On Enid Blyton’s 125th birthday, a look at her immense popularity, controversial legacy | Explained News,The Indian Express
Controversies over Enid Blyton’s work — its intellectual worth, inherent racism and problematic views on gender — have been ongoing since her lifetime.
Reporting on the death of children’s author Enid Blyton on November 29, 1968, the obituary in The Times, UK, records, “Miss Enid Blyton, who died yesterday, was perhaps the most successful and most controversial children’s author of the postwar period.”
Born on August 11, 1897, in East Dulwich, London, Enid Blyton, who would have been 125 today, remains one of the most popular children’s writers of all time. Yet, controversies over Blyton’s work — its intellectual worth, inherent racism and problematic views on gender — have been ongoing since her lifetime. Her books were removed from libraries across the world; her stories struck off syllabi. Between 1930 and 1950, the BBC refused to dramatise her work, describing her as a “tenacious second rater” in its internal correspondence.
Last year, as part of its attempt to re-evaluate controversial aspects of British culture, the UK-based charity English Heritage, which installs iconic blue plaques at sites that were once the working or living quarters of Britain’s culturati, updated the information associated with Blyton’s plaque: “Blyton’s work has been criticised during her lifetime and after for its racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit. A 1966 Guardian article noted the racism ofThe Little Black Doll (1966), in which the doll of the title, Sambo, is only accepted by his owner once his ‘ugly black face’ is washed ‘clean’ by rain. In 1960, the publisher Macmillan refused to publish her storyThe Mystery That Never Was for what it called its ‘faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia’…” It also goes on to mention Blyton’s rejection by the British Royal Mint for commemoration on a 50 p coin in 2016 because “the advisory committee minutes record, she was ‘a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer’.”
What’s problematic?
The shortcomings of Blyton’s prodigious output has been a matter of debate over decades. Blyton’s problematic gender politics, most apparent, perhaps, in her iconic Famous Five series, neatly divides domains into feminine and masculine, in which scientist fathers remain closeted in studies, cheerful aunts and mothers produce “smashing” picnic hampers and teas; girls do the washing up after meals and are almost invariably feminine and in need of chaperoning; those who are tomboyish are aberrations — difficult, headstrong, and never as wise or mature as a “real” boy. Later woke interpretations have cast George, the star of the Famous Five series, as gender-fluid, but Blyton, by all indications, wasn’t thinking along those lines.
Rating: 5