The Embodiment of Evil in Children's Literature. How Villainy and Adulthood are Interconnected in Children's Stories

Textprobe: Kapitel 4.2. Miss Trunchbull's Villainy: The villainy of Miss Trunchbull runs deep and is exercised with such sadism that it is still able to shock audiences today and divides opinions whether the novel (and film adaptation) is child appropriate. This controversy mainly derives from Miss Trunchbull's behaviour towards children, though she also is guilty of other capital crimes. Miss Trunchbull's offences against children cover every level from meanness to actual child abuse. She displays a general unfairness towards children - she is unable to admit defeat (MA 127) and guesses culprits (MA 102), for example when she blames the newt in the jug on Matilda (MA 155-158) - and spends a lot of their interaction insulting and verbally abusing them. The worst aspect of this is her use of corporal punishment which often takes on comic-like traits. She is reported to have thrown a boy out of a classroom window (MA 104), demonstrates her skill of hammer-throwing on a little girl (MA 108f), forces a boy to eat a giant cake (MA 121-124) and then hits him with the plate (MA 127) and picks up children by their hair (MA 142ff), ears (MA 146-149) and ankle (MA 212). The grotesqueness of these acts of violence is commented upon by Matilda who sees through the perfidiousness of Miss Trunchbull's violence. The more grotesque and outrageous Miss Trunchbull behaves, the less likely are parents to believe their own children: This is "the Trunchbull's great secret" (MA 111). This mechanism protects her from actual consequences and makes her crimes against children seem even worse: the children are up on their own against this enemy. DAHL's "voyeuristic fascination with the ritual of beating" (HOLLINDALE 2008:281) has been traced down by biographers to his personal experiences in British schools where he suffered from the hands of teachers (see LOVEDAY 2018:90), but a merely biographical interpretation is limiting here. Considered the extensive description of Miss Trunchbull's

Almut M. Amberg wurde 1995 geboren. Sie studierte Germanistik und Anglistik an der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg und schloss im Jahr 2020 ihr Studium mit einem Master of Arts in Englischer Literaturwissenschaft erfolgreich ab. Während des Studiums legte die Autorin ihre Themenschwerpunkte auf das Theater der englischen Renaissance, die Literatur der Romantik und die Kinder- und Jugendliteratur des englischen Sprach- und Kulturraums. Besonders die Auseinandersetzung von Kinderliteratur mit ungewöhnlichen Themen, wie zum Beispiel dem zweiten Weltkrieg oder dem Bösen, weckten ihr Interesse und gaben Anlass zum Verfassen der vorliegenden Studie.