Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Zuzana Lacová

The Theme of Morbidity in Children’s Writings of Roald Dahl Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2010

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author‟s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her professional advice, support and encouragement.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 5

2. Biography ...... 7

2.1. Life of Roald Dahl ...... 7

2.2. Roald Dahl as a writer ...... 9

3. Influential Events ...... 11

3.1. School Years ...... 11

3.2 Adulthood ...... 15

4. Definition of Morbidity ...... 18

5. Searching for Morbidity ...... 21

5.1 The Witches ...... 21

5.2 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ...... 28

6. Conclusion ...... 41

7. English Resume ...... 43

8. Slovak Resume ...... 44

9. Bibliography ...... 45

1. Introduction

The theme of morbidity is one of the main aspects in Roald Dahl‟s writings. It is usually derived from the early school experiences of the author who was a victim of violent caning and bullying when living at English boarding schools. Moreover, Dahl experienced personal tragedies for all his life which influenced his writings to a great extent. Later on he drew on his experiences and incorporated them into his writings in which the theme of morbidity is dominant. It is especially integrated in Dahl‟s writings for children in which perception of morbidity differs in dependence on a reader‟s inclination and understanding. Therefore, an adult reader is able to recognize morbidity hidden in the description of the main characters or main acts in the books for children because there are external factors which influence the thinking of an experienced person. On the other hand there are child readers who do not perceive the world in terms of morbidity or sadism. They accept the fantastic world invented by Roald Dahl, him who offers readers to enter his own imagination which is based on the real experiences of the author himself. Those experiences are considered to be the external factors which put pressure on the individual. There are usually events which cause mental distresses to an individual who is forced to deal with difficult situations that make the impact on an individual‟s nervous system. Mental distresses usually lead to a development of mental deviations and disorders. According to the explanation of the rise and development of those deviations and disorders provided by MUDr. Marcela Němcová, morbidity could be ranked among mental deviations developed on the basis of external causation which has a great impact on the nervous system of an individual.

The first part of my Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis summarises the life, personal experience and literary work of Roald Dahl. There is a biography of Dahl in the first

5 chapter. Then the biographical account of the author‟s life is supplemented by a chapter entitled “Influential Events” which consists of Dahl‟s main experiences influencing his further life, thinking and imagination as well as his writings, especially for children.

The chapter is divided into two parts – the first one draws on the author‟s childhood and the second one depicts the life and personal tragedies of adult Roald Dahl which belong to the main motivations leading to the morbid depiction of reality. An account of Dahl‟s widely read writings follows. The first part of my Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis is concluded by the definition of morbidity derived from the description of the main factors influencing the rise and development of mental deviations and disorders.

Moreover, the term morbidity is defined in accordance with entries in English monolingual dictionaries.

The second part of the Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis focuses on the analysis of two of Dahl‟s books written for children. The most influential events in Dahl‟s life are applied in the analysis. The two analysed books - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

(1964) and The Witches (1983) – rank among the most controversial writings by Roald

Dahl which were put down to the list of banned books. The analysis of those examples of Dahl‟s imagination full of morbid pictures presented in the stories is predominantly based on the author‟s experiences from his childhood and adulthood described in the biographical account. Moreover, a reader is provided with a background of the analysed stories.

6 2. Biography

2.1. Life of Roald Dahl

The Times described Roald Dahl as “one of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation” (Dahl 1). He was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales on

September 13th in 1916 to Norwegian parents - tremendous diary-writer Harald Dahl and his second wife Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg. He was the second child of their marriage and the only son. After the death of his older sister Astri and his father,

Roald‟s mother was left to rise two stepchildren and her own four children (Alfhild,

Roald, Else, Asta).

Roald Dahl‟s school years were unhappy. From the age of seven to nine he attended Llandaff Cathedral School (Preparatory School for boys). In years 1925-1929

Roald was a pupil of the boarding school at St. Peter‟s prep school in Weston-Super-

Mare where he suffered from an acute homesickness. At St. Peter‟s he got to the habit to write his mother once a week. The habit persisted until her death. He was thirteen years old when he started to attend Repton, the public school in Derbyshire. Excellent at sports, partially heavyweight boxing and squash, he did not do well as a student.

According to his English teacher he was “a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He seems incapable of marshalling his thoughts on paper”

(Dahl 126).

When Roald was eighteen instead of going to the university he decided to join the Public Schools Exploring Society‟s expedition to Newfoundland. Then he worked for Shell as a salesman in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. When the World War II broke out

Roald Dahl was only 23. He signed up with the Royal Air Force in Nairobi and as a

7 pilot officer he was trained on the birdplane Gladiator fighters in Iraq. He had a crash accident in Western Desert of Libya when flying to join his squadron there. Finally, after sustaining injuries and surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens he was sent home as an invalid. However in 1942 he was transferred to Washington, USA as an air attaché where “one of his first duties was to get close to as many well–placed people as possible. Another duty was to help create a kind of British propaganda to keep

America interested in the war and sympathetic to Britain's effort” (Howard).

Dahl was married twice. He met his first wife Patricia Neal, the Broadway and

Hollywood actress, at Hellman‟s dinner party in New York. Their five children (Tessa,

Theo, Ophelia, Lucy and Olivia) have considerably influenced Dahl‟s writings for children. As he stated himself: “Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so” (Howard). After

30-year marriage he divorced Patricia Neal and in 1983 he married the set designer

Felicity Crosland who was also divorced and lived with her three daughters. Their marriage which lasted for seven years was finished by Roald Dahl‟s death. It was officially announced that “in 1990 Roald was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder,

Myelo-displastic anaemia” and “he died on November 23rd 1990 at the age of 74”

(“Roald Dahl”).

The message of Roald Dahl to all children and adults is hidden in his remarkable writings. Furthermore, he is still alive in the name of Roald Dahl Foundation, “a grant- giving charity that aims to help children in the areas of literacy, neurology and haematology” (Day), run by his second wife Felicity Dahl.

8 2.2. Roald Dahl as a writer

The year of 1942 was the starting year of Roald Dahl‟s career as a writer. The very first piece of writing were his own memories from the war written for F.C.Forester who wrote it up for The Saturday Evening Post. Dahl‟s experience was published anonymously under the title “Shot down over Libya” (later on revised and retitled as “A

Piece of Cake” and published in the collection of stories Over to You: Ten Stories of

Flyers and Flying). The picture book The Gremlins (1943) was the first Dahl‟s book for children written for the Walt Disney studio to be made into a film. The aim was not completed but the book was successfully published. After that Roald Dahl abandoned the writings for children and began to produce macabre stories for adults. In his writings

Dahl “took advice from Ernest Hemingway who claimed that „never use the colon or semicolon‟ and „when it starts going well, quit‟” (“Roald Dahl”). The story “Shot down over Libya” published in The Saturday Evening Post was followed by other 16 stories published in the same magazine and in The New Yorker, Harpers and The Atlantic

Monthly as well. These stories of fiction were published in the collection Over to You:

Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946). Several more collections of Dahl‟s stories were published. Among them there was Someone Like You (1953), Kiss, Kiss (published in

1959 in the USA and in 1960 in the UK) and Switch Bitch (1974). Some of his stories were televised under the title Tales of the Unexpected. The collection with the same title was published in 1991.

Dahl is the author of two novels for adult readers Sometime Never (1948) and

My Uncle Oswald (1979). He did continue in short story writings for adult readers until the 1960s when he became father himself. His writings for children came into being as the bedtime stories which Dahl had made up for his daughters Olivia and Tessa. One of

9 them was James and the Giant Peach published in the USA in 1961 and in the UK in

1967. The second book published in the USA in 1964 and later on, in 1967 in the UK was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The other books for children followed, including Danny the Champion of the World (1975), The Wonderful Story of Henry

Sugar and Six More (1977), The BFG (1982), short for Big Friendly Giant, The Twits

(1980), The Witches (1983), Matilda (1988), Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) which is the first autobiographical book of Roald Dahl and Going Solo (1986), the continuation of the autobiography.

Almost all of Dahl‟s stories for children were turned into a film. There were two films based on the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. First of them, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, appeared in 1971. Then the film Charlie and the Chocolate factory directed by Tim Burton in 2005, featuring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, followed. Another film based on Dahl‟s story was Danny the Champion of the World

(1989) starring Jeremy Irons and his son Samuel Irons in the title roles. The BFG was remade into an animated film in 1989. The story of The Witches was turned into a film in 1990 and Matilda in 1996 directed by Danny DeVito.

10 3. Influential Events

3.1. School Years

From the several external factors which made Roald Dahl write the stories

“generally macabre in the nature” (qtd. in Royer) his own unhappy school years at

Llandaff Cathedral School, St. Peter‟s and Repton seem to be one of the most influential. It is obvious that those school years marked Dahl (and his writings as well) by its cruelty and sadism for the rest of his life and made him create the worst attitude towards authorities who tortured small boys for the violation of the school rules and discipline. The evidence of the personal suffering of young Dahl which was transferred to his writings is stated in the essay Boy Going Solo when claiming that “a key theme in

Dahl's novels and short stories is the use of violence and cruelty by authority figures on the weak. This is a direct reflection of his experiences as a child attending boarding schools in England” (Liles).

Mainly caning of pupils at Llandaff Cathedral School, St. Peter‟s and Repton, even if it was a regular practices at school of those times, is widely discussed issue in

Dahl‟s writings, predominantly included in his autobiographical account from his own childhood years published under the title Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984). As David

Rees puts it “many pages of Boy are devoted to unpleasantly detailed accounts of adult man caning children – an obsessive theme in Dahl‟s work” (144). The theme of caning

“also figures in Lucky Break (an autobiographical piece in The Wonderful Story of

Henry Sugar and Six More) and in Danny the Champion of the world” (Rees 144).

The very first caning mentioned in Boy is that one at Llandaff Cathedral School which was a cruel punishment for an adventure of five small nine-year-old boys which

11 is described in the chapter titled “The Great Mouse Plot”. The proprietor of a sweet- shop Mrs Pratchett asked revenge for putting a dead mouse into one of her sweet glasses. The whole act of caning, which is done by the Headmaster of the school, is depicted in detail in the chapter titled “Mrs Prachett‟s Revenge”. One of dreadful moments of that chapter is when Dahl himself claimed that “boys got the cane now and again, but we had never heard of anyone being made to watch” (54). In the process of caning of a first boy in a row Dahl stated that “the violence was bad enough, and being made to watch it was even worse” and “the watching and waiting were probably even greater torture than the event itself” (55-56). After that incident small Roald Dahl was taken away from that school by his mother who was irritated by caning practices.

The second school attended by young Roald was the boarding prep school St.

Peter‟s. Nine-year-old Roald had to “contend with the twitching Latin Master Captain

Hardcastle, the all-powerful Matron – a dead ringer for Miss Trunchball who „disliked small boys very much indeed‟ and the cane-wielding Headmaster” (“Roald Dahl”). To return to the theme of caning, nine-and-half-year-old Roald endured the second violent punishment of that kind at St. Peter‟s. Dahl himself described his fear of caning in the chapter of Boy (one of those where years at St. Peter‟s prep school are depicted) titled

“Captain Hardcastle”:

I was frightened of that cane. There is no small boy in the world who

wouldn‟t be. It wasn‟t only instrument for beating you. It was a weapon for

wounding. It lacerated the skin. It caused severe black and scarlet bruising that

took three weeks to disappear, and all the time during those three weeks, you

could feel your heart beating along the wounds. (Dahl 130)

The small boy enduring a caning torture for trivial little things had to be confused, mainly when he had never been beaten at home by his own parents. As stated in the

12 definition of morbidity, such external factors influence the psyche of an individual to a great extent. As written in the article of Book and Magazine Collector St. Peter‟s was a

“subject to all the usual injustices and cruelties of British public schools” (Nudd). Roald

Dahl himself called years at St. Peter‟s “the greatest torture in the world” (qtd. in

Howard).

The third school which influenced further life and thinking of Roald Dahl was the Public school of Repton. When he was thirteen he had to deal with prefects - older students - always called Boazers, who “could thrash juniors for a hundred and one other piddling little misdemeanours” (Dahl 151). Other caning (this time young Roald was not the victim) is depicted again in detail in the chapter titled “The Headmaster”. The chapter is one of the most impressive in Boy. There are few of things described which made young Roald Dahl feel extremely puzzled. One of them is that the Headmaster, in full name Geoffrey Francis Fisher or Baron Fisher of Lambeth, was a clargyman responsible for the violent caning at Repton school. Pradoxically, thanks to his organisation skills during World War II, when he “organized multidenominational reconstruction committee, headed war-damaged committee” and “he also associated himself with the Sword of the Spirit movement, seeking cooperation between Roman

Catholic Church and other churches” (“Geoffrey Francis Fisher”), he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1945. Moreover “Fisher conducted the coronation of

Queen Elizabeth II” (“Geoffrey Francis Fisher”). In this chapter Dahl offered his own point of view concerning the Headmaster of Repton, who was “an ordinary clergyman at that time” (157):

I would…listen to him preaching about Lamb of God and about Mercy and

Forgivness and…my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very

well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgivness nor

13 Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules… (Dahl 157)

There is again the feeling of confusion of the small boy who was in the middle of drastic torture at boarding school and could not do anything more than to conform himself and to obey the rules. Though the mind of a child is flexible and can easily deal with various situations it finds unexplained things difficult to cope with. Truly, beating at boarding schools was not explained enough because it could not be. First, the process of beating itself was considered to be the best way to pacify inventive minds of small boys. Second, the parents of beaten boys were not aware much of those practices at boarding schools. Thus, this kind of physical torture might be considered as one of the main factors influencing the development of the morbid thinking of an individual.

Adult Roald Dahl provides us again with his personal attitude towards beating at British schools as such:

By now I am sure you will be wondering why I lay so much emphasis upon

school beatings in these pages. The answer is that I cannot help it. All through

my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were

allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I

couldn‟t get over it. I never have got over it…It left another more physical

impression upon me as well. Even today, whenever I have to sit for any length of

time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along

the old lines that the cane made on my bottom some fifty-five years ago.

(Dahl 156)

All those memories rest in a mind of an individual and have a great impact on his further life. It is obvious that Dahl tries to do with these school has-beens in his writings, mainly in books for children in which he himself can return back to his own childhood and rewrite those unpleasant memories. The rewriting can facilitate the

14 process of dealing with bad events and can serve as a kind of cleanup of one‟s mind from unwanted experiences. As Nicholas Tucker stated: “The ability to write about childhood can itself act as a process of therapy and understanding where past experience is concerned” (156). As well as Tucker, an English writer of Korean origin Heinz Insu

Fenkl claims that “serious storytelling not only has the potential to heal, it can and does heal” (1). Furthermore, Peter Hunt puts it in his article “What the Authors Tell Us” that

“children‟s writers display down-to-earth concern with the complex situation in which they find themselves” (Hunt 555). That is the reason why Dahl focuses on his past experiences in his stories. He found himself in a difficult situation which should be rewritten and changed to comfort feelings of injustice. Moreover, the theory of depiction of experiences in the writings for children is supported by the argument of C.

S. Lewis who claims that “children‟s story is the best art-form for something you have to say” (qtd. in Hunt 558).

3.2 Adulthood

Personal tragedies which considerably influenced further writings of Roald Dahl continued in his adulthood as well. First of all, during World War II, pilot Roald Dahl survived a bad plane crash in the middle of the Western Desert of Libya when he was about to join his Eighty Squadron. When refuelling the second time in Fouka he was given wrong information about the position of the Squadron. As he himself claimed in the autobiography Going Solo, “it was revealed at an enquiry into my crash held later that the CO at Fouka had given me totally wrong information. Eighty Squadron had never been in the position I was sent to” (Dahl 299-300). He was badly injured – his

15 scull was fractured and the nose pushed into his face. Moreover, his spine was injured as well, he was blind for a while and his body was burnt. After the escape from the burning plane Gladiator he was found by the British soldiers and transferred to the hospital in Alexandria. Later on, during Dahl‟s career as a writer, it was believed that

“Dahl's fascination with the macabre derived from his war injuries, received when he was shot down over Libya during the war” (“Roald Dahl,” The Guardian).

Tragedies in Dahl‟s life continued after the war when he was married to actress

Patricia Neal. In 1960 Dahl‟s son Theo sitting in his baby pram was hit by a taxi cab in

New York City. The crash caused Dahl‟s four-month-old son massive head injuries which damaged his brain. Two years later, in 1962, Dahl‟s oldest daughter Olivia died of measles encephalitis. Roald Dahl saw his daughter dying in the hospital and he never got over it. Patricia Neal, mother of Olivia, stated for the People Magazine that “I found that talking about Olivia helped immeasurably. Roald couldn't say a word. It was locked inside him” (qtd. in Howard).

Another misfortune in Dahl‟s family life arrived in the year 1965. Patricia suffered three strokes when pregnant with their fifth child Lucy. She could not move and speak but Dahl did not surrender and he nursed his wife and ran the whole family.

The energetic way of life which was significant of Dahl is an evidence that he would not like to act as his father did and did not want to leave his family without father and without a person who could take care of them all. His acting also proved that in childhood, during his school years, he could not have done anything about the sadistic beating and bullying but during his adulthood he accepted the role of the person who could act against the wrong and help to mitigate it. For instance, after the car accident that injured his son, Dahl worked on a valve which could help his son and others as well. The valve named Wade-Dahl-Till (WDT valve) was a cerebral shunt designed for

16 treating hydrocefalus. Thanks to Dahl‟s invention his son recovered and could live without the valve. When Dahl‟s daughter Olivia died “he researched susceptibility factors for the rare measles until a cure became available in England” (Liles). Moreover, he developed the Patricia Neal Therapy Extension Program, which is “still in use at several stroke centres around the world” (Liles).

However, after 30 years of marriage Dahl divorced Neal and revealed his lasting relationship with Felicity Crosland. During Dahl‟s life with Felicity the very last tragedy occurred. It was the death of his stepdaughter Lorin (one of Felicity Crosland‟s daughters) of brain tumor a few months before Dahl died himself.

The many personal tragedies widely influenced not only Dahl‟s life but mainly his writings for children. Generally, “experience seems to be intrinsically valuable to the creative process” (Round). Thus Dahl‟s writings are “affected in terms of plot, character and motifs, choice of genre and implied reader, original inspiration, attitude and tone, both consciously and unconsciously” (Round) by his experiences. It is also suggested in a paper written by Caryn Liles:

All of Dahl‟s works reflect at least one aspect of his personal life, whether it be

his childhood, his marriage, his children, his experiences, or himself. It is quite

apparent that after all the hardship he survived, he managed to turn such

experiences into creative stories for children. (Liles)

So when a reader brings into consideration Dahl‟s personal life it is obvious that the author was considerably influenced by his own misfortune and the source of unpleasant pictures was inexhaustible. That is a reason why the theme of morbidity is often one of the most significant aspects of his writings which are widely discussed among critics mainly because of their morbid character.

17 4. Definition of Morbidity

The term morbidity is not so easy to define as it seemed to be. The difficulty lies in its acceptance by the society. Morbidity is not classified as a mental disorder but its origin and development has been influenced by the factors which contribute to the rise of mental disorders. The classification, or rather non-classification, of morbidity probably arose from the general attitude of society as a whole which does not feel to be endangered by those individuals who suffer from this kind of mental deviation. So the classification of morbidity is not ranked among those which would be widely discussed by psychiatrists and psychologists.

According to Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English

Language the adjective morbid is derived from the Latin word morbidus which means

„sickly‟ and from morbus with the meaning of „sickness, disease‟, which probably stands for *mor-bhos, or mr-bhos, literally translated as “that which consumes”, from the Indo-European base mer- which means „to rub, pound, wear away, consume, exhaust, worry; to be consumed‟, whence also from Greek μαραίνειν which means „to consume; exhaust‟ and from the word μαρασμός with the meaning of „consumption‟

(“Morbid” def.).

When speaking about somebody‟s mind or ideas the adjective morbid could be defined as “having or showing an interest in sad or unpleasant things, esp. disease or death: a morbid imagination/obsession/fascination/curiosity” (“Morbid” def. Entry 1). It is obvious that the morbid mind is somehow the sick mind which deals with gloomy aspects of one‟s life. Then the word morbidity itself could be defined as “a morbid state or quality” (“Morbidity” def. 1). Generally, from these definitions we can derive a way of thinking of the individual who tends to perceive the world from the morbid point of

18 view. Such an individual can be treated as a kind of consumer of macabre experiences that happened in his own life (such as death of a beloved family member, bullying at school and corporal punishments). Once these experiences are consumed and stocked in his mind, the morbid thinking starts to develop. This development is similar to the development of real mental disorders (such as psychopaty and oligophrenia). According to MUDr. Marcela Němcová all mental disorders and deviations are developed on the basis of internal and external causation which is asserted in different intensity. Among external causes there are infectious diseases – typhus, influenza and some intoxication – such as alcohol and carbon disulphide intoxication, head injuries, disfunction of endocrines, cardio-vascular diseases and long-lasting physical diseases. Social and environmental influences which burden the nervous system of an individual are also included in the group of external causation of mental diseases and disorders. They are represented for example by non-solvable conflict situations, mental distress, personal and family tragedies, commotions and injuries which cannot be normally coped with by the nervous system of an individual. Similar conditions can be also caused by minor traumatic events, persistent mental tension, uncertainty and minor lasting conflicts.

These strong and weak impulses can alternate and blend. In this category there is a situation when the individual finds himself between a desire and an opportunity, when there are affairs in which he cannot manage. A change of the everyday stereotype of the individual and a sudden turn of the whole situation when an individual has to accommodate to a new situation can have a similar effect. However, all of these impulses mentioned above do not cause the development of mental disease or deviation.

It depends on the type of the higher nervous function of the individual and his personal attitude towards these unfavourable situations. The significant factors are the psychic and physical conditions of the individual when strong mental impulses take effect. An

19 individual weakened by a physical disease, tired and exhausted may fall ill more easily than an individual full of energy (trans. from Němcová 49).

When dealing with the term morbidity from the point of view of ethics, morbidity can be considered as a kind of moral deviation. Each society has its own unwritten moral rules which usually consist of several taboos (such as death, diseases and decay). These topics are often not discussed openly because they offend people and cause unpleasant feelings in a listener or a reader. When one speaks about them directly without any euphemisms, one is considered to be morbid.

To define morbidity according to everyday experience of the individual there are an amount of external factors and situations which make the individual mock bad and clearly wrong behaviour of other members of society which he cannot prevent. Thus the morbid thinking is a sort of mockery of external situations based on the powerlessness of the individual who is not able to reduce unpleasant features of society as a whole.

20 5. Searching for Morbidity

5.1 The Witches

The story of The Witches was published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and in the same year edited and published by Stephen Roxburgh in the USA. According to Stephen Roxburgh “the beginning chapters of the manuscript for The Witches were based on materials drawn from Roald‟s childhood experiences at public school” (494) but in the end Dahl decided to put them away and later on they became the basis of the autobiographical account entitled Boy. Roxburgh added that “at any rate, The Witches was very successful, eventually made into a popular movie starring Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch” (495). The film was directed in 1989 by Nicholas Roeg.

The principal character of The Witches is a seven-year-old anonymous orphaned boy who is brought up by his Grandmamma after the fatal car accident of his parents.

Grandmamma is the character imagined on the basis of the most important person in

Dahl‟s life – his mother. As Dahl stated “it was a tribute to her” (“Roald Dahl”).

Obviously, there is a reflection of characteristic traits of Dahl‟s mother in the character of Grandmamma. To start on a basic level, both of these women were Norwegians and as the orphaned boy tells us he and his Grandmamma “spoke together either English or

Norwegian” (Dahl 6) as Dahl did with his own mother. Dahl‟s mother was very proud of her Norwegian origin so she kept alive Norwegian language, stories and customs at their house in Wales. Moreover, in the book there are mentioned annual trips to Norway which were also undertaken by Dahl‟s family. The boy puts it that “twice a year…we went back to Norway to visit my grandmother” (Dahl 6). Dahl‟s consciousness of his

Norwegian heritage is presented very precisely in the story. It is predominantly obvious

21 in the second chapter named “My Grandmother”, where the whole story about witches began. Traditionally, Norway is known as the country of myths and legends all of which

Dahl is aware thanks to his mother. It allows him to integrate in The Witches the thought that according to Grandmamma witches “were gospel true. They were history” (Dahl 8).

Moreover, boy‟s Grandmamma is described as “a wonderful story-teller” (Dahl 8) as well as Dahl‟s mother herself was.

The opening of the story is based on “A Note about Witches” where Roald Dahl provides us with the basic information about witches which are classified as “demons in human shape” (Dahl 24). There are a few facts which may seem to be puzzling for the reader. First of all, Dahl states that “this is not a fairy-tale. This is about real witches” who “dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs” (1). In that point the attention of the reader is focused on searching for the person in his mind who could be a bit suspect according to the given information. Furthermore, Dahl explains that “a real witch spends all her time plotting to get rid of the children in her particular territory” (1).

According to the critic David Rees these facts make The Witches “gratuitously frightening” (147). In connection with the frightful character of the story Rees adds that

“if you wanted to give children nightmares and thoroughly confused them about adult behaviour – the behaviour of women particularly – then The Witches could well do a first-class job” (147). Furthermore, Rees thinks that the fear in Dahl‟s The Witches is

“the very untherapeutic kind of fear” (148). He goes on claiming that kind of fear “is likely to result from much of The Witches because what it says is irresponsible, is there for no good reason” (Rees 148). Dahl‟s irresponsibility in The Witches supplements the story with the horrid sense of impossibility to escape from the cruel women-witches. On

22 the other hand, the responsibility which Roald Dahl lacks is transferred to the child reader who has to cope with the information of a real existence of the witches and their behaviour in the society. Paul Zindel generalises the responsibility of each of the authors which is usually addressed to the child reader when claiming that “there is a big responsibility that [the author passes] on to the children a sense of faith that it‟s an adventure and that it‟s something to be chosen over oblivion” (qtd. in Hunt 559).

The irresponsible choice of pieces of information in Dahl‟s story of The Witches is obvious in a frightening or rather morbid aspect of the liquidation of children all over the world which is not supported by any rational explanation in the book. The witches would just like to get rid of all children without any further motivation. The only one is that children smell like “dogs‟ droppings” (Dahl 22). Moreover, there is a depiction of real horrifying hatred of witches against children when it is written that “a real witch hates children with a red-hot sizzling hatred that is more sizzling and red-hot than any hatred you could possibly imagine” (Dahl 1). Besides all these facts there is Dahl‟s suggestion which is a kind of really sadistic and morbid punishments. He suggested a mean for wiping out all witches by putting “them in the meat-grinder” (Dahl 5).

However, they are wiped out in relatively more acceptable way when they are all changed in mice.

One of the obvious morbid features of the story is evoked in the chapter named

“The Grand High Witch”. Grandmamma explains what sorts of creatures children are turned into by witches there. She claims that “a slug is one of their favourites” and she adds that “then the grown-ups step on the slug and squish it without knowing it‟s a child” (Dahl 30). Even worse is when witches “turned children into pheasants and then sneaked the pheasants up into the woods the very day before the pheasant-shooting season opened. And then they get plucked and roasted and eaten for supper” (Dahl 31).

23 These transformations evoke Dahl‟s penchant in drastic changes to warn children and their parents as well to avoid naughty behaviour. However, in the story of The Witches it is obviously vice versa. Children are turned into nasty creatures which are usually killed by adults. This turn-over allows Dahl to take his revenge on “hideous and diabolical” (Hatch 1: 438) witches which torture little children. The revenge is typical for Dahl‟s writings for children where adults are often punished for harm and a maltreatment of little children. Generally, castigation of tyrannical adults is considered to be delightful element in the stories. As it is quoted in Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature: “One way that Dahl delights his readers is by exacting often vicious revenge on cruel adults who harm children” (Hatch 1: 438). The punishment acts as a rescue for harm or maltreated children who are often threatened by adult characters in Dahl‟s stories. It is depicted in the story of The Witches in which the only one adult figure, Grandmamma, plays the role of a rescuer. This characteristic trait of the character of Grandmamma again prompts the reader to connect her personality with the real personality of Dahl‟s mother who was “always on your side whatever you‟d done” and it gave young Roald “the most tremendous feeling of security” (“Roald

Dahl”).

There is another piece of evidence of the morbid thinking of Roald Dahl represented in the same chapter as the previous morbid feature of Roald Dahl‟s writings. In the chapter the little boy is trying to imagine what happened to his

Grandmamma when she was a young girl and had to deal with one of the witches. The main subject of the boy‟s thinking is the missing thumb on one of Grandmamma‟s hands which is the result of her encounter with a particular witch. She does not want to talk about the incident, so the young grandson is trying to guess what could have happened. He imagines that “the thumb had been twisted off. Or perhaps she forced to

24 jam her thumb down the spout of a boiling kettle until it was steamed away. Or did someone pull it out of her hand like a tooth?” (Dahl 30).

One of the most morbidly disgusting pictures described in the story is an introduction of the Grand High Witch standing on the platform and getting down her pretty mask from her face. The small boy who “was magnetized by the sheer horror”

(Dahl 60) provides the reader with very detailed description of the Grand High Witch‟s face when saying:

It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shrivelled, it looked as though

it had been pickled in vinegar. There was something terribly wrong with it,

something foul and putrid and decayed. It seem quite literally to be rotting away

at the edges, and in the middle of the face, around the mouth and cheeks, I could

see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working

away in there. (Dahl 60)

Dahl shows the reader his decadent and morbid thinking in the description of the witch‟s face with “the look of serpents in those eyes of hers” (Dahl 60) which may seem to be extremely disgusting especially to a child reader. This decadent description goes on when the Grand High Witch allows the other witches to remove their gloves, shoes and wigs. After the wig removing the principal character and the narrator of the story hidden behind the screen is extremely disgusted and he offers the reader his uncomfortable feelings when claiming that “I simply cannot tell you how awful they were…It was monstrous…unnatural” (Dahl 64). These unnatural creatures continue in listening to the Grand High Witch who is not only disgusting but also cruel. The evidence of her cruelty is depicted in the same chapter when she kills one of the witches who dared to argue with her by “a stream of sparks that looked like tiny white-hot metal-filings” (Dahl 69). After the act of striking, burrowing and howling screaming “a

25 smell of burning meat filled the room” (Dahl 69). Moreover the disgusting Grand High

Witch is an inventor of the special “Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker” which will turn children into mice in schools where the mouse traps will be widely used. These mouse traps “is going snippety-snap and mouse-heads is rrrolling across the floors like marbles!” (Dahl 78).

Roald Dahl supported the morbid behaviour of the witches by the macabre verses “Boil their [children‟s] bones and fry their skin…sqvish them, bash them, mash them! Brrreak them, shake them, slash them, smash them!” (Dahl 79) and by exclamations of the witches like “we‟ll swipe him! We‟ll swizzle him! We‟ll have his tripes for breakfast!” or “cut off his head and chop off his tail and fry him in hot butter”

(Dahl 84) to celebrate the idea of the Grand High Witch to turn the small boy into a mackerel. These exclamations are slightly morbid in nature when bearing in mind that the witches are still talking about children.

Furthermore, Roald Dahl leaves his principal character to cope with the difficult situation all alone. He does not provide him with any possibility either to escape from the Ballroom or to let Grandmamma know about the event of the witch meeting when it is in progress. The boy himself expresses his inextricable situation in the internal monologue starting with praying “Oh, Lord have mercy on me! These foul bald-headed females are child-killers every one of them, and here I am imprisoned in the same room and I can‟t escape!” (Dahl 64). Dahl keeps the boy in the secret place until the end of the meeting and he let him hear many secrets of the witches. That is the reason why they take revenge and turn the boy into a mouse for the rest of his life. So at the end of the story when it is obvious that the boy-mouse will not be changed into an ordinary boy there is an unpleasant anticipation that something goes wrong. According to David

Rees there is “the nasty feeling that the evil has triumphed” because “the main character

26 of the book does get turned into something else – a mouse – and has to remain a mouse for the rest of his life, which robs the story of its expected resolution. (The suggestion that he likes being a mouse does not convince.)” (Rees 148). Hence, the situation of the small boy could be considered a conscious torture of the child who cannot escape which is a typical feature of Dahl‟s writings. It is significant mainly in the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). The only thing the boy is allowed to do is to observe the frightening situation. Furthermore, there is still a kind of horror accentuated by the thoughts of the small narrator who is used as a mediator to allow Dahl to interpret his feelings. The examples of those horror are some parts of the boy‟s monologues such as:

“I was magnetized by the sheer horror of this woman‟s features” (Dahl 60), “…I was living in constant terror that one of the witches in the back row was going to get a whiff of my presence…” (Dahl 82), “the hair on my head were standing up…and a cold sweat was breaking out all over me” (Dahl 105), “the sheer terror of it all put wings on my feet!” (Dahl 106) and “from sheer and absolute terror, I began to scream” (Dahl 107).

To sum up, the story of The Witches is considered to be one of the most morbid and frightful children‟s stories which were put down to the list of banned literature for children. According to David Rees the book is not only frightening but also “sexist”

(147). This attitude is supported by Catherin Itzin who compares the story of The

Witches with “Kramer and Sprenger‟s misogynistic text Maleus Maleficarum” (qtd. in

Bird 119). Moreover, she claims that “The Witches is a dangerous publication … [it] re- enforces culturally conditioned misogyny” (qtd. in Bird). Finally, Mark I. West puts it:

“A number of British feminists […] launched a campaign to ban Roald Dahl‟s The

Witches from school libraries because Dahl‟s female witches are portrayed so negatively” (West 688).

27 5.2 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of the best known stories for children written by Roald Dahl. The book was published in 1964 in the USA and in

1967 in the UK by Allen & Unwin. The story of poor little Charlie Bucket and excentric owner of the chocolate factory Mr Willy Wonka is considered to be “Dahl‟s most popular and most controversial children‟s story” (Hatch 1: 439). It is often condemned for its poor philosophy of life and censured by critics for “its alleged stereotyping and inhumanity” (Hatch 1: 439). The main idea of the story was made up during Dahl‟s school years when studying at Repton where “every now and again, a plain grey cardboard box was dished out to each boy” from “the great chocolate manufacturers,

Cadbury” (Dahl 159). Each student of the boarding school was asked to taste and estimate new chocolate bars invented in the chocolate factory. This experience became a basis for writing the story of little Charlie Bucket and the owner of the chocolate factory Mr Willy Wonka. As Dahl claims himself: “When I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly- invented chocolates inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the

Chocolate Factory” (Dahl 161).

At the beginning of the story Roald Dahl introduces the poor Buckets family which is depicted as one of the poorest in an unnamed town. According to critic Eleanor

Cameron it is a “phony presentation of poverty” which is used as “a device to make more excruciatingly tantalizing the heavenly vision of being able to live eternally fed upon chocolate” (qtd. in Rees 144). In accordance to Cameron‟s attitude towards the presentation of poverty in the story it could be considered as bitterly ridiculous there.

28 Moreover, the bitter ridiculousness of the financial situation of the family is tinged by the fact that Charlie‟s father, Mr Bucket, worked in a toothpaste factory where “he sat all day long at a bench and screwed the little caps on the tubes of toothpaste after the tubes had been filled” (Dahl 15). The further explanation of Mr Bucket‟s working position makes the situation even more bitter and more macabre in its principal sense because “however hard he worked, and however fast he screwed on the caps, he was never able to make enough to buy one half of the things that so large a family needed”

(Dahl 15) and that is the reason why they usually “went about from morning till night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies” (Dahl 16). Later on the empty feeling in the tummies and the poverty get even worse when Dahl decides to close down the toothpaste factory where Charlie‟s father works in the tenth chapter of the story. The situation of the family which is almost unbearable has an impact on the main character.

He does not act as someone who is in need but from the reader‟s point of view (who must clearly have feelings of sympathy for Charlie) it is obvious that there is a kind of torture addressed towards the main child character. The boy does not show explicit signs of being tortured but Dahl hides the tantalization into the bitter poverty of the family which young Charlie is adjusted to because he lives in it all his life. This implicit hiding of the morbid torture of the main character is a typical feature of Dahl‟s writings, especially those for children (as it was described in the analysis of the main child character of the story The Witches) which are usually classified as violent and insensitive. Moreover, as it is stated in Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World

Literature Dahl‟s stories are “offensive and inappropriate for children” (Hacht 1: 439).

Thus, when a reader is aware of Dahl‟s other stories for children, he is able to recognise a kind of torturing of the main character of the story in the description of the poverty of

Buckets. This observation draws on the early life of Dahl attending English boarding

29 schools and on further personal tragedies. The argument is supported by Caryn Liles who claims that “there was a great deal of tragedy that occurred in Dahl's family while he was growing up, and while he was a parent as well” and that is the reason why a reader can find “many patterns...in Dahl's life and works, which include tragedy in the family” (Liles).

Furthermore, the tantalization mentioned by Eleanor Cameron, which subjoins the story a morbid character, goes on when the reader is acquainted with the fact that

Charlie is a great lover of chocolate which he can afford only once a year on his birthday. Dahl makes his main character long for chocolate which he simply can neither buy nor taste. The author himself admits that it “was pure torture” when Charlie

“walking to school in the mornings could see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows” and “he would see other children taking bars of creamy chocolate out of their pockets and munching them greedily” (Dahl 16). Dahl adds that there was

one awful thing that tortured little Charlie, the lover of chocolate, more than

anything else….It was the most terrible torturing thing you could imagine, and

it was this: In the town itself, actually within sight of the house in which Charlie

lived, there was an enormous chocolate factory! (Dahl 17)

In this phase of narrating the story perturbs a reader by its unpleasant insensibility addressed to the main character of the story. According to David Gooderham this part of the story “raises strong passion of delight, affection and distaste…”(113) towards the factory but also towards the author himself who is fiendish enough to let Charlie live in need and does not allow him to have loved chocolate. Furthermore, when the presence of the enormous chocolate factory in the town is perceived as the simple fact it could be considered incredibly exciting but when this fact is involved into the context of morbid torturing it is cruel playing with the main character who at the beginning of the story

30 can only admire the enormousness of the factory producing unreachable chocolate.

Moreover, Dahl makes Charlie “walk right past the gates of the factory” twice a day,

“on his way to and from school” (Dahl 18).

Once in the evening Charlie‟s father arrives home with a newspaper which announces the decision of Mr Wonka to allow five children to enter his chocolate factory if they find one of the Five Golden Tickets which “have been printed on golden paper, and have been hidden underneath the ordinary wrapping paper of five ordinary bars of chocolate” (Dahl 34). After that the four first finders whose characteristics and personal traits are depicted critically enough to let a reader to deduce that Dahl do not accept inappropriate behaviour and physical appearance in the world are introduced. So in the description of those four winners Dahl provides the reader with his own vision of the world which is divided into two parts. First, there are good characters (like Charlie in the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and an anonymous boy in The

Witches). Second, there are antagonists who are constructed by Dahl himself to torture good characters (like witches in the story of The Witches) or just to be in the story to warn children from being like they are (the example are four finders of the Golden

Tickets in Charlie and the Chocolate factory). They are usually described in a morbid way and punished at the end of the story. That is why David Rees claims that Dahl perceives the world as “black and white – two-dimensional and unreal” (144). The unreality mentioned by Rees is obvious in Dahl‟s perception of his characters in the story of Charlie and the Chocolate factory as well. They usually evoke one of nasty characteristic traits which should be slain and cured at all costs. Then Dahl chose the strategy of morbid torturing of those naughty and unpleasant creatures to eliminate their traits and suggest rehabilitation. These suggestions which are often turned into the acts of punishing of those characters should lead them to the creation of moral people from

31 those according to Dahl amoral nasty children. Accordingly to this observation Rees adds that Dahl “had a habit of elevating personal prejudices, ordinary likes and dislikes, into matters of morality” (144). That is the reason why all four finders of the Golden

Tickets represent one of annoying characteristic traits which “are displayed as so deplorable that the children have to be cured by sadistic punishments” (Rees 145) which are chosen very precisely to fit well to each of those children. Furthermore, the habit of elevating personal prejudices usually turns into morbid exaggeration which is the preferable writing strategy of Roald Dahl. It draws on external causes influencing Roald

Dahl who began to bring into the writings for children his own experiences tinged by his imagination which often falls into exaggeration. Thus, he adds to his works an urgency needed for depiction of his unpleasant experiences which constitute the basis of the macabre pieces of literature by exaggerating them. He emphasises not only the experienced acts but also the characters. Dahl himself claims “that the only way to make

[his] characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities” (“Roald Dahl”). Moreover, he adds that “if a person is nasty or bad or cruel you make them very nasty, very cruel. If they are ugly you make them extremely ugly”

(“Roald Dahl”). According to him the exaggeration “is fun and makes an impact”

(“Roald Dahl”). Bearing in mind Dahl‟s indulgence in exaggeration it is not difficult to reveal nasty characteristic traits of people which are constantly presented in his writings for children. David Rees provides the reader of his article with an example from other

Dahl‟s writings. For instance “in The Twits facial hair is perceived almost as a moral defect: bearded people are dirty and are trying to hide their real appearance. These remarks do not apply just to Mr. Twits (one of the main characters in the story of The

Twits) but to bearded men in general” (Rees 146). There is a number of such moral defects which are generally depicted in exaggerated form and usually mingle with the

32 morbidly perceived pictures of them in Dahl‟s writings. Generally speaking “Dahl … parades his own irritations – television addiction … overindulgence in sweets, gum- chewing, shooting foxes, beards, ugly faces, fat bodies, cranky old people, spoiled children – and presents them as moral objections” (Rees 149). This fact is one of those the most important in classification of Dahl‟s stories as morbid and macabre because these irritations are usually over-exaggerated which evoke unpleasant personal feelings of a reader during reading or listening to the text.

Then all children characters introduced in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reflect exaggerated nasty characteristic traits which have to be punished and altered into relatively normal states. Therefore, the first naughty prototype is the very first finder of one of the Five Golden Tickets, Augustus Gloop, “a nine-year-old boy who was so enormously fat he looked as though he had been blown up with a powerful pump” because as the boy‟s mother says “eating is his hobby. That‟s all he‟s interested in”

(Dahl 36). The boy is also the very first one who is punished for being widemouthed and for “lying full length on the ground with his head far out over the river, lapping up the chocolate like a dog” (Dahl 97) in Wonka‟s factory. In the end he is sucked into the pipe by which the chocolate is transferred to all other rooms of the factory. Other participants of the tour around the factory watch Augustus stuck in the pipe because it

“was made of glass” and “Augustus Gloop could be clearly seen shooting up inside it, head first, like a torpedo” (Dahl 99). The macabre picture of Augustus is completed by the panic of his parents which is balanced by the morbid sarcasm of Mr Wonka who hurries one of his workers, Oompa-Loompas, because if Augustus is left “in the chocolate barrel too long, he‟s liable to get poured out into the fudge boiler, and that really would be a disaster…the fudge would become quite uneatable!” (Dahl 103). The whole scene is an example of Dahl‟s morbid thinking because of the penchant of

33 watching the victim when suffering. This morbid observation could be derived again from the very first caning of Dahl in Llandaff Cathedral School where he himself witnessed four other canings of his friends. Moreover, according to Dahl‟s writing strategy to eliminate and rehabilitate the nasty character readers are expected to condemn the boy. As David Rees suggests the readers are explicitly “being asked to dislike this child because he is fat” (Rees 145). Furthermore, a deprecation of fatness which is, according to Rees, “a symbol of nastiness” (Rees 145) in the other books written by Roald Dahl is obvious as well. For instance “there is Farmer Boggis in

Fantastic Mr Fox, the punters at the casino in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and

Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach” (Rees 145) as well as there are a few fat characters as Violet Beauregarde, Mrs Salt and the shopkeeper in Charlie and the

Chocolate Factory.

The second finder of the golden ticket is Veruca Salt who “would lie for hours on the floor, kicking and yelling in the most disturbing way” (Dahl 40) because of being spoiled by her parents. Veruca is labelled as “the little brute” (Dahl 147) and a cruel punishment is assigned to her and her parents as well. In this part of the story Dahl let the character of Veruca act as the little spoiled brat who enters the forbidden nut room to get the trained squirrel. She is attacked there by one hundred squirrels which pin her to the ground and one of them “(obviously the leader of them all) climbed up on to her shoulder and started tap-tap-tapping the wretched girl‟s head with its knuckles” (Dahl

142). When the squirrels find out that Veruca is not a good nut because, as excentric

Mr. Wonka remarks, “her head must have sounded quite hollow”, she is thrown “down the rubbish chute” which goes “to the incinerator” (Dahl 143). The morbid picture of the girl attacked by the squirrels supplemented by the macabre comments about having

“chance that they‟ve decided not to light [the rubbish] today” (Dahl 144) is again

34 watched by other participants. The whole act of throwing down to the rubbish chute is completed when squirrels also push Mrs and Mr Salt down to the pipe. It is obvious that

Dahl needs to get rid of all members of each family to show that not only the children but mainly the parents are responsible for their behaviour. After those two described punishments the reader could be perplexed by the morbidity by which those punishments are provided. In Rees‟ point of view “it is difficult to avoid the feeling that

Dahl … enjoys writing about violence, while at the same time condemning it” (qtd. in

Hatch 1: 439). The idea of enjoying and at the same condemning is visible in all punishments of the children in the factory. They are violently as well as morbidly punished for their nastiness but it do not cause any harm to them. Dahl simply does not want to harm the children he would like to just warn them and their parents as well, that the fatness of Augustus Gloop, over-indulgence of Veruca Salt, repulsiveness of Violet

Beauregarde and slothfulness of Mike Teavee should be avoided. However, mainly the parts of The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which children are punished are the most disturbing. It is discussed among critics that the book itself could harm child readers by its morbidity and to support this idea the critic Eleanor Cameron implied that

“if I ask myself whether children are harmed by reading Charlie…I can only say I don‟t know” (qtd. in Krull 566). Cameron‟s reaction to the book was sharply attacked by Dahl himself when talking “about his young son Theo, who suffered several injuries after the accident, and to whom he dedicated Charlie” (qtd. in Krull). He claims that “the thought that I would write a book for him that might actually do him harm is too ghastly contemplate” (qtd. in Krull 566). On the other hand there is the discordance between what Dahl said and what is written in the book. It is true that children are punished but it is not obvious whether they are cured from their nastiness or not. In addition, the reader is familiar only with the fact that morbid punishments which were done to four children

35 in the factory changed them physically. As Grandpa Joe remarked Augustus Gloop

“used to be fat! Now he‟s thin as a straw!” (Dahl 182) and Mike Teavee is “about ten feet tall and thin as a wire” because he was “overstretched on the gum-stretching machine” (Dahl 183). Furthermore, Violet Beauregarde was de-juiced but she is still

“purple in the face” and there is nothing what can be done about that. Finally, Veruca

Salt and her parents were all “simply covered with rubbish” (Dahl 183). However, it is not revealed whether moral defects are obviated or not. That is why the question whether those morbid and violent punishments are necessary arises.

Generally speaking, it is common that Dahl suggested the way of either alterations or absolute elimination of those (for Dahl) unpleasant characteristic traits and features of physiognomy. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory those suggestions of the author are contained in songs sang by Oompa-Loompas which are added after each of the child‟s punishment in the factory. The songs usually start with disgusting and often also morbid description of the punished child and end with the suggestion what the child and its behaviour would look like.

To continue with the presentation of nasty golden-ticket finders, Violet

Beauregarde is the third winner of Wonka‟s day spent in the factory. She is “a gum chewer, normally” but she “gave up gum” for a while “and started on chocolate bars in the hope of striking lucky” (Dahl 47). The nastiness of that “silly gum-chewing girl”

(Dahl 119) with “huge rubbery lips” (Dahl 122) is hidden in her boastfulness when she shows the piece of gum she has “been working on for over three months solid” (Dahl

48). In the factory, prideful as her parents she chews the chewing-gum and within a minute turns “into nothing less than an enormous round blue ball” (Dahl 126). Again she has to be punished for her despicablness. In comparison to the previous punishments of Augustus and Veruca, that Violet‟s one is not morbid in its principal

36 sense but the watchers in the factory and external readers are stunned by the fantastic transformation of Violet into “a gigantic blueberry” (Dahl 126). However, there is the morbid aspect in transferring her into the juicing room where they have “got to squeeze the juice out of her immediately” (Dahl 126) by rolling “her into the de-juicing machine” (Dahl 130). Finally, the fourth lucky finder is Mike Teavee whose name itself reveals a favourite hobby of this character. He is a nine-year-old boy who is a great TV fun starring all day at the screen. The punishment is again completed when the boy is “going to be the first person in the world to be sent by television” (Dahl 163).

The morbid moment arises when Mr Teavee puts his screaming son, who became a midget, “into the breast pocket of his jacket and stuffed a handkerchief on top” (Dahl

168). Using this character Dahl criticises the modern-world invention of TV which according to him “rots the senses in the head! It kills imagination dead!” (Dahl 172). He expresses his main idea via the words of Mr Wonka when claiming that “I don‟t like television myself. I suppose it‟s all right in small doses, but children never seem to be able to take it in small doses. They want to sit there all day long staring and staring at the screen…” (Dahl 157).

Those nasty characteristic traits and physical features introduced in the part of the story where all visitors have a tour around Wonka‟s factory could be considered by the reader as little defects as well as characteristic traits which are not acceptable in a society. It seems that the second attitude of non-acceptance is acknowledged by Dahl himself and he would like to eradicate those characteristic traits from the whole society because they evoke unpleasant feelings. In a successful attempt to underline the unpleasantness of the characters in the story they are depicted with a violent or rather morbid desire to get rid of them for ever. That is the reason why Casssandra Pierce in

37 her essay perceives the character of all those lucky finders of the Five Golden Tickets in a morbid way when claiming that they

have rather mild vices. However their vices can be translated into some of the

Deadly Sins. Augustus Gloop is gluttonous; Veruca Salt is avaricious. Violet

Beauregarde is prideful because she displays a piece of gum to reporters which

she has been chewing for three months in an attempt for the world record and

global recognition. Mike Teavee is slothful. (Pierce)

Those children have vices because they can afford them. Dahl made them live the life of sufficiency. In comparison to those children the main character of the story does not have any of those vices mentioned above. According to Pierce, Charlie “displays a complete lack of any of these characteristics” (Pierce). However, she adds that he “has no tremendously positive traits, only an absence of negative ones” (Pierce). The reason is that he is not rich enough to afford to be avaricious, his family does not have enough money to provide him with redundant food to be gluttonous. Furthermore, he cannot be prideful because Roald Dahl assigns him neither a distinguish ability nor a material possession. Moreover in Townsend‟s point of view Dahl emphasises “unpleasantness” and he “appealed to the less likable of childish characteristics” (676) which are obviously developed by the parents of each of the child.

In connection to the character of little Charlie Bucket there is a parallel in a morbid character of the boy‟s situation with the classical story of “The Little Match-

Seller” written by nineteenth-century story-teller Hans Christian Andersen. The main resemblance could be found at the beginning of Andersen‟s story where the starving girl suffers from a freezing cold. Charlie himself undergoes freezing days when his father lost the job and the family starts to starve as well. Again, there is a morbid theme of torturing of a child when both of the characters are maltreated by the authors themselves

38 when they let them live in freezing conditions without any chance to warm themselves and without enough food. Andersen‟s stories as well as Dahl‟s are classified as

“traumatic for small children” (qtd. in Banerjee) by the French critic Isabelle Jan because of their unhappy character. Moreover there is a piece of evidence that

Andersen‟s fairytales are of a “folktale origin” (Banerjee) because of their morbid context (for example in “The Wild Swans”). However, to compare Andersen with Dahl or other classic collectors of the stories for children like the Grimm brothers it is obvious that Andersen‟s stories usually depict the period of the nineteenth century where the death of children, hunger and poverty were common. So his writings are much more acceptable and reasonable because they describe the real situation of living conditions in that time. On the other hand, Dahl reproves contemporary society of the twentieth century in which generally speaking, people usually live in sufficiency or rather they are not force to struggle as they used to be in the past. When comparing those two authors, Andersen and Dahl, it is obvious that the morbidity is integrated into their stories but each on a different level. Andersen‟s morbidity is derived from an everyday experience of ordinary people living in beggary. This level of morbidity is usually more acceptable because it is the whole fact of being. However, Dahl‟s morbidity could be classified as factitious because of its unnatural character. Morbidity in Dahl‟s writings is represented as a kind of annoyance with the unpleasant characteristic traits or physical appearance of people. The attitude that Andersen‟s stories are less morbid and macabre in its principal sense is supported by Jacquelin

Banerjee who claims that “despite dealing with plenty of episodes of individual suffering, [Andersen] generally avoided the crueller, more disturbing scenarios of folklore” which for example “the Grimms had set out to collect and preserve”

(Banerjee).

39 To follow up with the classic fairy tales, Dahl is one of authors who derive the basis of their stories from original fairy tales which often display a morbid character in the plot itself. According to Dahl‟s supporters “in Charlie, as in his other children‟s books, Dahl follows the traditional fairy tale style, which includes extreme exaggeration and the swift and horrible destruction of evildoers” (Hacht 1: 439). That is one of the reasons why there is the theme of morbidity widely presented in Dahl‟s stories for children. His supporters also add that “children are not harmed by this approach” (Hacht

1: 439) of Dahl‟s story-telling because of its relationship with classic fairy tales the aim of which is to advice rather than to harm.

To sum up, the analysis of Dahl‟s the most popular book Charlie and the

Chocolate Factory critic Alasdair Campbell, writing in School Librarian, argues that

“normal children are bound to take some interest in the darker side of human nature, and books for them should be judged not by picking out separate elements but rather on their basis of their overall balance and effect” (Hacht 1: 439). However, the feeling that there is something inappropriate in Dahl‟s books for children remains. There is a big difference in the level of readership and in the way how the readers of different age categories perceive the texts. As Roald Dahl himself stated in New York Times Book

Review the children who wrote him “invariably pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books…They don‟t relate it to life. They enjoy the fantasy”

(qtd. in Hacht 1: 438). Although, when talking again about morbid aspects and sadism in Dahl‟s writings the adult reader could agree with Eleanor Cameron who found that

“Dahl caters to the streak of sadism in children which they don‟t even realize is there because they are not fully self-aware and are not experienced enough to understand what sadism is” (qtd. in Hacht 1: 439).

40 6. Conclusion

The analysis of Roald Dahl‟s stories of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

(1964) and The Witches (1983) clearly shows that the author focuses on morbid elements to evoke the defects of individuals in the society of the second half of the twentieth century which irritate the author himself. Moreover, from the psychological point of view, Dahl deals with his own unpleasant experiences via morbid punishments which are assigned to the characters with annoying characteristic traits or irritating features of physical appearance.

The sequence of introduction of unfavourable traits and features and the resulting punishment suggested for each of them is the typical method of Dahl‟s writing process. The punishment for the antagonists of his stories is often morbid, sadistic as well as violent to warn the reader to avoid those unwanted traits manifested in his writings. For instance there are punishments of four little finders of one of the Five

Golden Tickets offered by Mr Willy Wonka in the story of Charlie and the Chocolate

Factory. Fat Augustus Gloop is sucked into the pipe in the factory and transformed into a slim boy, nasty Violet Beauregarde is turned into enormous blueberry, spoiled Veruca

Salt is thrown to the rubbish pipe and the last finder of the ticket, a great TV fun Mike

Teavee, is turned into a midget and after that he is overstretched on a machine for stretching chewing gums. The punishment is also integrated into the story of The

Witches in which all English witches are transformed into mice as a vengeance for torturing children.

The tendency to base the story on morbid elements originates in the author‟s experiences which widely influenced Dahl‟s writings. That is the reason why the

Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis deals with Roald Dahl‟s life and experienced events in its

41 first part. This knowledge of influential incidents and personal tragedies occurring in

Dahl‟s life is applied in the analysis of the stories in the second part of the Bachelor‟s

Diploma Thesis to show that the author‟s life is the most influential factor which creates the basis of his writings, especially those for children. It is so because the morbid elements implemented in the writings for children are easier to perceive and they are usually accepted as pure fantasy by young child readers. So Dahl himself supposes that those macabre elements manifested in the stories do not cause any harm to child readers. However, critics of his writings (such as David Rees and Eleanor Cameron) argue against his personal opinion. Nevertheless, the criticism of Roald Dahl‟s writings is not uniform in attitudes towards those stories of his which depict a kind of decadent and morbid perception of reality by the author himself. Hence, it is obvious that a recognition of morbid aspects depicted in Dahl‟s writings depends on the level of the reader‟s ability to reveal them in the stories.

42 7. English Resume

The Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis deals with the theme of morbidity in the writings by the British author of the second half of the twentieth century Roald Dahl. It focuses mainly on the theme of morbidity in writings for children.

The first part of the Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis concentrates on the author‟s life and his experiences which widely influenced the morbid thinking which already developed during Roald Dahl‟s childhood. The author‟s biography is supplemented by a chapter which deals with the most influential moments of the author‟s life. These moments influenced not only Roald Dahl‟s life but mainly his literary work, especially writings for children. Then morbidity is defined in the first part of the Bachelor‟s

Diploma Thesis. It is based on a description of external causation which influences the rise and development of mental disorders and deviations of an individual.

The second part of the Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis focuses on the analysis of two books for children written by Roald Dahl – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and The Witches (1983). The books are analysed according to the presence of morbid elements in them. The analysis of the chosen writings is predominantly based on the research of criticism of Roald Dahl as a well-known contemporary writer. Furthermore, the analysed pieces of literature are compared with classical fairy tales written by Hans

Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers. The comparing is based on the occurrence of morbid elements in their writings and the perception of the theme of morbidity by the authors themselves.

The conclusion of the Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis focuses on the summary of knowledge which emerges from the analysis and provides a new opinion on Roald

Dahl‟s writings.

43 8. Slovak Resume

V bakalárskej diplomovej práci sa zaoberám témou morbidity v dielach britského spisovateľa druhej polovice dvadsiateho storočia Roalda Dahla. Zameriava sa predovšetkým na morbiditu v príbehoch určených deťom.

Prvá časť práce je venovaná opisu autorovho života a skúseností, ktoré najviac ovplyvnili morbídne myslenie vyvinuté u Roalda Dahla pravdepodobne už v rannom detstve. Autorova biografia je doplnená podkapitolou zameranou na najvplyvnejšie momenty v živote samotného autora, ktoré ovplyvňovali nielen jeho život, ale najmä literárnu tvorbu, predovšetkým diela venované detským čitateľom. V prvej časti bakalárskej diplomovej práce je ďalej definovaná morbidita, ktorá je stanovená na základe opisu vonkajších faktorov, ktoré vo veľkej miere ovplyvňujú vznik mentálnych porúch a úchyliek u človeka.

V druhej časti bakalárskej diplomovej práce som analyzovala dve detské knihy

(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a The Witches) z hľadiska výskytu prvkov morbidity v daných dielach. Analýza vybraných diel sa zakladá predovšetkým na predošlom skúmaní kritických komentárov k dielam a na názoroch kritikov, ktorý všeobecne hodnotili diela Roalda Dahla ako jedného z najčítanejších autorov druhej polovice dvadsiateho storočia. Ďalej som porovnala analyzované diela s klasickými rozprávkami Hansa Christiana Andersena a bratov Grimmovcov. V ich dielach, v ktorých hrá morbidita dôležitú úlohu, som sa tiež zamerala na jej prvky a na to, ako k nim pristupujú samotní autori.

V závere bakalárskej diplomovej práce sú zhrnuté poznatky, ktoré vyplynuli z analýzy a poskytujú čitateľovi nový pohľad na diela Roalda Dahla.

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