Miss Buncle, and the Racist Newberys

[osprey_archer]

Just finished reading Miss Buncle Married, which is the sequel to Miss Buncle's Book and quite as delightful as the first - and with the added draw of being a book about a house, rather as The Secret Garden is about Misselthwaite Manor or Rebecca about Manderley (although in a much lighter vein than Rebecca).

I'm looking forward to reading as many more of D. E. Stevenson's books as I can track down.

***

The most interesting thing about Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill is what is not in it. Pace Wikipedia, when the book was originally published, the cook character was a blazing Aunt-Jemima-ish racial stereotype. This edited out of later versions - as far as I can tell, mostly by removing the cook from the story as much as possible, and definitively cutting any mention that she was meant to be black.

On the one hand it is laudable that the publishers or Newbery committee or whoever didn’t want their award-winning fiction to promote racial stereotypes - and this is a situation that actually comes up a lot in older Newbery books. Both Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (which also has some pretty sexist passages) and Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years have lengthy episodes that are cringe-worthy by modern standards.

But I am not sure about editing books (without even mentioning anywhere on the book that it has been edited!) and then sending them out, award in hand, as if they’d been like that all along.

I can’t decide what would be the best way to deal with this situation. Should they be published as is? For adult books I would say “Yes, do that.” But children are still forming their standards about what is acceptable, so it seems like a bad idea to simply republish award-winning yet racist fiction without at least saying that some parts of it are no longer appropriate.

So what then? Publish the books with an introduction explaining that this sort of thing was socially acceptable in 1940, but standards have changed? Quietly drop them from publication? Or is editing the right way to go? Or edit it - but include an introduction that explains “we edited this part because reasons”?

The Dolittle book I read took this final route. I am not sure that making the addle-pated African chief want to become a lion rather than a white man actually made things all that much better, honestly, but...I guess they tried.

Comments

[silverusagi]

Yeah, that's tricky. Like, if someone was trying to cut the racist things from Gone With the Wind, I'd be up in arms about it, because denying it happened doesn't do anyone any good. But it does seem really bad to give kids racist stories when the kids don't automatically have that disconnect about 'that was then and this is now'. But if they edit them, there should be a note somewhere, even if they don't turn it into a history lesson, the text should be clearly marked as altered.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've read that there was some suggestion about editing Huckleberry Finn for school use. I can see an argument for not using it at all, but surely if you cut out the skiffy bits then you've destroyed the point of teaching Huckleberry Finn? Surely the point of using it is to show how racist American society was.

But definitely, I think there always ought to be a note if a book has been edited.

[ladyherenya]

Whether or not to edit racism out of children's books is a tricky one.

The Billabong series, written in the 1910s and 1920s, was edited when it was republished more recently. Or at least some of them were - my school library had mainly older editions. The newer editions I read had an afterword explaining what had been edited and why. I got the impression that the changes were small ("comments made by this character in chapter 13 have been altered/removed"), and more about the language used than changing characterisation or plot. This seemed reasonable to me.
I wasn't aware of racist remarks and attitudes in the older unedited editions but I was also 13, so just because I didn't notice it doesn't mean it wasn't there.

I think editing is a reasonable option if the changes are little things - passing comments which can be removed without altering the story, or substituting a word/phrase for something that's more appropriate - and the reasons for the changes are discussed somewhere.

But I really don't know what to do when it comes to making bigger changes... because once you start editing things because they're no longer acceptable in today's society, where do you stop?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, if it's just a few comments in an otherwise lovely book, it seems reasonable to change it. Why let these incidental details spoil the book, after all?

But if the racism affects whole sequences or is baked into the premise, even, then I'm not sure it can be changed without destroying the author's vision. Someone did rewrite Hitty so the doll Hitty had different, less racist adventures, but I feel like it's not the same book anymore if you do that - it seems dishonest to say that the revision won the Newbery Medal.

I think I feel that it's probably all right to make minor revisions, but it's sketchy if the book has to be changed so much that it's not the same book anymore. If it's as bad as all that, it's probably just as well not to republish it.