Real Women

Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil

"Are you really being truthful, Grandmamma? Really and truly truthful?"
—Roald Dahl, The Witches1

The "hermeneutics of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur once dubbed a cluster of interpretative postures influenced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, isn't just the province of the academic left anymore.2 The notion that society is structured by oppressive forces whose power is effective to the exact extent that it is concealed has broken academic containment, resulting in strange echoes and isomorphisms. What else is the latest paranoiac vogue to seize the Anglo-American right — namely, the QAnon-adjacent moral panic peddled by the likes of LibsOfTikTok over "groomers" and the very idea of being transgender or queer — but a methodologically underdisciplined, theoretically fallacious hermeneutics of suspicion? Witness, for instance, this panic's discursive apotheosis in the online phenomenon of "transvestigators" who scour photographs of celebrities, politicians, and, inevitably, each other for signs of transness, certain that they are the only people left whose gender aligns with their sex as assigned at birth.3 A key move in contemporary transphobic discourse is the expression of suspicion that people, especially women,4 are not really the sex/gender they appear to be — and, further, that this alleged duplicity is, in itself, dispositive evidence of sexually predatory intent, especially concerning children.

Yet philosophical accounts of the mutability or mediation of sex and gender, even as they dispute the panic's mystified appeal to "biological sex," share the panic's assumption that how one presents oneself in gendered terms may differ from how one is sexually designated at birth; differences arise over the interpretation and judgment, not the observation, of this discrepancy. Such scholarship, which is intended to and generally has served to further public understanding and acceptance of trans people, thus finds its mirror-world Doppelgänger, to follow Naomi Klein's recent thinking, in the very conspiracy theory which vilifies it.5 Cross-referencing gender theory and conspiracy theory indicates that their shared assumption is not necessarily anchored in any particular political commitments. As the contributors to the edited volume Conspiracy/Theory (2024) remind us, when theory is left unsupervised and subjected to the distortions of mass-mediation, there is no guarantee that it will get mobilized toward those political ends of which professional theorists approve.6 Suspicion, by itself, is hardly a viable index of political values; at best, it is an affective tool that can assist a disciplined hermeneutical praxis in generating certain styles of insight.

The unpredictable political itinerary of suspicion is dramatized by a 2023 controversy surrounding the "beloved" children's fiction of the British author Roald Dahl. In February 2023, Telegraph reported that the copyright pages of the 2022 editions of Dahl's children's books published by Puffin — a children's literature imprint of the Big Five conglomerate Penguin Random House — all bore a statement not present in any previous editions. This statement read:

Words matter. The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.7

It turned out that in 2020 Puffin had hired an organization called Inclusive Minds to assist in the "review" of Dahl's "language." Inclusive Minds employs "Inclusion Ambassadors" — a branded name for what are more commonly known in the publishing industry as "sensitivity readers" — who, co-founder Alexandra Strick told the Telegraph, draw on "lived experience" to "help ensure that . . . stories can continue to be enjoyed by all children."8

In Dahl's case, dozens of changes were made to the language of the books, both omissions — the removal of references to any human skin color, even when describing things other than humans — and additions. For instance, in the original text of Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches, the narrator's grandmother warns him that witches hide their bald heads and clawed fingers with wigs and gloves, respectively, but then adds: "You can't go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens."9 In the 2022 version, the grandmother instead tells her grandson that "there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that."10

The Witches carries more than a whiff of transmisogyny; after all, the novel is about a global cabal of child-hating, -kidnapping, and -murdering (Dahl's term is "squelching") creatures disguised as human women, and the resonance with today's transphobic rhetoric is difficult to miss:

For all you know, a witch might be living next door to you right now. . . . She might even — and this will make you jump — she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness.

I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher is actually a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But . . . it is not impossible.

Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we could round them all up and put them in the meat-grinder. Unhappily, there is no such way.11

The motivation behind the "review" of the novel's language is the notion that children are impressionable, and that children who read the older edition of The Witches may unwittingly receive a tutelage in transphobic hermeneutics: they may finish the novel haunted by a suspicion that the women they encounter in life are not really women at all, but, rather, child-predating monsters disguised as women. Changing the language of the novel mitigates this phobic edge, the logic goes, and thus renders The Witches safe for children of conscientious liberal parents.

Quoting the grandmother's updated admonition, Helen Lewis — herself no friend to the trans community — commented in an essay for the Atlantic: "Have you ever read a less Dahl-like sentence?"12 Lewis's criticism stands apart from the predictable glut of vitriol from Anglo-American conservatives in response to the Telegraph's findings because she takes issue not with the ideal of inclusivity per se (at least, not in this particular essay), nor necessarily with the practice of sensitivity reading or emending outdated texts (again, at least not here), but rather with the attempt to bowdlerize these specific books in order to bring them into alignment with the publisher's stated values. The politically unsavory aspect of Dahl's writing, much more violently expressed in his work for adults, is not really an issue of diction but rather of worldview. As the critic Merve Emre, author of an essay on Dahl for the New York Review of Books, told Alex Pareene and Laura Marsh in an episode of their podcast, The Politics of Everything: "[N]one of these changes really makes any difference whatsoever to the overall imagination of nastiness or cruelty or the way that power works between children or between adults and children" in Dahl's books, adding that she regards the changes as "essentially cosmetic."13 The ventriloquizing of the grandmother in The Witches by the publisher so as to affirm the dignity of wigged women everywhere has no effect whatsoever on the novel's plot or, indeed, on its transphobia. There is in fact no way to purge The Witches of its transphobia without deleting the novel in its entirety. But if "reviewing the language" of a novel like The Witches cannot bring into existence the inclusive worldview the publisher apparently desires it to inaugurate, why interfere with the language at all?

One answer, the simplest answer, is money. "The Dahl controversy will inevitably be presented as a debate about culture — a principled stand in favor of free speech versus a righteous attempt to combat prejudice and bigotry," writes Lewis. (She was correct in this prediction.) "But," she continues, "it's really about money. . . . The Dahl rewrites were surely designed to preserve the value of the 'IP' as much as advance the cause of social justice."14 Publishers of children's literature — presumably intuiting, correctly, that those who advocate the banning of books from school libraries are unlikely to represent a large and reliable demographic share of their markets — have decided that political correctness is, if nothing else, good business. More parents apparently prefer for their children to read books that aren't grotesquely offensive to liberal sensibilities, or at least don't care too much either way, than those who actively wish for children to consume flagrantly prejudiced representations.

Yet this explanation, although doubtless correct as far as it goes, ultimately punts on the question of motive. If political correctness sells on the children's literature market, it is because parents and school districts are buying; and if they are buying because they want their children to read politically correct literature, why are they buying Dahl's books, which cannot reliably be made to conform ideologically to contemporary liberal values, no matter how many Inclusion Ambassadors pass over these texts, red markers in hand? As Emre remarks in the same interview, "children's literature is, out of all the genres we can think of, most sensitive to present political thematics. . . . [I]f you've browsed the children's section of a bookstore recently, . . . you can see this in all of the books that are laid out for your consumption now that the vast majority of them have some social justice or equality, diversity messaging."15 There are hundreds of better English-language options for parents who wish their children to read stories affirming social justice values; why opt for Dahl? (Or, translated back into the terms of capital: why is the Dahl "IP" so valuable for Penguin Random House?) If the inculcation of those values is truly the goal, would it not be better for children not to read a book like The Witches at all? Lewis writes: "A more honest stance would be that it's time to take Roald Dahl's work, put it on a Viking longboat, and sail it flaming into the sunset. Plenty of people are writing new children's books; whatever we lose by discarding Dahl can be gained elsewhere. A form of Darwinism is rampant in the literary canon."16

Yet Dahl persists, despite the vehement misogyny pervading his oeuvre and the well-documented antisemitic views that show up, barely disguised, in some of the children's books.17 His intractable canonicity is partially attributable to the commodity logic of the culture industry: Dahl is a brand, and the value associated with the brand can to some degree be self-perpetuating, especially if it can be attached to new commodities. It does not seem wholly accidental, in this regard, that the publication of the new editions coincided with Penguin Random House's sale of the film rights to Dahl's works to Netflix, although the publisher had retained Inclusive Minds prior to the sale (which has already issued in a new film adaptation of Matilda and four Wes Anderson-directed adaptations of stories from Dahl's collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar). But this explanation, too, falls short. As Emre notes, no other children's author of Dahl's generation is "being read at the same frequency as Dahl is being read," and this must also be attributed to the fact that the very people who are now purchasing Dahl's books for children to read also read Dahl's books when they were children themselves. After all, the conservative backlash decrying the new editions as travesties of classic children's literature is not being led by children.

There is significant overlap, then, between those conservative culture-war complainants and the liberals who would rather celebrate Puffin's willingness to bring Dahl's books into alignment with their own values. Since the books cannot quite be rescued politically, and since the very practice of "language review" itself at least potentially suggests a comfort with censorship that many liberals would in theory wish to denounce, it is not coherent to say that what liberals extol about the new editions is simply their conformity to a set of social values. Rather, the new editions help (some) adults, especially but not only parents, to reconcile a painful discrepancy between, on the one hand, their own memories of enjoying Dahl's books as children and, on the other, their own stated political commitments. What's at stake in the Dahl controversy is not only or even primarily what today's children will read but what today's adults did read when they were children. Put otherwise, what's at stake are the ideas adults have of their own childhoods, and with this, of what childhood is or ought to be.

The psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose, in her book The Case of Peter Pan (1984), argues that children's fiction is always about the adult's libidinal relation to the child. As Max Fox has recently elaborated Rose's argument, this literature generates a figure of the child "in order to stave off adults' neuroses. Instead of children's literature being where adults imagine stories to delight or soothe children, Rose holds that these stories are where we imagine children to delight or soothe adults."18 Children's fiction "fixes" — in multiple senses of that word — the child as sexually innocent, childhood as the time before desire. As Fox puts it: "Our self-understanding as adults demands that we be done with childhood," but Freud's fundamental insight was that "childhood persists in the unconscious. . . . The adult needs an image of the child as innocent for supremely adult ends: the manage their relationship to their own desire."19 That this Symbolic image of the Child (in the Lacanian sense theorized by Lee Edelman) is a fantasy quite distinct from "the lived experiences of any historical children" hardly precludes the two getting confused; indeed, the confusion between the Child an adult imagines and the actually existing child the adult encounters is rather the point.20

Moreover, the sexual innocence of the figural Child is directly linked to its political innocence. In the discourse of contemporary Anglo-American transphobia Fox anatomizes so persuasively, this connection is secured by the phantasmatic scene around which the transphobic imagination obsessively turns: "A child asks about a person's gender, rather than reading it as an obvious or natural fact."21 In the Dahl controversy, the political stakes of this innocence are mutable, shifting according to adults' political allegiances: either today's adults could not possibly have been inculcated, through the literature they loved as children, with the types of prejudice found in Dahl's writing, or else they did naturally hold such prejudices, which are now being taken away from them like so many forbidden (or "canceled") playthings.

It seems to me, in other words, that there are not really two "sides" to the controversy — even though there are opposed positions concerning the alteration of the books' language — because in the end the adults involved all want just one thing: to know the Child. (Except, of course, the publishers, who want, rather, to make money off adults' desires concerning the Child.) The Child should be inert, inflexible, uncomplicated, transparent, accessible, politically legible, sexually pure. It is only a matter of whether this entails the Child's embrace of a progressive vision of social order and the sexual, gendered subjects that populate this vision, or instead a rejection of this vision. In either case, though, the Child should want whatever adults deem appropriate. We might gloss the whole affair, then, as a rejection, across (at least part of) the political spectrum, of the psychoanalytic insight that children have desires and that these desires and the behaviors they motivate do not comport with the fantasy of the Child.

Three of Dahl's books become particularly interesting artifacts in this context, for they anticipate both Rose's theory of children's fiction and the state of children's literature in the era of conglomerate publishing. Matilda (1988) is literally about the panic aroused in a range of more and less predatory adults by the very notion of a child who reads for herself, while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) opts for allegory, using the industrial manufacture of candy to comment on the commodity status of children's literature itself.22

The uncanniest premonitions, though, are to be found in The Witches. This novel enfolds within itself a neat, and quite horrifying, allegory of the bowdlerization controversy: a tale the protagonist-narrator's grandmother tells him about a little girl she knew in her childhood, Solveg Christiansen, who fell prey to the witches. The Christiansens

had an old oil painting in the living room which they were very proud of. The painting showed some ducks in the yard outside a farmhouse. There were no people in the painting, just a flock of ducks on a grassy farmyard and the farmhouse in the background. It was a very large painting and rather pretty. . . . Well, one day . . . Solveg came home from school eating an apple. She said a nice lady had given it to her on the street. The next morning little Solveg was not in her bed. The parents searched everywhere but they couldn't find her. Then all of a sudden her father shouted, 'There she is! That's Solveg feeding the ducks!' He was pointing to the oil painting, and sure enough Solveg was in it. She was standing in the farmyard in the act of throwing bread to the ducks out of a basket. The father rushed up to the painting and touched her. But that didn't help. She was simply a part of the painting, just a picture painted on the canvas.23

As Solveg appears suddenly in the painting, so too does the figure of the Child appear in the text of The Witches where previously there had been none: on the copyright page. I refer, of course, to the publisher's statement about the "review" of Dahl's language. This statement constructs the fantasy of the Child; it would fix this image in the book through the permanent disfiguration of its prose. The statement does not make any actually existing children into the Child, but it does record a desire for them to be so transformed, widespread enough to motivate a business decision by a major publishing house. The novel's allegory, however, suggests that this desire is futile: "[A]s the years went by, [Solveg] kept growing older in the picture. In ten years, the small girl had become a young woman. In thirty years, she had become middle-aged. Then all at once, fifty-four years after it all happened, she disappeared from the picture altogether."24 Fixing the Child as an image does not turn real children into Peter Pans, never maturing into sexual adulthood. Nor can it save real children, or the parents who cannot quite know them, from the inevitable fate which maturation, in its turn, prefigures: death.

Here, The Witches prefigures its own reception by those adults who demand it serve a particular, obfuscatory function in their imaginary relations with children. After all, think of the most ostensibly transphobic element of the novel, the conceit that some women are not really women but rather child-murdering creatures in disguise. The conceit, put otherwise, is that something dangerous and ugly has been dressed up so as to appear innocuous and pleasant. But is this not like what the publisher did to the text of The Witches, by submitting it to the censorious appraisal of the Inclusion Ambassadors? Didn't Emre, quite rightly, describe the changes as "merely cosmetic"? Since, as I have suggested, there is no way to salvage The Witches for a politically correct representational program, then how else should we take the 2022 edition of The Witches, other than as a type of witch in disguise?

Dahl of course could not have known the details of his novel's reception when he composed the text. (He might have had some idea, though, that his vision might clash with changing social mores and the pursuant incentives of the publishing industry: by the 1960s, he had already voluntarily updated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in order to expunge some of the most overtly racist elements in the depiction of the Oompa-Loompas.) The inadvertent anticipation suggests that the political effects of this (or any) novel are not necessarily as straightforward as the publisher's attempt at regulation implies, since these effects are always caught up in the psychic dynamics of adult desire. The nonrecognition of this entanglement means that every attempt at intervention in those effects can only generate more of their symptoms: hence, the "review" of the novel's language has only turned the novel itself into something like a witch. And since the novel teaches its young readers to be suspicious precisely of witches, or rather of women, we can go further still and add that The Witches teaches its readers to be suspicious of it. Its lesson for children, in that case, would not really be about women, or witches, at all, but rather about The Witches.

Consider the first page proper of the novel, the page that bears the heading, "A Note about Witches."Is this "note" in the novel? Does the heading name a unit of the novel that can fairly be called a "chapter"? In the table of contents, "A Note about Witches" is italicized, setting it off from the unitalicized titles of the novel's other chapters; it thus appears not to be part of the novel's fictional narrative, but rather prefatory front-matter, or "paratext."25 This text belongs to a venerable novelistic tradition — stretching from Don Quixote (1605), to Pamela (1740), right on through to Operation Shylock (1990) and beyond — of fictions that present themselves as nonfictional paratexts in order to paradoxically abjure the fictitious nature of everything they frame. The note begins:

In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks.

But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.

The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.

REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.

That is why they are so hard to catch.26

Dahl, or Dahl's narrator, invokes the tropes about witches familiar to his novel's target readers, children, from other stories intended for children, and names these tropes and their sources as fictions. By setting his own narrative — never generically fixed as a "story," a "fiction," or a "novel," and identified only by the deictic "this" — against these, he establishes it as "real."

"A Note about Witches" dwells for five pages on the difficulty of telling the difference between "REAL WITCHES" and "ordinary women," a difficulty that continues (for the entirety of the novel) to be produced through an implicit contrast with the presumptive ease of distinguishing "ordinary women" and "witches in fairy-tales." In other words, "A Note about Witches" turns on a structuring typology of the self-evidently real and true ("ordinary women"), dissimulations announcing themselves as unreal and untrue ("witches in fairy-tales"), and then a third category, "REAL WITCHES," comprising entities as real as those in the first category but whose reality consists of dissimulation passing itself off as truth. We can designate these as, respectively, truths, fictions, and lies. "A Note about Witches" does not align itself with the realm of mere and overtly proclaimed fiction, but with reality and its deceitful dissimulation—with truth and lies.

Along with truth, "A Note about Witches" is concerned with interpretation and, relatedly, with pedagogy. It initiates its readers (presumably children, with all the qualifiers Rose teaches us to append to that presumption) in a hermeneutic of suspicion, teaching them how to read—and how to read, in the first instance, "A Note about Witches." For in the economy of truth and lie established by these pages, what text could merit the reader's suspicion more than a text which insists that it itself is definitely not fiction? Could not "A Note about Witches" — even as it enumerates the many stratagems "REAL WITCHES" use, often involving hexed objects children do not suspect of danger, such as candy (it is difficult to avoid thinking now of the allegorizing of children's literature as candy in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) — be said to function something like a "REAL WITCH," or one of a "REAL WITCH'S" enchanted implements for the seduction and "squelching" of children?

If The Witches instructs children in anything, it is, right from the very start, to be suspicious of that which presents itself as self-evidently true or authoritative — including The Witches. Its lesson is not necessarily a lesson about "ordinary women" and the "REAL WITCHES" who disguise themselves as "ordinary women" so much as it is a lesson about language: that language deceives, and never more so than when it insists it does not. And perhaps — I am no better positioned to say than any other adult who remembers with fondness the hours spent reading The Witches as a child — that really is what children enjoy about the novel: it admits in a self-implicating fashion what the adults in a child's life rarely do. Namely, that adults (even, indeed especially, those closest to a child) have desires for and about the Child; that this is the normal state of affairs in the contemporary family; and that these desires are at once expressed and masked in language, a realm where nothing is ever what it is said to be.

To attribute to The Witches a self-deconstructing pedagogical hermeneutics of suspicion does nothing whatsoever to clear the novel of charges of transphobia, misogyny, antisemitism, or whatever other "problematic" elements we might discover in its pages. It certainly doesn't stop a child (or, for that matter, an adult) from using the novel to learn a transphobic hermeneutics. However, The Witches inculcates a more radical suspicion. If this suspicion alights on the image of an "ordinary woman," in the same move it also implicates the linguistically mediated circuits of authority, concealment, fantasy, and desire that structure the libidinal position of the Child in the family, the bastion whose claim to absolute naturalness and security contemporary transphobes seeks to shore up. Attempts to keep this suspicion from reaching real children — whether through the bowdlerizing of the book, or the banning of it — may succeed, but only to the extent that they symptomatize the very thing they aim to conceal from view.

"A Note about Witches" ends by telling the reader how to spot a witch, although the narrator concedes that there is no "way of telling for sure." Following the narrator's advice — advice the novel has just taught the reader not to trust — can, he promises, help the reader "manage to escape from being squelched until you are very much older."27 But by then, of course, you will be all grown up, and it will be much too late.

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Samuel P. Catlin (Twitter, @lint_ax; Bluesky, @lintax.bsky.social) is the Irving M. and Marilyn C. Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is currently writing a history of the role of Jews and Judaism in the development of literary theory in the United States. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in academic and general-audience venues including Prooftexts, Naharaim, Political Theology, Parapraxis, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.

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References