69 pages • 2 hours read
Roald DahlMatilda
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Comical Threats
The author’s books are filled with bizarre characters and scary situations, yet they’re leavened with humor that helps young readers deal with the fearful events. Dahl wants his audience to remain calm enough to learn that bad people also are silly and that it’s possible to stand up to evil. Matilda contains an especially wicked antagonist, the huge and angry Miss Trunchbull, whose rages and abuse of school children are so over the top that they become ridiculous. She hurls kids out windows and over fences, but the victims are never hurt, only stunned. The author helps readers understand that the scary Trunchbull isn’t a qualified judge of people but instead a preposterous, cartoonish despot.
The other bad people, Matilda’s parents, verbally mistreat her and generally neglect her, but she’s never harmed physically. The mental abuse would normally damage a child, but Matilda is presented as a girl with a naturally resilient mind who can see her parents’ corruption for what it is and not take their casual cruelties to heart. She sees them as sadly comic, and she relieves the tension of living with them by playing pranks on them. These are the author’s ways of suggesting to his readers how thoughtless adults are really to be esteemed. His humorous portrayal of the bad characters helps children see such elders not as frightening but as silly.
Wordplay
Dahl is known for making up silly words and names that cleverly describe things and people. In Matilda, he especially has merciless fun with the names of villainous characters. Harry Wormwood, a most unpleasant person, has one of the most unpleasant names in all of fiction. Agatha Trunchbull’s name brings to mind agony, aghast, truncheons, and bulls.
Others’ names reflect their purpose in the plot: The troubled but energetic Hortensia, for example, conjures “hortatory”—urging others to action, as when she exhorts Matilda and Lavender to prepare to fight Trunchbull—and the tension of her troubled life. Good people get good names: Miss Honey’s suggests her sweetness; her father, a doctor, is named Magnus, which means “great,” and she remembers him that way.
Locations also get the humor treatment. Crunchem Hall Primary School is where kids get “crunched” by the vicious Miss Trunchbull. The Chokey is a tall, narrow cabinet that smothers its captive with terror until they choke with fear.
Characterization Tools
The author has a knack for describing characters’ personalities indirectly through their physical appearance or actions. Miss Trunchbull is physically huge, and she stomps around rather than walking, symbolizing her powerful position and sadistic personality. Mr. Wormwood wears garish clothes, the clown-like vestments of a dishonest salesman, and his thin mustache and small stature make him seem like a rat. Hortensia devours potato chips like someone hungering to fill an empty place in her spirit. Mrs. Wormwood’s “flesh appears to be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out” (27). Dahl uses this description, and her obsession with makeup, hair dye, endless games of Bingo, and hours of TV, to suggest the character’s vapid self-indulgence. Miss Honey is pretty but very slender, which suggests hungry poverty and the frailty brought about by years of torment under Trunchbull’s tyranny.
Related Titles
By Roald Dahl
