‘Switch Bitch’: Roald Dahl’s controversial rape by deception collection
Although the late Roald Dahl might have recently attracted controversy for his classic books using words like “fat” and “ugly” to describe characters, this supposedly offensive angle is nothing in comparison to what can be found in his adult short stories. Far from his enriching children’s novels, these titles often comment on the dark side of human nature.
Whilst the likes of Kiss Kiss and Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl are two of the Welshman’s most prominent collections of adult short stories, I’d argue that 1974’s Switch Bitch, contains some of his most alarming content, despite the ostensibly comedic aspects. For longtime fans of Roald Dahl, whose imagination was expanded by reading The Witches or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they were children, I must warn you that this might change your opinion of the author.
Furthermore, a trigger warning must be issued in a more alarming reflection of the content found within each of these four stories. This is because each plot is linked by a theme of rape by deception wherein a significant act of cunning, cruelty or hedonism underpins the sexual acts the characters get involved in.
It’s also important to note that each of the four stories was originally published in Playboy between 1965 and 1975, the publication that is most famous for its nude or semi-nude pictures of female models. However, as it is an entertainment magazine by definition, it has also published short stories by other prominent authors over the years, including those by Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami and even Margaret Atwood.
The first story in the collection is ‘The Visitor’. It is noted for its introduction of the Uncle Oswald character. This wealthy hobbyist would later appear in Dahl’s derided 1979 sex comedy novel, My Uncle Oswald, which was dismissed as a “festival of bad taste”, by the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Notably, and in a stark inversion of the child heroes of his most famous stories, Oswald is a male fantasy figure described as “the greatest fornicator of all time” who is embroiled in lewd comic tales.
In ‘The Visitor’, Oswald Cornelius finds himself stranded for a night near Cairo at the mansion of wealthy business magnate Abdul Aziz, whose wife and daughter are highly attractive. Oswald plots to seduce either of the women and believes he has succeeded when a woman slips into his bedroom at night and spends several hours making love with him. However, his experience is limited because he cannot see the face of the seemingly mute lover. The following day, Oswald leaves the house and still doesn’t know which woman he slept with. Yet, in a darkly comedic turn, Dahl delivers a twist. Aziz reveals to Oswald that a second daughter is living in seclusion in another part of the house, as she has incurable leprosy.
Whilst Uncle Oswald gets some form of comeuppance for his uncouth and immoral sexual scheming, things then take a darker turn in the second story, ‘The Great Switcheroo’. Viewed through a contemporary lens, the story is full of problematic, if comedic, content.
In the tale, Vic Hammond and his wife Mary attended a party their friends Jerry and Samantha Rainbow hosted. Vic lusts after Samantha as she is faithful to her husband and devises a plan for both men to switch wives for a night without the women’s knowing. The conniving Vic suggests his intent to Jerry in the form of a story and manages to lure him into undertaking it. The pair then hold a series of meetings where they map out the finer details of the scheme.
To ensure that their ruse is foolproof, the men agree to describe the individual sexual routines they have when making love to their wives, with both Jerry and Vic looking at each other’s with scorn. Vic, who is particularly proud of his technique, is furious when Jerry criticises it. Later, both men sneak into the other’s bedrooms on the night of the event. However, while sleeping with Samantha, under cover of darkness, Vic realises that he has forgotten to copy Jerry’s approach. At first, Samantha tenses up but then responds enthusiastically. When the men return to their lives, Dahl then supplies another turn for his audience: Mary admits she never really enjoyed sex with him until the previous night.
The most disturbing of the set is the third stop, ‘The Last Act’, which Dahl explained was his attempt to write about “murder by fucking”, a term you wouldn’t expect the man who wrote the likes of Esio Trot to vocalise. Accordingly, the content of the tale is very startling.
A middle-aged New York widow, Anna Cooper, contemplates suicide after losing her dear husband, Ed, in a car accident. However, she starts to see a ray of light after helping at her friend’s adoption agency. After feeling vulnerable when visiting Dallas, Texas, on her own for agency business, she remembers that her high school sweetheart, Dr. Conrad Kreuger, lives in the city. The pair had been young lovers, before Anna left Conrad to marry Ed. Appearing happy to reconnect with Anna, Conrad suggests the pair meet in the hotel bar for a drink. After meeting, Anna discovers that Conrad is now a divorced gynaecologist.
Conrad appears sympathetic to Anna’s emotional state but reveals that he feels resentment about how she left him. Regardless, the Doctor suggests that the pair have a touch of “unfinished business” to attend to. At this point, Anna has had several martinis and lets Conrad take her back to her room. As they get ready to make love, Conrad becomes aggressive, pinning her on the bed and “diagnosing” her with menopausal symptoms. As Anna starts screaming, Conrad pushes her to the floor, and she staggers to the bathroom, shutting the door.
Whilst this attack and the story that brought both characters to this juncture is alarming, the ending leaves a particularly uncomfortable feeling in the stomach. After Conrad hears Anna open the bathroom cabinet and fumble around, he changes quickly and leaves the room. She now seems intent on completing her suicidal mission, and Conrad leaves smugly, having achieved his long-sought-after revenge. A horrific fictional representation of assault, manipulation, sexual relations and women in menopause, this is perhaps the darkest tale Roald Dahl ever spun and makes criticism for words like “fat” and “ugly” seem rather inane.
The final story is ‘Bitch’, which infers the kind of vintage misogynism that is included, particularly because it sees Uncle Oswald return. The old cad becomes involved with an olfactory expert who claims to have discovered an eighth smell-related nerve that, when stimulated, can unlock new aspects of the human sexual experience.
The expert develops a perfume to stimulate the nerve, ‘Bitch’, which sends men into a sexual frenzy. Wanting to use the last drops of the scent to humiliate the President of the United States, things do not go as intended for Oswald. The woman he would use as his agent for sending the President into his career-ending sexual fervour was too fat and had too large breasts to operate the scheme properly. The last of the perfume is then accidentally used on Oswald, who has ecstatic intercourse with the woman. She tells him afterwards that he’s done her “a power of good.” Another sleazy, old-fashioned tale from Dahl.
The stories in Switch Bitch have been rightly slammed for their cruel and misogynistic aspects. The central motive of ‘The Last Act’ has been particularly decried, and even Dahl’s biographer, Jeremy Treglown, said that the story was better off being scrapped as it has “no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion.”
In 2006, he wrote in The Guardian: “Greed, deception, cruelty, infidelity, all meet their just deserts in Dahl’s work. Inevitably, these outcomes aren’t always moral by every reader’s standards, least of all the standards of our own time, though the claim that Dahl’s work is misogynistic has to contend with the fact that while there are some awful women in the tales, there are still more awful men, and his most technically accomplished plots involve victories by wives over bad husbands. Which is not to deny that there are stories that Dahl would have done better to have scrapped. In “The Last Act”, a man once discarded by his teenaged girlfriend gets his own back many years later when the woman, recently widowed and extremely vulnerable, renews contact with him. While the fiction is far from drawing readers into admiring Conrad, and its sympathies remain painfully with Anna, it has no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion.”
Elsewhere, novelist Zoë Heller wrote in 2010 in The New Republic that Dahl’s later adult stories are “almost unbearable to read”, pointing out the crude sexual sadism and vestigial wit. She asserted: “Dahl’s repeated depiction of sex as a foul, vengeful act and his obsessive disgust with human bodies—with sagging cheeks and bow legs and wet salmon mouths—are, to say the least, dispiriting. The later stories, in which the sexual sadism is at its crudest and the ‘wit’ at its most vestigial, are almost unbearable to read. One of the last short stories Dahl ever wrote, ‘The Last Act,’ describes in obscene detail the rape of a menopausal woman by a gynaecologist. Dahl cheerfully referred to it as an attempt to describe ‘murder by fucking.'”
To conclude her account, Heller used a quote from Roald Dahl at the end of his life that conceded how he got much less pleasure from writing adult works than his iconic children’s ones. “I do not believe,” Dahl wrote, “that any writer of adult books, however successful or celebrated he may be, has ever gotten one-half the pleasure I have got from my children’s books.” It makes you wonder why he veered so far from the beaten track in the first place.
