Telekinetic power

Telekinetic power is Matilda’s ability to move objects by concentrating through her eyes. The ability develops from a surprising capacity to push things over into a practiced, precise force: with effort, Matilda learns to lift an object and control its movement through the air. It becomes both a practical means of helping Juffrouw Engel and a bodily expression of energy that Matilda later no longer needs to release in this way.

Nature and Discovery

Matilda knows she can make things move and knock them over, but at first she does not describe a reliable ability to lift or steer them. When Juffrouw Engel proposes carefully testing how much she can move, Matilda declines. She wants to go home and think about what she has just heard, so the power’s next development begins privately, through her own decision to experiment rather than through a supervised demonstration.

Her first practice session takes place in an empty house. Mr. Wormwood has not yet returned from work, Mrs. Wormwood is still out at bingo, and Matilda’s brother is elsewhere. Matilda takes a cigar from her father’s stored box, locks herself in her bedroom, and sets the cigar on a dressing table. She sits about three metres away. The object is deliberately chosen for its weight: it may be a little thick, but Matilda judges it suitable for practice.

Practice and Control

Matilda concentrates until she feels a sensation of electricity gathering behind her eyes. She experiences her eyes as hot and imagines tiny, invisible hands flying towards the cigar. On this first attempt, the cigar, marked with a red-and-gold band, rolls almost immediately across the tabletop and falls to the floor. The successful push delights her. She describes the sensation as exhilarating and powerful, and the ease of the movement surprises her.

She retrieves the cigar and tries for a more difficult feat: lifting it rather than pushing it. At first it rolls away. By concentrating intensely, Matilda eventually raises one end only a centimetre or two above the table and holds it there for about ten seconds before it drops. The small lift establishes an important limit and a next objective. Moving an object along a surface is not yet the same as raising it and keeping it aloft.

Matilda then practises in her room every day after school. The training is purposeful: her plan to help Juffrouw Engel depends on whether she can make one particular movement with the force of her eyes. Six days after she began, on the following Wednesday evening, she can lift the cigar and make it travel wherever she wants in the air. The change from a brief, strenuous lift to controlled flight marks the power’s development from a startling impulse into a skill she can command. The cigar is no longer merely a test object; its repeated use measures the progress on which Matilda’s plan depends.

Use and Bodily Experience

Matilda’s later use of the power in the classroom makes its effects consequential beyond her private practice. As the chalk lifts and writes, Matilda remains sitting motionless behind her desk. She feels the energy gather behind her eyes and flow through her head; her eyes grow hotter than before, and something seems to shoot from them and raise the chalk. The movement feels so easy that she feels she has scarcely done anything. The contrast with the effort required to lift the cigar shows how far her control has advanced.

The ability is therefore presented through Matilda’s physical sensations as well as through visible movement. Heat, gathered force and the feeling of energy passing through her head accompany the objects’ motion. During her first success, that bodily experience is pleasurable and gives her a sense of power; during the classroom act, the same familiar process reaches a new intensity. The narrative links an inward sensation that only Matilda can report to outward effects that other people can witness.

Loss and Explanation

A few weeks later, while having tea with Juffrouw Engel, Matilda says she has tried to move something with her eyes for fun and could not. She felt no heat behind her eyes and could not produce any movement; she believes the power is gone altogether. The failure is defined not just by the object remaining still but by the absence of the bodily sensation that previously accompanied her attempts.

Juffrouw Engel offers a theory rather than a certainty. When Matilda was in her class, she suggests, Matilda had too little to occupy or challenge her enormous mind. Frustrated intellectual energy accumulated and, by some unexplained means, could be released through her eyes to move things. Now Matilda is in the highest class, learning alongside children twice her age. Her mind is finally working hard, and that mental energy is being used in class instead. Juffrouw Engel explicitly presents this as conjecture, not established fact.

Matilda is glad the power has disappeared; she would not want to go through life as a kind of wonder-worker. Juffrouw Engel, meanwhile, says she can scarcely believe Matilda managed what she did. The ending thus makes the power temporary without diminishing what it enabled: Matilda trained it, used it as part of her effort to help Juffrouw Engel, and then welcomed its loss. Its disappearance also connects the extraordinary ability to a change in Matilda’s ordinary intellectual circumstances: once her mind has enough work to do, the strange force no longer has to find an outlet through her eyes.