When the publishers of Roald Dahl’s books announced their decision to change some of the language that was seen as offensive, my thoughts immediately went to my favorite author and his very funny book Thank You, Jeeves. In that book, the hapless Bertie Wooster, in an attempt to escape from the yacht where he was being held captive by an angry prospective father-in-law, uses shoe polish to darken his skin in order to blend in with a troupe of blackface minstrels who had been invited to perform on the yacht, hoping to slip off with them after the show.
Nowadays, white people performing in blackface is severely frowned upon but in those times it was not uncommon, with people like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple being among those who did so. In this book, however, it is even worse because the narrator Bertie casually calls the performers ‘n-word minstrels’, again something that was apparently a fairly common description at that time. But reading that was really jarring, however much one might believe that there was no bad intent on the part of the author and that he was merely using the accepted language of his time.
So I welcomed the decision by the publishers to revise Wodehouse’s books to eliminate this and any other language that are no longer appropriate. In my view, doing so does not detract from the books. There are some books, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where retaining the original language is defensible because Twain was making social commentary and the language played an important part of his message. But while one might argue that Wodehouse’s use of those words tells us something about attitudes in those days and thus should be retained, his books were meant as light entertainment and those words were incidental to the book, so eliminating them should be uncontroversial.
But is anything involving race and gender uncontroversial these days?
