Plot
A young girl named Matilda Wormwood is gifted with precocity but her wealthy, dimwitted parents are oblivious to their daughter's prodigous skills and view her as foolish and idiotic. Aggravated by the rude behavior of her mother and father, Matilda constantly pulls pranks on her family as discipline for their misdeeds, such as pouring Superglue into her father's hat or hiding a parrot in the chimney, tricking the family into thinking there is a ghost in the house.
Eventually, Matilda begins schooling and encounters a loving, sweet schoolteacher named Miss Jennifer "Jenny" Honey, who is astonished by her unbelievable intellectual abilities and wants to move her into a higher class, but the school's hostile headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, who disciplines the pupils with abusive physical punishment, refuses. Miss Honey also tries to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood about Matilda's supreme intelligence, but they don't believe her.
Matilda quickly develops a particularly strong bond with Miss Honey over time after a classmate's practical joke on the headmistress leads Matilda to discover her secret telekinetic powers by using her mind to tip over a glass of water containing a salamander on Miss Trunchbull. They gather frequently at the teacher's tiny cottage in the forest and converse, where Miss Honey recounts her traumatic childhood experiences with Matilda that had been wreaked by her maliciously abusive aunt, whose guardianship she was forced to live under after the mysterious passing of her father Magnus. Stunned to learn that Miss Trunchbull actually was the aunt in question, Matilda devises a scheme in order to help Miss Honey earn her proper inheritance, which the aunt had seemingly stripped her of, and develops her telekinetic gift through practice at home.
During a lesson that Miss Truchbull is teaching Matilda telekinetically raises a stick of chalk against the black-board and poses as Magnus's spirit, demanding that Miss Trunchbull provide his daughter with the wages that she needs by name. Petrified by this, Miss Trunchbull flees from her house, which is later discovered to rightfully belong to Miss Honey by her father's will, and her niece moves into it from her cottage.
Matilda is re-positioned by the new headmaster to the sixth grade level of schooling, where she discovers that she is no longer capable of accessing her powers of telekinesis, and Miss Honey theorizes that it is probably because Matilda must mandatorily use more of her knowledge at school after skipping several grades.
Matilda continues to meet with Miss Honey at her home regularly, but one day arrives home to discover her parents hastily packing to go on the run from the police who have discover her father's deceptive practices in the automotive industry. Matilda asks permission to live with Miss Honey, to which her parents agree, thus providing her with a more loving home.
Read more about this topic: Matilda (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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