Matilda Matilda Quotes

You can't really blame Mrs. Phelps here, for being a bit skeptical about Matilda's abilities. She looks like a five-year-old, so she must read like one, too, right? What's so awesome about this little scene is that we get the sense, early on, that Matilda will keep defying the expectations of her teachers and the other adults in her life. They won't be able to educate her in the way they typically would teach a student. It's a different ballgame altogether.

You can tell that Matilda loves learning and stretching her mind. She doesn't just try to learn things to get good grades or to please other people. Far from it. (After all, the more she learns, the more her parents seem to hate her.) Instead, Matilda likes learning for the sake of learning—it moves her, brings her joy, expands her world.

While this seems like a supernatural moment to everybody else in the chapter (the Wormwood parents and Matilda's older brother), it totally has a logical explanation. There is no "ghost." It's a parrot. But, because the other people in the room don't know the logical explanation, they have to believe that it really is a ghost.

Since most of us are unlikely to move things with our own minds in real life (unless there's something Shmoop doesn't know about you), a writer who's describing telekinesis has to go the extra mile to make sure the readers get a feel for exactly what the process is like. We'd say Roald Dahl delivers on that here. Can't you imagine the millions of invisible little arms and hands that are reaching out of Matilda's eyeballs?

What Matilda's just done is so bananas that it doesn't make very much sense to say it aloud. She doesn't have the fancy words to explain moving stuff with her mind neatly or clearly. So her explanation comes out all jumbled, in a sentence that has five "ands" in it. (Go on, count 'em. We'll wait.) Of course, unless you're Roald Dahl, we're betting the supernatural is pretty tough to explain.

When Matilda tries "just for fun," she's not able to use telekinesis any more. Not even a little bit. It's like she never had the power in the first place. It has vanished into thin air. After this, Miss Honey suggests that Matilda lost the power because it was based on her extra brain juice; she had extra mental energy to burn and it was shooting out like telekinesis. But once she moves up to a challenging class, the extra energy gets used up.

You could also say, though, that when Matilda uses her powers earlier in the book, she's either really mad about unfair treatment or trying to prevent unfairness. And once the Trunchbull has been stopped, a lot of that unfairness goes away. Now she has no justice to dole out, so her powers are unnecessary.

Even when Miss Honey should have had freedom from the Trunchbull—as an adult making her own money and starting her own career—she couldn't stand up to her. Both her memories of how the Trunchbull had hurt her in the past and her worry that the Trunchbull "could still hurt [her] badly" keep her from striking out on her own. That's some powerful fear right there.

How sweet. Even though Matilda has a rough family life, she still looks for the good in other people. Her default setting is good. That's why her first impulse is to think that an adoptive aunt would be nice to Miss Honey. Unfortunately, as Miss Honey quickly explains, her aunt was a demon. Of course this makes the Trunchbull's violent abuse all the more terrible. How could she be so awful to sweet little Miss Honey?

Okay, Matilda might not be sitting up in her room sobbing over it every night, but that doesn't mean she doesn't care that her mom totally ignores her. In fact, we think Matilda probably cares a great deal (what kid wouldn't?), and this little line goes a long way to show it. But the fact that she says it only "a little sadly" shows she's resigned to her parents' behavior. They've always been like that and probably always will be.

In the Wormwood household, dinnertime is family time in name only. Really, it's just an excuse for these lazy-bones parents to watch TV. It's not like they're chatting up their kids or talking about their days. So Mr. Wormwood's high and mighty rant is really just a cover-up for the fact that he'd rather stare at a screen all night than have a conversation with his own daughter.

In this mini-epiphany, Matilda realizes she never thought about people like teachers having families before. While we're betting that most kids don't think about this either, Matilda isn't most kids. Maybe it wasn't on Matilda's radar because her own family is so awful. She'd probably forget them if she could, so why try thinking about other people's families, too?

Oh so that's why the Trunchbull gets away with her outrageous abuse. She can use punishments like The Chokey to imprison kids because she knows no one would believe the youngsters if they ever complained.

Miss Honey's predicament just goes to show that while physical imprisonment is awful, it's the mental prison that really counts. Sure, with a job and a house, she's physically free of the Trunchbull. But it's clear that her aunt's emotional abuse has kept her mentally confined for years. It's only with Matilda's help that she can finally be set free.

Okay, we were going about our merry business thinking the Trunchbull was a mean old tyrant. But now she's a murderer, too? Could this woman get any worse?