• Swathi Priya. S
• Dr .C. Candace Jessin Graceta

Abstract Matilda is a 1988 children’s novel by British author Roald Dahl, it was published by Jonathan Cape in 1988. The story follows Matilda Wormwood, an intelligent girl with two ignorant parents, who attends a certain school presided over by a harsh headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. The text of Roald Dahl's Matilda serves as an excellent tool for understanding how language, literature, and education can develop a critical awareness of power and social inequality among children. By analysing Roald Dahl's Matilda through the lenses of post-humanism, art, and creative practices, this paper sheds light on how creative acts of resistance can emerge within oppressive spaces as conceptualised by Foucault. Using Michel Foucault's ideas of "disciplinary power", "normalisation", and "the production of docile bodies", this paper discusses the home of the Wormwoods and Crunchem Hall as institutional spaces that exert control over the bodies, intellects, and behaviours of kids. In these spaces, there is a tendency to punish and pathologise individuals who display "difference", such as being intelligent, being sensitive, or having an autonomous decision-making process. An alternate method of resistance has been created by Matilda’s artistic means of creative expression rather than confronting authority directly. As the article demonstrates, in this context, the chalk-off Telekinesis by Matilda can be analysed as artistic concepts expressed within the institutional framework of a classroom that employs power and control. The transformational nature of this artwork changes the physical structure of the institution into a canvas in which Matilda’s body, voice and the chalk utilized in her representation, are and acted upon and through, in ways that allow for the spread of the creative energy of creation across the various individual elements: her physical body, her voice and the architectural elements surrounding her ability to create. The other major creative practice used to build an imaginative, alternative universe, as referenced by Foucault, is reading and storytelling, which facilitates the creation of an imaginative, alternative universe where normalisation does not exist. Further, the public library and Miss Honey’s home have been examined as ethical counter-spaces grounded in care and connectivity to one another, free of power and control. Through this perspective of Matilda, this article illustrates how children’s literature is critical in understanding contemporary artists, power, and resistance as such. Therefore, the analysis of Matilda demonstrates how children can have agency in institutionalised environments.

Posthumanism, Creative Resistance, Foucauldian Space, Children’s Literature, Matilda

"Creative Resistance in Disciplinary Spaces: A Posthuman reading of Art and Power in Roald Dahl's Matilda", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 2, page no.a505-a509, February-2026, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2602070.pdf

"Creative Resistance in Disciplinary Spaces: A Posthuman reading of Art and Power in Roald Dahl's Matilda", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 2, page no. ppa505-a509, February-2026, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2602070.pdf