'Offensiveness' and children’s books: censoring ‘slut’ from a Roald Dahl classic

A collection of Roald Dahl books

I’m fixated on scanning Aldi’s general merchandise offerings in its weekly catalogue. From big-screen TVs to tortilla warmers, Aldi will place almost any consumer good haphazardly in the middle of its grocery aisles.

Last week, the supermarket’s decision to stock Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes drew the book to the attention of at least one shopper who was perturbed by its use of the word “slut”. Aldi responded to a Facebook complaint by removing the title from sale.

The book of six poems, which parody fairy tales, was first published in 1982. Like most of the Dahl canon, it has remained in-print and popular with child readers ever since.

In the poem that prompted the complaint, the Prince says to Cinderella: “Who is this dirty slut? Off with her nut.” The book delights in gruesomeness (decapitated heads roll across the floor, and cannibalism features), violence (Red Riding Hood packs heat), and irreverent humour.

As the title warns, the book inserts all things “revolting” into stories that we’ve come to associate with happy endings, for an audience whom we believe to be innocent and vulnerable.

Though Aldi acted to prevent potential parental backlash, the reaction to the removal of Dahl’s book has been overwhelmingly negative. Over 90% of respondents in a Fairfax media poll believe Aldi acted wrongly, and there have even been calls for a boycott of the supermarket.

Many parents are concerned by inappropriate products being marketed toward minors, as when youth-oriented jewellery outlet Diva was criticised for selling a Playboy range of jewellery in 2011. However, adults also don’t like the cultural touchstones of their own childhoods being tampered with.

When original 1970s episodes of Sesame Street were released on DVD in 2007, they were sold with an adults-only warning label indicating that they “may not suit the needs of today’s pre-school child”. Adults who had been raised on a Cookie Monster who did not know the meaning of a “sometimes” food were offended that their childhood viewing could be considered harmful.

1940s children’s magazines containing stories by Enid Blyton 

Enid Blyton books, most of which were originally published between 1930 and 1960, have been subject to frequent revisions.

Golliwog characters were removed from editions of the Noddy series in the 1980s. References to the titular character and Big Ears sleeping in the same bed have also been expurgated. In the mid-1990s, the Faraway Tree books saw the spank-happy schoolteacher Dame Slap sanitised into Dame Snap, and characters Dick and Fanny can no longer prompt sniggering fits as Rick and Frannie.

As with the complaints about the use of “slut” in Dahl’s rhyme, many people mocked the notion that Blyton’s simply written and ubiquitous childhood books could suddenly be regarded as offensive or inappropriate.

Indeed, when it comes to children’s books, almost any form of content could be considered unsuitable to somebody, somewhere in the world.

Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, for example, appears on the American Library’s Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. The novel is at number 56 on the list and reported complaints, to school boards in particular, are as numerous as they are bizarre. James and the Giant Peach has been challenged because of its depiction of magic, use of the word “ass”, references to tobacco and alcohol, and for alleged promotion of communism.

As we view children’s books as having an educative role, it makes sense that we want them to be in accord with the values of our time and place. In the present moment, we are particularly attuned to screening out racism and sexism that was the historical norm in periods in which authors like Blyton and Dahl wrote.

The first edition of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) depicted the Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies from Africa who work for a meagre wage of cacao beans while happily chanting.
Subsequent criticism and debate in the 1970s lead Dahl to sympathise with those who found the characterisation offensive. In the second edition of 1973, the Oompa-Loompas were rewritten as dwarves with “rosy-white” skin from Loompaland. (The orange-skinned, green-haired monstrosities of the film came in between in 1971.)

Dahl’s response suggests that it is not unreasonable to change small aspects of creative works in light of shifting social norms. However, we also have to be mindful that the concepts of offence and unsuitability for children potentially have no bounds.

If millions of parents have read a deliberately grotesque and provocative book like Revolting Rhymes with their children over the course of three decades, should the offence of a handful of adults limit the sale of the book, or even prompt the removal of the word “slut”? Or is it time that a word that is typically used to demean women no longer passes as acceptable in a poem for children?

Whether or not we believe that we should reclaim “slut” from its negative connotations, and regardless of any concern as to whether children will understand the word to mean slovenly or sexually promiscuous, it is troubling when isolated claims of offence have the power to remove a book from sale from any retailer.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The History of Dolls: V & A Museum of Childhood

Jem and Stormer of Jem and the Holograms c.1986

During the past week in London, I've managed to fit in some unofficial research about childhood around my real work at the Bodleian Library and the British Library, where I have been reading girls' school stories. One thing I won't be listing on my university travel diary is a visit to Hamley's, an amazing toy store on Regent St. I braved four floors of frazzled parents, hyperactive kids, and enthusiastic staff demonstrating products in a zany fashion. Though the "zaniness" of the staff interacting with toys seemed confined to the boys' floor, with more sedate happenings on the girls' floor. Although technically they're not "boys'" and "girls'" floors since the "gender apartheid" of such labelling at this iconic store was pointed out last year. 

Nevertheless, the "not-just-for-girls" floor was a pink wonderland of Barbie, fairies and Hello Kitty. Astonishingly, there is even a beauty salon, at which girls can nag their parents into paying for them to have their nails, make-up or hair done, with glitter an optional extra. The salon is called Tantrum, and the website of the concept store doesn't give any sense that a boy would want to tangle with glitter tattoos or nail polish (after all, it's "the ultimate girls' experience): 

Shirley Temple cut-out doll, 1935

The current trends in toys make an ideal contrast to the history of toys and children's play that is recorded in the exhibits at the V & A Museum of Childhood. The Bethnal Green building once housed an odd mixture of items including collections from the Food and Animal Products displays at the Great Exhibition, as well as art works intended to bring culture to London's East End. Since 1973, however, all of the V & A's objects relating to childhood have been held here. With thousands of items dating from the seventeenth century onwards in the collection, only a fraction is able to be displayed. I gravitated toward toys from the nineteenth century and to those of my own childhood in the 1980s, hence the Jem photograph above (though I was more of a Barbie & the Rockers girl, despite it being a blatant copy). All of the periods represented have much to tell us about how childhood, manufacturing and branding have changed, and to reveal the fine strands that connect the toys of the past with those of the present.

Lillie Langtry soap ad

The Shirley Temple cut-out doll from 1935 is a good example of how celebrity crossed over media platforms long before the Olsen twins. Of course, celebrity association with brands began decades before Temple's dimples charmed the world, with the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising showing some of the products endorsed by music hall performer Lillie Langtry from the 1880s. While images of children, such as Millais' Bubbles, were used to sell products such as soap in the Victorian period, Temple is perhaps the first actual child to spawn her own merchandise.

Walking doll c. 1885

It is miraculous that many of the early toys survive at all, let alone with their accompanying packaging and tiny accessories in some instances. The care taken with them indicates the precious nature of children's toys in the 18th and 19th centuries, and differing ideas about their disposable nature today. The skill and patient labour required in the manufacture of many early toys is evident in the walking doll picture here: a mechanical device that made the doll perambulate was concealed beneath her large skirts. The Museum's amazing display of dolls' houses (which were originally the preserve of adults) shows the extent of the painstaking labour devoted to crafting these miniature replicas. 

Amy Miles dolls' house 1890

Though the V & A collection includes a royal dolls' house, the one pictured here from 1890 belonged to a girl named Amy Miles, who is believed to have helped in its construction. There are other objects on display that show how children and parents created or crafted their own amusements. I'm surprised my father didn't design his own board game like the very elaborate home-made game created by one family. A faultless girls' embroidery sampler from the nineteenth century shows the crossover of leisure time with the acquisition of practical skills for homemaking.

There were also amazing displays of optical toys, such as panoramas, shadow theatres and lantern slides, many of which promoted Britain's achievements or explained the customs of its colonies. In my next post, I'll show some of these toys that introduced ideas about the British Empire to children in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Childhood and World War One Symposium: Sydney, 1-2 December

When we think of the things that we wish to shield children from, war has to be one of the most concealed topics, right up there with sex. While many boys, in particular, may revel in playing war-based games on computers and in reality, the actual substance of war is something that parents fret about. Especially after 9/11, which was the catalyst for the ongoing "war on terror", there was frequent discussion on talk shows about how to explain or conceal the situation from children, who may be frightened by a world in which people wish to kill others mercilessly.

Yet there is no ability to entirely conceal the reality from children who are located in places of conflict. While most of these war zones today are not within view of children in the West, children in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries were once very much aware of and encouraged to participate in war. If we look to World War One, children's books, magazines and organisations across the British Empire were saturated with the influence of war in a way that did not seek to conceal its horrors, but to use them to bolster children's ideological and practical participation in the war effort.

Last week I attended 'A Game that Calls up Love and Hatred Both: The Child, the First World War and the Global South', a symposium that forms part of a major research project, 'Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War', involving scholars in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

I co-wrote a paper with my colleague Kristine Moruzi on the war-time trilogies of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. The illustration above is from Turner's novel Captain Cub and shows the kind of universal admiration for boys and young men who voluntarily enlisted in the war present in texts for young people at the time. We set our discussion of the novels against the Victorian School Paper, which was a monthly magazine that all children in the state were required to purchase and read from the late nineteenth century.

The cover from the February 1916 edition shows not only the way in which the war and Australia's necessary contribution to it where placed at the forefront of children's educational materials, but also how a role was figured for all kinds of people, including women as nurses and maintainers of the home front. It was important to generate a sense that all Australians were contributing to the war effort, even if children could only sacrifice treats and trips to the movies to contribute small amounts of money to various Education Department sanctioned appeals.

Other papers at the symposium showed just how diverse the contributions encouraged from children during World War One were. Branden Little from Weber State University spoke about the Junior Red Cross in the United States, which was so successfully promoted that eleven million American children enrolled during the War. The children not only made and gathered supplies for war victims and hospitals, but worked in 'Victory Gardens' to contribute to the food supply and raised funds to assist Red Cross efforts overseas. (The Junior Red Cross raised almost four million dollars at the time, which constituted 10 per cent of the total of Red Cross funds in the period).

While the Junior Red Cross proved popular with both boys and girls, there were also numerous organisations targetted specifically at each sex that supported particular war-time roles for each gender. The Girl Guides were a standout in this regard, with an international network of girls already in place across the Empire, which Mary Claire Martin from the University of Greenwich discussed. Though in places such as Australia, where Guiding was still establishing itself, the organisation did devolve somewhat into the Junior Red Cross, those groups of girls who did remain as Guides set about working to raise funds for the war effort. Girl Guide training at the time was very much concerned with nursing, and girls supplemented their community work with practice in bandaging the wounded and carrying imagined victims on stretchers to safety.

Christeen Schoepf from the University of New England spoke about the South Australian Children's Patriotic Fund, which, like the Junior Red Cross and the Girl Guides, actually raised quite a substantial amount for the war effort. What was particularly striking, apart from the quirky beauty of some of the events organised by the Fund, such as an Alice in Wonderland themed fair complete with giant mushroom, was the immersion of entire country towns in the war. When the Children's Patriotic Fund held an event or parade, people came from miles to support it. Whether their motivation was strictly related to the war or not, I can't say, but war certainly permeated community life. During talks from representatives from the Australian War Memorial and National Library we heard excerpts of songs sung by young girls who would situate themselves outside the prime location of the town pub to raise funds for the war.

As papers by Kim Reynolds (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and Jessica Gerrard (UTS) on pacifist movements for children, including socialist Sunday schools, noted, however, there were voices who opposed the war and sought to send children a different message to the mass of war-time propaganda. Nevertheless, their papers largely related to the UK, so how much these alternate voices permeated Australian culture during the war remains uncertain.

What seemed to come out across the papers was the sense of duty associated with the war. It is hard to conceive of children having any sense of nationhood beyond sporting events today and the concept of owing a duty to that nation seems so far removed from the ideas circulated during World War One that encouraged every child to "do their bit". Obviously, Australia is not as fixated on its relationship with Britain today, and we see war in a different light after the horrors of both world wars, Vietnam and endless fighting in the Middle East. So, in one way, the distancing of children from our involvement in war partially reflects our changing idea of conflict and greater reluctance to participate. But, also, we can see a sharp change in childhood expectations and the dissipation of the idea that children need to be part of important social changes and causes. While people do suggest that children are "losing their innocence" in the internet age, when it comes to war, children in the West are definitely more oblivious and shielded than they were a century ago.