Roald Dahl Propaganda

In 1983, Roald Dahl, a timeless master storyteller best known for novels such as James and The Giant Peach, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and The BFG, wrote another tale to add to his book shelf: The Witches. This particular story centers around a little nameless orphaned boy who, thanks to his guardian grandmother’s stories about them, stumbles upon a meeting of witches (“real witches”, the kind that absolutely hate children), and must subsequently stop them from completing their evil plan of getting rid of all the children in “Inkland” (Dahl 78)—as quoted by The Grand High Witch. Like many children’s books, however, it quickly gained unpopular favor with critical adults, despite that fact that it, like so many of Dahl’s other books,

Her brief excerpt from the Times Educational Supplement journal continuously slams down on Dahl as she writes “I find the similarities between Roald Dahl’s children’s story and the real propaganda about the persecution of women as witches [as found in the MM] deeply shocking and alarming” (para. 7) and “womenhatred is at the core of Dahl’s writing—creating fear and suspicion and disgust and misogynist attitudes towards women in children’s minds” (para. 8). Her ideology behind her comparing the similarities between the two text are not “bizarre”, as Talbot would say, however. The extent that she brings it to is what is bizarre—almost as if she is grasping at the concept that The Witches, like the MM, is trying to perpetuate the witch hunts in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries to happen again. Itzin, though her information regarding what happened to “witches” is correct, fails to recognize that the “core of Dahl’s writing” stems from a much deeper history regarding “womenhatred” and from witches themselves. She is also missing out on one important factor that separates The Witches from being the “misogynistic” text that is essentially another version of the Kramer and Sprenger text: Dahl does not constantly batter and abuse a woman’s name in order to get his point across. Several mentions throughout the MM tell of how women are worse than men, several of them being the title of a chapter found within the book itself: “Why is it that women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions” (Kramer 6), “Why Superstition is chiefly found in women” (Kramer 100), “Women are intellectually like children” (Kramer 101), etc. As described by Annette Schimmelpfennig in “Chaos Reigns — Women as Witches in Contemporary Film and the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”, “the Malleus Maleficarum proclaims in summary that women are credulous, deceptive and