Why do Matilda's parents act like they hate her? The movie shows them to be like this Dursleyish family, and it also has this general theme of adults hating children. They seem to like their older son just fine even though the father treats him a bit rough, but they seem to especially hate Matilda. Is it explained why? Is it because she's a girl?
My only reference is the movie, but if this is better explained in the book then a book answer is also appreciated.
It's like this:
Matilda's parents are stupid, narrow minded dweebs. They are incapable of understanding a lot of things, and anything they don't understand they sneer at and look down on.
They don't understand Matilda. She reads books, her parents read only at gun point. She wants to learn, they want to be entertained. She wants good food, they want whatever is easiest to snarf down while watching TV. Her parents are willfully ignorant - and proud of it.
Her parents like her brother because he is the same as they are. They understand him, so they get along better with him.
That's it, really. Her parents' sights are set on getting the most out of the gutter they live in, while Matilda is busy looking over the curb and trying to reach all the beautiful things you can see if you just look up over the dirt.
I've never read the book. I've only seen the movie with Danny DeVito. I don't know if the book explains it at all.
Adults, especially parents, are often horrible in Roald Dahl's books. The parents in Charlie And The Chocolate family are all awful, though usually just by indulging their children too much, causing the children to become terrible people. The Twits don't have children but they're a horrible old couple. George's grandmother is a nasty old trout too. It's just part of Dahl's style. I think he does it to make children find him empathetic, since kids often have to deal with terrible adults in their lives.
It also gives the reader sympathy for Matilda, whose parents are particularly bad. If Matilda was just some gifted genius with telekinetic powers, you might not instantly like her, but if you feel sorry for her downtrodden existence, you root for her to win and get out of that life. Same way Miss Honey is dreadfully poor (margarine back in those days was pretty bad!).
It's all good storytelling, basically, and intended even for young children who don't necessarily get subtlety, just moving on from fairy tales that are very black and white.
There is no specific reason given in the book, but the following quote sums up Mr And Mrs Wormwood's attitude to their daughter:
They had a son called Michael and a daughter called Matilda, and the parents look upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab. A scab is something you have to put up with until the time comes when you can pick it off and flick it away.
Taken from Matilda via Sparknotes.
It's not that they actively hate her specifically, just that she isn't top of their priority list. She is just a small person who happens to share their house, and they'd rather she wasn't there, but they tolerate her. If she wasn't "brilliant" and capable of taking care of herself from an early age (as evidenced in the movie with her ability to make pancakes), then she would have possibly suffered great neglect.
Often in Dahl's children's books, adults despise children but in this case, the parents are simply tolerating something they don't enjoy.
From an out of universe perspective it was because she was an audience surrogate.
To a child the world can see harsh and arbitrary. Adults can seem overly prescriptive, and criticism can seemingly come out of nowhere for reasons that they don't understand.
Having authority figures who are inherently - and obviously - unreasonable invokes a sensation of kinship and an emotional attachment to the lead character in children who feel that they are punished simply for being children or for doing things that children do.
From an in universe perspective, it's because she is essentially honest and innocent. While her family are greedy and see honesty as a sign of weakness. Her father in particular spends his days scamming people (for example, filling car gearboxes with oil and sawdust to stop them from making a noise, or winding back a vehicle's mileage to make it seem newer).
He sees her book smarts as being a waste of time because they won't enable her to do what he does, but he also feels threatened by them, because he spends most of his time dealing with directing people away from problems (misdirection to conceal them) while she is both capable of seeing through his misdirection and putting forth actual solutions to the problems that he is seeking to hide.
He also begrudges the fact that she doesn't contribute to the household, she takes but never gives. At least not things that he sees as being useful.
More so, when she takes he is obliged to give because she is his daughter. He is perfectly OK taking from other people because he sees himself as smarter than they are and more deserving than they are. He tricks people into buying poor quality vehicles so he believes that he is owed what he gets from them, whereas he has to provide for Matilda because she's small and can't provide for herself. He sees this as being the equivalent of stealing from him.
Because it makes a good story. You're right to compare it to Harry Potter, because it's the same device. "How do I make my character instantly sympathetic?" You could have cited Oliver Twist or Horatio Hornblower or a thousand other scamps who overcame their upbringing to make good.
Yanking some heart-strings is a good way to get someone vested in your character. Would you have felt better about her if she'd had everything?
