Readers of the 21st century are used to postmodernist ironic deconstruction satirical reinterpretations of fairy tales. In fact, it is entirely possible that a sizable chunk of young people are not even familiar with the original versions of some of the less iconic tales. When Roald Dahl published Revolting Rhymes in 1982, however, it was still a fairly new idea. At least, that is, fairy tales rewritten from a hipper, modern point of view specifically targeted for an audience of children was fairly news. Post-modernizing for adult audiences had already by the 1970s’s become almost a cottage industry. In the era of Shrek and the ABC series Once Upon a Time it may be easy enough to jump to the conclusion that Revolting Rhymes is equally geared to adults as well as offering entertainment to younger audiences—or vice versa—but the reality is that the book was written for kids and in a specific way.
In keeping with Dahl’s standard operating procedure, that specific mechanism of writing for kids is somewhat grotesquely ironic: instead of appealing to their imagination, the fairy tales are geared toward the simple logic of children that is partner to their more whimsical side. Consider the essential logic at work in the story Cinderella: she’s got a fairy godmother who can perform some pretty stunning magic and since she’s not constrained by any maximum usage of that magic as if she’d released a genie hiding in a lamp, what’s to stop her from taking advantage? The gun culture defining America sets the stage for the simple logic of asking what kind of parents would send a young girl through the dark woods without giving her something to protect herself with. Even children are identifying the basic underlying flaw of the story of Goldilocks when they’ve been taught not to take something their isn’t their since they could stand up.
The most basic of alterations in the underlying plots all make sense from the perspective of childhood logic. Take those little guys that Snow White is hanging around with. Kids, of course, see adult humans of diminutive stature all the time, but congregations of them are quite limited and by 1982 it was certainly not as sideshow attractions at the fair. Turning the dwarves from miners into horse-racing jockeys is precisely the kind of leap that would be made at the nexus between a young person’s imagination and their stripped-down essential sense of logic. There is even a rather perverse sense of logic to making Red Riding Hood obsessed with fashion. These poems were published at a time when PETA and the anti-fur movement was only just gaining steam so the kids old enough to enjoy them would not only have been raised in a gun culture, but one which equated fur with style. In a culture also obsessed with portraying images of beautiful young women, to think that young kids would not make that connection with a fairy tale heroine actually named after a stylish work of fashion design would be to make an horrific underestimation of just how much information going on around them kids process on a daily basis.
Revolting Rhymes is most assuredly not, therefore, a reinterpretation of fairy tales such as has become the norm in the 21st century. It is not filled with inappropriate double-entendres written for parents in the perhaps occasionally misplaced belief that they will soar right over the heads of their kids. The satire is not twisted so out of sync that the underlying premise of the original is sacrificed for the purpose of pleasing audience expectations. While adults can certainly find enjoyment in them, the language (with a few infamous examples) is written on a children’s level and the morals which accompany the ending are also clearly aimed at kids, though definitely with a more ironic twist than usual.
