The problem with sensitivity readers

Ella Nixon responds to the recent changes to Roald Dahl's work and explains why there has been such a visceral public response

Oscar Wilde’s fictive character Dorian Gray lives a devilish life with the face of an angel. All the while, his painted portrait bears the physical impact of his debauched lifestyle, spoiling with each sin committed. Disgusted, Dorian locks the painting away, enabling him to live without apparent conscience or consequence. The tragic suicidal ending of this paradoxical plot teaches us that superficial appearance cannot hide the ugly truth of a rotten soul.

The stories of Roald Dahl (1916 - 1990) teach us the same moral lesson but through joyful inversion. Love and kindness give beauty its true meaning in his popular children’s classics. In The Twits, he explains that “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face…A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.” Unlike Dorian, physical appearance is marred by sin without a magical opportunity for superficial concealment.

For many years, children and adults alike have enjoyed and understood the moral lessons embedded within Dahl’s tales and continued popularity attests to their quality. However, ‘sensitivity readers’ commissioned by Puffin Books have seemingly felt the need to adapt these stories for the modern day by making hundreds of changes to the original texts. A “queer ramshackle house” becomes a “strange ramshackle house”, “fearful ugliness” becomes just “ugliness”, and a rich but “crazy Indian prince” becomes “a ridiculously rich Indian prince”. The list of cosmetic corrections continues.

The alterations would be welcome if we were machines who could not distinguish between fictive and literal truth. However, these adjustments suggest a profound misunderstanding of literature and an underestimation of the human capacity for critical thinking. For example, changing “Like all extremely old people, he was delicate and weak” to “Like most extremely old people, he was delicate and weak” [italics mine], implies that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is valuable as a non-fiction tract about the elderly.

Instead, as rational beings aware of the context, we read Dahl’s work for its imaginative fiction rather than its factual accuracy (spoiler alert: the nut-sorting chocolate-factory department run by squirrels is also not real). Part of this fictitious quality emanates from the childlike authorial voice characteristic of Dahl. From the above example, the word “extremely” indicates exaggeration. Paired with “all”, the whole sentence becomes hyperbolic. We recognise this because it is us. Children (and obviously, not all children) are prone to exaggeration, as are adults in highly emotional states. How many of us have exaggerated the size of a spider, for example?

The sensitivity readers especially take issue with the stereotypical characters conveyed through Dahl’s exaggeration. For example, misogynistic depictions of shrew-like women – “those two ghastly hags” becomes “those two ghastly aunts”, and “she has a screeching voice” becomes “she had an annoying voice” – resonates with the prolific witch/old crone archetype within literature and art. When applied to real life, stereotyping can, of course, harbour prejudice. However, the ultimately fictive nature of Dahl’s stories provides an opportunity to figure out the complexities of life, providing a platform to recognise stereotypes as essentially unrealistic but with a shred of humorous truth.

Fashionable cosmetic corrections make timeless works of fiction relevant only for the current moment, but the stereotypes invoked by Dahl are thousands of years old, speaking to intrinsic human distrust of the ‘other’. Thus, the changes made are only cosmetic corrections, and like Dorian Gray, cannot correct the flaws which make us human. In contrast, original texts are always relevant for the current moment precisely for that reason – originality. This means we can always interpret them in new contexts, sharpening our minds to the fluidity of human nature with its continuously changing perspectives.

In fact, its historical idiosyncrasy is incredibly important to its artistic worth. Philip Pullman, arguing against the censorship, suggests: “If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print.” The hermetic alteration of a text aims to close meaning, but as John Stuart Mill famously argued, if an idea is not debated then it becomes “dead dogma”. In doing so, we are deprived of the opportunity to “exchange error for truth”. Structural impositions iron out meaning only to alchemise oppression under a different guise, offering no space for agency or the exercise of individual reason on the part of the reader.

Unfortunately for those disturbed by the original texts of Dahl, there is not much they can do –  it is usually wiser to let the works fade away rather than bowdlerise or pick a fight with them. Or, failing that, they can exercise their own agency and avoid texts that so distress them. History teaches us that iconoclasm only enhances the power that a certain artwork possesses; all the while, polarising either side into emotionally-fuelled positions. Like a giant peach, the perfect world which sensitivity readers naively construct and legislate for does not exist, and if it appears so, as in the case of Dorian Gray, we should be wary of its inner core.