73 pages • 2 hours read
Roald DahlThe Witches
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1983A 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.
Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Meeting“
The boy stays behind the screen and continues to train the mice. He’s not scared: He’s in a room with elegant women who prevent cruelty toward children. The boy notices a woman scratching her neck. He then sees another woman scratching her neck. He thinks they have nits or lice. Soon, the boy watches a woman put her hand under her hair and scratch her scalp. The woman is wearing a wig. She’s also wearing gloves. The boy realizes all the women wear gloves.
The boy thinks about escaping, but the women shut the doors and wrap a chain around them. Frightened, the boy faints. A few seconds later, he’s conscious and peeking through a crack in the screen.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Frizzled Like a Fritter“
The witches stare at a small, pretty woman on the platform. She has on long black gloves but no hat. She brings her fingers to her beautiful face and removes it—it’s a mask, and underneath is an extremely hideous face. The boy realizes the witch on the platform is the Grand High Witch.
The Grand High Witch asks if the doors are secure. After someone confirms they are, she instructs the other witches, in a foreign accent, to remove their gloves, shoes, and wigs. The boy sees their claws, toeless feet, and bald heads.
The boy remembers what his grandma told him about the “nose-holes” of witches. He wonders if they’ll smell him. Thankfully, the boy hasn’t taken a bath—he’s dirty, which makes his smell harder to detect.
The Grand High Witch upbraids the witches for not destroying all children. She wants all the kids in England gone. The subordinate witches promise to do better, but an unnamed witch thinks it’s excessive to eliminate every single child. The Grand High Witch scolds the nameless witch for questioning her, and the unnamed witch tries to take back her comment. She says she didn’t mean it. The Grand High Witch yells at the witch in rhymes before she shoots sparks from her eyes that turn the questioning witch into smoke.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker“
The Grand High Witch screams insults about children. She calls them dirty and smelly. She says witches have to flush kids down the drain and wipe them off the earth. Just speaking about kids makes the Grand High Witch ill.
The Grand High Witch has made a plan to rid England of children. The witches will quit their jobs and buy sweetshops. An excited witch thinks the plan is to poison the sweets and extinguish the children. The Grand High Witch scolds the witch and her harebrained interruption. Yet the Grand High Witch doesn’t incinerate this witch. Instead, the Grand High Witch returns to relaying her plan. The witches will have a big opening offering free sweets, and every treat in the shop will have the Delayed Action Mouse-Maker. The next day, at nine o’clock during school, children will turn into mice. The teachers will cry for help and put out cheese and mousetraps. The witches bask in their devious plan with a song that summarizes their cruel intentions.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Recipe“
The boy reminds the reader that he remains trapped behind the screen. He can’t cough or make noise—if he did, the witches would kill him. Thankfully, the boy has gone days without washing, and the Grand High Witch preoccupies the other witches, who praise her plan to turn the children of England into mice.
As the Grand High Witch prepares to tell the witches the recipe for the 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker, the witches notice two mice. The witches think the Grand High Witch made them appear, but the Grand High Witch screams they’re wrong. They’re pet mice that belong to a boy. She’s right: The mice are William and Mary. The Grand High Witch picks them up and kicks them against the wall.
Instructing her followers to get out pencils and paper, the Grand High Witch recites the ingredients for a complex recipe: A telescope’s wrong end boils for 21 hours, the tails of 45 brown mice fry in hair oil, the bodies of the 45 brown mice simmer in frog juice for an hour, an alarm clock, a gruntle’s egg, and body parts from a few other strange creatures. Mix it to make a green liquid, and put a drop of the liquid into the treat, but not more than a drop—too much will turn children into mice prematurely.
Chapters 6-9 Analysis
Dahl uses imagery to depict the boy and the witches. The boy says: “I watched them for a while longer through the crack in the screen” (65). This paints a visual of the concealed boy observing the women.
The scene with the witches brings in the idea of spying. In the early 1940s, Dahl was an informal spy for England in America during World War II. Before America joined the war, he disseminated anti-Nazi stories to get the United States to join the war. After America entered, he kept tabs on the country’s plans for Europe after the war ended. The boy in the story isn’t spying on a global superpower, but he is spying on the most dangerous creatures in the world: witches.
The arrival of the witches circles back to the theme of Appearances and the Fluidity of Identity. The boy says: “I was not particularly alarmed. What better than to be imprisoned in a room full of these splendid ladies?” (65). With their hats and gloves, the women look elegant, but under the veneer of sophistication, their sinister identity lurks.
Like a good spy, the boy carefully observes the woman and connects their behavior to his grandma’s wisdom. The boy says: “I glanced swiftly around at the rest of the now seated audience. Every one of them was wearing gloves!” (67). The exclamation marks and italics convey the boy’s alarming discovery: Witches, not cultivated women, surround him. The image of the shut, chained doors reinforces the boy’s precarious situation.
The novel continues to explore the theme of identity and appearance through the Grand High Witch. The boy says: “[S]he was very pretty. She had on a rather stylish long black dress that reached right to the ground and she wore black gloves that came up to her elbows” (69). Yet the Grand High Witch isn’t an attractive woman—she’s a witch.
After the witch removes her mask, the boy sees her face and says: “It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shriveled, it looked as though it had been pickled in vinegar” (71). The repetition of “so” emphasizes the witch’s “ugliness.” It creates a hyperbolic or exaggerated tone that conveys the hideousness of the Grand High Witch and the other witches.
The Grand High Witch also uses a hyperbolic tone with a slew of charged insults. She calls the witches: “Miserrrable vitches! Useless lazy vitches! Feeble frrribbling vitches! You are a heap of idle good-for-nothing vurms!” (77). Her odd diction emphasizes the witch’s otherness. She doesn’t speak like the boy or his grandma. Her words have extra r’s and v’s; the novelist Dara Horn thinks the accent is Yiddish.
The general belief is that the Grand High Witch is German. A German accent links the Grand High Witch to the tyranny of the German Nazis who ruthlessly ruled the country from 1933-1945. In Dahl’s story, the Grand High Witch is the tyrant, and the other witches are her followers. The Grand High Witch is a mostly pitiless leader. When a witch questions her plan to eliminate all of the children in England, sparks shoot out of her eyes and she eliminates the questioning witch. Like Hitler, the Grand High Witch isn’t running a democracy. She’s not interested in feedback. She has all the power and won’t relinquish any of it. As she declares in a rhyming couplet: “A vitch who dares to say I’m wrrrong / Vill not be vith us very long!” (80).
In the context of Nazism, the Grand High Witch is advocating genocide. She wants to methodically kill English children, and to do so, she and the witches will use Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker. The name echoes the Nazi program, Aktion T4, that systematically killed people with physical and mental disabilities. Although Dahl’s biography supports a connection to Nazism, there are no explicit Nazis in the story. Such an angle might come across as overwrought for a story intended for young readers. Yet even with a closed reading—a reading that sticks to what’s in the text—the Grand High Witch is a fanatical tyrant due to her violent, horrifying tone, diction, and plans to eliminate children.
Appearances are important to the witch’s plan. The sweetshops turn into agents of doom, the children become mice, and the teachers, fooled by the new looks of the children, bring in mice traps to kill them. The witches take advantage of how people are often duped by appearances. The song at the end of Chapter 8 reinforces their evilness. They enthusiastically sing about their atrocious, deceptive plans.
The witches convey their worship of the Grand High Witch with their hyperbolic praise of her plan. They exclaim: “Brilliant! Sensational! Marvellous! You are a genius, O Brainy One! It is a thrilling invention, this Delayed Action Mouse-Maker! It is a winner!” (95). Dahl subverts gender norms when the Grand High Witch kicks William and Mary across the room, as one often thinks of women as gentle and benevolent. The boy says: “Her aim was extraordinary. She would have made a great football [soccer] player” (97). Again, Dahl subverts gender norms, showing that women, or at least witches disguised as women, can be as good at sports as men.
Dahl arguably satirizes or mocks the creation of spells and potions with extremely nuanced directions for concocting Formula 86. The diction adds to the silliness and emphasizes that the story is meant to be fun and rollicking in spite of its sinister subject matter. Dahl invents absurd-sounding creatures like “the crrrabcrrruncher,” “the blabbersnitch,” “the grrrobblesqvirt,” and the “catsprrringer” (103). The names are absurd, detracting from their ominousness. As Dahl doesn’t define the creatures, the reader can imagine how they look and act.
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