“Mary, Mary”
The nursery rhyme about the contrarian gardener is updated to modern times. Dahl, a lover of the natural world and gardener himself, places Mary into a high-rise apartment and makes her contrary because she have neither the time nor space for a garden. Thus, she becomes a symbol of the urban landscape destroying gardens both literally and conceptually.
Mister Rat
Aesop’s fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare also gets updated to modern sensibilities which includes the addition of a new character. Mister Rat is a businessman who profits financially from assisting both the tortoise and the hare without either knowing he is helping his opponent. Mister Rat is identified literally as a “business man” who “always wins” making him symbolically a figure of the inherent corruptibility of capitalism.
Miss McPhee
Miss McPhee is a gym instructor who takes advantage of her position to seduce a male student into a sexual awakening. There is the strong suggestion he is neither the first nor the last. Dahl’s memoirs paint a horrific portrait adult exploitation of kids in the British boy’s school system and it is highly likely that the predatory Miss McPhee is a symbol of that aspect.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes”
In Dahl’s version of the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale, the King is a much nastier person verging on downright evil. He remains, however, a symbol of gullibility, but of a more precise variety. He is emblematic of that ruler who mistakes his position of complete authority requiring absolute loyalty for wisdom which inspires respect. When the king first denies that any cloth exists, the tailor’s response is quite telling about this type of head of state who is doomed to the forces of flattery:
“This cloth’s invisible to fools
And nincompoops and other ghouls.
For brainless men who’re round the twist
This cloth does simply not exist.
But seeing how you’re wise and bright,
I’m sure it glistens in your sight.”
Aladdin
As Dahl tells it, the story of Aladdin includes a twist that answers the question (though one not posed in the poem) of how one gets around the rule against wishing for an infinite number of wishes. Aladdin shocks the genie of the lamp by making a wish he’s never confronted before: to be turned into a genie himself. The story ends with the narrator explaining how over the course of the last five-hundred years, Aladdin has been the one responsible for the achievements of ordinary mortals like William Shakespeare, transforming him into a symbol for inexplicable genius occasionally entering into the world.
