Matilda's Family (Ready) Meal

Despite coming from a conventional home with loving married parents himself, Roald Dahl's children literature most often centres around children from unconventional homes. Perhaps Dahl's most famous and loved - not by her parents of course! - leading children's character is Matilda, whose parents despise her for no apparent reason other than finding her presence in their house as a nuisance.



The family dynamic in Matilda, (1988) couldn't be further from Dahl's idealistic family set up, both with his loving parents and the home he created with his wife for their own children, often contrasting from his ideal childhood for comedic effect. A perfectly hilarious example of this is Matilda's dinner time with her family.

As mentioned in my previous post, in his home life, the dinner table acts as a hub to Dahl and his entire family and they relish in meal times spent together. However, dinner time for Matilda is slightly different... To say the least! 

"They were in the living-room eating their suppers on their knees in front of 

the telly. Their suppers were TV dinner in floppy aluminium containers with separate 

compartments for the stewed meat, the boiled potatoes and the peas."(p26-27)

The Wormwood family have totally different values regarding their meal times than the Dahls, with very little regard of the enjoyment nor the nutrition of their food; the family focus more on the convenience of food and incorporating eating into their much more important television watching. There is immediately an uncomfortable and unrelaxed feeling created for the reader surrounding the Wormwood's eating habits as there is a sense of discomfort surrounding the image of eating food from your knees on a sofa as opposed to a steady surface like the seemingly unheard of table. There is also an implicit sense of comedy in the ill description of their food, with the food being described as very bland and unimaginative. This is a common allusion in Dahl's children's literature, the allusion of 'adult' foods being seen as repulsive as opposed to sweets or cakes etc. The 'separate compartments' of the food container as opposed to a plate also enhances the repulsion of the food as the image of the food being separated makes the food more unappealing as it appears like prison food and also is not the normal way for people to eat. This idea of repulsive food would particularly appeal to the humour of children who are inherently fussy eaters and eat with their eyes.

Another frquent way in which Roald Dahl created comedy in his children's literature is through ridicule and the idea of adults being ridiculous and illogical. The Wormwood's dysfunctional dinners are further poked fun at when Matilda asks if she may be excused to eat her dinner in the dining room. Emulating Dahl himself, Matilda's father responds to her (seemingly justified) request by telling her 'supper is a family gathering and no one leaves the table till it's over!'(28) However this claim is obviously TOTALLY ridiculous as they are not in fact eating at a table and rather off of their knees in the living-room, showing that the family share none of the values that the Dahl family hold towards food and meal times.

Dahl, Roald, and Quentin Blake. Matilda. Puffin, 1996.