When Fairy Tales Go Astray: The Dark Humour of Violence in Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes

Abstract

Depending on the time of their invention and transcription, style, theme, characters, and aim of the European fairy tales tend to reflect the notions of the current dominant ideology in society and culture. Either unwittingly or intentionally, dominant discourse of fairy tales endorses the overall inequality between ideological binaries which urges the contemporary writers into taking interest in rewriting these traditional tales to change the ideological and the serious tone. These source texts, whose expressions are based on discriminatory discourses such as sexism, ageism, ableism and racism, are revised by the contemporary authors who minds to be politically correct. Roald Dahl, one of the most significant writers of British children’s literature, in his Revolting Rhymes retells the traditional fairy tales, such as “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Snow White,” “Goldilocks”… by blending humour and his whimsical style within the overall frame of these tales. In order to eliminate the injustice, especially between strong and weaker characters, Dahl disrupts the balance of power in fairy tales with vindictive yet funny examples. In this work, the concept of funny for Dahl lies in handling of horrifying violence with lighthearted and hilarious manner. Since violence has been one of the entrenched constituents of classic European fairy tales, Dahl in his rewritings employs violence against the perpetrators to re-establish the justice and to amuse the readers. Moreover, the fact that he densely crafts the language with slang expressions and amusing coarseness reflects the hilariously revolting side of the fairy tales he aims to provide. In his attempt to deviate the tales, Dahl not only deals with the fairy tale characters and their stories, but also he subverts their messages into more unexpected, parodic and revolting conditions. In this light, this paper aims to analyse how and why Roald Dahl alters those classical fairy tales with dark humour while examining the laughter and amazement of violence to the readers.