When I showed it to him, his eyes got wide and he took the book from me. When I was ten or eleven, I was sitting in the playground at summer camp, minding my own business and reading this book, when one of the playground supervisers came and asked me what I was reading. He was just goi Warning: Extremely Long Review and Childhood Storytelling And he washed his hands afterwards, "to get rid of the filth." It was a library book. Then he went to the trash can and started ripping it up, page by page. In The BFG, kidnapped orphan Sophie emerges as the unlikely hero, saving herself and exerting a positive influence on her captor.Warning: Extremely Long Review and Childhood Storytelling When I was ten or eleven, I was sitting in the playground at summer camp, minding my own business and reading this book, when one of the playground supervisers came and asked me what I was reading. James’s wicked aunts get their comeuppance when they’re squashed by the giant peach. Initially, violence is used to reinforce the initial “victimhood” of the child, then it is repurposed in the latter stages of each tale to punish and overcome the perpetrator of the mistreatment. It allows downtrodden children to emerge victorious by outwitting their tormentors through their resourcefulness and a little magic. The initial disempowerment of the child lays the groundwork for the “underdog” narrative. The BFG reminds us that wordplay is part of learning and mastering languageĪlthough the violence present in Dahl’s work can be easily perceived as morbid, antagonism towards children is a necessary part of Dahl’s project. “Do them in! Boil their bones and fry their skin! Bish them, sqvish them, bash them, mash them!” “Down with children!” he overhears the witches chant. In The Witches, the young narrator initially finds comfort in the fact he has encountered such “splendid ladies” and “wonderfully kind people”, but soon the facade crumbles. So the real threats to the child protagonists of The Witches, Matilda and James and The Giant Peach are not monsters under the bed, but adults whose hatred of children is disguised behind a mask of benevolence. Indeed, the ultimate goal of The Grand High Witch is filicide: she plans to rid the world of children - “disgusting little carbuncles” - by tricking them into eating chocolate laced with her malevolent Formula 86: Delayed Action Mouse-Maker. At their hands (or claws), young children are not only mutilated but exterminated. “Real witches,” we are told, “hate children with a red-hot sizzling hatred that is more sizzling and red-hot than any hatred you could possibly imagine”. The Witches is centred around the theme of child-hatred. When gum-chewing champion Violet Beauregarde turns purple, Wonka is indifferent. In Wonka’s determination to make the “rotten ones” pay for their moral failings, he not only humiliates the children (and their parents), but permanently marks the “bad” children through physical disfigurement. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka not only orchestrates the various “accidents” that occur at the factory, but he stands by indifferently as each child suffers. “Now he’s as thin as straw!”įrom Miss Trunchbull to the Twits, Aunts Spiker and Sponge, and even Willy Wonka, many of Dahl’s adult characters are merciless figures who enjoy inflicting physical and emotional pain on children. “He used to be fat,” Grandpa Joe marvels. After he tumbles into Willy Wonka’s chocolate river and is sucked up the glass pipe, he’s physically transformed. Augustus Gloop is ostracised because of his size. With the exception of Bruce Bogtrotter, “bad” children are usually unpleasant gluttons who are punished for being spoiled or overweight. MANUEL HARLAN/Royal Shakespeare Company/AAP The cruel and imposing figure of Miss Trunchbull in the stage musical Matilda.
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