Who is Mr. Wormwood?

Who is Mr. Wormwood? By Ana Artz

Mr. Wormwood is a prominent character in the children's book Matilda by Roald Dahl. As the secondary antagonist, his actions affect the protagonist, Matilda Wormwood, his daughter, heavily. As a father he is neglectful towards his only daughter, but he loves his eldest son. All the time yelling at her for reading and telling her to be more dishonest like her older brother, Micheal, and the rest of the family. He views his son as perfection but never fails to kick Matilda to the curb. Mr. Wormwood works as a corrupt car salesman. He is the prime target of Matilda’s tricks, but he doesn't realize it as he thinks that Matilda is a stupid child despite her being a genius. He shows no interest in her, even when Matilda's teacher comes to his house in person and lets him know how smart Matilda is, he thinks that she's lying. Even at the end when Mr. Wormwood flees the country; he chooses to leave his daughter behind. Prioritizing himself, he doesn’t care what happens to her. 

One evening the Wormwood family sat down together in the family living room after school. Mr. Wormwood has a proposition for his son, prompting him to solve a complicated math problem. Mr. Wormwood has always wanted his son to take over his car sales business, so he figured that this would be good training. As they began to talk about the numbers Matilda's ears perked up, she could do this math in her head easily. When Micheal was thinking of the answer Matilda piped up, its “$10,265, that's your profit for the day” (Dahl 30). The rest of the family turned to look at her, Mr. Wormwood was enraged, he couldn’t believe that she had developed this number in her head. He started to scream and accuse her of cheating. This led to Mr. Wormwood storming out in utter disbelief, thinking about how impossible it would be for such a stupid little girl like Matilda to do such a thing. Matilda becomes extremely irritated and begins to plot a plan to get vengeance on her father for disregarding her. 

As the target of Matilda's tricks Mr. Wormwood’s day-to-day life is shaken up. After facing years of neglect Matilda makes a move to shake up her family's lives. One targets her mother, one the entire family, and the final one her father. Matilda intends for the result of these pranks to make her family pay attention to her and realize that she is in fact an important human being, but her family does not get the message. The prank that targets her father is replacing her father's hair tonic with the platinum blonde hair dye of her mother mixed with peroxide, as well as super gluing his hat to his head. Mr. Wormwood is blamed by his wife Mrs. Wormwood for the prank, she believed that he accidentally did it to himself. The couple squabbles as Matilda sits smugly nearby. Afterwards Mr. Wormwood has to end up cutting his hair and is angry, yet he doesn't know who did it. The event is one that he’ll remember, but not one that he learned from. 

Towards the end of the story Matilda has successfully defeated the Trunchbull and returns to her house happy that she got proper justice for her school. However, Matilda's dad has screwed up with his job and was finally found out as being a horrible and deceptive guy salesman. Matilda is upset about this and tries to fight her father's actions, but he says that they have to move to Spain before the sunset. Matilda runs in despair to miss honey, her teachers' house and asks her to adopt her, in the end the wormwoods say yes and part with her easily. Not caring at all if Miss Honey was a good person to take Matilda in. They never loved Matilda; she was always a speck of dust on a white shirt to them. Despite being the end Mr. Wormwoods character does not develop to become a better father, or a better person in general. The character of Mr. Wormwood is unique because usually in these types of stories the characters learn their lessons and become better people, but he doesn't.

Below shows Mr. Wormwood yelling at Matilda after she says the correct answer to his math problem.