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| Alas, our See's Easter Eggs have vanished. Please come to our aid, Willy Wonka! |
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie lives in a
small house with his mother and father, who care for his four
grandparents. As the house is small, his
grandparents share the bed, while Charlie and his parents sleep on the
floor. As his father’s meager wages from
the toothpaste factory must satisfy all their needs, Charlie’s mother has little
money for food, and sometimes she and his father miss a meal to ensure Charlie
has enough to eat. But when his father
loses his job, and only brings home a fraction of his former pay shoveling
snow, Charlie refuses to take their portion of food. Instead, he stops playing, and refuses to do
anything that will make his body burn precious calories. Even so, he grows dangerously thin.
Contrast Charlie with Augustus Gloop, a nine-year-old boy
who finds the first Golden Ticket for a tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate
Factory. He was, in Roald Dahl's words, so enormously fat he
looked as though he had been blown up with a powerful pump. Great flabby folds of fat bulged out from
every part of his body, and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough with
two small greedy curranty eyes peering out upon the world.
“I just knew Augustus would find a Golden Ticket,” his
mother had told the newspapermen. “He
eats so many candy bars a day that it was almost impossible for him not to find
one. Eating is his hobby, you know. That’s all he’s interested in. But still, that’s better than being a
hooligan and shooting off zip guns and things like that in his spare time,
isn’t it?”
Or how about Veruca Salt, the girl who lived with her rich
parents? When she heard about the Golden
Tickets, she told her father that she simply had to have one. So her father, who owns a peanut business,
stops buying peanuts and buys Wonka candy bars by the hundreds of
thousands. Each night, his father went
home to find his daughter lying on the floor for hours, kicking and yelling and
screaming for her Golden Ticket. So on
the third day, one of his workers found a ticket inside a candy bar
wrapper. The newspaper carried a picture
of Veruca sitting between her beaming parents, and the girl was grinning from
ear to ear.
Better yet, meet the third lucky ticket holder, Violet
Beauregard. She stands on a chair in her
living room, loudly telling the assembled reporters how much she enjoys chewing
gum all the time. “My mother says it’s
not ladylike and it looks ugly to see a girl’s jaws going up and down like mine do all the time, but I don’t agree. And
who’s she to criticize, anyway, because if you ask me, I’d say that her jaws
are going up and down almost as much as mine are just from yelling at me every minute
of the day.”
“Now Violet,” Mrs. Beauregard said from a far corner of the
room where she was standing on the piano to avoid being trampled by the mob.
“All right, Mother, keep your hair on!” Miss Beauregard
shouted, and goes on to tell the reporters about her record for continuous gum
chewing.
Strangely, the fourth ticket holder, Mike Teavee, grows
annoyed by the reporters who swarm his living room. “Can’t you fools see I’m watching
television?” he asks angrily, “I wish you wouldn’t interrupt.” He then goes on to tell the reporters how
much he enjoys all the shows involving guns and gangsters and shootings. “Their terrific, those gangsters!” he
says. “Especially when they start
pumping each other full of lead, or flashing the old stilettos, or giving each
other the one-two-three with their knuckle-dusters! Oh boy, what wouldn’t I give to be doing that
myself!”
Clearly, a mother’s presence alone is not enough. For a person to grow up respectful of others,
and capable of acting responsibly in society, more is required.
On the day of the tour, the other four children show up with
both parents, who are beaming and dressed to the hilt. Charlie’s father decided he didn’t deserve to
go, but Charlie’s grandpa Joe did, as he had fed the boy’s dreams of touring Willy
Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. And his
mother feels it’s her duty to stay home and care for the other three
grandparents, so she consigns Charlie to his grandfather’s care, knowing that
her presence is not necessary for the boy to conduct himself properly during
the tour.
Despite the presence of both parents, the other four lucky
ticket holders lack Charlie’s maturity and discipline, and come to grief amid
so many fantastic temptations. Charlie,
on the other hand…well, let’s just say that he does his mother
proud.
Dragon Dave
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