The Censorship Of Roald Dahl Shows The Left’s ‘Book Banning’ Accusations Are Utterly DisingenuousThe same people who say it’s OK to expose young children to sexually explicit material also think kids’ books need to be censored to stop calling people ‘fat’?BY: MARK HEMINGWAY
FEBRUARY 21, 2023
It was recently announced that Roald Dahl’s much-beloved children’s books — which include “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Witches,” “Matilda,” and “James and the Giant Peach” — were all being posthumously edited to reflect woke sensibilities. The changes are, frankly, appalling. Descriptions of characters as “fat” or “ugly” have been eliminated, gender-neutral language has been introduced, and laughable injections of political correctness have been made.
In one notable instance in “The Witches,” the description of the witches as bald has been altered and an all-new sentence added to communicate something Dahl obviously did not intend. The original text — “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens” — now reads, “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” Heaven forfend that long hair continue to be associated with femininity! (You can find a more thorough rundown of what the various changes to Dahl’s books are in this Twitter thread.)
There are so many things wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin. Joyce Carol Oates, a major figure in the world of literary fiction, makes a key point. “Prose so radically revised by ‘sensitivity readers’ should be noted as collaborations. it is unfair to readers to be deceived into thinking that they are reading the original work,” she tweeted. “If Dahl is so egregious as to require such wholesale whitewashing (sic) why republish him at all?”
However, another major author, Walter Kirn, takes Oates’ observation a step further. Maybe on a personal level, Dahl was something of a mean antisemite, but what’s happening isn’t some concession made for a singularly problematic writer. “Writers may wish to rethink their ambitions. If their work should prove lasting, it may end up being tortured for all eternity,” Kirn observed. “This is not mere ‘sensitivity’ editing, by the way. This is blunt, agenda-driven rewriting. It is idea injection. And it will be continual once it starts.” (Also worth mentioning is that Salman Rushdie — who had ample reason to personally dislike Dahl — is also decrying the decision.)
However, what’s most disheartening about the Dahl episode is that the amount of outrage has been pretty minimal. Notably, the rights to Dahl’s work are owned by Netflix, which purchased them for $500 million in 2021, giving these Orwellian rewrites the patina of a cold business decision. Nor is this unprecedented. In 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises surrendered to politically correct pressure and stopped publishing several of Seuss’s works altogether, which caused quite a lot of public debate.
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But perhaps what’s most remarkable about the muted response to the Dahl censorship is that it pretty definitively shows the left really doesn’t care in the slightest about book bans, despite their posturing in the ongoing controversies over the last few years about politicized and inappropriate books finding their way into school libraries.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/21/the-censorship-of-roald-dahl-shows-the-lefts-book-banning-accusations-are-utterly-disingenuous/
