In the World of Miss Honey: Transformation and Culinary Symbolism in Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Abstract

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is a fundamental writer in the history of contemporary Children’s Literature. In his novels Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), food plays a central role shaped around three different narrative strategies: representing power relations, subverting the tradition of Children’s Literature as a didactic or moralizing genre, and functioning as an element of transformation inside the respective plots. Dahl reinvented the literary tradition of Children’s Literature and shaped a metaphorical universe in which power relations between child and adult are being disrupted. While employing food as a polysemic sign to portray and convey new meanings to the power relations between children and adults, Dahl subverts and homages classical Children’s Literature and traditional fairy tales at the same time.