Character Clues
Character Analysis
Actions
One of the big questions of Howl's Moving Castle is how you should judge character in the first place. How can any of us know what another person is really like? So none of the characterization tools that the novel uses are completely reliable, and it is up to us to figure out what we believe about each figure in the novel. For example, we know that Howl makes Sophie go to the King's Palace to badmouth Howl so that the King will be disgusted by Howl's cowardly behavior and refuse to hire him as Royal Magician.
In fact, Sophie's act of badmouthing the King actually convinces him that Howl must be out of other options, so if the King insists that he become Royal Magician, Howl will have no choice but to say yes. By sending Sophie to the Palace, Howl actually guarantees that he'll be hired as Royal Magician, even though he claims not to want the job.
And later on we find out that Howl knew what effect Sophie's badmouthing would have on the King, and he asked her to go anyway. Howl wanted to be forced into becoming Royal Magician. Howl explains to Sophie that he arranged this whole performance to help him to rescue Prince Justin: "I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!" (21.59).
So if we were to judge Howl solely based on the way that he gets Sophie to run him down to the King, we might think he's a coward dodging his responsibility to help find Prince Justin. But it turns out that Howl's initial actions have a deeper purpose behind them: he wants to help the King, but he also believes that he is a coward. So he comes up with this plan to have the King force him to help, so that he can't wriggle out because facing the Witch of the Waste is too frightening.
By the end we discover that Howl's actions were heroic all along—but we have to get through about eight chapters before we find out the true meaning of his behavior. What's the lesson here? Actions do matter in Howl's Moving Castle, but you can't judge the characters based on what they do too quickly, since sometimes their behavior has surprising explanations that we may not get right off the bat.
Speech and Dialogue
Speech and Dialogue—like actions—is a fairly hit-or-miss way of getting to know the characters in Howl's Moving Castle. Oh sure they all talk a lot—especially Sophie—but they also lie, both to others and to themselves. It's up to us to figure out the truth of their characters by reading between the lines of their conversations and paying attention to clues throughout the novel about each character's sincerity.
For example, when Howl sends Sophie to see his tutor Mrs. Pentstemmon in Kingsbury, he tells Sophie that he wants her to get used to grand people before she meets the King. Mrs. Pentstemmon says very seriously to Sophie that, "We are two old ladies who both had a hand in forming [Howl. Howl is], one might say, our joint creation" (12.31). You might think from this heavy announcement that Mrs. Pentstemmon really does regard Sophie as Howl's mother, in a position of responsibility over Howl.
However, while Mrs. Pentstemmon might genuinely hope that Sophie can help to break Howl's contract with Calcifer, we find out later that she doesn't believe that Sophie is Howl's mother. In fact, Howl later tells Sophie that he brought her to Mrs. Pentstemmon not for his own sake, but to see if his old tutor could lift Sophie's curse: "I took you to Mrs. Pentstemmon, hoping she could do something, but she evidently couldn't" (19.84).
Sophie's conversation with Mrs. Pentstemmon has a lot of relevant content—especially since Mrs. Pentstemmon tells Sophie about her magical gift of talking the life into things—but we still have to take their conversation with a grain of salt since Mrs. Pentstemmon is talking to Sophie out of well-meaning but false pretenses. One thing we do believe absolutely about Mrs. Pentstemmon after reading this scene is that she is a firm, imposing, grand old woman. We're sad that the Witch of the Waste brought her down right after Sophie had a chance to meet her.
Physical Appearances
Hoo boy—considering the number of crazy curses floating around this novel, we don't think that you'll be shocked to find out that we are going to warn you against believing in physical appearances as an accurate mode of characterization in Howl's Moving Castle. But, you may well ask, if you can't trust appearances to tell you anything about a character in this novel, why are we listing this as a characterization tool?
Good question, Shmoopster. And here's our answer: We think that appearances are so deceptive in this book that they become active invitations to figure out more about who the character is underneath. So for example, when Martha first appears to Sophie wearing her magical Lettie disguise, she explains:
And this way gives me time to wait and see if the person I want likes me for being me. The spell's going to wear off gradually, and I shall get more and more like myself, you see. (2.12)
In other words, Martha's changed appearance is a kind of test to her future husband: if he falls for her Lettie-like appearance and then loses interest as she grows to look more and more like Martha, then he's not the guy for her. Michael passes this test with flying colors: even once he's seen the real, original Lettie at Mrs. Fairfax's, he says, "The niece in Upper Folding isn't as pretty as my Lettie" (9.5). Michael may not know that "his Lettie" is actually called Martha, but he does know that he loves her best of all, no matter what she looks like.
There are tons of other examples of this kind of character judgment happening in spite of physical appearances rather than because of them. So Howl falls in love with Sophie before he knows for sure what she looks like as an uncursed woman; Lettie and the dog-man have a vibe going before she finds out that he is really the Wizard Suliman; and—in a less positive example—we know that there is something wrong with the Witch of the Waste because she tries hard to maintain a youthful mask for herself, but there is something off: "The lady's face was carefully beautiful. The chestnut-brown hair made her seem young, but …" (2.41).
Appearances are so obviously deceptive in this book that they become a negative tool of characterization. We quickly learn not to be fooled by how people look, which makes us more alert to clues like speech and action which may give us a better sense of what these characters are like underneath the surface.