Matilda’s ability to move objects with her eyes

Matilda’s ability to move objects with her eyes is a power she first recognizes as the capacity to push or tip things, then patiently trains until she can lift and direct an object through the air. It becomes central to her plan to help Juffrouw Engel, but does not last: after Matilda moves into a more demanding class, she finds the force has vanished. Its rise and disappearance connect extraordinary physical agency to the needs of an exceptionally active mind.

Nature and First Recognition

Matilda describes the ability in practical terms: she can make things move and knock them over. When Juffrouw Engel suggests testing its limits, Matilda declines. She wants to go home and think about what she has heard that afternoon. The pause matters: the power is not introduced as a performance she eagerly displays, but as something Matilda understands only partly and approaches on her own terms.

Her purpose soon takes shape. At home, Matilda decides that helping Juffrouw Engel will depend on whether she can accomplish one particular movement with the force of her eyes. She does not expect to manage it immediately; she trusts that practice and effort might make it possible. To train, she takes a cigar from Mr. Wormwood’s box. Its thickness may be inconvenient, but its weight is suitable for the exercise she has in mind.

Practice and Increasing Control

Matilda clears a dressing table, setting aside a hairbrush, a comb, and two library books, and places the cigar in the middle. She sits on the edge of her bed about three metres away. As she concentrates, she feels an electric sensation gather behind her eyes. The cigar, marked with a red-and-gold band, rolls across the tabletop almost at once and drops to the floor. The first success is a push rather than a lift, but it confirms that she can direct the force at a chosen object from a distance.

Matilda retrieves the cigar and tries a harder task. If the force can push, she reasons, it might also lift; she particularly needs to learn to raise an object and keep it suspended. She summons the sensation behind her eyes again, but at first the cigar only rolls away. Concentrating more intensely, she raises one end by about two centimetres and holds it there for roughly ten seconds before it falls back onto the table. This partial success establishes that the ability has degrees of control, and that lifting demands more effort than simply making the cigar move.

She practises for an hour. By the end, she can raise the whole cigar from the table and keep it in the air for about a minute. The effort leaves her suddenly exhausted: she falls back on her bed and goes to sleep. Mrs. Wormwood later wakes her, asking whether she is ill; Matilda explains that she is only tired. The episode makes the cost of training concrete. The power is exhilarating, but learning to sustain it takes enough concentration to overcome her.

After that first session, Matilda shuts herself in her room to practise with the cigar every day after school. Her control improves quickly. On the following Wednesday evening, exactly six days after she began, she can not only lift the cigar but make it do whatever she wants in the air, sending it wherever she directs. The change from coaxing one end a little above the tabletop to controlling the whole object marks a rapid progression from discovery to mastery. With that ability acquired, she is ready to carry out her larger plan.

Use and Significance in the Classroom

During the classroom crisis, the force again gathers behind Matilda’s eyes, now with greater heat than she has ever felt. She experiences it as a warm liquid flowing through her skull, then feels something shoot from her eye sockets and lift a piece of chalk so that it begins to write. The action is so easy that she feels she has scarcely done anything. Earlier training had required a cigar, distance, repeated concentration, and an hour of exertion; here, the chalk moves with startling ease. The power has become an instrument through which Matilda can intervene in the situation involving Juffrouw Engel.

Matilda remains motionless at her desk afterward, but inwardly feels elated, as though she has touched something beyond the ordinary world. The scene presents the force not merely as a mechanical capacity to move objects, but as an intensely embodied experience: heat, pressure, and a rush of energy precede the visible action. Its importance lies in the contrast between this private physical sensation and the public effect of the chalk moving in the classroom. Matilda’s extraordinary agency becomes legible to others through an object that writes where she sits.

Disappearance and Explanation

Several weeks later, while having tea with Juffrouw Engel at the Red House, Matilda reports that the ability has gone. That morning she tried, for amusement, to push something with her eyes, but nothing moved; she felt no heat behind her eyes either. The loss is defined by the absence of the very sensations that had accompanied her earlier attempts. Matilda believes she may have lost the power altogether.

Juffrouw Engel offers a theory, while acknowledging that it is only a guess. When Matilda was in her class, she had nothing to do and nothing to stretch her abilities; her enormous brain, Juffrouw Engel suggests, was frustrated, with energy accumulating that Matilda somehow released through her eyes to move objects. Now she is in the highest class, working alongside children twice her age. Her mind is occupied by challenging work, so that energy is being used in the classroom instead. This explanation is not presented as established fact, but it gives the power’s course a clear relation to Matilda’s changing circumstances: it appears when her intellect is underused and fades when she is finally challenged.

Matilda is glad the ability has disappeared. She does not want to go through life as a kind of wonder-worker. Juffrouw Engel tells her that she has already done more than enough, and admits that she can hardly believe Matilda managed it. Their conversation ends not in a renewed test or a demand for proof, but in the ease of their ordinary afternoons together: Matilda sits at the kitchen table, eating bread and jam slowly, comfortable with Juffrouw Engel and talking with her almost as an equal. The power’s disappearance therefore closes one extraordinary chapter without diminishing what Matilda accomplished; it leaves her with a more demanding education and a valued relationship rather than a permanent identity as a miracle-worker.