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March 29, 2024, 07:39:56 AM

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Let's list all the dodgy stuff in Roald Dahl books

Started by MojoJojo, June 07, 2020, 07:39:12 PM

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MojoJojo

Well, the Oompa-Loompas are probably the most dodgy thing. Only changed from being black african pygmies by the American publishers. But there is lots of dodgy shit in his work:

Esoi Trot - man tricks woman into marrying him by pretending to magically grow her pet tortoise. Which he then gives away. Patrick Rothfuss gives a pretty entertaining description here: https://i.redd.it/tjxc12rmn3421.png (this is what he does instead of finishing his trilogy apparently, it's been 10 years since the second book came out).

The Twits's - ugly people are ugly because they are horrible people. I'm not sure, but I think the monkey and the african bird are racial stereotypes.

George's Marvelous Medicine - get all the stuff from the medicine cabinet, under the sink, all the chemical crap you can find, then feed it to your grandmother and amazing stuff will happen! Up there with the Magic Noose in terms of responsibility. Then they kill the grandmother but it's OK because she was old and becoming a nuisance anyway.

The Witches - often seen as misogynist - I can't really remember it well enough to comment.

What am I missing?

bgmnts

I think Twits is alright because they became ugly by being ugly on the inside didn't they? Morality tale and that.

Old Nehamkin

#2
I remember reading one of his adult short stories where there's two neighbours who fancy each other's wives, so they talk about it and they come up this scheme where one night they each sneak out of their house into the other one's and proceed to have sex with the other one's wife - with the lights turned off and making sure not to say anything so the wives are none the wiser that they've had a switcheroo pulled on them (the two men are of similar height and they've established between themselves that their cocks are about the same size and that they're both uncircumcised). Anyway, this all basically goes off without a hitch and the punchline is that the next morning one of the guy's wives is like "I didn't much like the way you did it last night", and the other guy's wife is like "ooh, more of that, please". Wahey!

Jumblegraws

Copy/paste of the thing I wrote over on the Glinner thread where this subject came up:

I was six-years-old when I first read Dirty Beasts and, even though I didn't really know what racism was then, I had been taught not to be rude about people for being from other countries and I thought there was something weird about how much was made of nationality of the man who got shat on by a flying cow:
QuoteAnd all of them were well behaved
Except for one quite horrid man
Who'd travelled from Afghanistan
This fellow, standing in the crowd,
Raised up his voice and yelled aloud,
''That silly cow! Hey listen Daisy!
I think you're absolutely crazy!''

Unfortunately Daisy heard
Quite clearly every single word
''By gosh, '' she cried ''what awful cheek!
Who is this silly foreign freak?''
She dived and using all her power
She got to sixty miles an hour
'Bombs gone!'' she cried. ''Take that'' she said,
And dropped a cowpat on his head.

Jumblegraws

Quote from: bgmnts on June 07, 2020, 07:41:30 PM
I think Twits is alright because they became ugly by being ugly on the inside didn't they? Morality tale and that.
Equating good looks with good morals is exactly the problem, is it not? Dahl gives himself some wriggle-room with it because the book says people who aren't conventionally attractive still look lovely if they have an inner-niceness, but I'm not sure reality supports this.

bgmnts

Quote from: Jumblegraws on June 07, 2020, 08:43:29 PM
Equating good looks with good morals is exactly the problem, is it not? Dahl gives himself some wriggle-room with it because the book says people who aren't conventionally attractive still look lovely if they have an inner-niceness, but I'm not sure reality supports this.

I suppose yeah. I just took it as metaphorical ugliness.


Blue Jam

Quote from: Roald DahlIf a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Make of that what you will.

Personally, I don't think the whole beauty = virtue and ugliness = moral bankruptcy is particularly progressive, and it was a bit of a tired old trope even then.

kalowski

I get what he means, and so do my kids. You may be what is considered conventionally ugly or beautiful, but really it's down to your thoughts, not your face

Jumblegraws

Quote from: kalowski on June 07, 2020, 09:24:39 PM
I get what he means, and so do my kids. You may be what is considered conventionally ugly or beautiful, but really it's down to your thoughts, not your face
I doubt anyone misses that point or that the book struck a blow for lookism, I just also think it's stuck into the narrative to put a gloss on Dahl using the old hat fairytale trope of making your villains ugly. It doesn't help that Mr Twit is used as an excuse for Dahl to vent his pognophobia, the big proto-Glinner that he was.

idunnosomename

The Twits thing is difficult, but the illustration does show someone who is "ugly" but still "lovely"



for someone like Katie Hopkins you can see where he's coming from. it's hardly phrenology.

non capisco

Quote from: Old Nehamkin on June 07, 2020, 07:58:39 PM
I remember reading one of his adult short stories where there's two neighbours who fancy each other's wives, so they talk about it and they come up this scheme where one night they each sneak out of their house into the other one's and proceed to have sex with the other one's wife - with the lights turned off and making sure not to say anything so the wives are none the wiser that they've had a switcheroo pulled on them (the two men are of similar height and they've established between themselves that their cocks are about the same size and that they're both uncircumcised). Anyway, this all basically goes off without a hitch and the punchline is that the next morning one of the guy's wives is like "I didn't much like the way you did it last night", and the other guy's wife is like "ooh, more of that, please". Wahey!

And that story is called, brace yourself, 'Switch Bitch.' Oh, Roald!!

Pingers

He wrote The Twits after finding a note in an old notebook that read "Do something against beards". Whether that's dodgy or not depends on where you stand on beards.

Jumblegraws

Quote from: idunnosomename on June 07, 2020, 09:42:48 PM
for someone like Katie Hopkins you can see where he's coming from. it's hardly phrenology.
No, it's physiognomy, which is also quackery. I've seen pictures of Hopkins where she looks nice and if she wasn't a horrible person then my cognitive biases would probably elevate that to 'pretty'. And to his credit (sort of), I don't think Dahl thinks there's a science to the passage, he's basically saying "look, don't be nasty about people's looks, except when it's fun to do so because they're arseholes anyway"

idunnosomename

im sure theres a version where it's less the appearance dictates the personality than the personality transforms the appearance. god i did this Lavater guff once.

anyway I think there's a great case to say a lot of Dahl's nasty shit was diluted by the drawings of Quentin Blake. of course William Blake was interested in Lavater. and he was an awkward dickhead. but he did some right-on stuff so hmm

Old Nehamkin

Quote from: Pingers on June 07, 2020, 09:47:48 PM
He wrote The Twits after finding a note in an old notebook that read "Do something against beards".


I think that people who are fairly good looking - like Roald Dahl - sometimes forget what it is to be ugly and flatter themselves that there's an easy relationship between inner life and the outer face. Having said that, it doesn't hurt to have a bit of confidence and put a smile on.

Retinend

Quote from: idunnosomename on June 07, 2020, 09:42:48 PM
The Twits thing is difficult, but the illustration does show someone who is "ugly" but still "lovely"



for someone like Katie Hopkins you can see where he's coming from. it's hardly phrenology.

This is such a lovely sentiment and I remember reading this as a child. Thankyou for sharing.

Dewt

Yeah I've always struggled about that Twits ugly thing but I think it's pretty good really.

The BFG is really royalist.

The Culture Bunker

I found the end of the Witches quite sinister, where the kid who is now a mouse works out his now massively shortened lifespan means he should die around the same time as his grandma, and this is apparently a good thing.

MojoJojo

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on June 08, 2020, 02:21:50 PM
I found the end of the Witches quite sinister, where the kid who is now a mouse works out his now massively shortened lifespan means he should die around the same time as his grandma, and this is apparently a good thing.

Yes, I found it odd at the time, but now thinking about it in the context that he's already been orphaned once makes it worse. I mean, sure it's sort of understandable that he might feel like that but maybe his trauma of being orphaned should be talked about a bit before he just casually resigns himself to his fate.

I forgot to mention that Matilda is basically Carrie: For Kids!. Although nothing really objectionable about that.

Not surprised My Uncle Oswald wasn't the class book at some point:
QuoteWhen Uncle Oswald discovers the sexually invigorating properties of the "Sudanese Blister Beetle"', he devises a plan to steal the semen of great men and sell it to women who want to have children fathered by geniuses.

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: MojoJojo on June 08, 2020, 02:51:02 PM
Yes, I found it odd at the time, but now thinking about it in the context that he's already been orphaned once makes it worse. I mean, sure it's sort of understandable that he might feel like that but maybe his trauma of being orphaned should be talked about a bit before he just casually resigns himself to his fate.
I think for me it was also the grandma's happy acceptance of this too, unless I remember it wrong - it's over 30 years since I read it - but you would have thought the prospect of the grandson barely (if at all) outliving her would be horrifying.

sevendaughters

The one thing that I guess to some here, but not all, could be considered troublesome in Going Solo (aside from his tales of having black manservants, etc.) is the tale of landing at a remote site in Palestine during WW2 and meeting an old Jewish man who lamented that his people have no land, and Dahl assuring him it will all be fine after the war, which considering it was written in 1986 could have been handled a bit more sensitively.

Inspector Norse

There's also the bit in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me where the monkey talks for six pages about how much life improved for the average German in the 1930s and how people have blown the Holocaust out of all proportion and that that Hitler had some good ideas, really.

Blue Jam

Can we have a thread where we list all the dodgy stuff in Enid Blyton books?

kidsick5000

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 08, 2020, 04:38:57 PM
Can we have a thread where we list all the dodgy stuff in Enid Blyton books?

Enid Blyton books

Solid Jim

The bizarre stream-of-consciousness sequel to Chocolate Factory has that bit where they phone up China, during which you do not find yourself thinking "this is surprisingly progressive for the early 1970s" at any point.

flotemysost

#26
Quote from: idunnosomename on June 07, 2020, 09:42:48 PM
The Twits thing is difficult, but the illustration does show someone who is "ugly" but still "lovely"



for someone like Katie Hopkins you can see where he's coming from. it's hardly phrenology.

Aw, yeah I remember this. Credit where it's due to Quentin Blake's illustrations too, though - for what it's worth he seems like a thoroughly nice bloke.

In fact I'd say that much of the warmth and silliness that I remember associating with Dahl's work is probably thanks to Blake's illustrations (at least in the editions I had), the stories would probably seem a fair bit darker and weirder without them.



Edit: covered already, sorry

Quote from: idunnosomename on June 07, 2020, 10:03:03 PM
anyway I think there's a great case to say a lot of Dahl's nasty shit was diluted by the drawings of Quentin Blake.

I mean, remember all the hoo-ha around the JonBenet Ramsay and the Chocolate Factory: Penguin Nonce Classics Edition reissue cover:


MojoJojo

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 08, 2020, 04:38:57 PM
Can we have a thread where we list all the dodgy stuff in Enid Blyton books?

Maybe, we'd have to check with Barry how much storage he has free.

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 08, 2020, 04:38:57 PM
Can we have a thread where we list all the dodgy stuff in Enid Blyton books?
I swear to God there's a story where, idk a pixie or an elf or a Noddy knock-off has a party and he invites three gollywogs named Golly, Wolly, and N****r. And the main character can't tell them apart so he says to each one "Hello Golly-Wolly-N****r!"

even as a child I knew that was fucked up

flotemysost

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 08, 2020, 04:38:57 PM
Can we have a thread where we list all the dodgy stuff in Enid Blyton books?

I remember reading Bimbo and Topsy (one of the lesser known ones, about a Siamese cat and a Jack Russell) and there's a story where the cat goes up the chimney and no one recognises him because he's all sooty, and the human family go on for ages about how this disgusting hideous savage BLACK thing has got into the house.

Maybe my seven-year-old heart was already bleeding soy-rich snowflake blood but I distinctly remember thinking that seemed a bit suspect.