Should we update classic stories with modern morals? Two film-based kerfuffles have reopened the question. Reports that the next James Bond “won’t be white” have provoked a backlash, as did the launch of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which features a black Ariel.

Negative “review bombing” of the film, which has been the target of criticism since its lead actor, Halle Bailey, was announced, caused the Internet Movie Database to make a rare intervention and change its ratings system. There is abhorrent racism on show here – about which perhaps little more needs to be said. But alongside it is a broader, longer running argument that might be worth addressing. Namely, that 21st-century mores – diversity, sexual equality, and so on – should not be shoehorned into old stories.

General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently a forthcoming film with a Latina actress as Snow White, and a new Peter Pan & Wendy with “lost girls”. The argument is that too much fashionable refurbishment tends to ruin a magical kingdom, and that cult classics could do with the sort of Grade I listing applied to heritage buildings. If you want to tell new stories, fine – but why not start from scratch?

But this point of view misses something, which is that updating classics is itself an ancient part of literary culture; in fact, it is a tradition, part of our heritage too. While the larger portion of the literary canon is carefully preserved, a slice of it has always been more flexible, to be retold and reshaped as times change.

Fairytales fit within this latter custom: they have been updated, periodically, for many hundreds of years. Cult figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes fit there too, as do superheroes: each generation, you might say, gets the heroes it deserves. And so does Bond. Modernity is both a villain and a hero within the Bond franchise: the dramatic tension between James – a young cosmopolitan “dinosaur” – and the passing of time has always been part of the fun.

This tradition has a richness to it: it is a historical record of sorts. Look at the progress of the fairy story through the ages and you get a twisty tale of dubious progress, a moral journey through the woods. You could say fairytales have always been politically correct – that is, tweaked to reflect whatever morals a given cohort of parents most wanted to teach their children.

The earliest known versions were published in Venice in 1550, the cautionary tales of peasants in all their rapey gore – and then in the 1700s adapted again by the French aristocracy, with a sprinkling of refinement: posh characters and upper-class mores. (An earlier version of Cinderella, in which she murders her stepmother, manipulates gifts from her father and requests magical help to meet the prince, was updated in the 1700s to make her more virtuously passive. Beauty and the Beast, in similar fashion, was written to reconcile high-born girls to domesticity – it taught patience with non-ideal husbands.)

By the 18th century, fairytales had gone out of fashion again; they were too pagan and otherworldly. Then came the Grimm brothers with their own moral agenda: patriotism. They sought to shore up German national identity by laying claim to “foundational” folk tales, adding dashes of local culture. They kept the violence, for authenticity, but cut out the sex.

Hans Christian Andersen reworked them with a streak of puritanism, forcing them in line with Christian values (obedience to your parents was a running theme). Then came Disney to take out the last remaining nasty bits and insert the morals of the day. Witness a (woke?) leap between 1950’s Cinderella and 1991’s Beauty and the Beast: the former embraces marriage as female destiny; the latter puts up a weak fight, at least in the first few scenes. In the 1970s, second-wave feminism stamped itself on the history of the fairytale, with burlesque rewrites, Angela Carter at the helm. And then in the 00s came racial diversity: 2009 saw Disney’s first black princess.

Those who demand fairytales stay “exactly as they were” are searching for a point in history that never existed. These folk stories have always been on the move, flitting from one incarnation to another.

Bond is an ever-moving target too. Dr No came out just as Jamaica declared independence – but featured deferential black Jamaicans calling white Englishmen “captain”. Bond villains as racist stereotypes went out of fashion over the years.

In older films, women tended to be ditzes – it was only really in the 1990s that capable Bond girls appeared. Female secretaries have become full-blown agents, and non-white characters have climbed the hierarchy. Bond’s jokes have become less offensive, his relationships more complicated. Where does woke begin here, exactly? At what point did Bond, as they say, “stop being Bond”?

The idea that we are pasting over history – censoring important artefacts – is wrongheaded too. It is not as if old films or books have been burned, wiped from the internet or removed from libraries. With today’s propensity for writing things down, common since the 1500s, there is no reason to fear losing the “original” stories.

As for the suggestion that minority groups should make their own stories instead – this is a sly form of exclusion. Ancient universities and gentlemen’s clubs once made similar arguments; why couldn’t exiled individuals simply set up their own versions? It is not so easy. Old stories weave themselves deep into the tapestry of a nation; newer ones will necessarily be confined to the margins.

But here’s a thought to console those torn between tradition and progress: “quintessential” European fairy stories and folk tales already have roots outside the continent. After all, stories told by wildly different cultures often have striking similarities – a bit of borrowing is more than likely. Last month, the “very English” Beatrix Potter was accused of owing much to traditional African folk tales – if true, this fact could do with some greater publicity. Ethnic diversity is not so modern after all.

• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist

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