White Oompa-Loompas

The Oompa-Loompas are now with “skin [that] was rosy-white… (and) long hair [that] was golden-brown” (101-102). Racially, the Oompa-Loompas have changed from Blacks to distinctively Anglo-European. This revision provides an alternative reading of the text which is more relevant in the present capitalist society. Though motivated by the need to be politically correct, Dahl could have portrayed the Oompa-Loompas as unlike the orange skinned and green haired i.e. in the 1971 musical film adaptation but instead, he describes them as distinctly white.

By depicting the slave figure as the dominant, normative white population, the narrative relocates the discussion of the disadvantages specific to the black Oompa-Loompas to the majority. The deep rooted unhappiness, alienation of labour and the sense that the rewards for labor is insignificant are not just sentiments of the racial minority but universal questions about an individual’s place in the capitalist world. These concerns are not exclusive to the colonized but are reflections of a post-war delusion when the fragility of the American Dream is questioned. As a point of reference, in works like Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, the same insecurities and uncertainties are deliberated and articulated. My point here is that Dahl’s fantastic stories are concerned with issues real and relevant to the larger world. The white Oompa-Loompas who are emblematic of the dominant majority of society repositions the paradoxes of slavery as enslavement by consumerism. Like the ‘happy slaves’, the general public have assimilated consumerist ideologies such that they are blind to the limitations of the capitalist institution that they live and work in.