Miss Honey – Is Matilda’s teacher a role model or unprofessional?
Is it time to reevaluate our feelings about Matilda’s beloved teacher?
Ask any adult in the UK to name a teacher from children’s literature and they will invariably cite Miss Honey from Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
Role model or unprofessional?
Research by Weber and Mitchell identified her (and Miss Trunchbull) as part of the cultural basis for understanding the role of the teacher within the UK. It was a popular response when I posed the question to trainee teachers as part of my own study.
Listening to the story of Matilda as children explicitly fuelled participants’ ambition to teach. One student was so certain that everyone who read the story would feel equally inspired by Matilda’s teacher that they thought this response a cliché.
Conversely, another indicated their dislike of the character for being a poor example of a teacher due to her inauthentic classroom practice.
This split raised a question: is Miss Honey deserving of deified teaching status, or have we mythologised her beyond her actual abilities?
Who is Miss Honey?
In the novel, our first glimpse of Miss Honey makes it clear she’s sweet and virtuous with a “madonna face”.
“Is Miss Honey deserving of deified teaching status, or have we mythologised her beyond her actual abilities?”
The illustrations show her constantly surrounded by smiling children. This conveys her willingness to interact with her class in a relaxed, open manner. One blog post describes her as “an idealistic view of what a child’s dream teacher would be.”
Despite this, however, Miss Honey is not totally benign: she borders on unprofessional in her description of the school’s headteacher. She’s not afraid to name and shame in her reprimands and she is not without flaws as a classroom manager.
Indeed, against today’s government teachers’ standards we may judge her harshly. She leaves the rest of the class passively ignored while she grapples with Matilda’s genius. She has gaps in her subject knowledge that leave her struggling for an answer the child reaches easily. Miss Honey is not above lying to her pupils to avoid answering difficult questions.
Pedagogic methods
Miss Honey’s success with learners, then, is not due to her integrity or academic ability, but her pedagogic methods.
Pupils enthusiastically describe how she uses multisensory approaches to help them learn. These are methods sneered at by Miss Trunchbull, who raises pertinent concerns about the gendered nature of the lesson:
‘Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs FFI, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs LTY: that spells difficulty.’ ‘How perfectly ridiculous!’ snorts the Trunchbull. ‘Why are all these women married?’
“Pupils enthusiastically describe how she uses multisensory approaches to help them learn”
More disturbing than unnecessarily gendered spellings, however, are the number of safeguarding issues Miss Honey fails to report. This is everything from parental neglect to the physical and mental abuse of pupils by the headteacher.
Once we realise that Miss Honey has herself suffered years of cruelty at the hands of Miss Trunchbull, though, some of her actions are easier to understand, even if we cannot condone them.
She is powerless to break the cycle of abuse, and ultimately unable to solve her own problems. It takes a five-year-old girl with special powers to address the injustices in Miss Honey’s life.
Mentorship
Despite not being totally convinced of her brilliance as a classroom teacher, I do have a particular soft spot for Miss Honey.
According to Dahl, she and I are alumni of the same teacher training establishment in Reading. I well remember my days as an NQT/RQT as fundamental to my development as a practitioner.
Miss Honey is still at the beginning of her career when we meet her in Matilda. It is unlikely, in a school with such a strong culture of bullying, that she will have received the mentoring or support she deserved.
Thus, while placing Miss Honey on a teaching pedestal is unwarranted based on the evidence, we shouldn’t judge her too harshly.
As an exemplar, Miss Honey must be approached with a note of caution. Her altruism and willingness to take her pupil with a troubled life into her home encourages unrealistic expectations of the teacher-pupil relationship, if nothing else.
“We shouldn’t judge her too harshly”
However, there are worse people to aspire to be than someone who tells the children on their first day, “I myself… want to help you to learn as much as possible while you are in this class”.
For Miss Honey, providing the best learning experience in order to provide a solid foundation on which to build is what teaching is all about. I for one wouldn’t argue with her.
Dr Branwen Bingle is the Operational Lead for ITE Partnerships at the University of Greenwich and a committed advocate of children’s literature. Download our Roald Dahl Ultimate Primary Resource Pack.
Who played Miss Honey?
Miss Honey was played by Embeth Davidtz in the 1996 film Matilda, directed by Danny DeVito. This version is based on Roald Dahl’s novel.
Lashana Lynch portrayed Miss Honey in the 2022 film Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical. This adaptation is based on the stage musical version of the story.
Is Matilda Miss Honey’s inner child?
The idea that Matilda represents Miss Honey’s inner child isn’t explicitly mentioned by Roald Dahl, but it offers a compelling metaphor for healing and empowerment.
Miss Honey’s abusive childhood left her timid and self-effacing, while Matilda’s resilience and sense of justice embody the strength Miss Honey might have had if nurtured.
Their bond helps both heal: Matilda encourages Miss Honey to reclaim her independence, and Miss Honey provides Matilda with the love she’s never known.
Through Matilda, Miss Honey reconnects with the bold, joyful part of herself that was buried under fear and oppression.
