Just in time for Christmas, I’ve regendered one of the most classic stories, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The story of Scrooge being confronted by three spirits, past, present, and future, in order to change his ways and find redemption is one that continues to resonate today. The numerous adaptations and rereleases are proof of this.

Once again, names proved to be one of the trickiest parts of regendering this novel. Ebenezer is such an iconic name, so closely aligned with Scrooge, that I was loathed to change it. During the regendering process, however, I found it only appeared in the text twice. So, in order to emphasise the change in gender, I chose to regender the name to Evelyn Scrooge. Similarly, Tiny Tim is nearly as famous as Scrooge but I chose to regender the character to Timara, in order to emphasis the change in gender while still feeling close to the original Tiny Tim.

One particularly problematic chapter concerned shaving, one of those activities that doesn’t regender easily. I chose to replace it with combing, which isn’t really the same but close enough within the context of this novel.

The last tricky section was towards the end, where the family had gathered together. There’s plenty of romantic situations developing which don’t feel natural after being regendered, but that is one the main reasons I have for The ReGender Project. By examining these situations, looking at them from different points of view, I hope we’ll start presenting the genders more equally.

Thank you for reading my Regendered novel, A Christmas Carol. I hope you have a very happy holiday!

I feel this theme makes the novel a great choice for regendering since it strikes at the very heart of one of the great gender imbalances in our society. While it applies to somewhat to men, it is predominantly women who have to suppress their desires and impulses in order to fit into the image society has of how they should look or act. In this sense, regendering this novel isn’t particularly enlightening but does help to illustrate the point and the dangers of trying to suppress parts of our nature.

I must also admit that one of things I enjoyed about regendering this novel was simply the conversion of Mr Hyde, another iconic name and character, into Miss Hyde. Just like Sherlock Holmes I liked how the regendering challenges the reader to imagine our world in a whole new light, without the male dominated preconceptions we usually have.

The technical side was mostly due to the language used in the novel. Almost all the novels I work with are set in the 19th century, which has its own quirks in the way language is used compared to modern times. Set in the 17th century, The Scarlet Letter is as far removed again, making the language feel even more archaic and difficult to work with. For instance, all too often, people and events were mentioned obliquely, not directly, making it hard to follow who was being talked about at times. This was particularly important when regendering since I needed to make sure the gender pronouns still matched the regendered characters, which took a bit of deciphering.

The section at the start of the novel, The Custom-house, was also tricky to handle. It serves as a sort of prelude to the story, though it’s set well after the events, and details the narrator’s discovery of Hester’s story, and his search for more information. While this section is also fictitious, it’s also reminiscent of Hawthorne’s actual life, sharing many similarities to his own time working in a custom house and the experiences he had there. I decided keeping the narrator unchanged helped to anchor the story with historical accuracy around its original author.

Clergy also feature a lot in the novel. While I haven’t come up with a rule for how to regender them, it’s become somewhat of a habit to leave them unchanged as well. In this case, it wasn’t an option since Dimmesdale’s affair with Prynne is crucial to the story. Therefore, if I was going to regender one clergyman, I’d need to regender them all, though for some reason is feels far more jarring to historical accuracy than any other profession.

This in turn led to probably the biggest flaw resulting from regendering this novel. The original novel hinges on the idea that the father of Hester’s child is unknown. After regendering, we’re left with a situation where it’s the mother of the child who is not known. While this isn’t outside the realms of possibility, it does stretch plausibility quite a bit. A woman’s pregnancy and the effects of giving birth are far harder to hide than just an affair. And that doesn’t even take into account a mother’s bond with her baby, and the decreased likelihood she’d give up any involvement in raising the child. By and large I chose to ignore this issue, glaring as it is. Partly this is because the pregnancy and birth occur before the start of the story, effectively making them ‘off-screen’. It still requires a suspension of disbelief but it’s limited to this particular point and not prolonged throughout the novel. But the main was reason was I felt it helped to illustrate one possible cause of the double standard that exists in how we treat boys and girls with regards to sex: namely, it’s far easier for men to hide their involvement in the act along with having the option of not having to deal with the unwanted consequences, such as pregnancy.

Of course, the biggest issue I encountered when regendering the novel was how much the tone and themes changed. The original story presented us with Hester Prynne, a woman who instead of succumbing to the effects of being ostracised, takes the opportunity to think for herself and break free from the indoctrination her society imposes. While she does still consider her act a sin, she no longer believes it should condemn her for all time. This is exactly the sort of strong female characters I felt were lacking when I started The Regender Project. So, by regendering her character into the male Heston Prynne, I couldn’t help but feel I was undermining many of the goals I was striving for with the project.

Still, I couldn’t shake the appeal of regendering the novel. In particular, I was attracted to the idea of portraying a man going through the same persecution, and suffering the same consequences, that so many women have had to. I hope that by shining another light on this double standard, I’ll help foster the main goal I have for the project, which is to promote gender equality.

Once again, this novel was selected for The Regender Project due to its author as much as for the novel itself. I’ve admired the work of Mark Twain for ages and wanted to ensure I included something he’d written in the project. His two more famous works, the Adventures of Tom Sayer, and Huckleberry Finn, would have made great choices but I was particularly drawn to The Prince And The Pauper. The theme of characters swapping positions and roles, and discovering insight into how the other lives just resonated so much with what I’m trying to achieve with The Regender Project.

The biggest challenge I faced when regendering the novel was how I wanted to handle historical figures. One of the original ‘rules’ I established when creating The Regender Project was historical characters would remain unchanged and retain their original genders. Given this novel is centred on the royal family of England, I had to reassess this rule. In the end, I decided to keep the king, Henry VIII, and his wife, unchanged but regendered all the other characters. I felt this create enough of an anchor to its historical setting while also allowing the story to be regendered. It does end up creating an alternate version of history where one of the most famous kings of England had many sons and just a younger daughter who became his heir. It’s a situation I wanted to avoid but couldn’t in this case.

The next challenge was all the titles in the story. Just keeping track of them was difficult but the main issue was how biased they are towards males. While certain titles have obvious female equivalents, such as King and Queen, Duke and Duchess, and Baron and Baroness, there some many without them. Lords, Earls, and Sirs all regender to simply Lady. Not only would this have proven to be confusing, it didn’t accurately convey the differences in rank between the titles. I decided to regender Earls into Countesses, even though it’s a European rank not used in England.

As always, names proved to be a thorny issue. In this case, it was mostly due to the volume of them. Not only were there more characters than any of the other novels I’ve regendered but there were quite a few using the same name. ‘John’ in particular seemed very common, which no doubt mirrors the time the story’s set in. Regendering them all to the same name, such as ‘Jane’ or ‘Joan’, didn’t really have the same feel, as well as making the story a tad overly complicated. Therefore, I chose to regender each character into new, different names when they happened to share a first name.

Apart from these challenges, I found regendering the novel to be a delight. The end result keeps all the main themes and social commentary from the original novel but centres them around female characters. There is some sense of gender stereotypes are play, particularly with how now it is women who are presumed to be heirs and holders of important positions and titles. Also, the regendered novel features men portrayed as being soft, caring and nurturing, which is jarring a first but I think reinforces the lack of depth that female characters generally have.

Billy Budd was a strange choice for inclusion since it’s not as well-known as Melville’s other work, Moby Dick. Technically it’s not even complete since it was published after his death from his notes. I hadn’t even heard of the novel before a few years ago when I encountered it during my studies. Then I came across it in two completely different subjects from two different universities.

While I enjoy the novel on its own merits due to its interesting plot and story, it is actually the setting that prompted me to select it for regendering. Even today, sailing tends to be a male dominated profession but back in the 19th century it was pretty much exclusively so. To me, regendering such a scenario represented the ultimate expression of the project.

Of course, it also led to quite a few complications beyond the ones I normally encountered during regendering. While the names weren’t any harder to regender, the fact the title of the novel is shared with the main character’s name gave me food for thought. I was tempted to change it slightly, to Billie, in order to reinforce the change in gender but given Billy can be used for a girl’s name, albeit uncommonly, I decided to stick to my guideline and leave it unchanged.

Where I encountered the biggest issues was in the terminology used throughout the book. Almost all the nautical terms used were male regendered, such as seaman or foretopman. These started to sound weird and awkward when referring to female characters, yet they are part of our history. In the end I decided to break the guidelines I had set and regender these terms. Partly it was to aid in readability but mostly to help create an image of what it might have been like on a ship with all female crew. It wasn’t a complete change, since I kept the tradition of referring to ships as females unchanged, as well as the big class of warships continuing to be called Men of War.

One of the interesting results of the regendering process was the change to one of the subtler elements of the novel. One reading of the novel suggests a homoeotic attraction on the part of Claggart towards Billy and it is his torment at the possibility that causes his antagonism. I’m not sure this carries over after the regendering.

Apart from that, the regendering of Billy Budd had a fascinating result. Perhaps what I found most interesting was how easy and natural it felt to have a ship of war with a completely female crew, led by a more than capable female captain whose qualifications for the job were never put into question due to her gender.

Addendum:
While I had originally published this novel under it’s original name, Billy Budd, I’ve decided changing the name slightly could be more effective. This was a result of my decision to change the protagonist’s name. At this point, it’s more of an experiment to see the effect of changing names more then necessary. I’d love to hear your feedback on what you think of the change.