Matilda

“Over the next six months, under Mrs. Phelps’s watchful and compassionate eye, Matilda read the following books:

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Animal Farm by George Orwell”

Matilda’s reading list would challenge an adult, much less an avid five-year-old. Her mind, already brilliant, grows rapidly as she reads classic novels. This kid is going somewhere despite her useless parents. Matilda also uses these books as an imaginative escape from her parents’ dullness and cruelty.

“She resented being told constantly that she was ignorant and stupid when she knew she wasn’t. The anger inside her went on boiling and boiling, and as she lay in bed that night she made a decision. She decided that every time her father or her mother was beastly to her, she would get her own back in some way or another. A small victory or two would help her to tolerate their idiocies and would stop her from going crazy.”

Ignored or hushed by her greedy, dishonest parents, Matilda calms herself by deciding to get revenge. Much smarter than her family, the little girl is clever enough to get away with it. The most important thing she knows, though, is that she is smart, despite her parents’ foolish opinion of her.

“‘Filth,’ Mr. Wormwood said. ‘If it’s by an American it’s certain to be filth. That’s all they write about.’ ‘No daddy, it’s beautiful, honestly it is. It’s about…’ ‘I don’t want to know what it’s about,’ Mr. Wormwood barked. ‘I’m fed up with your reading anyway. Go and find yourself something useful to do.’ With frightening suddenness he now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket.”

Matilda’s father isn’t a reader; he’s jealous that his daughter, whom he doesn’t like or respect, can do something that’s beyond him. Her intelligence, and the fact that she’s not a son, trouble him. He resolves it by punishing her, destroying something important to her. 

“At this point Mr. Wormwood came noisily into the room. He was incapable of entering any room quietly, especially at breakfast time. He always had to make his appearance felt immediately by creating a lot of noise and clatter. One could almost hear him saying, ‘It’s me! Here I come, the great man himself, the master of the house, the wage-earner, the one who makes it possible for all the rest of you to live so well! Notice me and pay your respects!’”

The author makes savage fun of the conceited Mr. Wormwood, who cares only about how important he thinks he is. Wormwood loudly insists on his family paying him constant, admiring respect. In fact, Mrs. Wormwood has decidedly mixed feelings about her husband, Michael respects but doesn’t understand him, and Matilda despises him. It’s one of the recurring themes in Dahl’s books: Bad people always end up paying for their rudeness and cruelty.

“I’m afraid men are not always quite as clever as they think they are. You will learn that when you get a bit older, my girl.”

Matilda tricks her cruel father into dying his hair dirty gray, and her mother concludes that he accidentally applied her peroxide hair dye instead of his usual lotion. Her advice to Matilda is accurate, but it also shows she has no idea how bright and resourceful her daughter has become. Not only does Matilda get away with her prank, she already knows quite well that fathers can be less “clever [than] they think”—and, apparently, so can mothers.

“‘For instance,’ Miss Honey said, ‘if I asked you to multiply fourteen by nineteen…No, that’s too difficult…’ ‘It’s two hundred and sixty-six,’ Matilda said softly. Miss Honey stared at her. Then she picked up a pencil and quickly worked out the sum on a piece of paper. ‘What did you say it was?’ she said, looking up. ‘Two hundred and sixty-six,’ Matilda said. Miss Honey put down her pencil and removed her spectacles and began to polish the lenses with a piece of tissue.”

The author has Miss Honey busy herself with cleaning her glasses to suggest stunned surprise and an attempt to calm herself and collect her thoughts. Matilda’s superb brainpower overwhelms the teacher, and the passage elegantly expresses that emotion through gesture. This exchange also underscores Matilda’s intellectual prowess: Miss Honey, an adult, must use paper and pencil to work out what Matilda, the child, calculates mentally.

“‘I’ve always said to myself that if a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn’t I?’ ‘Why not indeed,’ Miss Honey said. ‘The human brain is an amazing thing.’ ‘I think it’s a lot better than a lump of metal,’ Matilda said. ‘That’s all a calculator is.’”

At age five, Matilda already knows her math tables far better than most adults. She’s also self-aware enough to realize that people have much more potential than they give themselves credit for. Her lonely home life has given her time and freedom to explore that potential to great effect.

“‘Do you think that all children’s books ought to have funny bits in them?’ Miss Honey asked. ‘I do,’ Matilda said. ‘Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.’”

A five-year-old girl who has read Dickens as well as Tolkien has a right to her opinions about literary classics. Much of Matilda’s charm is her youthful, innocent enthusiasm about the great books she’s already read, when most kids her age can barely read. Her attitude, and the lengths to which she’s gone to develop her own mind, serve as inspirations for young readers: If she can do it, maybe they can, too, or at least more than they thought they could. Her comment about humor in books is also the author’s veiled criticism of the overly serious content of many famous children’s books.

“‘What did you say?’ [Miss Honey] asked. ‘I said you chose books and I chose looks,’ Mrs. Wormwood said. ‘And who’s finished up the better off? Me, of course. I’m sitting pretty in a nice house with a successful businessman and you’re left slaving away teaching a lot of nasty little children the ABC.’”

The Wormwoods live in a fantasy world in which they are much more wonderful than they really are. Miss Honey quickly discovers that Matilda’s parents are too self-absorbed to care about their daughter’s education. They regard learning as a time-wasting obligation; Miss Honey is completely on her own in helping Matilda develop her powerful mind.

“The nice thing about Matilda was that if you had met her casually and talked to her you would have thought she was a perfectly normal five-and-a-half-year-old child. She displayed almost no outward signs of her brilliance and she never showed off. ‘This is a very sensible and quiet little girl,’ you would have said to yourself. And unless for some reason you had started a discussion with her about literature or mathematics, you would never have known the extent of her brain-power. It was therefore easy for Matilda to make friends with other children.”

Matilda’s complete lack of self-importance, coupled with her pleasant personality, makes it easy for the other first-year students to like her. This gives her the freedom to study advanced subjects without being teased by jealous kids. It also helps her to network with co-conspirators in their ongoing battle of wits with Trunchbull.

“‘It’s like a war,’ Matilda said, overawed. ‘You’re darn right it’s like a war,’ Hortensia cried. ‘And the casualties are terrific. We are the crusaders, the gallant army fighting for our lives with hardly any weapons at all and the Trunchbull is the Prince of Darkness, the Foul Serpent, the Fiery Dragon with all the weapons at her command. It’s a tough life. We all try to support each other.’”

Hortensia overdramatizes her role in the fight against Trunchbull, but she understands how nasty the headmistress is. This makes her a mentor and ally of Matilda and Lavender in their plans to make Trunchbull’s life as miserable as she makes theirs. As hyperbolic as they are, the ideas of a “Prince of Darkness” or “Fiery Dragon” suggest a heroic quest—and this is exactly what Matilda undertakes in her ultimate efforts to reclaim Miss Honey’s estate.

“‘Listen to this then,’ Hortensia said. ‘Only yesterday the Trunchbull caught a boy called Julius Rottwinkle eating Liquorice Allsorts during the scripture lesson and she simply picked him up by one arm and flung him clear out of the open classroom window. Our classroom is one floor up and we saw Julius Rottwinkle go sailing out over the garden like a Frisbee and landing with a thump in the middle of the lettuces. Then the Trunchbull turned to us and said, ‘From now on, anybody caught eating in class goes straight out the window.’”

This passage exemplifies the author’s trademark ability to turn garish cruelty into absurd comedy. His antagonists truly are fiendish, but their awful treatment of children becomes a cartoon slapstick. This draws laughter, which softens the blow of moments that might otherwise seem too grim in a middle-grade novel.

“Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.”

Matilda reasons that Miss Trunchbull can be viciously cruel to children because no one will believe the students’ eyewitness accounts. It’s dawning on Matilda that the way to fight back against such treatment is to meet it with equal force. She’s only a very small girl, though, and doesn’t yet know how she might achieve that.

“I have never been able to understand why small children are so disgusting. They are the bane of my life. They are like insects. They should be got rid of as early as possible. We get rid of flies with fly-spray and by hanging up fly-paper. I have often thought of inventing a spray for getting rid of small children. How splendid it would be to walk into this classroom with a gigantic spray-gun in my hands and start pumping it. Or better still, some huge strips of sticky paper. I would hang them all round the school and you’d all get stuck to them and that would be the end of it.”

Miss Trunchbull runs a school but wants the students dead. She speaks viciously to their faces, but she’s insulated from reprisals because her insults are so outlandish that no outsider will believe them. To any witness, though, her behavior proves that she’s not merely wildly inappropriate for her job but also absurdly incompetent. She’s a classic Roald Dahl wicked antagonist, her actions dreadful yet ridiculous.

“Matilda, in the second row, sat very still and said nothing. A strange feeling of serenity and confidence was sweeping over her and all of a sudden she found that she was frightened by nobody in the world. With the power of her eyes alone she had compelled a glass of water to tip and spill its contents over the horrible Headmistress, and anybody who could do that could do anything.”

Furious by Trunchbull’s unfair accusations against her, Matilda suddenly discovers she can move objects with her mind, and she causes a glass of water—including Lavender’s prank newt—to spill all over Trunchbull. Thus suddenly empowered, Matilda feels a rush of confidence: It’s the first moment in her life where she feels capable of protecting herself against cruel adults. This new ability gives her a shield against unfair treatment, one she wants to understand and master.

“[…] Miss Honey I do honestly feel I could move almost anything in the world, not just tipping over glasses and little things like that…I feel I could topple tables and chairs, Miss Honey…Even when people are sitting in the chairs I think I could push them over, and bigger things too, much bigger things than chairs and tables …I only have to take a moment to get my eyes strong and then I can push it out, this strongness, at anything at all so long as I am staring at it hard enough…I have to stare at it very hard, Miss Honey, very very hard, and then I can feel it all happening behind my eyes, and my eyes get hot just as though they were burning but I don’t mind that in the least, and […]”

Walking with her teacher, Matilda rambles to her, enthusing about all the things she might be able to do with her newfound power. She’s discovering an ability that’s hers alone, something that belongs to her and can’t be taken away. Like every child who realizes new strengths, only more so, Matilda delights in the freedom that such a power offers her.

“Miss Honey was walking slowly so that the small child could keep up with her without trotting too fast, and it was very peaceful out there on the narrow road now that the village was behind them. It was one of those golden autumn afternoons and there were blackberries and splashes of old man’s beard in the hedges, and the hawthorn berries were ripening scarlet for the birds when the cold winter came along. There were tall trees here and there on either side, oak and sycamore and ash and occasionally a sweet chestnut. Miss Honey, wishing to change the subject for the moment, gave the names of all these to Matilda and taught her how to recognise them by the shape of their leaves and the pattern of the bark on their trunks. Matilda took all this in and stored the knowledge away carefully in her mind.”

The lovely countryside reflects Miss Honey’s peaceful personality. It also signals the warm friendliness between her and her young charge, a moment of bonding between a kindly mentor and a gratefully eager student. The author thus paints a picture of how adults should treat children, by sharp contrast to the negligent and impatient treatment so many kids receive from the Wormwoods and Trunchbulls of the world. 

“Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again. Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers go when school is over for the day? Do we wonder if they live alone, or if there is a mother at home or a sister or a husband?”

Mentally a grown-up in many ways, Matilda wonders about things most children never think about. She’s beginning to realize that the world is larger and more complicated than the limited realm of school. She’s also beginning to see Miss Honey as a person with her own life away from school, someone Matilda can get to know and be friends with.

“Matilda hung back. She was a bit frightened of this place now. It seemed so unreal and remote and fantastic and so totally away from this earth. It was like an illustration in Grimm or Hans Andersen. It was the house where the poor woodcutter lived with Hansel and Gretel and where Red Riding Hood’s grandmother lived and it was also the house of The Seven Dwarfs and The Three Bears and all the rest of them. It was straight out of a fairy-tale.”

When she first sees Miss Honey’s tiny cottage deep in the countryside, it’s so different from her school and her tract house that it frightens her. Entering the mysterious, tree-hidden cottage, where she’ll talk about her telekinetic power, seems like stepping into a fairy tale in which fantasy rules over reality. Matilda is entering a new phase of her life; it’s the dawning realization of her tremendous mental powers that awes the tiny girl.

“‘You are so much wiser than your years, my dear,’ Miss Honey went on, ‘that it quite staggers me. Although you look like a child, you are not really a child at all because your mind and your powers of reasoning seem to be fully grown-up. So I suppose we might call you a grown-up child, if you see what I mean.’”

Miss Honey has no one to talk to about the terror that haunts her life. She confides in Matilda because the girl is smart and perceptive beyond her years and because Matilda—who knows full well the sadistic cruelty of Trunchbull—is the only person on Earth who’ll believe Miss Honey’s story about the decades of cruelty she’s suffered under the headmistress. They share an enemy; only they can work together to solve that problem.

“Give my Jenny her wages

Give my Jenny the house

Then get out of here.

If you don’t, I will come and get you

I will come and get you like you got me.

I am watching you Agatha.”

A chalkboard message, seemingly written by the ghost of Magnus Honey, threatens Trunchbull with punishment for murdering him, taking his daughter’s inheritance, and enslaving her. In fact, it’s Matilda, sitting in the classroom, who’s moving the chalk with her mind. The scary prank is her way of helping her teacher recover her life and freedom from her aunt’s terror. It doesn’t hurt that, this way, Matilda also can rid her own life of Trunchbull. Matilda also had enough intuition and foresight to learn beforehand how Magnus referred to both Trunchbull and Miss Honey—as “Agatha” and “Jenny”—and as she writes with the chalk, she slips into Magnus’s “voice.” This kind of awareness of perspective is outlandish for a five-year-old to have, further evidence of Matilda’s extraordinary nature.

“As for Matilda, she continued to sit motionless at her desk. She was feeling curiously elated. She felt as though she had touched something that was not quite of this world, the highest point of the heavens, the farthest star. She had felt most wonderfully the power surging up behind her eyes, gushing like a warm fluid inside her skull, and her eyes had become scorching hot, hotter than ever before, and things had come bursting out of her eye-sockets and then the piece of chalk had lifted itself up and had begun to write. It seemed as though she had hardly done anything, it had all been so simple.”

The effort to make the chalk move against the board makes Matilda feel not tired but delighted. Her newfound ability seems to have a spiritual dimension, something that takes her out of herself and this world to access powers not available on earth, then leaves her feeling joyful. Part of the joy comes from having performed a great deed by ridding the school and, especially, Miss Honey, of the viciously hateful Trunchbull.

“While you were in my class you had nothing to do, nothing to make you struggle. Your fairly enormous brain was going crazy with frustration. It was bubbling and boiling away like mad inside your head. There was tremendous energy bottled up in there with nowhere to go, and somehow or other you were able to shoot that energy out through your eyes and make objects move. But now things are different. You are in the top form competing against children more than twice your age and all that mental energy is being used up in class. Your brain is for the first time having to struggle and strive and keep really busy, which is great.”

Miss Honey explains to Matilda that the little girl’s mind, lacking a challenge, may have poured its energy into moving objects at a distance. Now that Matilda has plenty of challenge in the top level at school, her mind no longer needs to make things move around. The real power—the real magic—is Matilda’s brilliant mind, which can learn to do anything it wants.