Reading gender in classics of children’s literature: the anthropomorphic representation of gender in Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the way in which translation and re-editioning intervene in the representation of the mutable concept of gender in a classic of children’s literature. It explores Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio [literally: The Adventures of Pinocchio] (1883) and the first English translation of the novella (1892), as well as selected re-editions and reprints of this translation (1911-2011), focusing on the anthropomorphic characters of il Gatto [The Cat] and la Volpe [The Fox]. Through a comparative analysis of the ways in which gender is constructed through these two characters in the source text, the first English translation, and the re-editions and reprints, this paper foregrounds how the translation process can influence the portrayal of the social construct of gender that is presented to the child reader. The analysis reveals that the first English translation reverts to conventional gendered ideologies that reinforce the model of the androcentric society, an aspect that is absent from the Italian tale. This idea is carried through time in the re-editions and reprints, some of which were published in the twenty-first century after the social construct of gender had arguably become framed differently to how it was regarded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s literature
• children’s classics
• translated children’s literature
• gender
• re-editioning
• Pinocchio

Children’s classics have survived generations of young readers precisely because they have the ability to engage with important themes that have perpetually assumed a central role in society. The interactions between children and stories have powerful implications for children’s personal and social development (Marriott, 1998). Indeed, stories can influence a child’s personal and social identity (Watkins, 1992). Ideas that underpin tales for children can shape certain aspects of a child’s identity, which makes the deconstruction of the way in which an important strand of identity – gender – is presented in a popular classic of children’s literature valuable. This paper asks how the socially-constructed concept of gender has continued to be reconstructed in versions of Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio [literally: The Adventures of Pinocchio] (1883) that have been created for new audiences in Britain over time. Today, gender assumes an essential role in dialogues of identity within society, and it proves especially pertinent to position this strand of identity at the centre of this paper.

Judith Butler, who conceptualises gender as ‘performative’, argues that gender is not something we are but something we do. She maintains that ‘because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all’ (Butler, 1990, p. 273). The body assumes its gender ‘through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time’ (ibid., p. 274). This depiction of gender reinforces its position as a social construction that is likely to become disputed and re-appropriated as the ideas of society alter. This is particularly relevant to the discussions within this paper since they examine how gender has been constructed through time and space in a classic of children’s literature.

In a comparable manner to many classics of children’s literature, Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio (LAdP), which was originally penned in Italian, is rooted in a social atmosphere that constructed the concept of gender in a different manner to the way in which it is constructed today. Despite the evolvement of society’s convictions, the story has continued to be presented to young anglophone readers in Britain since its inception; it has been translated, retranslated, re-editioned and adapted on countless occasions. This paper therefore questions how transitions in the conceptualisation of gender have been managed in various versions of this children’s classic published between 1892 and 2011.

This paper will explore Collodi’s version of LAdP that was first published as a novella in 1883 in Florence, Italy.¹ The tale has been the subject of intense translation activity; translated into over 260 international languages and dialects (Gasparini, 1997), it is one of the most translated texts in the world (Christensen, 2014). Collodi’s novella was first translated into English by Mary Alice Murray and published in London in 1892 under the title The Story of a Puppet, or The Adventures of Pinocchio. Included in T. Fisher Unwin’s book series The Children’s Library, this translated text was primarily aimed at the child reader. Yet, children’s literature often addresses a dual audience. As Sandra L. Beckett (2012, p. xii) affirms, ‘[s]ince the boundaries between adult and children’s fiction were first drawn in the mid-eighteenth century, authors have been crossing them in both directions’. Collodi’s tale and Murray’s close translation of it are no different: the Italian text ‘was intended to appeal to children and adults’ (Zipes, 2002, p. xiv, my emphasis), and this was mirrored in the translation. This paper will examine Murray’s original text to reveal how aspects of the notion of gender that frame Collodi’s tale first travelled through translation to Britain.

LAdP has since been retranslated and adapted on numerous occasions, with Walt Disney’s animated adaptation film Pinocchio (1940) proving one of the most renowned English language versions of the Italian tale. While abundant translations by various translators have appeared throughout the centuries, it is notable that Murray’s text has been re-editioned and reprinted in Britain on numerous occasions. The fact that her translation has endured demonstrates that the act of re-editioning played, and continues to play, a vital role in the tale’s survival in the country. This paper will, therefore, consider the re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation which were published in 1911, 1939, 1946, 1951, 1968, 1975, 2005, 2006 and 2011. This will highlight how certain images of gender presented to the child in Collodi’s text and Murray’s translation have been reshaped for young audiences in Britain over time.

Beckett (2012, p. xv) continues that ‘paratext can be crucial in determining the target audience of a text’. Several of the re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation that are examined in this paper were illustrated by illustrators of children’s stories, which suggests that they were primarily aimed at children. In addition, the fact that the 1951 re-edition and its reprints were published in J.M. Dent’s Children’s Illustrated Classics series indicates that they were predominantly intended for the child reader. Each re-edition and reprint of Murray’s translation that is analysed in this paper was destined for a young readership, which allows a consideration of the ways in which the representations of gender that frame Collodi’s tale have been reconstructed for children in Britain over time.

In her ‘Does Pinocchio have an Italian passport? What is specifically national and what is international about classics of children’s literature’ (2006), Emer O’Sullivan explores how children’s stories are adapted to literary norms and cultural traditions of the target language and culture ‘to make [them] more acceptable to readers there’ (2006, p. 151). She notes how this is exacerbated by the asymmetrical nature of children’s literature: it is written, evaluated, published, purchased, and presented to children by adults (ibid., p. 153). The process of translation, through inviting adults to intervene, once again, in the construction of a text for children, aggravates this further (ibid.). Translation acts as a tool to enable adults to adapt texts – linguistically and/or culturally – to make them products of another culture. Through its examination of Murray’s translation and re-editions and reprints of it, this paper will determine how the notion of gender has been approached to allow Collodi’s tale to become a cultural product in Britain.

Scholars have explored how gender is conceptualised in LAdP (Perella, 1986; West, 2006; Stewart-Steinberg, 2007; Sinibaldi, 2011). While Nicolas Perella (1986) and Rebecca West (2006) analyse the construction of gender through the Blue Fairy, highlighting how she introduces a true feminine presence into a tale that is dominated by males, Susan Stewart-Steinberg (2007) examines how the gender constructions in Collodi's tale helped to shape national discourses within a newly-unified Italy through their focus on masculine performativity. This paper will focus on identifying moments in the narrative in which tensions emerge between what is expected of certain characters, based on what society considers appropriate gendered behaviour, and how they actually behave. In order to do this, it analyses the construction of socio-cultural gender through the characters of il Gatto [the Cat] and la Volpe [the Fox], two anthropomorphised animals who often defy the norms of gendered behaviour. This subversion is ultimately underpinned by the way in which the Italian and the English languages exhibit grammatical gender. Therefore, while our attention is firmly fixed upon socio-cultural gender, a consideration of grammatical gender at the relevant moments will enhance our understanding of the way in which the overarching notion of gender is presented to the young reader. The literary translator must often grapple with the fact that grammatical gender, which emerges through the structure of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL), shapes how socio-cultural gender is presented through characters. It is not unusual for the TL to express grammatical gender in a different manner to the SL, and the translator must negotiate these linguistic aspects in order to portray socio-cultural gender.

An exploration of Collodi’s Italian tale, the first edition of Murray’s English translation, and selected re-editions of Murray’s translation will arguably reveal how gender has been presented diachronically and diatopically in this children’s classic. This will, in turn, enable an examination of the ways in which translation and retranslation intervene in the representation of the mutable concept of gender. The history of LAdP is underpinned by translation: translation has enabled it to enter Britain, be reconstructed for new audiences, and become a classic of children’s literature in the country. The role of translation in the history of this narrative is essential to our understanding of its position as a classic in Britain’s literary sphere. The text has negotiated time in order to occupy a central place in the country’s literary landscape since the nineteenth century, and this can be unravelled if we look through the lens of translation. As Gillian Lathey (2006) alludes, a comparison between a source text (ST) and a target text (TT) reveals the translator’s consciousness at work as it makes linguistic decisions and adapts the context of the original tale for a new audience.

Il Gatto and la Volpe in Collodi’s Tale (1883) and the First Edition of Murray’s Translation (1892)

Il Gatto and la Volpe first appear in Chapter 12 of Collodi’s novella. The reader immediately notes that the masculine noun il gatto (as opposed to the feminine noun la gatta) is accorded to il Gatto. Other masculine nouns also appear in phrases that refer to the animal both in this scene and later in the tale, corroborating that he is biologically male. The words ‘il mio compagno’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 58)² and ‘l'amico mio’ (ibid., p. 86)³ are examples of the fact that il Gatto is portrayed as a male; the feminine equivalents ‘la mia compagna’ and ‘l'amica mia’ would have proved more appropriate if the character were biologically female.

The word la volpe is an epicene noun which is used to denote both male and female foxes (Treccani, 2021). The appearance of the subject pronoun lei in the phrases ‘[l]a Volpe avrebbe spelluzzicato volentieri qualche cosa anche lei’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 57, my emphasis)⁴ and ‘[a]veva tanta nausea per il cibo, diceva lei, che non poteva accostarsi nulla bocca’ (ibid., p. 58, my emphasis)⁵ suggests that the animal is biologically female. That la Volpe is presented as a female is corroborated by Antonio Castronuovo who asserts that, until the emergence of the young girl in Chapter 15 of Collodi’s novella, ‘[l]a sola presenza femminile è la Volpe’ (2017, p. 251).⁶ Dieter Richter also alludes to the fact that la Volpe is female in his affirmation that il Gatto and la Volpe ‘sono una “coppia mista”’ (2002, p. 81).⁷ The written text contradicts several popular visual adaptations in which this character is depicted as male.

While Collodi’s tale presents la Volpe as a female, Murray’s translation presents the Fox as a male. This is primarily evident through the fact that masculine pronouns are used to refer to the character. The phrase ‘[a]veva tanta nausea per il cibo, diceva lei, che non poteva accostarsi nulla bocca’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 58)⁸ is rendered as ‘[h]e had such a disgust to food, he said, that he could put nothing to his lips’ (Murray, 1892, p. 57, my emphasis), whilst the words ‘disse la Volpe, e cominciò a ridere’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 51)⁹ become ‘said the Fox, and he began to laugh’ (Murray, 1892, p. 50, my emphasis). The character’s gender has not only changed during the translation process, but it has also become accentuated. The subject pronoun ‘he’ and the possessive pronoun ‘his’ need to be inserted since the English sentences cannot function without them. Yet, the Italian phrases do not use a subject pronoun with the conjugated verbs ‘aveva’, ‘poteva’ and ‘cominciò’, and they do not employ a possessive pronoun with the noun ‘la bocca’. That Murray’s translation characterises the Fox as male is distinctly discernible through the masculine pronouns.

The gender of il Gatto is also altered in Murray’s translation, and the character becomes portrayed as a female. This is first visible in Murray’s translation of the phrase ‘il Gatto rideva anche lui, ma per non darlo a vedere, si pettinava i baffi colle zampe davanti’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 51),¹⁰ which she renders as ‘[t]he Cat also began to laugh, but to conceal it she combed her whiskers with her forepaws’ (Murray, 1892, p. 51, my emphasis). The subject pronoun ‘she’ and the possessive pronoun ‘her’ undoubtedly illustrate that the animal is female. The gender of the Cat can also be discovered through the way in which the words ‘[m]angiato che l'ebbe e ripulitasi la bocca, chiuse gli occhi dacappo e ricominciò a fare il cieco come prima’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 53)¹¹ are translated. The translated phrase reads ‘[h]aving eaten him and cleaned her mouth, she shut her eyes again and feigned blindness as before’ (Murray, 1892, p. 52, my emphasis), which emphasises that the Cat is female since the grammatical rules of the English language demand that a subject pronoun and a possessive pronoun are introduced into this phrase. Indeed, pronouns are not employed with the conjugated verbs ‘chiuse’ and ‘ricominciò’ or the nouns ‘la bocca’ and ‘gli occhi’ in the source sentence.

The reason for which Murray’s translation invites il Gatto and la Volpe to ‘swap’ genders is unknown. It is possible that the etymology of and connotations related to the word ‘cat’ could encourage the animal to be intuitively considered as female in the anglophone world; the noun can be employed as a term of contempt for women, a usage that arose in the early thirteenth century (Merriam-Webster, 2021).¹² Indeed, Murray does not depict only il Gatto as female but also Geppetto’s cat, whom the reader sees ‘amusing herself’ (Murray, 1892, p. 28, my emphasis),¹³ and the Coachman, who speaks in ‘a soft caressing voice like a cat when she is trying to insinuate herself into the good graces of the mistress of the house’ (ibid., p. 173, my emphasis). The latter sentence represents what can be determined as a deliberate attempt to portray the animal as female. After all, the analogy of a female cat is used to describe the male Coachman. The source phrase – ‘una voce sottile e carezzevole, come quella d’un gatto che si raccomanda al buon cuore della padrona di casa’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 171)¹⁴ – employs the masculine noun ‘il gatto’ and, therefore, does not depict the cat in this simile as female. Since il Gatto is a deceitful and crafty character, the undesirable undertones that can be associated with the term ‘cat’ prove appropriate in this context, and the fact that these unpleasant connotations emerge when the word is used to denote females could explain why it was deemed more apposite to portray the Cat as a female in the TT. We cannot be certain why the TT presents the Cat as a female and the Fox as a male, but what is more important here is how this shapes the way in which the TT constructs the notion of gender through these characters. This will be discussed in the following pages.

The very fact that the TT amends the gender of il Gatto and la Volpe prompts it to exhibit the notion of gender in a different manner to the ST. La Volpe is positioned as the leader of the pair in the Italian tale. She takes control of each situation and seems to guide the actions of il Gatto. She initiates and steers the conversations with Pinocchio, she encourages him to accompany her and il Gatto to il Paese dei Barbagianni [literally: The Land of Barn Owls] and to il Campo dei Miracoli [literally: The Field of Miracles], and she proposes that they stay in l’Osteria del Gambero Rosso [literally: The Red Prawn Inn]. The reader, situated in nineteenth-century Italy, would have encountered a partnership in which the female holds more agency than the male. If we consider the social context in which Collodi’s tale was penned, this is not wholly unwarranted. The Casati Law was passed in 1859, establishing a framework for the reformed education system of a unified Italy of which women became the backbone (Morgan, 1996). The mid-nineteenth century saw Italian women grappling for equality with men, particularly in the context of the country’s new Civil Code that materialised after its unification (ibid.). By 1865, women were entitled equal inheritance rights to men, unmarried women were granted legal majority, and a married woman was allowed to become the legal guardian of her children if her husband abandoned them (Howard, 1977). Women were officially accepted to Italian universities from 1876 (Lange, 1897), and wealthy women assumed an influential role in parts of the country such as Milan that were becoming industrialised (Licini, 2006). In a similar manner to their European and American counterparts, Italian women continued to face a struggle that would last for many more decades, but the end of the nineteenth century welcomed several successes. While the presence of female characters is limited in Collodi’s tale, the representation of a relationship between a male and a female in which the female possesses more power seems to nod to the evolving social atmosphere of the time.

Murray’s translation echoes the fact that la Volpe calls the shots, and it portrays the Fox with greater agency than the Cat. Yet, we must remember that the Fox is depicted as male and the Cat as female in this translated tale. Murray’s Fox might possess the same attributes as Collodi’s Volpe, but the fact that Murray’s Cat is characterised as a female causes gender to be constructed in a different manner in the TT to how it is constructed in the ST. The TT presents a female Cat who acquiesces to a male Fox which, as the following paragraphs of this paper will reveal, prompts the relationship between the pair to become underpinned by the premises of an androcentric society. By re-appropriating the gender of the two animals, Murray’s tale encapsulates the traditional thought that women are subservient to men. This idea cannot crystallise in Collodi’s text since the compliant cat is male and the dominant fox is female.¹⁵ Only a comparative analysis between the ST and the TT using the analysis of translations as a methodological tool can indicate this grammatical and allegorical shift that has occurred during the translation process. It illustrates that Murray’s translation employs these two characters to offer a more conservative representation of gender roles than the ST.

The reader of Collodi’s tale learns that il Gatto often repeats the words of la Volpe. An example of this is:

- Dunque – disse la Volpe – vuoi proprio andare a casa tua? Allora vai pure, e tanto peggio per te.

- Tanto peggio per te! – ripetè il Gatto.

- Pensaci bene, pinocchio, perchè tu dài un calcio alla fortuna.

- Alla fortuna! – ripetè il Gatto.

- I tuoi cinque zecchini, dall’oggi al domani sarebbero diventati duemila.

- Duemila! – ripetè il Gatto.

(Collodi, 1883, p. 54)¹⁶

Il Gatto’s repetition of his companion’s words radiates a comical feel into the tale; it acts as a humorous device which enhances the literary quality of the narrative. Indeed, il Gatto does not always mimic la Volpe and he does, on occasions, formulate his own phrases. Yet, this humour becomes overshadowed in Murray’s translation. The fact that the female Cat echoes the words of the male Fox can be interpreted as an indication of a society in which men are the dominant sex, a thought that is introduced into the TT through its decision to reverse the genders of the two characters.

The idea that il Gatto does not possess his own voice is further developed in Chapter 18 of the novella. In Chapters 14 and 15, the puppet is pursued by two assassins. In an attempt to defend himself, he bites off the hand of one of them. While the reader realises that these assassins are il Gatto and la Volpe in disguise, Pinocchio does not. The puppet is therefore surprised to note, when he re-encounters il Gatto and la Volpe in Chapter 18, that il Gatto has lost his paw. When he naively enquires what happened, ‘[i]l Gatto voleva rispondere qualche cosa, ma s'imbrogliò’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 86).¹⁷ La Volpe thus explains ‘[i]l mio amico è troppo modesto, e per questo non risponde. Risponderò io per lui’ (ibid.).¹⁸ Once again, the construction of gender that is built through the relationship between il Gatto and la Volpe grants more power to the female. Here, the calm and articulate female comes to the aid of the hesitant and agitated male: she must speak for him because he is unable to answer for himself.

The reader of the English tale discovers that ‘[t]he Cat tried to answer but became confused’ (Murray, 1892, pp. 87–88), which prompts the Fox to declare ‘[m]y friend is too modest, and that is why she doesn't speak. I will answer for her’ (ibid., p. 88). That the Cat is depicted as a female and the Fox as a male causes the TT to construct the notion of gender in a different manner to the ST through these words. To agree with the fact that the TT portrays the Cat as a female, the sentence ‘[r]isponderò io per lui’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 86, my emphasis)¹⁹ is translated as ‘I will answer for her’ (Murray, 1892, p. 88, my emphasis). The characters’ roles are reversed: now it is the confident and poised male who must speak for the addled and flustered female. Murray’s translation emerged at a time in which British women were fighting for suffrage (Murphy, 2016), property rights (cf. the Married Women's Property Act 1884 which granted married women in Britain the right to own and manage their own property), and legal guardianship of their children (cf. the Custody of Infants Act 1873 which gave custody to mothers until their child reached 16 years of age). Women were struggling for legal, electoral, economic and social parity with men, and the fact that the male Fox answers for the female Cat in this scene could be interpreted as a representation of a dominant male who overrules a voiceless female. Literature is often employed as a tool to escape the ills of the world. Indeed, Louise Joy (in Cotterill, 2011, no pagination) claimed that ‘[adults] cherish children’s classics precisely because they represent a world that does not resemble the world as [adults] experience it’. Yet, the depiction of a male interceding for a female foregrounds the gender inequality that was prevalent in society at the time in which the TT was read, prompting the reader to rapidly return to reality.

The TT’s introduction of traditional gender roles not only symbolises the world in which the tale was published but also reinforces these conservative ideas of the position of men and women in society. It subtly acquaints the young reader with the natural order of the world which, at the time in which this translation was produced, was shaped by a society in which women were subservient and played an inferior role to their male counterparts. Translation undoubtedly intervenes in the way in which the notion of gender is presented to the young anglophone reader of this tale. The ST does not advocate, at this particular moment, that society and the relationships built within it are framed by androcentricity; this construction of gender has been brought into this part of the narrative by the act of translation. The fact that the tale that circulated in Britain offered a different conceptualisation of gender compared to the same story that was disseminated in Italy less than a decade later can be observed only when the ST is examined next to the TT. This uncovers a shift which, whilst silent and subtle, has a significant impact on the messages that frame the narrative and were disseminated to society’s youngest generation.

By assigning the female gender to the Cat, the TT disregards the fact that the ST avoids representations of motherhood. Murray translates the phrase ‘il Gatto ha ricevuto un’imbasciata, che il suo gattino maggiore, malato di geloni ai piedi, stava in pericolo di vita’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 59)²⁰ as ‘the Cat had received a message to say that her eldest kitten was ill with chilblains on his feet, and was in danger of death’ (Murray, 1892, p. 58). This introduces a maternal figure into the tale since the devious conman who appears in the Italian tale instinctively becomes associated with the characteristics of a doting and concerned mother in the translation. LAdP is dominated by male characters, and the relationship between Pinocchio and his father frames the narrative; displays of motherly affection are limited, emerging only when la Fata, or the Fairy, offers words of advice to the puppet. Murray’s text thus emphasises motherhood in a tale that focuses on fatherhood, which transforms the way in which gender is presented at this particular moment in the story.

The introduction of the relationship between a mother and her child attempts to ‘normalise’ the tale: the juxtaposition of the mother cat with her poorly and vulnerable kitten promotes the archetypal paradigm that nurturing children is the duty of females. This idea simply cannot materialise in the ST because il Gatto is male. This is an example of how the act of translation can intervene in the representation of the concept of gender. Through its depiction of primarily male characters, Collodi’s tale does not embody the conceptualisation that females are the ones who conventionally tend to children; only when the text enters Britain does this thought emerge. That a translated text tends to be treated as an independent object by the recipient situated in the TL and the TC means that he or she is oblivious to the fact that the translation process might have reshaped certain aspects of the narrative and that the ST did not characterise them in this manner. This conditions the way in which the text is interpreted in its new socio-linguistic environment. A nineteenth-century, anglophone reader who read Murray’s translation as an individual tale and did not ponder on its history would have been unaware that this idea came into the story during the translation process. Here, the act of translation reconstructs the ST’s portrayal of parenthood, prompting the TT to exhibit this depiction of gender in a different manner to the ST.

This section has explored how the notion of gender is constructed through il Gatto and la Volpe in Collodi’s tale and Murray’s translation of it. The remainder of this paper will examine the way in which these constructions are transferred to selected re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation.

The Cat and the Fox in Selected Re-Editions and Reprints of Murray's Translation

The re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation that are examined here maintain Murray’s words. Each version thus portrays the Fox as male and the Cat as female, employing the pronouns he and his to refer to the Fox and she and her to denote the Cat. In a comparable manner to the reader of Murray’s original translation, readers of the re-editions and reprints of her translated text encounter a relationship between the Cat and the Fox that reinforces traditional gender roles. It is important to remember, however, that the position of women in various spheres of Britain has transformed since Murray created her translation in 1892. In preserving the words of the first edition of the translated tale, the re-editions and reprints revert to a conceptualisation of gender that is rooted in the nineteenth century.

This paper considers re-editions of Murray’s translation that were issued in 1911, 1939, 1946, 1951, 1968, 1975, 2005, 2006 and 2011. During this period spanning one century, several significant developments to the status of women in Britain occurred. All except the first of these re-editions were published after women were permitted the same grounds on which to file for divorce as men (1923) and were granted electoral equality with men (1928). The majority of these re-editions emerged after the Abortion Act 1967 took effect and the Equal Pay Act 1970 made it illegal for women to be denied equal pay for equal work. And half of the re-editions were printed after the Sexual Discrimination Act 1975 outlawed discrimination against women in the workplace, the Employment Protection Act 1975 introduced statutory maternity leave, and Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister. The publication of these re-editions was framed by the successes gained by women in various areas.

Of course, this does not mean to suggest that these advances that were made official in the eyes of the law necessarily translated to the way in which the construct of gender was considered by society. While an investigation into this would transcend the limits of this paper, what we can uncover here is the fact that Murray’s translation rewrites a central aspect of the ST to encapsulate the traditional depiction of a dominant male and a subservient female and that this is transferred to the re-editions and reprints of the translation. This can only be seen through the lens of translation, which permits a diachronic comparison between the first translation and re-editions and reprints of it. We realise that a seemingly negligible amendment in a TT can have a consequential impact on the ideological undertones of that narrative as it is reshaped for new audiences for centuries to follow.

It is particularly worthwhile to note that each of these re-editions and reprints incorporates the noun ‘gentlemen’ to allude to the Fox, the Cat and Pinocchio collectively. Indeed, this illustrates how a diachronic and comparative analysis conducted through the lens of translation allows us to examine the way in which constructions of gender can be carried through time. The Italian tale reads:

– Sissignori, – rispose l’oste, e strizzò l’occhio alla Volpe e al Gatto, come dire: «Ho mangiata la foglia e ci siamo intesi! … »

(Collodi, 1883, p. 59)²¹

The innkeeper employs the masculine term ‘[s]issignori’²² to salute la Volpe, il Gatto and Pinocchio since, in Italian, groups of individuals in which at least one individual is male are referred to or addressed with masculine nouns and pronouns (Sabatini, 1986; Formato, 2019). Il Gatto and Pinocchio are biologically male, and so the masculine noun ‘signori’ is used here.

Murray’s translation renders this phrase as:

‘Yes, gentlemen,’ answered the host, and he winked at the Fox and the Cat as much as to say: ‘I know what you are up to. We understand one another!’

(Murray, 1892, p. 57)

The masculine noun ‘gentlemen’ is employed to speak of the male Fox, the female Cat and Pinocchio. The English language has often drawn upon masculine forms to denote a group that consists of men and women (see Stahlberg et al., 2007), a practice that conforms to the traditional gendered hierarchy which regards men as more powerful and with a higher social status than women (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). The ideologies of society underlie its cultural products. In this instance, they determine the way in which gender is constructed in this classical children’s narrative. By offering a close translation of the word ‘[s]issignori’ and, therefore, selecting a masculine noun to refer to a male and a female simultaneously, Murray’s translation reinforces the archetypal trope that women are inferior to men. It could be argued that the translator simply literally reproduced the word that was used in the ST, but this translatorial decision has consequences on the TT’s depiction of gender.

Each re-edition and reprint examined here preserves Murray’s translation of the word ‘[s]issignori’ as ‘[y]es, gentlemen’. The employment of masculine terms to allude to females started to be challenged in Britain in the late twentieth century. Anne Pauwels (2003) argued that the women’s movements which took place in the West during the 1970s and 1980s propelled women to call attention to and confront the male bias present in language. Casey Miller’s and Kate Swift’s The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (1980) deemed that the use of the masculine term as the generic term excludes and dehumanises women, whilst Dennis Baron (1986) related this practice to androcentric mores. While the twenty-first century has not witnessed the eradication of masculine nouns to refer to females (‘guys’ continues to be used today to address men and women, for example), attempts have been made to curtail it. One case-in-point is that masculine terms are often accompanied by their female equivalent (cf. ‘ladies and gentlemen’ and ‘boys and girls’).²³ It can therefore be argued that a reader in twenty-first-century Britain might not welcome the fact that these contemporary re-editions call a character who is depicted as biologically female a ‘gentleman’.

The UNESCO’s ‘Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language’ (1999) state that:

[There is] a growing awareness that language does not merely reflect the way we think: it also shapes our thinking. If words and expressions that imply that women or men are inferior are constantly used, that assumption of inferiority tends to become part of our mindset.

This hints that language impacts emotion, defining the way in which humans think. The use of a masculine term to denote a female character in contemporary re-editions and reprints of a popular piece of children’s literature not only challenges efforts that have been made towards gender equality, but it might also negatively affect the reader through highlighting that even language contributes to the repression of females.²⁴ By examining these re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation diachronically, we discover that the employment of this masculine term has been carried through time and is not necessarily representative of the socio-cultural contexts for which the re-editioned and reprinted texts were intended. It emerged in the Italian ST, was transferred to the first English translation, and has been preserved in the re-editions and reprints of this translation. Yet, the individual who encounters a contemporary edition without any knowledge of the text from which it derives might consider the tale as misogynistic or, at the very least, lexically erroneous. The re-editions and reprints are influenced by the way in which the text from which they originate – Murray’s translation – exhibits gender, but this tale was penned in a social context that had not enjoyed the same successes towards gender equality as that in which later versions emerged. Due to the process of re-editioning, the construction of gender has been interpreted in a manner that challenges the socio-linguistic environment in which it is positioned in re-editions and reprints issued in the twenty-first century.

Once again, it is important to accentuate that this particular construction of gender in contemporary versions of the translation could not have been thoroughly investigated if one re-edition or reprint were considered in isolation. That a text published in Britain in the twenty-first century selected a masculine noun to denote a female character stems from the fact that it mirrors its source, but this can only be revealed through a diachronic and comparative analysis between the first translation and re-editions of it. Translation acts as a tool that allows such aspects to be understood in a more comprehensive and accurate manner. Here, it reveals how gender is conditioned in this classic of children's literature.

Conclusion

Through an analysis of the figures of the Cat and the Fox, this paper has explored how the notion of gender is constructed in selected translated versions of the classic children’s tale Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Affording particular attention to socio-cultural gender and complementing it with a discussion of grammatical gender at appropriate moments has highlighted how this classic of children’s literature uses these two characters to exhibit the notion of gender. This descriptive approach has uncovered that, in ‘swapping’ the gender of il Gatto and la Volpe and portraying the Cat as female and the Fox as male, the first edition of Murray’s translation rewrites a central aspect of Collodi’s narrative; it introduces the traditional depiction of a dominant male and a subservient female, and it reinforces the model of the androcentric society to the child reader, subtly encouraging him or her to see this as ‘normal’. The reinforcement of conventional gender roles in Murray’s translation prompts the tale to revert from other children’s stories that dare the child to be ‘different’. Rather, this translated tale urges the young reader to adhere to the standard conventions of society.

Despite the fact that the re-editions and reprints of Murray’s translation were framed by the successes gained by women in various areas, the subversion of females and the dominance of males that emerge in the first edition of the translated text have not been altered. That the construction of gender through the Cat and the Fox in each of these re-editions and reprints remains reflective of an androcentric society suggests that we should perhaps rethink the way in which we read classics of children’s literature. Those who reproduce literary classics for children should be mindful of this tension between the context in which the ST was written and the context in which the re-edition is presented. Indeed, a tale rooted in a particular socio-cultural atmosphere might not speak to the social constructs of the time in which it is consumed by the child reader, and the translator must negotiate this.

The fact that these conclusions can be drawn because this paper has looked through the lens of translation evidences the contribution that research situated in the field of Translation Studies can offer to debates in other areas, such as the field of Children’s Literature. Using the analysis of translations as a methodological tool has permitted a diachronic comparison between Collodi’s Italian tale, the first edition of Murray’s translation, and re-editions and reprints of it. It has uncovered how a seemingly negligible amendment that occurred during the translation process has had a significant impact on the ideological undertones of that narrative as it is redefined for new audiences through time and space.

Acknowledgments

The author extends her sincere gratitude to Dr Cristina Marinetti (Cardiff University) and Professor Loredana Polezzi (Stony Brook University) for their invaluable advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Williams

Dr Rebecca Williams, BA(Hons), MA(Dist), AFHEA, PhD having completed her Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) at Cardiff University, which explored the construction of notions of identity, specifically gender and physical difference, in translated children's literature, Rebecca is currently undertaking a Master of Science (MSc) in Educational Assessment at the University of Oxford.

Rebecca is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a linguistic tutor in the communication skills component of both the highly-reputed Cardiff MRCS OSCE Preparation Courses and the Cardiff DOHNS OSCE/MRCS(ENT) Preparation Courses. She also teaches in Doctors Academy's Medical School Interview Preparation Courses. She is the author of Academic IELTS - Questions and Answers and a co-author of the Doctors Academy Preparation Guide for UCAT.

Notes

1 Writing in Il Giornale per i bambini [literally: The Newspaper for Children], Collodi first published fifteen episodes that told the tale of a mischievous Pinocchio in 1881. Between 1881 and 1883, Collodi created a further twenty episodes, which he gathered under the title Le Avventure di Pinocchio. All thirty-five tales were then combined into a novella entitled Le Avventure di Pinocchio, and the book was published in 1883 in Florence.

2 ‘my companion’ All literal translations into English that are presented as footnotes or within the text are my own. They are intended to offer the reader a literal rendition of the source text.

3 ‘my friend’

4 ‘the Fox would have willingly nibbled at something herself too’

5 ‘[The Fox] had such an aversion to food, she said, that [she] could not put anything near [her] mouth’

6 ‘[t]he only female presence is the Fox’

7 ‘are a “mixed couple”’

8 ‘[The Fox] had such an aversion to food, she said, that [she] could not put anything near [her] mouth’

9 ‘said the Fox, and [she] began to laugh’

10 ‘the Cat also laughed himself, but to hide it from [Pinocchio], [he] combed [his] whiskers with [his] forepaws’

11 ‘having eaten him and cleaned [his] mouth, [he] closed [his] eyes again and continued to act blind like before’

12 It is also a slang word for ‘fellow’ or ‘guy’, but this practice developed in 1920 (Merriam-Webster, 2021), almost thirty years after Murray’s translation was penned.

13 The Italian text states that Geppetto’s cat ‘si divertiva’ (Collodi, 1883, p. 29). This conjugated reflexive verb does not reveal the biological gender of the character since Italian employs the reflexive pronoun si for both males and females.

14 ‘a soft and gentle voice, like that of a cat who pleads with the good-heartedness of the mistress of the house’

15 In fact, through allocating the male gender to the submissive Cat and the female gender to the dominant Fox, the Italian tale challenges the archetypal gender roles.

16 ‘- So – said the Fox – you really want to go home? Then go ahead, and so much the worse for you.

- So much the worse for you! – repeated the Cat.

- Think about it well, Pinocchio, because you are letting a chance go by.

- Go by! – repeated the Cat.

- Your five gold coins, between today and tomorrow, would have become two thousand.

- Two thousand! – repeated the Cat.’

17 ‘the Cat wanted to answer something, but [he] fumbled’

18 ‘my friend is too humble, and that is why [he] doesn’t answer. I will answer for him’

19 ‘I will answer for him’

20 ‘the Cat received the news that his eldest kitten, suffering with chilblains on [his] feet, was in a critical condition’

21 ‘“Yes, gentlemen,” answered the innkeeper, and he winked at the Fox and the Cat as if to say: “I smell a rat. We understand one another!”’

22 ‘yes, gentlemen’

23 The English language has, in fact, performed a U-turn during the twenty-first century. Gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language has now become standard practice in written and spoken communication in Britain. The use of gender markers and gender-specific language is avoided as far as possible, a move that is promoted by academic and public service institutions such as universities and the NHS. See, for example, Warwick University. 2021. Gender neutral language. Available at: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/equalops/getinvolved/initiatives/lgbtua/gender_neutral_language.pdf [Accessed: 3 February 2021]; and NHS. 2021. Inclusive language. [Online]. Available at: https://service-manual.nhs.uk/content/inclusive-language [Accessed: 3 February 2021].

24 A study of how language affects the psychological development of the reader would be located in the realms of social science and would, therefore, transcend the limits of this paper.