Matilda Wormwood

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Matilda Wormwood is a fictional character in the book Matilda by Roald Dahl. She is a highly precocious five-year old girl who has a passion for reading books. Matilda's parents do not recognise their daughter's great intelligence and show little interest in her, particularly her father, a second-hand car dealer who has performed numerous abusive actions on Matilda. In the movie, as a six year old she is portrayed by Mara Wilson and as a toddler she is portrayed by Catilin and Amanda Fein.

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[edit] Matilda's characteristics

Matilda has black hair in the book (though in the movie her hair is brown). She has brown eyes in both the book and the movie. In the movie, she says she is six and a half.

[edit] About Matilda

Matilda is a six-year old girl who lives in Buckinghamshire near the local library. She has parents that are constantly rude to her. However, her father has the role of constantly performing abusive actions.[citation needed] Her parents insist she watches television.[1]

Matilda's school is Crunchem Hall Primary School which is run by a fearsome middle-aged woman named Miss Trunchbull. The school is described as having "about 250 pupils". Matilda makes friends with many other students, particularly a girl called Lavender. While at school, Miss Trunchbull performs actions of child abuse, such as throwing a child out the window for eating sweets in class or locking children in a cupboard with nails and glass in the walls and door- known as the 'Chokey'- for any infringement of the rules.[citation needed]

Matilda lives with Miss Honey, a teacher at the school, after Miss Trunchbull's demise a little later.

[edit] Books

Matilda has read a variety of books, especially at the age of four, when she read many books in six months:

[edit] Early skills

  • One and a half - Lingustic skill and vocabulary on par with that of an adult's[1] (called a "noisy chatterbox by her parents and told sharply that little girls should be "seen and not heard", again by her parents)
  • Three - Amateur reading skills (mainly due to the lack of reading material accessible to her at the time)
  • Four - Reading skills on par with that of an adult's[1]

[edit] Powers

Matilda has psychokinetic powers.[2] Her powers are first discovered when the glass of which Miss Trunchbull drinks from tips over and a newt (which Lavender caught in her garden) jumps onto Miss Trunchbull's "ugly" green breeches. The Trunchbull accuses Matilda of running out and tipping the glass over when she wasn't looking. When Matilda says that she didn't do it, a verbal argument which lasts for about a minute sprawls out between Matilda and Miss Trunchbull. Miss Trunchbull ends the argument by telling Matilda to shut up and sit down. At home, Matilda practices using her powers with a cigar, learning fine control of her abilities. The last time that Matilda uses her powers is when she writes on the chalkboard ending Miss Trunchbull's reign over the school (although in the movie she still has them after Miss Trunchbull's demise).

In the movie, she ends up also using her powers before she knew she had them, such as exploding a television, and making some food that was falling land perfectly on her plate (although it also landed on the shirt of her brother, Mike). While her use of her powers in the book was limited to an object that she was directly concentrating on- and even this could be draining to her at first-, in the film she shows the ability to move several objects at once.

The precise nature of her powers varies between the film and the book. In the book, Miss Honey speculates that her powers may tie into the amount of knowledge she possesses, the reasoning being that Matilda has so much information in her head that some of it has to be 'forced out'. This explanation also accounts for why her powers cease after she is moved to an older class; facing a real challenge from her classmates to keep up with them, she exhauts all her mental energy on her education. In the movie, by contrast, her power is portrayed as the more conventional style of telekinesis, with no specific explanation implied beyond the traditional idea of her accessing potentially dormant portions of the human brain. Also, while in the novel Matilda could only direct her power through her eyes, the film version shows her flicking her hands to control something that she is manipulating with her powers as she masters greater control.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Tomalin, Mary (1999). Matilda by Roald Dahl (pdf). Penguin Readers Factsheets. Pearson Education. Retrieved on 2007-12-20.
  2. ^ Matilda, By Roald Dahl (pdf). Novel units. alphasmart.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-20.