WEEK 5 - Witches & Women in Genre: "Aunt Maria"

For this week's topic, I tackled the book "Aunt Maria", written by Diana Wynne Jones. This book deals with a wide variety of things including difficult relationships, abuses of power, a parental break-up, and even their mother's complete subjection to a sweet and helpless— but very strange—great-aunt. The stresses of life with Aunt Maria are developed in the format of a suspenseful story which includes ghostly apparitions and other paranormal phenomena. Although the events that take place are unlikely to occur, Meg and Chris themselves are believable characters who must tackle family problems that most readers can recognize in their own lives.

Jones presents ideas about tyranny in families that also apply to the community, since Aunt Maria's actions have overwhelmed the men, women, and children in her entire town. Aunt Maria works on several levels to examine conventional rules, personal freedom, and the roles of men and women. Meg and Chris resist Aunt Maria's magic, thus showing that resourcefulness, courage, honesty, and caring can defeat evil manipulations and restore proper balance among individual people in the real world.

On the surface, Aunt Maria in particular seems like a cuddly old lady, all chit-chat and lace doilies. BUT! When Meg and her family go for a short visit, they soon learn that Aunt Maria rules the place with a sweetness that's "tougher than iron and deadlier than poison". Along with the characteristically inventive story, Aunt Maria is full of memorable characters, particularly the sinister Aunt Maria, who is so sweet and helpless on the outside and chillingly evil within - one of Jones's most memorable villains, I think.

The plot was incredibly interesting and complex with so much going on under everything, even though it seemed pretty ordinary on the surface for awhile. It was strange, yet also fascinating. The undercurrent of magical things, the strange, almost sci-fi/dystopia set-up of the strange village with its people divided into vacant worker-men, women who work for Aunt Maria, and clone-like children in an “orphanage.” There are so many questions about EVERYTHING, so it’s very much a mystery (especially since we’re in Meg’s limited point of view).

For a good half of the story though, I wondered why it WAS Meg’s POV, because it seemed like it would have worked better from Chris’s perspective. He was the one who was doing everything to start with, and Meg is always telling us things about what he thinks. But then things just... well, happened and everything clicked, and I realized exactly why it had to be Meg telling it. It ultimately made perfect sense.

Overall, I thought the characters were all so complex and well-written that most of the time, I was kept guessing and re-adjusting on who I thought was good, bad, or on their way between changing back or forth. As was often the case however, they all had bits of good and bad mixed up in them-- just like real people. I would give this story another read if I had the chance, because I feel that there was just so much deep messages about society, gender, and everything in between.