Aunt Maria, Diana Wynne Jones

Witches are bitches. So we know, for an American audience, witches aren’t really ever on the good side. They are either trying to steal children’s souls out of vanity or are trying to bring forth the devil. Hallelujah, praise Jesus that he may smite this witch.

But let’s go across the Atlantic to where it started, Britain, which is the location in the novel Aunt Maria. Where as we know from Harry Potter not all witches are bad and not all of them are good. Across the Atlantic witches have a longer history and although in old renditions are depicted as evil, because it is a woman with power. They tend to land in a gray area. So does Aunt Maria, Dianna Wynne Jones plays with the idea of the basis of the witches, the fight for power between the sexes. That is the whole theme of the book is that balance of power and how when the balance is tipped to one side bad things start to happen. And things only become balanced when Mig and Chris finally communicate. Now in the story the power is to the women with this manipulative selfish queen bee, Aunt Maria. Things in the town aren’t quite right, the men seem like zombies and the women are stuck under Aunt Maria’s thumb, some enjoy how she uses her power but mostly they fear it. This is interesting since as we have seen in history when someone is tyrannical a minority becomes quit and those in the tyrants favor live meekly under them. They hope not to upset them. Amazingly Diana Wynne Jones puts this historical knowledge into a young adult novel and makes it understandable. She doesn’t make you feel as though she is patronizing you. This is due to the character Mig retelling the story.

Diana Wynne Jones puts forth that there needs to be a balance between genders and that putting restrictive rolls upon a gender is unfair. Hence why Aunt Maria fears Anthony Greene he simply wants to share the power with everyone. It’s socialism versus fascism. Aunt Maria wants a society like a dollhouse where she controls everything, women do women like things, men do men like things. Both Mig and Chris hate this because they become restricted in who they actually are. Mig is not just a girl, she is a writer. Chris isn’t just a boy, he is a mathematician. But Aunt Maria sees in a gender specific view, you have certain roles as a girl and certain roles as a boy that’s it. Anthony Green in some ways, he doesn’t acknowledge Mig at first till her mother forces her way in, does not see just through your gender, he see through your attributes. This is what can destroy people with to much power; once you see you can stretch out of their restrictions you can think for yourself. This is what Mig learns, she learns she can stretch beyond what is restricted and help Chris, this also happens to Chris. That is how they learn they can save the town, it is also what Anthony Greene also learns. Because he learns to trust them. This at the end of the novel brings the balance of power.

Now I know I just threw up a slew of ideas, but I’m not sure how to neatly tie it up. Dianna Wynne Jones even in her tiniest of novels seems to always have a way of packing a punch.