Have you ever read a book that makes you go ‘oh jeepers, when was this written? Ah yep,
that makes sense.’ Yeah, books written decades ago can have some pretty outdated language, which is
why you might have heard some popular titles lately have been getting a literary makeover.
Some updates to beloved children's classics are being met with cries of censorship.
This is silly, and it's pathetic.
Mrs. Twit isn’t ugly and beastly anymore, she’s just beastly.
Y’all gotta stop this okay?
In those days, we had different attitudes.
The name’s Woke...James Woke.
New editions of James Bond's Live and Let Die have taken out references to alcoholism and
African criminals, while Roald Dahl's most popular works got an overhaul, deleting words like fat and
ugly and the addition of some gender-neutral terms. It's caused quite a stir. Some people
say it better reflects who we are today. Others call it absurd censorship. So, which is it?
One of the arguments against changing the words in books is that it makes
it actually harder to discuss the issues to see the problem and to talk about it.
This is Dr. Michelle Smith. She's a senior lecturer in literary studies
at Monash University, and also has a cat, hello cat.
Why would people want to change the words in old books, you know,
particularly in books where a lot of the authors don't really have a say in what's changing?
Sure, well, I think people want to change the words that we find in books,
particularly when the books get quite old. So books by someone like Roald Dahl,
a lot of them were written in the 1960s and the world has changed pretty radically,
things we think about gender, race, are worlds apart and so people worry
that children reading these books will think those values and morals are the right ones.
Puffin Books the publisher of Roald Dahl's work and Ian Fleming Publications who are
responsible for the James Bond series, hired people called sensitivity readers to, well,
read through the novels and mark out anything that is deemed to be offensive by today's
standards. The James Bond novels remains relatively unchanged. References to racial
stereotypes were deleted, but pretty abhorrent phrases like ‘blithering women failing to do a
man's work’ and referencing homosexuality as a ‘stubborn disability’ have remained
in the books. Experts tend to agree there's a massive difference between altering adult and
children's literature, with the latter being analysed with a bit more of a fine-tooth comb.
So we, through books, imagine that children learn what's right and wrong, what's good and bad. I
mean, a lot of children's books have heroes and villains, right. So in a 21st century context,
some of these 60s ideas from Roald Dahl now don't seem appropriate for children.
To be clear, this isn't a new issue at all. People have been
discussing this throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. A lot of them though,
seem to agree that there's a better approach than completely changing or deleting words.
I think that it should stay the same,
because we need to have an idea of history and what it was like back then
This is not our views anymore, this is how it used to be viewed in the time and they could
maybe put like, perhaps like maybe a date that this was what it was like during that time period,
just so that people are aware that this is no longer how they see things.
If we go back and read Shakespeare, we don't expect it to accord with today's
way of thinking and values or if we read a classic book Charles Dickens book from the Victorian era,
we know those times had racism, had sexism and work differently.
Some experts reckon changing words or phrases in old books actually makes it
harder to teach kids about issues like racism and misogyny because it kind of just sweeps
the issue under the rug. But there might be another reason that publishers are doing it.
A lot of these books that are in contestation are
ones that are connected with a lot of film and TV adaptations.
In 2021, Netflix bought the rights to Roald Dahl's works for more than
500 million dollars. And there's always new James Bond movies on the horizon.
You can imagine why I’ve come back to play.
Some people reckon publishers want to make sure they can keep making money from their old books.
With that in mind, do we want businesses deciding what books say?
Michelle says with all of these changes,
it's important to remember who these books are written for.
We should give credit to young people as readers to not just think that they need
protection all the time. Young people aren't just passive readers that they
can understand different time periods and that things were different in the past.
The language used is what makes the books the Roald Dahl books. And then
if you take that language away, it doesn't have that same feel to it.
It is kind of changing the story and how people are thinking of it.
And they've never made me offended by anything. And I know that it's just a story,
so I know it can't hurt me in any sort of way.
Do we want to, you know, have everything go through an acceptability filter? And
does that make our culture a bit poorer if we think that
young people or adults can't cope with some different or challenging ideas?