PR 20749 gives each dict view access to a mappingproxy for the original dict, although I don't know if that defeats the original purpose. It might be hard to sensibly make MappingProxy(d).items() return something other than d.items(), since this is already the behavior for user-defined classes: >>> class A: def __getitem__(self, key): return "value" def items(self): return 17 >>> from types import MappingProxyType >>> MappingProxyType(A()).items() 17