ENGB35 Matilda
Dahl:
o Her reading habits are what enable her to transcend her middleclass philistinic upbringing
Reading, culture enlarges your horizons
Makes you a better person
o Miss Trunchbull‟s face “neither a thing of beauty nor a joy forever”
John Keats, an address to an adult, first line of his poem
An adult‟s supposed to feel terribly superior
But we don‟t al recognize it when we see it
o Out of all the books that Matilda reads
Female heroines, courtship plots
the ones she likes the best aren‟t the stereotypical women‟s books
But the adventure plots, traveling all over the world
It mentally larges her horizons
The boys‟ stories particularly catch her eye
o His use of the grotesque to vilify Miss Trunchbull and Mrs. Wormwood:
Grotesque women who don‟t conform to ideals of femininity
Clearly Matilda suffers at the hands at her father because she is a girl
Mrs. Wormwood: watching an American soap opera while telling Ms. Honey
that women should think about making themselves attractive
Not only superficially anti-culture
But also reinforced narrow models of femininity: soap opera idols
Trunchbull pissed that all the women are married (when spelling „difficulty‟)
Rejected domestic femininity
Makes her sound like a feminist literary critic
o So basic and fundamental ascription of marriage in Ms. Honey‟s
teaching
Ms. Wormwood drops unity with her husband—a little female bonding
“I‟m afraid men are not quite as clever as they think they are. You will
learn that when you get a little older, my girl.”
Ms. Honey:
Her house located in the country
o Whole social history to it:
Really small
Farmer‟s old cottage
Whitewash comes off on people‟s clothes, „cause cheap paint
No running water
Matilda has Wormwood-esque moment when she gets snobbish about how Ms.
Honey‟s too poor to buy butter
Very subtle snobbish in consumerism and food-shopping
o In country: in a different realm
Narrative style completely changes at this point Set up as fairy-tale-like
Moving Matilda into romantic nature, a liberation of the world of tv dinners and
soap operas
The narrator starts rambling on about the beauty of nature and stuff
Gets really lyrical
We get a glimpse of the proper adult-child relationship (pedagogical)
Ms. Honey teaches Matilda about things she doesn‟t know, how to recognize
trees and shit
This relationship is framed explicitly in nature
Romantic nature vs. realist poverty vs. fairy-tale aspect
Before they get to the house, Ms. Honey recites Thomas‟s poem
Invoking Little Red Riding Hood,
o Never and never… Fear or believe
o That the wolf in the fairy-tale will attack you
o There‟s a doubleness of acknowledgement and reassurance
With the fairy-tale invoked, there is an
acknowledgement
Present to us, the reassuring adult, she‟s protecting the child (Matilda)
from the fairy-tale
o The power of those stories and the imagination
o The stories, fairy-tales that spell the child to sleep (read to them
before bed?)
Becomes heavily ironized a couple of pages later
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