Title: "A Sort of Mouse-Person": Radicalizing Gender in the Witches
Abstract: The narrator of Roald Dahl's The Witches (1983) practically whispers psst ... I've got a secret for to young readers on the first page of the text: this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming (7). The intimacy established between the narrator and readers here is bolstered by the opposition set up between what readers actually know and what readers simply think they know. The complicated connection between secrecy and knowledge becomes the foundation for the narrative that unfolds; while other texts, myths, authors, parents, and guardians may perpetuate a safe and inevitably cartoonish mythology about witches, Dahl's narrator promises to reveal a grand that adults have been consistently hiding and that children desperately need to access. Thus, readers are invited into a space where they will, undoubtedly, be enlightened. The narrator's own world, by extension of this intimacy, becomes the reader's world as well. From the first words of the novel, Dahl presents readers with a true story. Despite the implausibility of the narrative that unfolds, Dahl packs the first chapter with references to the inescapable reality that provides the foundation for the text itself: For all you know, a witch might be living next door to you right now. Or she might be the woman with the bright eyes who sat opposite you on the bus this morning. She might be the lady with the dazzling smile who offered you a sweet from a white paper bag in the street before lunch. She might even--and this will make you jump--she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness. I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But ... it is not impossible. (10-11) While this moment is infinitely humorous, it draws readers' attentions to the real-life implications of the unfolding tale. By presenting such claims as viable possibilities, the narrative encourages readers to ascribe a truth-value to elements in the text that extend far beyond the seemingly universal possibility that the ornery lady down the block is actually a witch in disguise. Echoing sentiments from previous generations that the is in our own backyard--replace enemy with Nazis, barbarians, Communists, Jews, Catholics, infidels, etc., based upon any given historical moment--Dahl uses an already-powerful insinuation about the relationship between self and other. As readers are encouraged to open their minds to the magical elements in the text and to the ways in which those magical elements have powerful historical resonances, they are accordingly invited to seriously consider the representations of gender and sexual identity that surface in the tale. Moreover, it is the presentation of the narrator's transformation from boy to that raises serious questions about gendered identities that lie beyond the spectrum of traditional--and even nontraditional--possibilities: masculine, feminine, androgynous, neuter. The novel's consistent engagement with questions about the truth of gender identity--readers, for example, might wonder exactly how to categorize and define the narrator once he becomes a mouse-helps to establish a critique of gender as organic or performance, and as status marker or false signifier. Although the narrator's punishment at the hands of the witches suggests that he initially falls victim to their destructive plotting, the transformation that ensues reveals itself to be a positive, life-altering, and affirming change. The language that the narrator uses to describe himself after becoming a encourages readers to read mouse as an alternative gender; rather than a boy who organically grows into a man, the narrator is a boy who violently transitions into a mouse. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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