the thing about mr. hatter is that he is a black hole of a character. we know NOTHING about him except that he was proud of his daughters and sent them to a prestigious school, and went heavily into debt for it. we don’t know how he treated his daughters, or if he paid them any attention for anything other than scholastic achievement, or if he had an obvious favorite child; all we know about mr. hatter is how his death affected his family. and I think the lack of personal information on mr. hatter is a choice that diana made on purpose.
because without telling us that mr. hatter was a bad father or a unrelentingly strict man, without including a single scene where he shouts at his daughters or acts coldly to his young - very young - new wife, she leaves space for us to slowly realize what is not so obvious, what sophie herself does not recognize or understand about her family: that none of the hatters truly know each other, only the roles they have played for so long.
the death of a beloved and loving father would have been deeply grieved. fanny would have been inconsolable. sophie would be shedding green silme, so to speak, left and right. lettie would have taken to her bed. martha would be sobbing in her friends’ arms.
instead, what we see in the aftermath of mr. hatter’s death is this: fanny goes about her business, briskly gets each of her daughters settled in a trade, and then wipes her hands clean of the hat shop and marries agains, within three months of her husband’s death. lettie is full of anger and rebellion and runs away from her apprenticeship; martha blames fanny for all her problems - and lettie and sophie’s too - and runs away from her apprenticeship.
and sophie.
never says a word about her father once he dies. does not miss him. does not think about him, not ever. only regrets leaving her prestigious school. and goes into a sharp depression that has nothing to do with losing a beloved family member and everything to do with seeing a promising future that she’d worked so hard for taken away.
this was not a happy family when mr. hatter was alive. diana never tells us so, but you can tell from clues she sprinkles in throughout the story that mr. hatter was not a kind or even particularly moral man.
the most glaringly obvious sign of dysfunction in the hatter family, of course, is that immediately after his wife died, mr. hatter married fanny, his youngest shop assistant, who very soon afterward gave birth to the youngest hatter daughter: the implication being that he had been having an affair before mrs hatter died, and that he carried on with fanny, who was probably no older than sophie herself when she entered that hat trade, who was no position to tell him no and had few choices she could make for herself.
there is sophie’s intense perfectionism and dedication to the hat trade despite hating it, a sign that mr. hatter probably demanded perfection and obediance from his daughters.; she probably worked equally hard to achieve good grades and accolates at school. notably, neither martha nor lettie regret leaving their school - but neither of them seem to have internalized perfectionism to sophie’s degree.
there are mentions of sophie frequently acting as a caregiver to martha and lettie; she has become a partent-figure towards her sisters and even fanny, who is not much older than she is. and it’s clear that sophie has deeply internalized that sense of parentification and duty - she stays late at the hat shop, well after the other employees leave - and can’t force herself to abandon the hat shop until she becomes an old woman, because she believes fanny needs her to keep working. sophie so deeply believes herself as worthless unless she is serving others that she becomes a housecleaner in the very first place she finds, and then spends the entire book scrubbing howl’s floors and sweeping his rafters, keeping herself so busy that she never has a chance to wonder why she thinks she is only valuable when she gives every part of herself to others.
this is a family that keeps secrets from each other - lettie and martha plot to subvert fanny’s and mrs fairfax’s plans, sophie runs away from home in disguise because she is afraid of her family seeing her as she truly is - they ALL hide from each other. fanny does not really know martha or lettie or sophie’s true natures, she makes assumptions about what trade each daughter would like to be settled in; sophie herself is shocked to learn a new side to her sisters when they subvert their destiny. and her perception of fanny is shaken through the book: sophie looks at her and is surprised to realize that fanny is still young and pretty and wanted more in life than a hat shop, just like sophie herself, but had done her best for her girls with the resources that she had at the time.
howl’s moving castle doesn’t tell the story of a grieving family who rises above the loss of a beloved patriach - it would be quite a different book if it was. instead, it’s the coming-of-age story of four women who finally have a chance to learn who they truly are, instead of who they thought they were supposed to be.
