KidLit Forum

This book is rather different from the other writings for children. First of all because it opens with a discussion of its own genre. As we know, fairy tales tend to be about witches with hats and broomsticks. But this story is not like that, because it is a real story about real witches. More over it is a clear example of intrusion of fantasy in our world. There is no longer a portal to a fantastic world (as in Alice in Wonderland); but the fantastic surrounds the real world, there are witches at every corner, round around the universe.

The main theme of this book is the problem of appearance and essence. We can observe that the psysical transformation does not lead to an internal one, too (all they have done is to shrink you and give you four legs and furry coat, but they have not been able to change you into a one hundred per cent mouse. You are still youtself in everything except your appearance). So the conclusion is obvious: it does not matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.

Another important theme could be the problem of deceiving. Usually when we think of lying, we think of words that are untruthful. Of course, there is some of that in this book, but the witches themselves are constantly deceiving through another means: disguise. The only way witches are able to pass for humans and trick children is because they are constantly in disguise – wigs, gloves, and sometimes masks – to make them look like normal ladies. They are pretty much telling everyone around them that they are someone they actually are not.

As you said Anca, this story points us the fact that it doesn't matter who you are as long as you stay the same. Grandma still loves his grandson even when he is turned into a mouse because he is the same great boy he always was.I should add that this story is about unconditional love.

' Don't judge a book by it's cover', you may never know what you'll find inside...

The witches are portrayed to be creatures that have the sole purpose to destroy children, a trait that is shared by nearly all of Dahl's villains. As his books are written for children, it is understandable why Dahl creates villains not only for characters in the text but also for readers.

@ Cosa: You make three good points. One about the ubiquity of witches and their global assault. The second about their capacity to incur physical transformations but not psychic ones. And the third about deception and (dis)guises. All these have something to do with the ethical plane.

@ Ramona: I like your pointing out that this book is actually about unconditional love. I thought about that too. And this love goes both ways: remember the touching moment when the boy asks Grandma about the life expectancy of mice and is happy that he won't survive the olde woman...

@ Adina: Well, I am not sure whether this mysogynism is indeed Dahl's, or it might belong to the anonymos creator of fairy tales -- for it is still from fairy tales that Dahl adopts most of his imagery, even if it secularizes it into a lay (=laic) one.

In the book called “The witches”, we find a different type of fantasy book. This is in terms of the elements of usually book which we read as “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. If in those books, real world is very exact delimited from the secondary world, and the portal is the key to pass to the other world, in the book about witches, the real and the fantastic are all in one, mixed together. Other differences between those types of books is the fact that in “The witches” didn’t exist the portal. There is a kind of soft pass from real to fantasy. This really happened maybe when he met the first witch, and than he really believe in witches and believe also all the stories about witches told by his grandmother. Than, the story continues with the beautiful describing of the boy which was transformed into a mouse by witches and he fight to kill the witches using their potions which was made especially for killing all the children.

What was much unexpected, was the ending of the story. I expect in the final to appear the boy wihich was transformed into a mouse, but it didn’t happened. Maybe because, as his grandmother says, he is smarter mouse than boy. This condition of him as mouse is more helpful for him to hiding, in terms of killing all the witches in the world, because what he did, was only the beginning.