Veruca Salt
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- This article is about the fictional character. For the rock group, see Veruca Salt (band).
Veruca Salt is a fictional character from the Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the subsequent film adaptations.
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[edit] Background
Veruca is the only, and very spoiled, daughter of a wealthy nut magnate who regularly capitulates to his daughter's copious demands. She is the second of the five children to score one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets, even though she never bothered to actually search for it herself and instead relied on outside help to obtain the ticket. She becomes the third to be expelled from the tour of Wonka's chocolate factory due to dissension. After her (and her parents') departure from the tour, her parents become far less lenient and more strict, finally seeing the error of their immoral parenting.
[edit] Veruca in the novel
Veruca, the daughter of Henry and Angina Salt, is described in the novel as having long blonde hair with a bow perched on top. She is dressed in a frilly pink and purple tutu-like dress with pink gloves and red shoes, and wears a mink coat. She regularly and frequently exerts petulant behavior in order to get what she wants, and even her parents are not immune to her outbursts. When Veruca demands that she must have a Golden Ticket, her father buys numerous cases of Wonka Bars, and orders his factory workers to put aside their regular duties of peanut-shelling and unwrap the bars. The process lasts three days, all of which Veruca spends complaining that she doesn't have her ticket. When the ticket is finally found, Veruca is "all smiles again." Her father later confesses to Wonka that he knows his daughter is "a bit of a frump," yet says that it's no reason for his daughter to be "burned to a crisp," on grounds that he and his wife love their daughter very much.
[edit] Veruca in the 1971 film
Salt in Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory
In the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca hails from England (her nationality was never determined in the novel), and her parents are renamed Henry and Henrietta. She complains about her father's staff's inability to find the Golden Ticket, and forgoes school until the ticket is found. He pleads with her to give him time, saying that he can't make the staff work any faster because they were already searching round the clock for five days straight. Veruca bellows in response, "Make them work nights!" In order to expedite the process, Mr. Salt offers a pay raise to the first employee who finds the ticket.
Veruca wants to be the first to enter while waiting with the tour group outside Wonka's factory, during which she is wearing one of her personal collection of four mink coats. She is obnoxious and aggressive, as depicted in the novel, in addition to resorting to threats and even physical violence. She shoves, pushes, and hits her father, and does likewise to Violet Beauregarde while both girls are descending the Chocolate Room stairs. This incident aside, she is not completely indifferent, though not entirely amiable, to the other children; she confides to Charlie, "He [Wonka] is absolutely bonkers!" and expresses concern over Violet and Augustus Gloop's separate punishments for disobeying Wonka's orders during the tour.
Julie Dawn Cole portrayed Veruca in the film. The song "I Want it Now" was recorded on Cole's thirteenth birthday, and Veruca's trashing of the Golden Egg Room required a total of thirty-six takes.
[edit] Veruca in the 2005 film
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
In the 2005 adaptation, Veruca (played by Julia Winter) resides in a palatial mansion in Buckinghamshire. Her repugnant personality is still intact, but it is expressed in a cold and direct manner rather than whiny and loud. Only when she is denied something does the overly spoiled Veruca completely lose her cool.
As in the 1971 version, Veruca is not particularly nasty to her mother, who sips martinis in lieu of reacting to her daughter's familiar outbursts. Her primary parental figure and factory tour chaperone is once again her father (now renamed Rupert). Even when her parents satisfy her incessant desires, Veruca lacks any sense of gratitude in return. When Mr. Salt proudly presents to her the long-awaited Golden Ticket that took three days for his staff to find, her first response is, "Daddy, I want another pony." Along with Mike Teavee, Veruca never actually consumed any Wonka Bars during the ticket search.
During the tour, Veruca is the first to spot the Oompa Loompas when the group visits the Chocolate Room. She and Violet pretend to become friends, though both couldn't care less about the other. After Violet is punished for chewing a prototype gum against Wonka's orders and consequently transformed into a giant blueberry, Mrs. Beauregarde wonders what she'll do with a blueberry for a daughter. Veruca snidely replies, "You could put her in a county fair."
Veruca's greed finally gets the best of her when she is penalized for infiltrating Wonka's Nut Sorting Room by getting knocked down a garbage chute along with Mr. Salt, who crossly glares at her when they later leave the factory covered in large amounts of refuse. Her final demand, "Daddy, I want a flying glass elevator," falls on deaf ears. Instead of catering to his spoiled daughter, he scolds Veruca by sternly saying the only thing she will be getting that day "is a bath, and that's final."
Earlier in the film, Veruca cuts in front of Wonka to introduce herself as he leads the tour group through the factory entrance, and Wonka replies, "I always thought a verruca is a wart you get on the bottom of your foot." Indeed, the term verruca plantaris is Latin for "plantar wart," and is a common British English phrase. Dahl claimed that "Veruca Salt" was the name of a wart medication he once had in his medicine cabinet.
[edit] Veruca's Endgame
In the novel, Veruca's comeuppance takes place in Wonka's Nut Sorting Room, which is occupied by worker squirrels. After being denied a squirrel by both Wonka and her mother, Veruca brazenly enters the premises and attempts to take a squirrel anyway. She is immediately engulfed by the creatures, pinned to the floor, rejected as a "bad nut," and hauled into the garbage chute. Both her parents quickly suffer the same fate afterwards.
Her predicament is similar in the 2005 version, minus her mother; the Oompa Loompas instead drop a painting of Mrs. Salt into the chute in order to emphasize that Veruca's parents have spoiled her rotten. Mr. Salt, hovering over the chute opening in a vain attempt to spot his daughter, is then knocked in from behind. Both Veruca and Mr. Salt are spared immolation along with three weeks' worth of trash on the weekly burning day only because the incinerator is broken. They are later seen departing the factory unharmed yet covered in garbage, during which Mr. Salt flatly refuses Veruca's demand for a glass elevator and replies that she will be getting a bath instead.
In the 1971 movie, the squirrels are substituted by geese sorting Golden Eggs. Wonka denies Veruca one of the birds, after which she sings her musical solo "I Want It Now." After then making a mess of the room, she stands atop the egg-sorting machine, which judges her a "bad egg," and sends her plummeting down the garbage chute en route to the furnace. Mr. Salt reaches down to rescue her but winds up falling in himself. Their aftermath is only mentioned at the end when Wonka assures Charlie that the four bad children will still be their normal terrible selves, albeit a little wiser.
[edit] Veruca Salt song
Veruca's impending doom in the chute is the subject of the novel's poem and the 2005 lyrics, as is the Salts' blame for turning Veruca into a spoiled brat. The 1971 lyrics center on who is to blame for Veruca's avarice, and what can be done to prevent children from suffering a similar fate. In the novel and first film, the song is performed after Veruca and her parents go into the chute. The 2005 version is sung to an upbeat and psychedelic folk-style melody along the lines of Oliver's "Good Morning Starshine," which was quoted by Wonka earlier in the picture. Mr. Salt is pushed into the chute after the song ends.
[edit] External links
- Original Veruca Salt memorabilia from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
- "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Official Oompa-Loompa Songbook - Veruca Salt
- Quotes from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"
- Quotes from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - Veruca Salt
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