To be perfectly honest, the title of this post was misleading. Roald Dahl didn't have a problem with women. He has a lot of very lovely female characters, from Matilda and Miss Honey to the caring Grandmamma of The Witches, and even a few misguided and maybe overindulgent mothers (and fathers) in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie's mother seems kind and caring throughout the book and her son is the hero of the story, the rest of the parents have raised a variety of greedy, cruel monsters but they do love their children.
So Roald Dahl didn't have a problem with women. Roald Dahl had a problem with feminists.
No, really. Let's look at some of the villains in his most popular books for children. Let's start with James and the Giant Peach.
James Henry Trotter lives an idyllic life in a house by the sea with his loving parents until his parents meet their untimely demise via an escaped rhinoceros from the London Zoo. He is promptly packed up with nothing more than a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush to live with his aunts, named Sponge and Spiker (because those are totally normal names given to people in England?)
Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker live together, unmarried, and Dahl is quick to inform us that they are both very horrible people.
They were selfish and lazy and cruel, and right from the beginning they started beating poor James for almost no reason at all. They never called him by his real name, but always referred to him as "you disgusting little beast" or "you filthy nuisance" or "you miserable creature," and they certainly never gave him any toys to play with or any picture books to look at. His room was as bare as a prison cell.
- James and the Giant Peach
In chapter 2, Dahl gives us insight into what Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge look like. Aunt Sponge "enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth...she was like a great white soggy overboiled cabbage." While Aunt Spiker, true to her name, is "lean and tall and bony, and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles that fixed onto the end of her nose with a clip. She had a screeching voice and long wet narrow lips, and whenever she got angry or excited, little flecks of spit would come shooting out of her mouth as she talked."
Now, let's move on the Matilda.
"Oh, now, how could Matilda be anything but feminist? The hero is a girl and Miss Honey is lovely!"
You're right, of course. The problem doesn't lie in the heroine or Miss Honey, but in The Trunchbull.
Headmistress Trunchbull of Crunchem Hall Primary School. Her first description in the book is that she is "formidable middleaged lady" but Dahl can do better than that for description and he soon does.
She was a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike. There was an aura of menace about her even at a distance, and when she came up close you could almost feel the dangerous heat radiating from her as from a red-hot rod of metal. When she marched — Miss Trunchbull never walked, she always marched like a storm-trooper with longstrides and arms aswinging — when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed right on through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.
- Matilda
Miss Trunchbull, emphasis on the Miss because she is not married, is not described in any feminine way. She's described a tank, formidable, bull-necked, able to bend iron bars. Her face is not beautiful, obstinate chin, cruel mouth, small eyes. She dresses like a "rather eccentric and bloodthirsty follower of the stag-hounds" (a very masculine description) rather than the headmistress of a "nice school for children." You get the point, but the makeup and wardrobe department for the 2022 Matilda The Musical did a fantastic job.
Miss Trunchbull hates children, especially the small ones. One older child, Hortensia, shares this with Matilda and Lavender: "She hates very small children. She therefore loathes the bottom class and everyone in it. She thinks five-year-olds are grubs that haven't yet hatched out."
In another spot Miss Trunchbull says: "Small people should never be seen by anybody. They should be kept out of sight in boxes like hairpins and buttons. I cannot for the life of me see why children have to take so long to grow up. I think they do it on purpose."
She seems to have a special hatred of little girls and especially little girls with long hair and pigtails. So much so that she takes a small child, by the name of Amanda Thripp, and hurls her around by the pigtails and hurls her right over the playground fence after Thripp talks back to her when Trunchbull tells her "I want those filthy pigtails off before you come back to school tomorrow! Chop 'em off and throw 'em in the dustbin, you understand?"
Miss Trunchbull doesn't have an ounce of gentle feminine behavior or maternal love in her at all.
As a sidenote, the other main adult female figure we are meant to hate in the book is Mrs. Wormwood, Matilda's mother, who also fails to fulfill her property feminine role of maternal affection or attractive appearance, she plays bingo 5 days a week, leaving her toddler child to care for herself completely, her family eats TV dinners in front of the television, and she isn't properly dainty or in shape at all, described as wearing "heavy makeup" and having an "unfortunate bulging figure."
And finally, let's talk about Roald Dahl's book, The Witches. Now there's a lot that could be discusses about The Witches, including the weird anti-semitic descriptions of witches, but I'm hardly the first to point it out and I'm not going to muddy the waters of my post with that point today. Let's talk about the way he depicts witches and women.
A witch is always a woman. I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women. There is no such thing as a male witch. ... Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we could round them all up and put them in the meat--grinder. Unhappily, there is no such way. But there are a number of little signals you can look out for, little quirky habits that all witches have in common, and if you know about these, if you remember them always, then you might just possibly manage to escape from being squelched before you are very much older.
- The Witches
The narrator's grandmother explains how to recognize a witch, though it is very difficult. Most of these descriptors don't have much to do with my point, but there is one I want to talk about.
The wigs. A real witch is always bald, not a single bit of hair on their head.
Now, I'm absolutely certain this is an anti-semitic issue, as women in Hassidic communities usually have the tradition of shaving their heads and wearing a head covering (often a wig) after marriage, but anti-semitism and misogyny are in no way mutually exclusive personality traits.
The most important part about witches, the book says, is that they hate children. This is the overriding thing they all have in common.
REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS. That is why they are so hard to catch. A REAL WITCH hates children with a red-hot sizz-ling hatred that is more sizzling and red-hot than anyhatred you could possibly imagine. A REAL WITCH spends all her time plotting to get rid of the children in her particular territory. Her passion is to do away with them, one by one. It is all she thinks about the whole day long. Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving round in a fancy car (and she could be doing any of these things), her mind will always be plotting and scheming and churning and burning and whiz-zing and phizzing with murderous bloodthirsty thoughts.
- The Witches
So the villains of the book are women (or at least woman-shaped creatures) with normal jobs in all spectrums of employment, from cashier to secretary, who drive cars and go about all day, mostly focused on the idea of hating children and killing them.
They are in every country, plotting and planning ways to get rid of all children.
We can likely believe that these women are single (there are no male witches and there is no way a married woman could hide the disfigured aspects that witches have from a sexual partner) and though they dress outwardly like proper women, it is all a cover for their physical ugliness. Most importantly, they are bald. The narrator describes the witches in one scene, focusing highly on their bald heads beneath their wigs.
There now appeared in front of me row upon row of bald female heads, a sea of naked scalps, every one of them red and itchy-looking from being rubbed by the linings of the wigs. I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural.
- The Witches
1 Corinthians 11:15, you'll see that a woman's hair is considered her "glory" (one reason that some very strict Christian denominations demand women have long hair). God even uses baldness and sores on their head as a punishment for women who are haughty and wanton in Isaiah chapter 3: "Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; and instead of a belt, a rope; and instead of well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a skirt of sackcloth; and branding instead of beauty."
Isaiah chapter 3, for additional context, is about the punishment of Judah and Jerusalem for wickedness. Which includes the wickedness of letting women rule over them.
Whether or not Dahl was specifically referencing these biblical verses in The Witches is something I can't speculate on, there's simply no evidence (or at least not any evidence that I can find in a reasonable amount of time for an article I'm writing for fun in my free time) to support or disprove that claim.
What I do know is that long hair has long been associated with femininity and The Witches was published in 1983, the tail end of the 2nd wave of feminism, a period in which women's fashion was changing to allow for a lot of more freedom in hairstyles and . Short hair and feminism go together like peanut butter and jelly (not that you can't be a feminist and have long hair, but the societal association between short hair and being seen as a "feminist killjoy" is undeniable).
In 1984, feminist Susan Brownmiller talked about the way hair length was viewed by society.
I harbor a deep desire to wear my hair long because like all the women I know, I grew up believing that long hair is irrefutably feminine. I could certainly use the advantage that long hair confers, but I happen to look terrible when my hair is long. I know what some people think about short hair they say short hair is mannish, dyky.
So by making the witches of The Witches bald, Dahl is making them women who fail to meet the expectations for "proper" behavior of "real" women.
Are you seeing a pattern emerge or is it just me?
The women who are depicted as heroines (or at least not fully villainous) are the maternal figures. The mother of Charlie, who does her best to care for her child even in poverty, to the point of trying to feed him her own portion of food. The mothers of the other children who visit the Chocolate Factory who are misguided and spoil their children, but obviously love them. Miss Honey, unmarried as she is, is still described in very feminine terms. "She had a lovely pale oval madonna face with blue eyes and her hair was light-brown. Her body was so slim and fragile one got the feeling that if she fell over she would smash into a thousand pieces, like a porcelain figure." She is mild and sweet and very maternal, she adores her students and they adore her right back.
When I started this article I said to myself that I couldn't possibly examples of the opposite in James and the Giant Peach, since the book's positive characters who become James' family, are insects but Dahl is nothing if not consistent. There are gender roles at play even in this book and the good female characters definitely fit their roles.
"We really must get some sleep," the Old-Green-Grasshopper said. "We've got a tough day ahead of us tomorrow. So would you be kind enough, Miss Spider, to make the beds?" ... "I do hope you'll find it comfortable," Miss Spider said to the Old-Green-Grasshopper. "I made it as soft and silky as I possibly could. I spun it with gossamer. That's a much better quality thread than the one I use for my own web." ... The Ladybug, who was obviously a kind and gentle creature, came over and stood beside him. "Would you like me to take you under my wing so that you won't fall over when we start rolling?
- James and the Giant Peach
Every one of the insects plays an important role in the story, but even as insects we find male and female roles being part of the story. The female insects are homemakers and protectors of James, while the male insects are often crotchety and demanding (though still nicer than either of James' aunts). And yes, of course, the spider is the logical one to make the beds, but there's no reason why the spider couldn't have been "Mister Spider" and Old-Green-Grasshopper couldn't have been a woman. Male spiders possess the ability to spin webs after all and there's no anatomical difference between male and female grasshoppers that would have impacted the story (why yes, I did do far more research into insect anatomy for this article than I originally intended, you're welcome).
The heroic grandmother of The Witches is doubly maternal, mother to her own child and then taking charge of her orphaned grandson. She is self-sacrificing as well, leaving her beloved Norway to raise her grandson in England the way his parents wanted. Even when her grandson is turned into a mouse, she's no less protective or loving towards him.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, women who fail to meet the proscribed gender roles of femininity in their behavior, clothing, hairstyles, and maternal duties are the villains of all three of these books. The good and kind women who are meant to be liked are those that fit traditional gender roles (Miss Honey has a job, but it's a good "feminine" job of teaching young children).
And it's not just in Dahl's children's books that we find this pattern. A number of the short stories written for Tales of the Unexpected which feature these stereotypes and behaviors, which place women in the role of murderer, adulteress, or just overtly cruel.
The accusations of anti-feminists for years have been that feminists are mannish and unnaturally rejecting their proper role in society by pushing to work outside the home, not wishing to marry, not wanting children, wearing pants, demanding the vote, wearing their hair short, and on and on. Roald Dahl perfectly depicts these ugly stereotypes of feminism in his female villains.
Roald Dahl didn't have a problem with women. Roald Dahl had a problem with feminists.
This article is already far longer than I intended, but I'd be remiss if I didn't address one final issue I have with The Witches. The book is almost impossible to read from a feminist perspective without seeing it as an anti-abortion narrative. Published in 1983, 10 years after Roe v. Wade and 16 years after abortion was legalized in Great Britain, there are just too many pointed remarks on how to "trick" people into killing their own children to ignore.
"Tell me what those English witches do, Grandmamma," I said. "Well," she said, sucking away at her stinking cigar, "their favourite ruse is to mix up a powder that will turn a child into some creature or other that all grown-ups hate." "What sort of a creature, Grandmamma?" "Often it's a slug," she said. "A slug is one of their favourites. Then the grown-ups step on the slug and squish it without knowing it's a child." "That's perfectly beastly!" I cried. "Or it might be a flea," my grandmother said. "They might turn you into a flea, and without realising what she was doing your own mother would get out the flea-powder and then it's goodbye you...Yes," my grandmother said, "it gives the English witches great pleasure to stand back and-watch the grown-ups doing away with their own children."
- The Witches
In 1972, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English published their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, which argued that the women who knew how to heal "women's issues" (including providing abortifacients to end pregnancy) were often targeted as witches. Even the Malleus Maleficarum, the authoritative witch-hunting manual produced in 1487, demonstrated that the criteria for witches included the work of midwives who were commonly accused of witchcraft if a death occurred in childbirth or a woman miscarried.
The legalization of abortion and creation of hormonal birth control in the 1960s and 1970s had a major impact on the growth of feminism as a movement. The stereotype of women hating children because they chose to not have them was a common anti-feminist stereotype. As Pat Robertson put it, feminism was a “a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
Matilda, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, and James and the Giant Peach all offered countless hours of entertainment and escape for many generations of children. For myself, Matilda was one of the most formative heroes of my early life and I will always have a special place for her in my heart no matter what form she takes, book, film, or musical.
However, as an adult I have to deconstruct what these works really taught me on a subconscious level and doing that can be uncomfortable. I'm not saying the Trunchbull, the Aunts, or the Witches aren't villains...they are some of the most terrifying villains in all of the childhood literature I read. They are cruel, vicious, and downright evil. That can't be denied. The question is why these vicious characters imbued with all the stereotypes of anti-feminist propaganda in the first place.
Unfortunately, while Roald Dahl gave us many hours of entertainment as children, he did so while being a viciously nasty human being and we have to talk about that.
Or, as Matilda Wormwood would say:
If you sit around and let them get on top, you Might as well be saying you think that it's OK, And that's not right.
