Abstract
This article explores the two film adaptations of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Mel Stuart’s 1971 Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Burton’s (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Warner Bros., Burbank, CA, 2005). It champions Robert Stam’s approach to adaptation, which looks at the way a text positions itself in relation to earlier texts in the light of the surrounding cultural environment, arguing that this is a more flexible and “adaptable” approach than earlier favoured models, such as Geoffrey Wagner’s influential tripartite approach. It is argued that these adaptations, despite some attempts at political correctness (especially regarding the Oompa-Loompas) have been at the expense of the feminine, which has been marginalised.
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Notes
“Allingham’s poem itself borrows from Robert Burns’ “Charlie, He’s my Darling” (1946, pp. 166-7) which, given the name, has slightly more connection: “It's up yon heathery mountain,/And down yon scroggy glen,/We daur na gang a milking,/For Charlie and his men.”
Curiously, Cheetham’s undated paper does not mention Burton’s 2005 film, although its author cites material accessed in July 2006.
In fact, one of the Oompa-Loompas in Stuart’s film was played by a female, Pepi Poupee, albeit she is indistinguishable from the males (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693802/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t41).
Although the intertext here is the musical Hair, and it is earthlings greeting the moon.
The latter munches on an edible cup in the Chocolate Room. Right at the end, we do see Burton’s Wonka preparing to eat dinner with the Buckets, but nothing is consumed; also, in flashbacks, the young Wonka is seen eating.
Dahl’s Wonka, without Burton’s subplot, does not need such motivation, creating “CAVITY-FILLING CARAMELS – NO MORE DENTISTS” (1995, p. 151).
Despite sounding like Christopher Lee, though, the voiceover is actually performed by Geoffrey Holder.
I have not the time to pursue it here, but it is worth emphasising that in certain discussions of the “abject,” the female is further derogated, becoming the “monstrous feminine” (Creed, 1993); whereas, for Kristeva, the abject invokes not the mother herself, but the process of separating from her.
Hamida Bosmajian (1985, p. 37) covers some aspects of this, seeing the factory as a “great digestive system” that deals with both consumption and excretion. But her reading generally goes elsewhere, arguing that the novel provides an “excremental vision,” projecting “the meanings and problems of an acquisitive consumer society” (p. 47).
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David Rudd is former Professor of Children’s Literature and Director of the National Centre for Research into Children’s Literature (NCRCL) at the University of Roehampton, where he was involved with undergraduate, Masters and research students. He is now Emeritus at the Professor University of Bolton, where he introduced Children’s Literature courses in the 1990s. He has published around 100 articles and three monographs on children’s literature—most recently, Reading the Child in Children’s Literature (2013). He also edited The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (2010).
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Rudd, D. Adaptable, Edible, Oedipal? The His-Story of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its Adaptations. Child Lit Educ 51, 374–391 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09386-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09386-5