Roald Dahl: Matilda

I don't know why I pulled this off the shelf the other day, but what an amazing book.

It's odd to read a book first as a child then much later as a professional literature analyzer person. You see things a little differently, put it that way. 

Matilda is a book about terrible abuse, but we don't think of it that way. We think of it as a tiny girl who reads a lot who gets rid of the mean headmistress and then gets to go live with her nice teacher instead of her mean family. But back up a minute. Her family is horrible to her. Her dad tears up one of her library books. She starts punishing him for his meanness in various ways that are satisfying to us if we identify with a tiny powerless person in a household of people who don't care about her, but ultimately don't accomplish much. He does get cowed a little bit every time one of the punishments happen, but it doesn't ultimately solve her situation.

I'm fascinated by this little novel (or chapter book technically) because it's a master class in writing. You can watch Dahl write himself into a corner. Right there, where I just stopped, that is a narrative dead end. Matilda can't do horrible things back to her family for very long before we stop liking her. So we need to raise the stakes.

She goes off to school, where there's a much bigger, scarier, more violent, and worse bully. Aha! Stakes raised. But even Miss Trunchbull, who is outrageously awful, can get got. It's a little girl named Lavender who gets her back, putting a newt into her water jug. But now we're in the same narrative pickle as before. When the victims of bullies are mean back to bullies, at a certain point we stop sympathizing with them. Now we just have two bullies! That's no good.

So we need a victim of Miss Trunchbull who is worse off than the children at the school. That victim is Miss Honey, the absolutely lovely and utterly sympathetic teacher of Matilda's class. She's so good as a character! Because yes she's gentle and kind and intelligent and sees how smart Matilda is, which her parents don't--her father told Miss Trunchbull to look out for Matilda in particular as a troublemaker--but also she's in an awful situation that is very like the one Matilda is in, only much, much worse.

Setting aside the unlikely nature of the scene in which a kindergarten teacher reveals her appalling abuse to a five year old, we find out just how bad it was for Miss Honey growing up with Miss Trunchbull as her abusive aunt and guardian. Well, we get hints about much worse things than we hear about. Miss Honey keeps saying things like, "We don't need to get into details." Yikes, Miss Honey. 

The point is, now Matilda is fighting for someone besides herself. That makes us really like Matilda and also raises the stakes even more. Miss Honey lost her family home and her father's money and is living in extreme poverty because Miss Trunchbull made her sign over even her salary, saying Miss Trunchbull deserved to have it for paying for her all those years. Which she didn't. But also, that's your job as parent or guardian. Obviously.

Everything we learn about Miss Trunchbull is more outrageous. The kids at the school even say that's part of her method. She does things so outrageous that nobody would believe them ON PURPOSE. So when she swings a little girl around by her pigtails and throws her over the fence into a nearby field, that's way out there on purpose, so nobody would believe it happened. 

Matilda says what everyone says to every victim of domestic abuse or domestic violence: why didn't you just leave? This is where a child's chapter book gets extremely real. Miss Honey has to explain that when you're that beaten down, you can't stand up for yourself anymore. It's true. It's something nobody gets who hasn't been in that position, but you can easily imagine it in a workplace if that's more accessible. 

Imagine it. Your boss is so awful and invasive and controlling and mean. They tell you over and over you'll never get another job. They increase your workload and hours without increasing your pay. These are the kinds of bosses it's hard to walk away from, not because you want to stay, but because you start to think that people in general are horrible, everyone is awful to you, maybe you're awful and deserve it, no doubt it'll be the same anywhere else you go so why change anything? And you know you won't get a recommendation or reference from this person. They beat you down until you don't know you have other options.

Miss Honey gives such a good explanation of this mindset. It kind of blew me away when I read it yesterday. I've been thinking about it ever since. 

It's also the only way to make someone staying in that situation sympathetic. Because otherwise people tend to blame someone for putting up with a bad situation. Oh, that is the most normal thing of all time. "Why didn't you just...?" I promise you, there's a good reason.

Never ask anyone "Why didn't you just...?"

The narrative crisis Dahl is now in is that this tiny child needs to overcome a big terrifying powerful woman who has even other adults daunted by her bullying. When I read this as a kid, I was all set to learn how to do this. How? How? I was so disappointed that it was a supernatural power. Matilda does this thing with her eyes where she can stare and move things. Dahl wrote about a similar thing in the short story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," which is well worth looking up. Well, so it's not good real life advice, but it does give a tiny girl a way to overcome Miss Trunchbull.

Even then, though, she doesn't take a direct physical approach. She works and works on her skill until she can write on the board with chalk. She waits until Miss Trunchbull is in the room and writes on the board with chalk from a distance, in the voice of Miss Honey's father, telling her to give Miss Honey back the house, the money, and her salary. It works! Miss Trunchbull goes away, Miss Honey gets everything back, and all is well.

But also Matilda's awful dad gets caught for his used car mafia connections and the family flees the country, except Matilda gets them to agree to leave her with Miss Honey instead. Happy ending to the story! There's a wonderful Quentin Blake drawing of Miss Honey holding little Matilda at the end of the book. 

She needed a new family and that's what she got. Amazing! Satisfying! She did it herself! But she did it in service of helping someone else who needed that help even more than she did!

This is such a great book. But it also reminds me that the victims of villains in fiction need to be managed carefully so they don't turn into villains themselves. Hitting back is still hitting. When you can set someone up to bring themselves down by their own crimes, that's the best thing ever, like Matilda's dad. I still keep thinking Miss Trunchbull should have been brought down by her own crimes somehow, but can't think how. Also if I could make one tiny change it would be to set up that she's terrified of ghosts or something like that, maybe early on, like they aren't allowed to have Halloween because she's so afraid of that sort of thing. I don't know, who am I to make editorial suggestions to a book this great?

Anyway that's Matilda. I have strong feelings about the almighty chapter book as the pinnacle of fiction in a lot of ways. It does all the best things fiction does and leaves out all the worst ones. It can deal with terrible things in a matter of fact way, like this one does. It's just the best genre. I know, isn't it weird I never write them?

But it's like with Coraline, the way adults get terrified because they don't know things are going to turn out okay, while children love the story because they trust things will turn out all right in the end. I don't believe things will turn out okay! I need more of a chapter book mentality, maybe. I might read a whole lot more of them. I did read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last night. So moralizing! But also wonderful, obviously.