Fonterra has revealed (snigger) a new shape (chortle) for its milk containers (yada yada yada). Why this piece of marketing puffery (guffaw) is deemed news is anyone’s guess, but at least it’s given the WWNews graphics dept a legitimate excuse to trawl the interweb for a norks pic.

In employment news a freezing worker who was sacked for showering his bosses with a stream of expletives has been reinstated by the ERA who ruled that there’s a difference between swearing and abuse. The man, a boner (giggle [Enough. Ed.]), agreed, telling WWNews reporter Thomas Bowdler he was blimmen stoked and the court was a good pack of bastards.

The Greens have accused the Speaker of the House, David Carter, of being biased. They also say John Banks wears glasses and more people live in Auckland than Dunedin.

Dame Susan Devoy has waded into the controversy over her appointment as the first squash playing woman ever to be given a serious job. She says being Race Relations Conciliator is just a natural progression. “A lot of sports feature races,” she told WWNews on condition they helped her lace up her bata bullets. “And a lot of my relations watched me play, and made the right noises when I lost. Which I hardly ever did.” Dame Susan says her first move will be to travel around the country to find out exactly how many foreign people there are and what problems they might be facing.

To the weather and expect showers for the next few days. That way, you might be presently surprised.

It’s a transitive verb that means to remove material from a work (such as a book or a play) that is considered improper or offensive, with the result that the work becomes weaker in some way. It started being used as a word a few years after the death of a guy named Thomas Bowdler. Surprise, surprise – the word is based on his name. Here’s why:

In 1807 Thomas Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, in which he (or possibly his sister) edited out all the parts “which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” On one hand, it made Shakespeare accessible to a huge number of 19th century women and children who otherwise might not have been allowed to read his works due to some of their racier content. On the other hand, though, the resulting work was much less… Shakespeare… than the bard’s originals.

When I learned the word bowdlerize, it made me think of something that happened to me a couple of months ago. On a Sunday morning I got called into our 3-4 year old room because there was a poop emergency in the 2-3 year old room. It was near the end of service, so I figured I’d spend a few minutes just hanging with the kids and shooting the breeze.

One of the little girls brought me her tiny little pocket New Testament and asked me to read her a story. I thought that was a great idea, so I grabbed a stool and flipped to the Gospel of John. I happened to flip straight to John 8 and the story of the woman who is caught in adultery and brought before Jesus to be stoned. I really didn’t want to explain to a group of 4 year old girls (several more had gathered by this point) what adultery was. Or why people wanted to kill this woman by throwing rocks at her.

So I flipped again… to Mark 5, where Jesus encounters a man who is demon-possessed and runs around a graveyard naked, cutting himself with stones. I didn’t want to try to explain even a bit of that to these 4 year olds.

So I flipped again… Matthew 14 – John the Baptist is beheaded. I didn’t want the girls to be scarred by a story of a man being beheaded because a wicked king wanted to sleep with his sister-in-law’s (who he had also been sleeping with) daughter.

So I flipped again… Luke 22 – Jesus is arrested and Peter cuts off a guy’s ear. Geez…

By this point the girls were getting restless, since they’d been sitting patiently and I hadn’t actually read them anything. In desperation, I flipped to the book of Acts, where I knew there were a lot of good stories about the early Church.

I happened to flip to Acts 5, where a guy named Ananias and his wife Sapphira are struck dead because they were greedy liars.

I flipped again… to Acts 16, where Paul and Silas are in jail because they cast a demon out of a girl, and while they’re there an earthquake hits, and the jailer is about to kill himself because he thinks all the prisoners will escape…

Mercifully for me, the service ended and parents started showing up at that point.

That episode really reminded me that the Bible is not a children’s book. There is some heavy stuff in there, everything from theft and murder to rape and incest to suicide and demons. It is definitely a book written for adults.

So, back to bowdlerizing stuff… I think when people talk about something being bowdlerized, they usually mean that it’s been censored to the point of being weak, watered-down, having less meaning. I wonder how much we do that with the Bible. I wonder how much we should do that with the Bible. Is it better to share the whole Bible, even the difficult to explain parts, with everybody (including younger kids)? Or is it better to give young kids and people who aren’t believers yet a more sanitized, easy to digest, version?

Thoughts?

The orangutan learns his lesson.

In 1807 Thomas Bowdler, trained but not employed as a physician, published a heavily expurgated volume of the works of William Shakespeare, which he entitled Family Shakespeare. It was a task so delicate that he got his sister to do the editing. Together they purged Shakespeare’s papers of genitalia-inspired puns, curse words, and whole prostitutes, banishing them to editorial purgatory. It is history’s most famous fig leaf, the world’s first bowdlerization.

In other news, the French-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, who became interested in the work of Edgar Allan Poe while at school, was dismissed from said school for painting red the fig leaves covering the private parts of its campus statues. Who was this phallic saint that was this gifted artist’s namesake? History keeps him hidden. Edgar Allan Poe, meanwhile, wrote ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), said by some to be the world’s first detective story. Its action opens with a gruesome scene set in an old Parisian house. A head lies on the floorboards, lopped near clean off its body. Another victim is found stuffed up a chimney, like Santa Claus in reverse. A detective named Dupin is employed to unwind the mystery, and I don’t mean to be a spoiler, but it turns out that the perpetrator of these heinous crimes was – an orangutan. Seriously, Edgar? This is how you’re going to found an entirely new wing of literature’s library, with the world’s largest tree-swinger? In a related matter, orangutan is Malay for ‘man of the forest’ and has nothing to do with the color of the beast. Tang (the astronaut’s drink) is orange (in color and in flavor, approximately), and so is an orangutan (though most likely not in flavor), but all of this is mere coincidence. No unraveling to be done here.

Meanwhile it is noted that dolma is more or less Turkish for “get stuffed”. It would have been more harmonic had dolmas consisted of stuffed fig leaves rather than stuffed grape leaves, but no matter: we persist. Dolmas of course are not to be confused with doldrums, the most popular location for boredom, which stems from the nautical term for the area around the equator where the winds are low, making for slow sailing. Doldrums are also known as the Horse Latitudes, itself taken from the popular seaman’s practice of beating dead horses. Not actual horses, mind you, but effigies, stuffed with straw and thrown overboard as a way of celebrating payday, which often came about around the time they reached the dead zone of the globe.

And then there is Jacob, whose name means, perhaps, “leg-puller”, and who was later dubbed Israel by an angel. Jacob fought with his brother Esau while they were still stuffed in their mother’s womb. Now God is said to have breathed life up Adam’s nose (surely enough to make anyone sneeze, the breath of God). It is also rumored that Jacob was the first man to die following an illness rather than after a sneeze, which marked the moment when everyone else up to that point in history had died.

So imagine that that house on the Rue Morgue is Jacob and that the chimney was his nasal passageway. Further imagine that an orangutan has stuffed a corpse into that chimney, and God has blown into the other end. Wouldn’t Israel, née Jacob, explode? Couldn’t that be expected, when an orange man of the forest has gone and stuffed a corpse up his nose? Wouldn’t you have traded a bowl of stew in exchange for your birthright – which you had just finished blowing all over the house at Rue Morgue, which itself doubled as your own corporeal interior? Heady stuff.

I previously mentioned that the first book I downloaded to my Kindle was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When a couple of transcontinental flights provided me ten or so hours of uninterrupted reading time last Fall, I tried out the Kindle and read the book for, I think, the first time since high school (and, yes, I went to high school after 1884).

As I read it and rediscovered one of the great books of western literature, I started thinking about what I might write here, either to motivate my readers who, like me, hadn’t read the book in a long time, or those who had never read it. This enormously entertaining and wonderfully told story is something everyone who can should read. If you read it because it was assigned to you in high school or college, and you found it long and somewhat obtuse, I encourage you to try it as a grown-up, and see if you don’t think differently now. And if you’ve always thought of Huckleberry Finn as one of those hoary old chestnuts that take up space in attic of our literary history, I can promise you that you’ll be interested — if not captivated — by the charming Huck (the entire story is told in Huck’s words, with his very picturesque way of speaking), and I can also promise that you will laugh out loud a few times. All American readers already know that Mr. Twain’s humor is always lurking close around every corner, and it will jump out and grab you here, too.

However, reducing the blog output from five to 2 weekly posts has shoved this item down in the queue. Now, however, I have two timely reasons to talk about Huckleberry Finn. You’ll probably have heard that The Autobiography of Mark Twain was published late in 2010. With Mr. Twain’s stipulated 100 years having passed since his death, the terms of his will are fulfilled to allow its publication (only the first volume is currently printed). This book has been a runaway hit, and is selling as fast as they can print more copies. The fact that most of this material has, in fact, already been published in various forms — wheedled out of Twain’s daughter by a persistent editor — hasn’t stopped the Twain train in the least. So, Mark Twain is a big deal right now.

Secondly, Huckleberry Finn, itself, is an even bigger deal, and at this very moment. If you’ve been away from the news for a couple of weeks, you may not know that there’s a new edition of the book forthcoming, and that the editor has determined that it’s some of that “picturesque” language I referred to above that’s been keeping the book out of the hands of many people and off the shelves of some libraries. You probably know what I’m referring to, even if you haven’t been following the enormous brouhaha that’s surrounded this announcement. Huck (and other characters whose dialogue he relates) refer to African-Americans as niggers. It’s a shocking word. I’m sure I’ve never actually typed it out on a page in my life. The word gets used a lot in the novel, because Huck is telling the story of how he teams up with the runaway slave, Jim, and travels down the Mississippi, having adventures aplenty. The new publisher proposes to replace the 218 occurrences of that word in the book with the word “slave.”

I guarantee that if you take my advice and read (or reread) Huckleberry Finn, you’ll have a reaction to seeing that word in print. However, you’ll react just as strongly as you encounter first-hand through Huck’s eyes the attitudes of white people to black people (slave or freedmen). Keep in mind that Twain set his story some 40 or more years before he was writing in the 1880s. He was portraying a time before the Civil War when the world was different from his own present, and Huck’s language is one of his primary tools. Huck changes during the course of the story; he matures and learns about many kinds of people (a lot of them bad people, but a fair share of them are good people, too).

I want to say that I understand this notion that removing the word from Twain seems like a right and good idea to many, many people. I happen to disagree with them.

On a purely semantic basis, there is a difference between our offending word and “slave.” To Huck and to most of the white people in the book, any black-skinned person was the former. But not all black-skinned people were slaves. A black man or woman could have acquired their freedom, but the color of their skin made them “niggers.” It’s not a happy thought, but it represents the thinking of the people Twain was portraying. I believe that he was doing that for a reason, and changing his language dulls his purpose and introduces some silly ideas.

Eighty years before Twain was writing, there was a chap in England named Thomas Bowdler. He believed that Shakespeare, while great literature, was inappropriate for the tender minds of women and children, and that some careful editing could shield them from certain harsh and inappropriate words and ideas, thus making The  Bard something they could politely read. Bowdler and his sister undertook to do this. In Hamlet, Ophelia does not commit suicide; she’s the victim of an accidental drowning. Perhaps stupidest of all, Lady Macbeth does not say, “Out, damned spot,” but “Out, crimson spot,” which is just utterly idiotic not only in meaning but in scansion. Time and good sense have not been kind to Mr. and Ms. Bowdler, and the term to bowdlerize has become byword for the stupid censoring of texts. They’re mostly forgotten now, except as exemplars of a certain kind of namby-pamby self-righteous bloviating.

One can predict that, in time, this new edition of Twain will become a kind of curiosity of an overweeningly self-conscious timidity, and be mostly forgotten too.

All this aside, I hope you have time to travel down the river with my old friend Huck and his friend, Jim. It’s a joyful and adventurous story, and full of some of the greatest writing in the language. It’s probably in your library, there are plenty of inexpensive copies in the bookstores, or you can download a free copy (it’s in the public domain) for your e-reader.

At the last, his days on the river at an end, Huck is returned to the sheltering arms of Aunt Sally and is once again in the throes of being “civilized.” That’s when he delivers one of his most famous lines as he contemplates “lighting out for the territories.”

Let’s go, Huck!

(Don’t blame it on Queen Victoria, by the way. She was only five years old when Thomas Bowdler died, and The Family Shakespeare was first published in the reign of George III.)

It should be noted that the Bowdlers’ effort was a popular one, and that they were not the first or the last to try to clean up literature. Disney threw history out the window to make Pocahontas (as Fox did to make Anastasia), and peopled the sometimes gruesome fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm with dancing, singing forest creatures. But Disney wasn’t the first to change the rape of Sleeping Beauty to a kiss, and it was the Grimms themselves who recast Snow White’s jealous and hateful mother as an evil stepmother.

The Bible, with its tales of gratuitous violence, adultery, and incest, has been especially prone to editing, and not just for children’s story books. Some internet forums censor perfectly good Anglo-Saxon words like ass and piss, making it impossible to accurately quote parts of the King James Version of the Bible. The translators of the New International Version, while claiming to believe in biblical inerrancy, were careful to edit it to suit Evangelical sensibilities. For instance, they couldn’t bear having Jesus say the mustard seed was the smallest of all seeds — which is obviously not true — so they changed it to “the smallest of all your seeds.” (They must have taken a lot of flack about that, because they changed it back in the 2010 edition.) A century ago, the translators of the American Standard Version frankly announced that “changes made for the sake of euphemism have been considerably increased,” so that early 20th-century Christians wouldn’t be confused by references to reins or kidneys, or scandalized by bowels or guts. The Talmud itself takes time to explain that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, wasn’t really his half-sister but his niece — which, until pretty recently in historic terms, was considered much less shocking. Even the ancient editors and redactors of the Hebrew text used euphemisms for bodily functions (see, I can use euphemisms too!) and genitalia. (Hint: It wasn’t Boaz’ “feet” that Ruth uncovered.)

So it’s not at all surprising that we’ve had two major events of bowdlerization in the news this week, or that both involved race. Race is a touchy subject in America, and discussions of race can quickly stir up anger all over the place. Talking about race pisses off black folks who think — with good reason — that white folks just don’t get it. It pisses off people of all colors who wish that racists would just get over their stupid fucking racism. And it pisses off racists, who wish people would just shut the fuck up about it. There’s no subject more susceptible to censorship d in America today than racism.

Our first news story involves a censored version of Huckleberry Finn, in which the word nigger is replaced by slave and the word Injun is replaced by Indian. This has raised all kinds of fury, from people saying Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t be taught at all, censored or not, to people saying this marks the end of free speech and the triumph of an absurd degree of political correctness.

Let me say right here that my favorite novel is The Count of Monte Cristo. I was introduced to it in tenth grade English class, and somebody edited the hell out of the version we read. I think it was stupid to edit it, but I’m grateful that my teacher managed to get at least a version of it into my hands. So I can understand where Alan Gribben — our present Bowdler — is coming from. He knows Huckleberry Finn is often challenged and often banned, that teachers and students alike are often uncomfortable discussing it, and that as a result it often isn’t taught at all. He just wants to make it possible to teach a book that is often considered the definitive Great American Novel. If you don’t know Huck Finn, you don’t know American literature.

But Gribben’s efforts are misdirected. Nigger is an offensive word, and ought to be have been recognized as such a long time before it was. When you take the word out of Huckleberry Finn, you’re trying to sanitize a book that’s really all about racism. You can’t pretty up Huck Finn. It’s an ugly story; it’s meant to be an ugly story. But it’s also a story of redemption. Huck is an ignorant racist, brought up believing that the social order prevailing in antebellum America was good and right and godly. The book shows Huck’s gradual enlightenment, as he slowly and haltingly comes to the realization that Jim is a man, a full-fledged man with dignity and rights that supersede the conventional morality Huck has been taught. Huck learns that he has to embrace compassion instead of conventionality, that it’s better to be “wrong” than to betray his only real friend. And then he backslides again as soon as his idiot friend Tom Sawyer shows up, forgets all about Jim’s dignity and the debt he owes to Jim, and has to learn the lesson all over again. The first time I read Huckleberry Finn, I wanted to strangle Tom Sawyer. But I think you’re supposed to want to strangle him. If Twain wants you to be impatient with social convention, he also wants you to see that it’s not enough to be unconventional. Tom Sawyer can thumb his nose at convention, but he’s still a racist jerk. Huck has to get past convention and rebellion. He has to overcome peer pressure and superficial camaraderie. He has to learn that it’s not enough to be a rebel. The rebel has to have integrity and heart, too.

One could argue that there’s still plenty of racism in Huckleberry Finn, even without the word nigger. True enough. But I think it’s a mistake to tone down the racism in the book. Huckleberry Finn ought to make you uncomfortable. It ought to piss you off. It ought to turn you into a radical.

There aren’t many teachers who have the guts to teach it that way, though, or many local school boards that would let them if they did, so we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. This isn’t the day I’m going to talk about what I think of education in America, or waste my time responding to jackasses who make comments like this:

You know black people are just way to sensitive. You don’t hear Jewish people crying the way blacks do and they have been pursicuted for thousands of years. I think black people forget it was the stronger blacks who sold the weaker into slavery and it was white folks who fought to free them. NUFF SAID!

Jesus! we’ve got a long way to go in this country before we’re civilized. And that leads me right to our Bowdlers in the House of Representatives. If you want proof that the United States of America is profoundly dysfunctional, you need look no further than the fact that we’re still electing Republicans to public office.

The Republican Party has sworn undying loyalty to the worst forms of idolatry and superstition in religion, economics, and law, and one of their most adored idols is the Constitution of the United States, as interpreted according to what they imagine to be the original intent of the founders. So when Republican members of the House decided to make a gesture to please their Tea Party faction, what could have been more appropriate than reading the Constitution aloud on the House floor?

Except they didn’t read it. They skipped some parts, apparently by accident, and I’m not even going to pretend to be surprised they didn’t notice.

More importantly, they intentionally read an expurgated version. They refused to read the entire Constitution, choosing instead to read it “as amended.” That is, they ignored the folly of Prohibition, and more importantly they ignored the blatant injustice of the original document, in which a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportionment. That didn’t mean black people got three-fifths of the representation white people got. It meant slave states got extra credit in Congress for holding people in bondage. They got to count three-fifths of their slaves toward apportionment, as if they were in some way representing those slaves in Congress. That’s not the kind of thing Republicans, especially their Tea Party branch, like to dwell on. It’s hard to pretend that the Constitution is some kind of divinely inspired document, or that we ought to be forever bound by the founders’ “original intent,” when it’s obvious to anybody with a functioning brain and some semblance of a conscience that the Constitution has furthered injustice as well as justice, and that the original intent of the founders was morally repugnant.

That’s not what the Tea Party wants to hear.

Recently I quoted Zora Neale Hurston saying that mystery is the essence of religion, but that’s not always true. The essence of the Republican civil religion is denial, and I mean both willful lies and willful ignorance. The fact that about half the voters in the U.S. support a party that deals with racism and injustice by denying their existence is a problem for America, and it’s a hell of a lot more serious than whatever we decide to do about Huckleberry Finn.

They don’t just preach their religion; they practice it, too: One Day In, and the GOP is already disenfranchising People of Color.

Can we therefore be surprised that a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being announced by NewSouth Books, where all instances of the word “nigger” are being replaced with “slave”? Does this proposed new edition really provide a solution to these charges of racism, or is this merely whitewashing the issue?

Does replacing this racist term with “slave” address the charges of racism, or does it merely hide them? Is not one of the important aspects of this book, the reminder that for much of early American history, those of African descent were treated as subhuman, owned as livestock?

While this new edition will still depict slavery, will the reminder that being a slave was determined by the hue of one’s skin be forgotten?

What impact can we foresee about this new edition of Huckleberry Finn? While the cofounders of NewSouth have stated that there is “a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial,” they acknowledge that there are claims of censorship. To this, they argue that “there are plenty of other books out there — all of them, in fact — that faithfully replicate the text” (Publisher Weekly).

How difficult is it now going to be, however, for a school to choose one of these more traditional texts, when those who challenge the original text can point to this edition as being less controversial? How many opportunities to address the issue of Huck’s racist statements in a classroom setting will be lost, in order that others may read this watered down edition?

While I do appreciate the editor’s introduction, which attempts to explain these editorial changes to the reader, Alan Gribbens fails to show in this new edition how the casual usage of this term by an otherwise innocent boy shows how entrenched the racial slavery was in the lower States in the 1850s. Gribbens even notes how the change to “slave” loses the “caustic sting” of the original word.

When reading the novel in it’s full context, one can see how Twain is challenging the traditional values towards the enslavement and ownership of African Americans, as Huckleberry Finn’s views towards “his” Jim change from an owned slave, to a friend whom he must break free. While the ending of the novel does tend to go over the top with Tom Sawyer’s ludicrous attempts at freeing Jim, it is Huck’s earnest desire to free his friend that shows how Twain sought to bring social justice to those enslaved.

Image via Wikipedia

excerpted from Publishers Weekly:

Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition’s potential for controversy. “I’m hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified,” he said. “Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this.” Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that “a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn’t challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?’ “

(the rest of the article here)

.

Seems like a scrubbing of American history and culture to me.  I guess when we find things in our country’s past troubling to us, we should simply pretend that they never occurred.

.

Bowdler is best known for his 1807 work, Family Shakespeare. In this, he edited Shakespeare’s plays to make them “family friendly.” In Bowdler’s words, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” This consisted of deleting certain elements of the plays or rewriting them to make them less interesting. What a sanctimonious [male organ of generation].

Actually, in reality, much of the work was done by his sister Harriet. But being a woman and all, it would Not Have Been the Done Thing for her to understand that, e.g., when Ophelia talks about “country matters,” she’s actually talking about her lady-parts. So that’s someone who, by the standards of the 19^{th century moral guardians, was irredeemably corrupt and slatternly censoring Shakespeare to prevent others from being corrupted.}

This is the thing that always gets me about censors. They always seem to be more filthy-minded than the rest of us. For instance, one of the expressions that the Bowdlers considered “of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased” was King Lear’s “Ay, every inch a king.” Now, while Shakespeare was undeniably not above a bit of filth, I don’t think any of us read that line and thought, “Ay, every inch a king, including my penis.”

Regardless of whether Lear meant to include his gentleman’s prerequisites in that line or not, I rather think that if you think an author is that great, you take or leave them as they are. For instance, one of Bowdler’s changes was to turn Ophelia’s death from suicide to an accident. This impacts rather significantly on the character and the play as a whole.

The original edition just didn’t bother with several of the plays. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was not in there at all. Nor were Measure for Measure, Love’s Labours Lost, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of Windsor, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, Pericles or The Comedy of Errors. The totally awesome Titus Andronicus was cut out, but frankly Troilus and Cressida was no great loss. And nobody ever read Timon of Athens in the first place (if you’re curious, it’s the story of a courageous dog turned superspy and is most famous for the five-minute cavalcade of incoherent swearing in Act III, Scene IV). I do wonder how you make a play like Othello, whose key plot point is the suspicion of adultery, work for kids.

Later editions would restore most of the missing plays. No sign of Pericles, though. And he’s forgotten bloody Cardenio again.

The trouble is, Shakespeare wasn’t writing for kids. He wrote for adults. His public were adults. Much of the filth in his plays was in the form of innuendo, which would only really be understood by adults anyway. I would imagine that to your average child, “the beast with two backs” is a surreal rather than sexual image. Still, apparently there was a need for family-friendly Shakespeare, as the book was hugely popular throughout the 19th century and Bowdler’s name much praised.

Of course, Bowdler was not without his critics – you may have heard the term “bowdlerise,” a word coined in 1836 to describe the excessive and unwelcome censorship of a work of literature. You’ll struggle to find a positive reference to him in the 21st century. Speaking personally, yeah, there are things I’d not introduce my theoretical kids to, but I think that if your child understands the double-meaning of “country matters,” you have bigger problems on your hands.

… and then Little Red Riding Hood said ‘What big eyes you have, Grandma!’

‘All the better to see you with,’ Wolf replied. 

‘What big teeth you have, Grandma!’ said Little Red Riding Hood.

And Wolf opened his mouth to reply and at that moment Grandma came back.

‘You’re not Grandma!’ exclaimed Little Red Riding Hood, amazed.

‘Oh Wolf,’ said Grandma. ‘Stop teasing my granddaughter and help me with my shopping’.

So the Wolf helped with the shopping and then they had tea.

Your eyes met those of the other Mother. “That,” she said, shutting the book briskly and putting it back, ”is not quite how I remember it.

At the time you were quite tickled by this exhibition of rampant Bowdlerism. But since then you have discovered that the same treatment has been meted out to an awful lot of the fairy tales you and your son come into contact with.

Hansel and Gretel get a bit shouted at by the woman whose house they are nibbling on, get slightly lost and their parents come and get them. Promptly.

The Princess simply forgets briefly about kissing the frog in the excitement of getting her ball back and immediately puckers up as soon as she is reminded.

Rumpelstiltskin becomes the obliging hero of his story. Don’t ask how as you only caught the end of that one. You are also unclear on how the Prince locking up the Princess and offering her a choice between gold and a beheading was whitewashed. But you feel sure it was.

And you haven’t heard this one yet but presumably the Ugly Sisters are not ugly and mean at all, but disabled, and Cinderella doesn’t get out much because she is devotedly caring for them. The Differently Abled Sisters hire a makeover team and send Cinders to the ball in gratitude and when the Prince shows up with the glass slipper, he displays a creditable blindness to their condition by humouring the plucky Sisters’ participation.

It’s not that you don’t realise that the fairy tales you grew up with, Grimm and their ilk, aren’t already watered down versions of older, darker more bawdy stories. You try to look at these rewrites as being in keeping with the tradition. The fact that all nastiness and violence has been airbrushed out is clearly in line with our more caring sharing society where nothing bad happens to children ever.

But you can’t. Of course, your idea of a decent reworking goes like this:

As soon as Wolf began to feel
That he would like a decent meal,
He went and knocked on Grandma’s door.
When Grandma opened it, she saw
The sharp white teeth, the horrid grin,
And Wolfie said, “May I come in?”
Poor Grandmamma was terrified,
“He’s going to eat me up!” she cried.

And she was absolutely right.
He ate her up in one big bite.
But Grandmamma was small and tough,
And Wolfie wailed, “That’s not enough!
I haven’t yet begun to feel
That I have had a decent meal!”
He ran around the kitchen yelping,
“I’ve got to have a second helping!”
Then added with a frightful leer,
“I’m therefore going to wait right here
Till Little Miss Red Riding Hood
Comes home from walking in the wood.”
He quickly put on Grandma’s clothes,
(Of course he hadn’t eaten those).
He dressed himself in coat and hat.
He put on shoes, and after that
He even brushed and curled his hair,
Then sat himself in Grandma’s chair.
In came the little girl in red.
She stopped. She stared. And then she said,

“What great big ears you have, Grandma.”
“All the better to hear you with,” the Wolf replied.
“What great big eyes you have, Grandma.”
said Little Red Riding Hood.
“All the better to see you with,” the Wolf replied.

He sat there watching her and smiled.
He thought, I’m going to eat this child.
Compared with her old Grandmamma
She’s going to taste like caviar.

Then Little Red Riding Hood said, “But Grandma,
what a lovely great big furry coat you have on.”

“That’s wrong!” cried Wolf. “Have you forgot
To tell me what BIG TEETH I’ve got?
Ah well, no matter what you say,
I’m going to eat you anyway.”
The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.
She whips a pistol from her knickers.
She aims it at the creature’s head
And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.
A few weeks later, in the wood,
I came across Miss Riding Hood.
But what a change! No cloak of red,
No silly hood upon her head.
She said, “Hello, and do please note
My lovely furry wolfskin coat.”

 (Roald Dahl, Revolting Rhymes)

However, more than the cloying niceness of the new versions, what’s annoying is the lack of some of the surreal exuberance. 

Admittedly some of this might have been due to divorcing the original metaphors from the meaning. Sleeping Beauty goes into a traumatised sleep after getting pricked and oozing a small amount of blood, nudge nudge wink wink. And that business of Cinderella’s Prince exerting his droit du seigneur by trying out every female in the kingdom until he finds one who fits? Hmmmmm.

 It’s not a lack of magic.

After all, the frog still turns into a prince, the straw is still spun into gold, houses are still made out of gingerbread and the slipper still miraculously fits only one foot in the entire country.

But the updaters have made the stories make (a bit) more sense.

And that’s a shame.