Carleigh Shannon
Professor Ulanowicz
LIT4331
7 December 2017
Matilda: A Mischievous Child or Neglected Child Trying to Cope?
Roald Dahl’s Matilda presents young Matilda as a powerful being with superior intelligence and the unique ability of controlling things with her mind known as telekinesis. Throughout the novel, Matilda uses her powers to seek justice on the adults in her life who have “wronged” her. Critics can argue that Matilda is acting out by seeking this sort of justice on her own accord and is somewhat of a “bad child”. However, instead of classifying Matilda as “mischievous” and a “trouble maker” it can be argued that Matilda is only acting out because it is a coping mechanism for the abuse she suffered from. Along with this, Matilda has observed adults misbehaving in similar ways, thus she thinks this is the appropriate way to “act” when something occurs that one disapproves of. Matilda is not a mischievous child, but instead she represents a child who does not understand how to behave properly due to the lack of proper adult influence in her life. Matilda is not a mischievous child, but rather she is an abused child dealing with multiple accounts of abuse between her parents and her school principal Miss Trunchbull. Matilda suffers from both physical and verbal abuse from these adults in her life, along with being oppressed by being a daughter rather than a son to her parents. This type of abuse and neglect results in this mischievous behavior that Matilda is claimed to have but instead, it is used as a defense and a coping mechanism. Simply put, Matilda is not “bad” just because she is a mischievous child, but rather her actions are simply influenced by treatment from the adults around her. Matilda’s behavior being classified as “bad” is simply the only way she escapes the abuse and oppression that she lives with every day.
Matilda is constantly called things such as “an ignorant little squirt” or “nasty” by her parents throughout the novel clearly showing the type of verbal abuse that Matilda faces while she is at home (Dahl 25). Matilda constantly being belittled by her parents when she is clearly an intellectual individual and she clearly understands what her parents are doing to her is wrong. However, Matilda is still only a five-year-old child, and she does not know the proper way to handle this type of abuse and neglect, thus she forms her own idea of “justice” in order to punish her parents, which in return evens out the playing field in Matilda’s eyes. Matilda thinks of it as this, “every time her father or her mother was beastly to her she would get her own back in some way or another”, and Matilda thinks this type of behavior is acceptable because it would allow her to “tolerate their idiocies” (Dahl 29).
This type of attitude is an adaptation to the type of “child hatred” that Matilda faces in her everyday life. It is natural for Matilda to want to retaliate against her parents, when this is what she has observed as natural behavior in her household. Matilda has learned that it is okay to wrong other people for ones own personal gain, which is mainly taught to her by her father. Matilda’s father is constantly boasting about how he is clever at his job by the way that he tricks his customers into buying cars that are actually junk. While Matilda acknowledges that it is wrong to fool innocent people, she does seem to accept the ideology that her father instills that it is okay to “trick” someone for ones own personal gain or benefit.
While critics can claim that Matilda’s behavior is simply that of a bad child, there is much more complexity to her actions. James M. Curtis discusses themes of “child hatred” in Roald Dahl’s novel The Witches with the idea that when an extreme, such as child hatred, is present in children’s literature it needs a counterpart, such as overprotectiveness. Curtis describes this as “genuine care on the one hand and outright antipathy on the other” (Curtis 168). In Curtis’ essay he describes the witches as those treating children with “outright antipathy” and the grandmother as the one with “genuine care”. These same representations can be viewed in Matilda, with Matilda’s parents and Miss Trunchbull the equivalence to the witches and Miss Honey the equivalence to the grandmother.
In addition to this, Matilda also has to fight against oppression from her gender, which in its self results in a different type of abuse and hatred that Matilda has to learn to cope with. Matilda’s brother Michael is clearly the favored child in the Wormwood family due to various reasons such as him fitting in with the family dynamic better and possibly because he is a boy. One example of lack of respect for Matilda due to the fact that she is a girl can be seen when Mr. Wormwood and Michael are discussing about the family car business and figuring out the profit of the day. When Matilda gets the answers correct, Matilda’s father says “No one in the world could give the right answer just like that, especially a girl” (Dahl 54). This is just one of the examples where Matilda not only faces abuse from her parents, but also has to deal with the fact that she is looked down upon because she is a girl rather than a boy. Mr. Wormwood, in this instance, is showing his preference for his son, along with sexist and demeaning comments and stigmas working against her. This type of behavior can influence the way that young Matilda views herself, and how she wants to be perceived despite the fact that Matilda has a superior intellect compared to other children her age and even the adults that surround her.
Kristen Guest describes this type of perception in her article by saying that Matilda takes on a “male voice” in order to achieve her status as a “hero”. Matilda is constantly being led to believe that in order to be powerful or intelligent, one must be a male. This is problematic within itself because it is oppressing Matilda’s ability to be a strong female character by taking on this male voice. Matilda constantly sees examples of women who either represent badness, passiveness, or cluelessness and Matilda breaks away from this pattern when she describes to step up and save Miss Honey from her problems. Guest says, “Matilda’s impulse to fix Miss Honey’s problems situates her as a “good” character in opposition to the evil Miss Trunchbull. In resolving Miss Honey’s difficulty, however, Matilda must move outside a conventionally feminine subject position” meaning that Matilda does not become a hero by using her own voice, but instead borrows the deceased Dr. Magnus Honey’s voice instead in order to “fix the problems” (Guest). Along with this, Miss Honey uses Matilda as a confident led to her feminine identity as a hero to be squandered due to the fact that Matilda only sought success with the use of a male voice, which once again led to Matilda being oppressed due to her gender. This type of oppression is a type of psychological abuse within itself affecting Matilda and her behavior in the long run.
Overall, Matilda’s entire story revolves around the effects of psychological, verbal, and physical abuse. Matilda taught herself in her own ways how to deal with these types of mistreatment and cruelty on her own based on what she has observed around her. This idea about Matilda can clearly be seen when Dahl writes, “Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honorable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of these things was something she had to put up with. It was not easy to do” (Dahl 49). This description shows that Matilda longs to have parents that do not need to be punished for their “beastly” ways and does not want to be mischievous, but rather she feels like she has to conduct these acts in order to bring balance into her world.
In conclusion, James Pope states that Matilda is described as “both good and bad; both heroine and wrong-doer” which is an overall a fairly accurate description of Matilda (Pope 258). While to the outside eye, it can be argued that Matilda’s behavior can be classified as naughty due to the fact that she used both her intellectual gift and her telekinesis for questionable activities, she is not necessarily a bad person for these behaviors. Instead she is a good person with a complex past that has influenced her decision-making skills. Matilda had an improper upbringing that lacked the necessary observation of how adults acted properly in society leaving her without a role model. Along with this, Matilda also had to deal with an oppressive atmosphere due to her gender and the stereotypes associated with it.
Overall, Matilda used this mischievous behavior as a coping mechanism that resulted from the various types of abuse she faced in her young life. Throughout Roald Dahl’s novel it can clearly be seen that Matilda did not want to punish her parents, but instead she felt like this was the proper action to take in order to teach them a necessary lesson. The overall conclusion that can be seen in Matilda is the idea that Matilda learned improper social skills despite her intellect and that is why she “punished” her parents and Miss Trunchbull in such ways.
Works Cited
Curtis, James. "'We Have a Great Task Ahead of Us!': Child-Hate in Roald Dahl's the Witches." Children's Literature in Education, vol. 45, no. 2, June 2014, pp. 166- 177. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-013-9207-6.
Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Puffin Books, 2004.
Guest, Kristen. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Resistance and Complicity in Matilda." Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3, 2008, pp. 246257.EBSCOhost,lp.hscl.ufl.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.a spx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2008395827&site=eds-live
Pope, James and Julia Round. "Children's Responses to Heroism in Roald Dahl's Matilda." Children's Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 257- 277. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-014-9233-z.