Should Wizard Hit Mommy?

Jack tells his daughter Jo a bedtime story about Roger Skunk, a little animal who smells terrible and is therefore excluded from playing with all the other woodland creatures. Crying and alone, Roger Skunk goes to the wise old Owl, who directs him to the Wizard. The Wizard transforms Roger Skunk's smell — for four pennies — into the smell of roses. Now all the other animals want to play with him, and Roger Skunk is happy. However, the story does not end there. Roger Skunk's Mommy smells him and is horrified — she does not want her child to smell of roses. She marches Roger Skunk back to the Wizard and demands that the Wizard restore the original skunk smell. The Wizard (reluctantly) complies. Roger Skunk is back to smelling like a skunk — but the story insists that Mommy was right, and Roger Skunk eventually comes to see it that way too. What Roger Skunk's problem symbolises: 1. Childhood anxiety about social acceptance: Roger Skunk's stink represents anything that makes a child feel different, awkward, or excluded — whether it is a physical characteristic, a social background, or a personal trait. Every child who has felt 'different' can identify with Roger Skunk. 2. The pressure to conform: Roger Skunk's problem is solved only by becoming something he is not — changing himself to fit in. This resonates with childhood social anxiety. 3. The conflict between conformity and identity: The deeper question the story raises — through Jo's protest — is whether changing yourself to be accepted is right, or whether your authentic self (even if it smells) has value.

Jo's reaction is the emotional and thematic centre of the story: Jo's reaction: When Jack tells the story, Jo is outraged when Mommy makes the Wizard restore Roger Skunk's skunk smell. She insists that the Wizard should have 'hit Mommy' for being so cruel and unreasonable. She wants Roger Skunk to keep smelling of roses so that the other animals will keep playing with him. From Jo's perspective: 1. Mommy is the villain: Mommy is interfering with Roger Skunk's happiness. He was lonely, excluded, and sad; the rose smell solved all his problems. Why would his mother take that away? 2. The child's moral logic: Jo sees the world through a simple lens — Roger Skunk was happy; Mommy made him unhappy again. The Wizard should have stood up to Mommy. Her desire for the Wizard to 'hit Mommy' is a child's blunt expression of this moral outrage. What this reveals about the story's central conflict: 1. Children vs. parental authority: Jo represents the child's perspective — immediate happiness, social acceptance, and conformity are paramount. Jack (and through him, the story's Mommy) represents adult authority — the insistence that one's authentic identity matters more than social approval. 2. The story-within-a-story: Jack's insistence on telling the story his way (with Mommy being right) is itself an exercise of parental authority over Jo — mirroring the conflict in the story. 3. The generational tension: Jack is uncomfortable with Jo's challenge to his version of the story. He is also thinking about his own life — his pregnant wife Clare, his domestic discontents. Jo's demand reveals the instinctive resistance children have to parental imposition of values.

John Updike's story operates on multiple levels — it is simultaneously a bedtime story, a meditation on parenthood, and a subtle psychological portrait of Jack: 1. Storytelling as a vehicle for values: • Jack has told this Roger Skunk story many times, and each time the ending is the same — Mommy is right, the wizard restores the skunk smell, and Roger Skunk accepts it. • By controlling the story's ending, Jack is instilling in Jo a value: that parental authority knows best, that one's authentic nature is more important than social approval. • But Jo's resistance — her insistence that the Wizard should hit Mommy — suggests that children are not passive recipients of parental values. They actively interrogate and resist the lessons embedded in stories. 2. The parent's anxiety: • Jack's insistence on his version of the story is driven not just by principle but by anxiety. The story is told against the backdrop of Jack's own domestic situation — his pregnant wife upstairs, his sense of being trapped and dissatisfied. • He is uncomfortable with Jo's challenge, partly because she is right by one moral standard (Roger Skunk was happier with the rose smell), and he cannot easily counter her argument. 3. Whose 'right' is right? • Updike leaves the question genuinely open. From the child's perspective (and from a liberal social perspective), Roger Skunk's rose smell was a net positive. From the parental perspective, authenticity and self-acceptance matter more than social conformity. • The story resists a neat resolution — this is its strength and its point. 4. The limits of parental control: • Jo will not let Jack change the subject; she keeps returning to her objection about Mommy. Children are not entirely controllable, just as stories, once told, take on a life of their own. • The story is a gentle warning to parents: your children will not simply absorb the values you embed in stories — they will think, judge, and push back.