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?”
