue eyes…. her body was so slim and fragile one got the feeling that if she fell over she would smash into a thousand pieces, like a porcelain figure.” Matilda immediately composes a poem about how pretty she is, which the teacher modestly denies.

When Miss Honey tells the Wormwoods their daughter is a prodigy, the vapid Mrs. Wormwood tells Miss Honey that “A girl should think about making herself look attractive so she can get a good husband later on. Looks is more important than books. . . . Now look at me,” Mrs Wormwood said. “Then look at you. You chose books. I chose looks.”

The delicate schoolteacher silently judges Mrs Wormwood: “Miss Honey looked at the plain plump person with the smug suet-pudding face who was sitting across the room.” Ouch.

Despite the overt words, I don’t take away a message that looks don’t matter. Dahl constantly talks about the looks of the characters, but implies that beauty is only possible when it’s effortless. To try to be more beautiful than you are, like Mrs. Wormwood, is foolish and grotesque.

(It turns out Miss Honey’s trick for being so slim is being so poor she has only one meal a day. This is also why Charlie Bucket and James are so thin — a lot of Dahl’s heroes are literally starving.)

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James and the Giant Peach has deliciously hateable villains, the wicked Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. In addition to their greed and cruelty, they’re ugly. But not just ugly, they’re vain.

Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth, and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled. She was like a great white soggy overboiled cabbage. Aunt Spiker, on the other hand, was lean and tall and bony, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles that fixed onto the end of her nose with a clip. She had a screeching voice and long wet narrow lips, and whenever she got angry or excited, little flecks of spit would come shooting out of her mouth as she talked. 

And there they sat, these two ghastly hags, sipping their drinks, and every now and again screaming at James to chop faster and faster. They also talked about themselves, each one saying how beautiful she thought she was. Aunt Sponge had a long-handled mirror on her lap, and she kept picking it up and gazing at her own hideous face. 

“I look and smell,” Aunt Sponge declared, as lovely as a rose!

Just feast your eyes upon my face, observe my shapely nose!

Behold my heavenly silky locks!

And if I take off both my socks

You’ll see my dainty toes.

“But don’t forget,” Aunt Spiker cried, “how much your tummy shows!”

Aunt Sponge went red. Aunt Spiker said, “My sweet, you cannot win,

Behold MY gorgeous curvy shape, my teeth, my charming grin!

Oh, beauteous me! How I adore

My radiant looks! And please ignore

The pimple on my chin.”

“My dear old trout!” Aunt Sponge cried out, “You’re only bones and skin!”

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Here’s Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “ a nine-year-old boy who was so enormously fat he looked as though he had been blown up with a powerful pump. Great flabby folds of fat bulged out from every part of his body, and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes peering out upon the world.”

And here’s Charlie Bucket:

Three guesses as to which one is the hero.

Apparently Augustus is now described as “enormous” rather than “fat,” but no child is going to miss the message.

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Here’s another part that recently got edited, from The Twits. I remember it well. “A double chin” is now omitted.

But none of Dahl’s admirable characters do have a wonky nose, a crooked mouth, a double chin, and stick-out teeth. And apparently ugly people deserve to be ugly, because their bad thoughts have made their appearance what it is.

No child reading this book aspires to be either of the people on this page. (And redacting one of the items on the list doesn’t really change that.)

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I still love Dahl’s stories, and my kids do too. They’re often about the triumph of powerless children over cruel, stupid adults. They’re irreverent and hilarious.

But some parts are crueler than I want to feed into my children’s ears. I’m sure someday they’ll read crueler things, but I’ll delay that while I can.