Growing up a Blyton girl
Cleaning up controversial children’s books isn’t the answer to discrimination
One of the most striking memories I have of school involves an extempore competition that I participated in when I was around ten. After hours of fretting, wondering whether my topic would be mainstream or completely out of my league, I heard it being announced: My favourite author. It was, to a bookworm like me, an unexpected windfall. I walked up to the microphone to talk about the world of adventures and fun summer hols that would captivate me for hours on end. To my surprise, after I finished the two-minute speech, my class teacher took me aside and told me kindly that I would have won the prize, had it not been for a basic mistake in the very first sentence — I had referred to my favourite author, Enid Blyton, in the masculine.
My immediate reaction was — But of course Enid Blyton is a man! Didn’t he write about how George in The Famous Five series always wanted to be a boy and how she always thought girls were silly, and how Peter in The Secret Seven said girls weren’t half as good as boys when it comes to mystery-solving? Even as a child, I would sometimes wonder why Anne had to inevitably cook or make the beds, even on days when she wanted to go on adventures herself, or why Peter would never listen to Janet’s opinions even when they made sense. However, having more pressing matters on hand than my reflections on reading, my teacher shook her head and walked off. I went home that afternoon, furtively switched on the computer (that I wasn’t allowed to use unsupervised) and verified this on a painfully slow internet connection. The author who indisputably dominated my home library was indeed a lady, and that left me even more perplexed — why then, would she consider girls less capable than boys?
My heartbreak about the unfairness that Blyton’s girls had to put up with was soon subsumed by my craving for a new Famous Five. My parents were mostly content to leave me to my own devices if I was reading and I soon went back to accepting that wonderful world of camping, mysteries and adventures with all its flaws. On the best of days, I turned to classics and difficult texts, but a Blyton book was like comfort food in times of sadness, despair and early teenage angst. For the better part of a decade, I continued to buy and ask for more Enid Blyton books; on occasions when my conscience grumbled on behalf of Anne, Janet and George, I appeased it by having my girl dolls rescue the boys whenever I played an adventure game. I didn’t know better, and neither did most of my counterparts growing up in an English education system — we were quietly smug about our British pronunciations and colonial hangover. No one ever discussed sexism at dinner, and I don’t think my mother, who read quite a few of my Noddy and Famous Five books, would notice any significantly undesirable overtones in them even today.
Before beginning to evaluate Blyton’s work on grounds of prejudice, it is essential, as several critics point out, to look at where, or rather when she was coming from. Blyton’s writing spans the years between 1920 and 1960, an era when her way of thinking was possibly no different from most upper-class white people around her. Curiously, she herself resembled the traditional definition of a “tomboy”, a word that continues to be thrown around casually even today by a sizeable proportion of our intelligentsia. Enid is described by her biographer Barbara Stoney as a “constantly rebellious, hot-tempered and pugnacious” individual who was closer to her father than her homely mother. This leads one to wonder if her portrayal of George, who wants to be just as good as a boy, is a somewhat misguided attempt at feminism by scorning femininity. In her defence, her work lived up to the mandate of what children’s books must, first and foremost, do — for decades, they have held the attention of their target audience and transported them into a world of fantasy, mystery and magic with ease. The childlike quality and predictability in her writing, spoken of harshly by some of her detractors, served to connect her to young children in an unparalleled way. Indeed, I would attribute my own knack of finishing books in one sitting to my childhood tendency of devouring every Enid Blyton book within hours of receiving it.
Every culture perhaps has an inherent set of biases ingrained in its folklore and stories. One of the greatest dangers of growing up with stories like Blyton’s, is in how it shapes the impressionable minds of children, especially those unaware of the historical subtext. Having grown up in a sheltered environment, my ideas about the habits and nuances of foreigners were greatly derived from these books — French people were unscrupulous and had exaggerated mannerisms; gypsies were untrustworthy and coarse and dark-skinned Golliwogs were portrayed as ugly; and a Spanish girl would obviously have a flaring temper because she’d grown up with circus folk. I grew up with a mistrust of people who seemed “weird” and an obvious fascination with everything British — their accents, expressions, the wonderful world of calling lunch dinner and jam scones for tea.
For the longest time (in fact, until I went to college) I held opinions much like George of the Famous Five. To me, the greatest compliment that could be paid was when a boy told me, “You’re not a girl.” Somehow, attributes like showing emotion, affection, or crying were labelled as “female” and automatically sidelined as inappropriate and disgusting. Instances of more nuanced writing, such as Anne being unashamed of the fact that she cries and mentioning that her brothers have been known to cry as well, exist in the books but are far less obvious takeaways. Eventually, I did learn to be a girl, and a woman, and proud of it, but I still tend to snap back to the Blyton-ed boy zone under occasional duress.
In taking a stance on the bias inherent in Blyton’s works, it is important to not dismiss outright the contribution that Enid Blyton’s stories have had on our childhoods in cultivating a spirit of curiosity and imagination. Indeed, in writing about his childhood obsession with Blyton’s works in Bookless in Baghdad, Indian parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor points out, “…After 200 years of the Raj, Indian children knew instinctively how to filter the foreign — to appreciate the best in things British, and not to take the rest seriously.”
But when, more than eight decades after her time, Blyton continues to reign supreme over half the children’s section in most leading bookstores, it is equally crucial to not leave another generation of children completely unsupervised with stories that conform to stereotypes of racial and gender superiority. Rather than presenting them with a politically correct version of it, if I must gift a child a Famous Five book today, it would be a far better idea to sit them down with the original and talk about how there’s nothing wrong about Dick fearing thunder or George being far better at rowing than her brothers. The time is ripe to move beyond merely cleaning up the stories we tell our next generation and to instead make sure they get their serving of lessons in understanding racism and sexism along with mysteries and adventures, sardine sandwiches and ginger beer.
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Thanks to Nandini Varma and Arihant Verma for valuable feedback.
