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Snow White and the “vertically limited seven”: Roald Dahl and the politically correct tales

2023-03-02T10:41:43.272Z


The British author's rewrite shows what happens when culture is left in the hands of big corporations


In the 1990s, writer James Finn Garner published his

Politically Correct Children's Stories,

which sold millions of copies and were widely translated (here edited by Circe).

His rewriting of the classics was very clever, sometimes hilarious.

Snow White's encounter with the dwarfs was described as follows: "When she awoke she saw before her the faces of seven bearded and vertically limited men."

Her version of

Little Red Hood

It started as follows: “Once upon a time there was a young person named Little Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a forest.

One day, her mother asked her to take a basket with fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother's house, but not because she considered it a woman's task, but because it represented a generous act that helped to strengthen the feeling of community ”.

And

Sleeping Beauty

was titled: "The Sleeping Person of Above Average Beauty."

Beyond the jokes at a time when politically correct language was a demand of the left and of minorities so that very common words would be marked as what they were, racist, homophobic or sexist insults, the book emphasizes evidence: that children's stories have been adapted over the centuries.

In fact, most of them are lost in the mists of time —as is the case with jokes or fables— and have undergone constant transformations from their origin to their normalization during romanticism by authors such as the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Andersen until Walt Disney versions.

More information

Roald Dahl, between anger and humor.

By Elvira Lindo

The historian Michel Pastoureau explains in his book

The Colors of Our Memories

(Peripheral) that, although

Little Red Riding Hood

is one of the most studied tales by folklorists and philologists, there is no single version to explain the color that gives rise to the story.

Pastoureau's journey through the history of this fable helps to understand the extent to which children's stories are complex.

The first time it is documented is in the Liège region around the year one thousand.

For some authors, red has to do with blood, the violence of the wolf, the death of the grandmother, even the devil.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim in a book that was very fashionable in the seventies,

Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales

, dives into medieval versions, before they were lowered in the 19th century, and argued that the color red is related to sexuality and the deep brutality of history (cannibalism included).

Pastoureau, on the other hand, offers a less twisted explanation: in the Middle Ages red was the color of Pentecost, the day Little Red Riding Hood was born.

Children's stories have evolved and changed along with the fears, fears, hopes and fantasies of childhood and therefore of society.

And some remain outdated: I wonder how many people will continue to use an expression like “you have more story than Calleja”.

It is a mistake and nonsense to rewrite Roald Dahl, but to be scandalized by it is a bit like that famous phrase of Captain Renault in

Casablanca

: “What a scandal!

Here it is played”.

What this error reflects, partially corrected because a decaffeinated edition and another with its calories of black humor will circulate, is not that children's literature adapts to the current times, something that goes back to the Middle Ages, but what happens when culture is left in the hands of huge corporations that —legitimately— are concerned above all with profit.

They do not offer a poisoned apple to society, but, as Disney did at the time, they look for what they believe a mass audience will pay to read, without getting into trouble or complications.

The

light

versions of Dahl are more like Google, preventing Tibet or Winnie the Pooh from being searchable in China, than Snow White and the vertically limited seven.

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Source: elparis

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