One day my daughter will realise I’ve been fibbing to her. As parents we edit our language for our children’s consumption all the time, to avoid blurting out expletives.
But I’ve been maintaining an elaborate pretence where my young daughter is concerned. She thinks that Janet in Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven is the one who leads all the adventures, goes out after dark and says patronising things to the opposite sex, while Peter pours the tea and hands out the biscuits.
It started when I was reading her the first story and found myself backchatting the insufferable, sexist Peter under my breath. He set my teeth on edge with his treatment of the other children and particularly his sister Janet and the girls. I longed for a new volume in the series: Stage a Coup, Secret Six!
We really did imbibe a lot of passive chauvinism when we were kids.
But did I want to deprive my daughter of these wonderful adventure stories, where a gang of plucky children discover kidnappers in abandoned houses and catch criminals stealing railway freight? Heck no – I’d just have to improvise. Janet became Peter and Peter became Janet. Sorted.
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I almost derailed myself a couple of times when I forgot to change the names as I was reading. My puzzled daughter would correct me, but she accepted Janet’s sudden personality change without questioning it. Janet had become a bit of a pain in the arse, but that couldn’t be helped.
I found myself editing out further expressions of prejudice and it all worked frightfully well, except for one unforeseen consequence.
One night, as she was settling down to sleep, my daughter frowned at me. “Why is it always the girls that get to do the exciting stuff?” she asked. “It’s not fair on the boys.”
She had me there.
In a small way, this illustrates the problem with trying to edit books to avoid stereotypes: they change into something different in the process. It’s an unsatisfactory solution. The original work may display retrograde views, but at least it’s an honest, authentic representation of the author’s world view.
Even so, when it comes to children’s fiction, some light editing is surely legitimate, given the glaring stereotypes that some classic children’s fiction contains. With older children, you can stick with the original and use the problematic bits as discussion points, but young children do not have the context, knowledge or experience to understand bias in the same way. They accept the world as it is presented to them, so you have to be careful.
Random House arrived at a sensible compromise by producing parallel editions of Roald Dahl’s books – the classic unedited editions and a second set with perceived slurs and stereotypes removed.
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I would prefer to do the editing myself, as with the Secret Seven, but I can see a role for the edited editions, for when children are reading on their own and there’s no opportunity to talk through the questionable bits. These editions should not replace the originals, but serve a useful purpose alongside them.
Things get more complicated, however, when you are dealing with adult fiction. There’s a trend for fiction to be vetted before publication to remove content that some might deem offensive and it’s causing understandable concern.
It’s an issue that was addressed this week by the Booker prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan. Certainly no darling of the populist right, he criticised the use of so-called sensitivity readers.
They go through manuscripts and highlight perceived instances of bias or stereotyping. Authors then receive a report suggesting possible changes.
Are sensitivity readers just a sensible addition to the editing process, formalising something that was already happening informally?
Or do they represent unacceptable interference in an age of hair-trigger outrage, where fear of being cancelled trumps all other concerns?
I find myself conflicted.
In theory, there should be nothing to worry about having fiction vetted for bias. What sensible person wouldn’t support the aim of bringing an end to persistent, unhelpful stereotypes? They have a real, pernicious and lasting impact on people’s lives.
And using a sensitivity reader is surely just an extension of literary research. Most writers won’t want to publish work that causes unintentional hurt or that belies a lack of insight into the experience of a particular group. Irvine Welsh used a sensitivity reader on his novel Long Knives which featured trans characters. After initial misgivings, he said his reader was “absolutely brilliant” and felt the process improved the finished product.
Even so, as an adult, reader and journalist, I find myself worrying about who gets to decide what is and what is not acceptable in a given book.
“These mass hysterias, moral panics, sweep through populations every now and then. And I think this is one of them,” Ian McEwan told the AFP news agency.
McEwan is worried that younger writers will feel constrained as a result of having their work gone through in search of possible stereotypes and bias, advising writers to think “be brave”. “You’ve got to write what you feel. You must tell the truth.”
He makes a fair point. Is it always fair and proportionate for writers to have their work reviewed quite like this? There is a serious question about who decides what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Do sensitivity readers always have personal lived experience to draw upon in relation to individual characters and if not, how do they decide what’s potentially offensive? How do you accommodate the reality that different members of the same community – women, for example – may vary in their views on whether a depiction is stereotyped or not?
And then there is the fundamental question of whether adults need to be protected in this way. Readers can already vote with their wallets and their online reviews if they are offended. Certain novels featuring two-dimensional depictions of women I find so distractingly annoying that they end up discarded and unfinished. Isn’t that an adequate response?
It's easy when you are just switching genders in a classic children’s book, but assessing adult fiction for “offensive” content is more fraught. It needs to be handled with the greatest care.
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