I happened to read Howl's Moving Castle (by Diana Wynne Jones) and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (by Roald Dahl) back-to-back and it got me thinking about the shared theme of instantaneous aging / de-aging by magic (a charm, a pill, etc.)
In Howl's Moving Castle, a character's body is suddenly turned into the body of an elderly person, by means of a spell, but she retains her young mind and memories. It's only her body that is changed. But in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a character is turned into an impossibly ancient person (300+ years old) with a magic substance, and this transformation leads to not only a very old body, but also an altered mind and memories as well, so that this person starts to recall personally living through events that occurred 300 years ago! (When the magic is reversed, she loses these false memories instantaneously.)
My first thought in the latter case was that the memory-modification in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator violates traditional "rules" of body transfiguration in children's stories. The charm/magic pill can can cause physical changes, but how can it implant false memories as well? Does it mean that this magic is actually tampering with past timelines and inserting the character into the past in times/places where the character never existed to begin with (this would open a whole can of worms)? In Harry Potter for instance, is it ever suggested that the past memories of a transfigured person (e.g. ferret Draco) or a magically-aged person (e.g. the Weasley twins) would be temporarily altered? I think not! I can certainly think of examples where time travel itself causes a character to go back in time and then age from there into the present day (like being taken by the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who). In the Narnia books, the children age to adulthood in Narnia (where time travels faster than in our world), then return to our world where their bodies instantaneously de-age and they find no time has passed since they went to Narnia. But the de-aged children still retain their adulthood memories from Narnia. I cannot think of any examples like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator where magical aging / de-aging is simultaneously accompanied by memory modification.
I know it's all fantasy and there aren't strict "rules" about this, but I was hoping that people who are more knowledgeable about children's fantasy writing, especially other examples of magical aging/de-aging, could weigh in on this. I'm curious if there are similar examples in other books which might point to a trend regarding body aging with or without false memory addition or real memory removal!
by milly_toons