That Matilda Mug, And The Problem Of 'Woke' Society
“I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
So cry those wounded by Sainsbury’s production of a mug featuring a quotation from Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988). The offending ceramics were printed with the line: ‘A brilliant idea hit her’. The supermarket giant has been sent to the chokey, accused of promoting physical violence against women. If I don’t clarify this now, I will unintentionally upset a lot of people: I am not saying that domestic abuse isn’t vile or depraved, or that it isn’t carried out by vile or depraved people. The typography of the mug itself was admittedly a bit crass. But, come on. To quote Emma Webb, director of a social policy think tank Civitas: ‘Stop trying to find offence where there is none!’.
Luis Labaton, head of Domestic Violence Assist, said the event ‘shows just how far from reality [Sainsbury’s] are’ – without any obvious awareness of the irony of his statement. How are we defining printing a mug about inspiration, using an idiom about having a grand idea, as demonstrating ‘a lack of empathy’? What else are supermarkets expected to do? Remove your ex’s favourite chocolate from the aisle before you arrive? Carefully curate lists of the foods you find offensive or non-offensive? Brilliant! For too long the salad bar has had me in torment. Revolution in retail!
This illustrates the unnerving censorship that is gripping the twenty-first century: a veritable storm in a tea-cup. Let’s also not forget that it highlights the worrying prospect that people do not understand idioms. Earlier in the novel Dahl says ‘It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful’. I would argue that the same wilful ignorance is being cradled by those who can’t comprehend that someone may disagree with their views – which they believe are beyond reproach. Not only is disagreement okay, but it should be expected in a diverse society. People exist; people have contrasting views. Such is life.
With the logic perpetuated by these mug-minders (is there a sub-section of society which trawls Etsy pages looking for trinkets with slogans they can also claim are non-woke?) then a lot of change needs to happen.
Firstly, the full quotation from the novel reads: ‘When at last the germ of a brilliant idea hit her, she began to expand on it and lay her plans with the same kind of care the Duke of Wellington had done before the Battle of Waterloo’. This therefore means that the mug will trigger army veterans, who shiver to imagine the sort of battle plans with which the Duke was involved.
We shouldn’t be able to say that we’ve been ‘struck down with the flu’ – because of course, this also perpetuates violence, and such language may be extremely uncomfortable for flu-survivors, or those who can’t stomach aggressive verbs. Which is annoying, because I am SICK to death of people – wait I can’t say that can I – I don’t want to offend the dead.
I can no longer wrestle with my feelings for want of being non-woke; we no longer wrestle; we can have thought bubbles over brunch instead. Nothing says millennial culture like an echo-chamber. But don’t focus too much on the word chamber, in case the word makes you think of a dank place in which you could become trapped, and therefore more upset.
Getting struck with inspiration is apparently a wrongdoing. We can no longer have lightbulb moments, because that will insult the blind people who can’t see light. Also, forget having a hunch – we can’t offend the hunchbacks of the world. And don’t do anything gingerly, it’s culturally appropriating the ginger biscuits.
Forget having neither rhyme nor reason – the undergrad poets going through writer’s block will berate you for insulting their creative process and their feelings. Actually – dismiss ‘writer’s block’, because block implies obstruction, which must be bad.
No longer can push come to shove – perhaps asking someone to move politely could come to a sterner ‘excuse me’? This would be the linguistic equivalent of replacing clapping with jazz hands in universities - another example of political correctness straightjacketing sheepish institutions and leaving them looking foolish.
Speaking of politics, forgo being on the fence – that’s MY private property. If you don’t own the proverbial fence, then you cannot be on it, and that’s that.
It would be much easier if we just said nothing at all: speech is offensive to the mute, and those who can hear are itching to feel uncomfortable with what you say.
This marks a tearing apart of language – if we censor it all – what do we have left? If we live in a world in which idioms become problematic then where does language stand? I recently wrote an article on the beauty of words, and the worrying trend of removing them from the lexicon in order to avoid offending or upsetting others. If we start clipping and snipping, all we’ll have left is a bunch of emojis and non-offensive cat videos. If you exist in the world thinking you have the right to not be upset, offended, or disagreed with, then back to the nursery. Matilda is a bright girl in fiction who defies the parents who tore up her books in front of her. She doesn’t go to therapy; she doesn’t grow into an adult who can only move through a world cushioned with ‘safe spaces’. She reads more and she learns and meets a few newts along the way. Fundamentally she moves on.
Allowing ourselves to be obsessed and knocked back by every little thing that is said is not just inane, but exhausting. Language is supposed to facilitate sense. Stop shoehorning meaning into words and phrases so that you can claim to take offence and then gather in safe spaces whingeing about it. In another of Dahl’s classics, the BFG quips that ‘the human bean is not a vegetable’. Let’s start proving that our brains haven’t turned to poppyrot. It’s all becoming, quite frankly, rather tiresome.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.