Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

            Experimentation in children’s media generally is about process as much as product — in the examples we watched in class, it was Winsor McCay or Walt Disney’s breakdown of their medium that allowed a child viewer to further engage with the work. Pulling back the curtain, as it were, was an important part of the ultimate work, and that trend seems to exist in nascent mediums like animation and film, particularly in their earliest days when there were not codes and concrete languages of understanding.

            So how does one experiment in a novel for children? The written text has existed for thousands of years, and the aforementioned codes are pretty locked down. More than any other medium, children understand how books are supposed to work, which is why something like The Book with No Pictures seems so transcendent. But Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is similarly transcendent simply because of its subject matter and not necessarily its form. In those terms, Charlie is relatively straightforward, telling a narrative about a boy actualizing himself and becoming a sort of hero. The experimentation here happens in Dahl’s audacity. Where most children’s stories worship the child and the young imagination, Dahl seems to repel it, and makes definitive statements about what makes for good and bad children.

            It is the presence of bad children that makes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, and Mike Teavee are villains of the highest degree, repulsive creatures that the author labels as such. But the novel idea at play is that these are children, and perhaps children that the reader may recognize from their playground or school. A child is accustomed to morality tales that treat badness in the abstract, as wolves in the woods or evil witches. Charlie offers them the opportunity to see themselves as the bad children, a novel idea that borders on revolutionary.

            Dahl would later go on to romanticize naughty children in works like Matilda, but in Charlie he is deeply concerned with punishing bad kids. Perhaps there is a distinction between the exploratory naughtiness of Matilda Wormwood and the straight-up evil of a Veruca Salt, but that’s less the point. It’s telling that Dahl wrote drafts involving upwards of 20 bad children — there was no shortage of bad habits or trends to criticize. As remarkable as it is, Charlie is an angry, rotten book, furious at the bad children and the parents who make them so; its beauty and specialness come from its ability for the child reader to see themselves within it.