Thoughts On “Updating” the Classics

I’ve been thinking lately about how many of the books I enjoyed as a kid are… pretty explicitly awful in the way they treat anyone who isn’t white, straight, able, upper/middle-class, Christian, cisgender, and male. Part of that is because a lot of my favourite children’s literature came from pre-1960s UK: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.

I’ve been thinking about this in part because my friends and family have awesome kids who sometimes enjoy books, and that makes me wonder how or if I’d share books I love with kids I also love. And also because recently in the news, not everyone has reacted to “hey, you thought that piece of popular media was OK in the past because you didn’t listen to anyone who wasn’t like you” in a stellar way And ALSO because I took Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood (1939) out of the library and read its Goodreads reviews.

According to variously annoyed, pleased, and apathetic fans, recent rereleases of Blyton change her words in the name of updates. Some are relatively innocuous: characters like the Faraway Tree’s Fanny and the Famous Five’s Dick become Frannie and Rick so as not have protagonists whose names are now slang for genitalia.

Other changes claim to update the language and culture: removing old slang like “jolly” to mean “really” and using terms like “traveller” instead of pejoratives like “tinker.”

Personally, I agree that children can cope with language from different times. If they don’t read a book about a boy named “Dick” because it’s just too funny that “Dick” can also mean “penis,” well… let them? There are plenty of other books they can read instead. And if the worry is that they might use the word/name “Fanny” without understanding that it can also mean genitals? Well… again, let them? Or explain to them. They’ll figure out how navigate it.

They can handle different slang like “jolly” and words that harken back to practices that have now become obsolete, such as boarding-school jargon. If it’s too “uncool” for them, don’t worry: there are plenty of other great books that are more contemporary. I have confidence that they can deal with violence or villains who threaten corporal punishment, and if they can’t, then… they won’t read the book? Unless an adult makes them?

However, there are absolutely some elements of Enid Blyton’s writing that no publisher should tacitly support by reprinting them. For example, describing people derisively as “common” is elitist and classist. Treating Black people, Indigenous people, Romani people, Travellers (not to mention the intersections of these identities) etc. as weird and inferior and using offensive names for them is racist. Treating girls as inferior to boys and reinforcing the idea that some attributes and skills are inherently gendered is sexist.

Almost ten years ago (!), Baby Me had Thoughts on the responsibility of those re-telling stories to own the ideas that story contains. I’ve learned a lot in the past decade, and I strive to keep learning, so I’m surprised to find that I mostly* agree with my past self.

However, Past Self was still pretty ignorant (Today Self is just kinda ignorant but at least aware of it and trying to change it), so there is one major development in my thought: it would be nice if knowing the real-life details of the author didn’t make a difference, but since publication and production mirror the inequity in society, who’s telling the story matters.

Are stories about marginalized people portraying them from the perspective of a marginalized storyteller? Or are these marginalized characters in a dominant author’s story aimed at dominant audiences?

For me, personally, it’s easier to engage with Enid Blyton and E. Nesbit’s sexist portrayals of girls and women because these female authors were showing their own experiences. Some of their characters express the straitjackets that confined them, and some characters (sometimes the same ones) express who they were and what they experienced. Reading C. S. Lewis or J. M. Barrie’s sexism is more grating, because both men present their female characters from the outside, without a sense of inhabiting their lives.

Likewise, I have to be aware of my own privilege: when I read authors who shared my whiteness, my middle-class background, I’ve got to work extra-hard to challenge their assumptions and biases, since I probably share them. I need to seek out voices of people who don’t share that privilege and listen to what they have to say. I need to be aware that they may have a multiplicity of opinions because they are, y’know, multiple people, and I need to be wary of choosing to hear only the opinions that are most convenient for me.

I know, I know: how does that answer the question of what to do as a publisher or educator or producer? On one hand, some of these works have permeated the dominant culture to the extent that ignorance of them can put a reader at a disadvantage. And, as the boilerplate to Warner Brothers classic cartoons collections repeats ad nauseum, we don’t want to pretend that bigotry and discrimination never existed.

On the other hand, there’s no literary knowledge worth making the only Jewish kid squirm as an authority figure glibly recites The Merchant of Venice‘s anti-Semitic tropes.** Privileged artists don’t get to decide that now’s the time for those who don’t share their privilege to remember group trauma. And I stand by what I said ten years ago: really, really interrogate your intent if, as a member of a privileged group, you want to reanimate or resuscitate a work that is harmful to those who don’t share your privilege. Is this for them? Really? Really? Or is it for the privileged group?

But that still doesn’t mean we need to throw away everything written before ten years ago. Altering and/or re-imagining stories can also be an act of subversion, a deliberate counterargument to the original version. As above, it depends who’s doing the altering–in general, let the people who were suppressed subvert the negative messages about themselves, y’know?

I guess that means overall that I’m uneasy about the changes in Enid Blyton that I mentioned above, but not because they tarnish the original. I’m uneasy because maybe the important changes don’t go far enough — instead of or in addition to sanitizing phrases so young privileged readers don’t learn offensive language, publish adventure stories for and by the groups that Enid Blyton left behind. Let everyone live in inclusive worlds, not just learn inclusive words.

* That is, I agree with my overall conclusions. The details and examples, I’ve learned enough to do better. Today, I’d use way more direct and confident language: blackface by white people is never, EVER appropriate, no matter what the good-hearted or scholarly intentions, and there is no way it should happen in universities. And I’d think more carefully, for instance, about throwaway examples of how different presentations of Tiger Lily send different messages — the overall story and social context of the theatrical production I describe is still anti-Indigenous racist, and I don’t want to imply that a simple costume change would make a significant difference or not bring representation problems of its own.

** I choose this example because it’s happened to me and others in my family. So I know it pretty well.