Christine Ford

Golliwogs in Children’s Literature

            After my first post on the historical background of golliwogs, I was interested in looking at them in a more specific context. Children’s literature seemed the most obvious place, since that is where golliwog first began. In my research I kept finding news articles from the UK and its former colonies talking about how Enid Blyton’s books are being reissued with a more politically correct approach. Her golliwogs, not surprisingly, were a major part of this PC overhaul, completely disappearing from new editions and being replaced with other characters. All of this uproar made me curious as to how the scholarly community has received Enid Blyton’s books. Is there any place for her unedited work in a community of modern readers, or are they simply unacceptable in our current society?

            As I read all sorts of news blurbs and blog entries, I found a curious mixture of opinion, as well as a real dearth of critical study of her works. A fairly representative piece (as well as the closest thing to a scholarly work I could find) was a short article written by elementary school teacher Gina Taylor for the Canadian Library Association. She talks about how much she loved Blyton’s books as a child, but immediately counters that with how she would never teach them in her first grade class. Her adult reaction to Golliwogs is that they are “depicted as mischievous, nasty, lazy, rude and ignorant,” and she notes that these characters no longer appear in any Blyton adaptations. However, she makes an observation about the effects of racist characters like the Golliwog on herself that I found interesting: “As a child, I saw the Golliwog only as ‘the sometimes bad guy,’ and had no concept of the racially insensitive tone of the books. Did it affect how I perceive other races? Truthfully, I think that’s too difficult a concept to prove or disprove” (218). This uncomfortable truth—that she knows golliwogs are racist by modern standards yet still sees them as a beloved and apparently harmless part of her childhood—is at the heart of all the debate around the character (and toy). Nobody can bring themselves to denigrate their favorite series of childhood books, and they feel what I suppose is best termed a sort of “white embarrassment” for this.       

Another article, this time from by Zoe Williams in the New Statesman, slyly pokes fun at well-meaning people like Gina Taylor who have eliminated the Golliwog for fear of teaching children negative racial attitudes. She notes that somehow the Noddy series has, over the years, been the site of not just racial debates, but also of homophobia and sexism, and that the supposed “sanitation” of the series has not been altogether a success. On Blyton’s golliwogs she sarcastically writes, “It is unarguably the case that without the persistence of her slothfully vile characterizations, the Macpherson report (seminal British study on police attitudes/brutality towards minority groups) would never have been necessary” (40). Williams is equally unimpressed with the “black assertive ethnic-minority female” character (the BBC’s description, not her own, as she pointedly states) that has been recently introduced to the Noddy television series. Essentially she is unafraid to call foul on what she sees as an overly sensitive British media, adding yet another voice to the mix of Blyton critics and supporters. Her perspective is, of course, that of someone who is only observing the debate, not of someone who actually is considering giving Blyton’s books to children, as is the case with Taylor. It is one thing to make fun of the “PC police” and wonder what all the fuss is about, and quite another to personally make the choice to tackle potentially racist stories in an elementary school classroom.

Perhaps the most interesting voice I found on the discussion on Blyton’s place in the modern literary community comes from Oindrila Mukherjeeof India, who loved Blyton’s books as a child and wrote her dissertation on them. She credits Blyton with sparking a life-long love of reading and holds the books up as possessing good morality and a healthy dose of escapism. Her problem with the books, far beyond worries that they are racist, is that they are being taken out of their historical context because people have such anxiety over their content. Mukherjee bluntly states, “It was not a PC time, Blyton wasn’t a PC writer….By providing [children] with our own de-historicized version of the original texts, we are being deceitful. At this rate, the only kind of lit we will be left with is contemporary.” She gives children much more credit for looking beyond any racial peccadilloes than Taylor does, though as a teacher Taylor has a more vested interest in avoiding anything that could potentially hurt her job. The core of Mukherjee’s argument is that the good in Blyton’s stories outweighs any (real or imagined) flaws and that by changing and banning the books we are essentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As I saw with the other two articles, her perspective is very much bound up with her location, both literally and theoretically, within the debate. Mukherjee is living in post-colonial India and is a proponent of an extremely British children’s story—for her to come out in support of these books is making much more of a statement than Williams is, writing from the UK.

After reading all of these authors, I have formed no more definite opinion on the place of Blyton’s stories in modern society than I had before. I still feel the same discomfort with golliwogs and golliwog stories that I did at the end of my first research post, though I can at least say now that those feelings are much more a product of American culture than I previously thought. American educators and critics have taken a staunch stand on children’s books with racial stereotyping for some time—no one here is worrying over excluding “Little Black Sambo” from children’s literature. But as stories with a global presence, Blyton’s works are going to face a more complicated life, simply by virtue of the widely varying cultures that they have found their way into. I found it a fascinating debate to observe, but in the end I simply have to say “no comment.”

Works Cited

Mukherjee, Oindrila. “Clear Orf, Political Correctness.” Times of India. Web. 11 April 2010.

Taylor, Gina. "Golliwogs: Harmless Fun or Racist Caricatures? Questioning a Childhood

Favourite." Feliciter 52.5 (2006): 218-219. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 8

Apr. 2010.

Williams, Zoe. "By golly." New Statesman 132.4622 (2003): 40. Academic Search Complete.

EBSCO. Web. 8 Apr. 2010.