Matilda

Matilda’s first-grade teacher is the young, shy, gentle Miss Honey—her name suggests how the students feel about her—“a mild and quiet person who never raised her voice and was seldom seen to smile” (66-67), who’s adored by her students. However, the fact that Miss Honey is “rarely seen to smile” hints at the painfulness of her current situation as well as her past. One trait she shares with Matilda is her experience of familial abuse and loneliness. Orphaned since childhood, she was tormented by her aunt, Miss Trunchbull, who now takes all her salary as payment for this childhood “care.”

Miss Honey also shares Matilda’s esteem for knowledge and learning. She realizes that little Matilda is a genius whose abilities far outstretch her grade level, and she helps the girl with advanced studies and bonds with Matilda over their shared love of education. Miss Honey is also a dramatic foil to Matilda’s parents, who are cruel, negligent, superficial, despise book learning, and could not be less nurturing. Miss Honey is the opposite of these things. She is the mother Matilda needs, someone who appreciates the child and will do anything to help her grow into her true potential. Miss Honey and Matilda are therefore both heroes who rescue one another and rescue the school from the villainous headmistress.

Matilda’s chief antagonist is Miss Trunchbull, director of Crunchem Hall and “a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike” (67). Like her name, her arms swing like great truncheons as she marches through the halls, and “you could actually hear her snorting as she went” (67), as if she really were a bull. She detests school children and wishes she could squash them like bugs. This is a key irony in the character: Her profession as headmistress requires commitment to the students’ best interests, but she is most committed to controlling, humiliating, or banishing the children.

A former Olympic hammer thrower, she more than lives up to her frightening appearance by lifting up “misbehaving” students and hurling them through windows or over fences. Trunchbull distills the cruelties visited on students by sadistic school staffers everywhere. She’s so outlandishly hateful and vicious that, though terrifying, she becomes comically ridiculous and richly deserves her comeuppance. Trunchbull stands as a lesson in the ugliness of unrestrained bullying. Crunchem Hall’s assistant headmaster, Mr. Trilby, takes over when Trunchbull disappears at story’s end, and he’s a vast improvement over the tyrannical headmistress. He represents one of the benefits of Matilda’s chalk-writing prank: It frightens Trunchbull into leaving the school, which no longer must suffer under her frightening rule. 

Matilda’s parents, the Wormwoods, don’t much care for their daughter, though she’s brilliant and kindly; they’re just waiting for her to grow up and leave. Their name, Wormwood, refers to a plant with a bitter taste.

The garishly dressed Mr. Wormwood is terribly proud of himself because he knows how to sell stolen cars to unsuspecting buyers. He far overestimates his own cleverness, something overlooked by everyone in the family except Matilda, who must resign herself to having a low-minded criminal father whom she surpasses in both ability and moral character. He’s so self-centered that he can’t appreciate his own daughter but instead is thoughtlessly cruel to her. Mr. Wormwood gives an early hint at the sexism of Matilda’s parents: Despite Matilda’s glaring mathematical aptitude, he ignores her so that he can teach math to his son, believing his son to be destined for the same great enterprise of hoodwinking customers.

As deluded and self-important as her husband, Mrs. Wormwood is also very vain—and this vanity is her defining feature, playing into her belief that a woman’s purpose is to be attractive so she can win the heart of a successful man. She thus regards Matilda’s precocious reading skills as a waste of time. Mrs. Wormwood is brazen enough to tell Miss Honey directly that because she (Miss Honey) is unmarried and allegedly unbeautiful, she is a clear failure in comparison to Mrs. Wormwood, who thinks highly of her own appearance and is married. The exchange exposes Mrs. Wormwood’s real character. She’s a mother too self-involved to appreciate her wonderful child, and she represents thoughtless parents everywhere who waste the chance to help their children reach their full potential.

Matilda’s brother, Michael, is an ordinary boy. Though his father tries to teach him the math necessary to cheat used-car customers, Michael doesn’t quite have the aptitude for it. Michael’s main purpose in the narrative is to expose the unfairness of family sexism, where the boys, despite their weaknesses, get priority treatment, while the girls, despite their strengths, are ignored.