Week 5: Aunt Maria


I’ve read a great deal of Dianna Wynne jones books over the years, and I was especially obsessed with several of her novels or series when I was a child. Unexpected Magic, Howl’s Moving Castle, and the Dark Lord of Derkholm series were the ones I owned and obsessed over, while many others I got to read once or twice from the library. Despite how many of her books explore witches, I’ve never really been too attached to witches as a theme. I’ve always been a bigger fan of her non-human characters. In some manner, Aunt Maria is patently Dianna Wynne Jones because of the grounded elements it explores. The biggest of these is the concept of coming of age, and the struggles of being a young girl or a young boy expected to enter the adult world as a woman or a man. It’s this element that Wynne Jones focuses on with Aunt Maria – the fact that girls and boys are forced into specific roles as men and women, expected to separate themselves from each other and put themselves on a team against the other gender. This is presented very literally in Aunt Maria as a balance of magical power, but of course it’s a metaphor for the subtler ways we (in the real world) separate men and women, forcing them to play on opposite sides in many situations. Though the tyranny of Aunt Maria and her cronies over all the men seems somewhat unfamiliar to readers, it’s really just a reversal of how our society all too often functions, with men at the top and women at the bottom. Wynne Jones makes sure to say that in order for us to have an ideal world, power should be shared equally. We suffer just as much with only women in power as we do with only men in power. Wynne Jones gets at her point in her classic roundabout, fantastical way, allowing it to take us by surprise so that we learn it better and absorb it as a truth. If I had to pick another book where she takes a similar approach to similar issues, it would be Fire and Hemlock, which looks at the maturation of another young girl who often finds herself crossing over into the unseen magical part of the world. Dianna Wynne Jones always does a good job of showing the parental issues that so many children experience with subtlety and realism, and she does an especially good job of this in Aunt Maria.

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