Cattery Spunge (Nanny): The Unlikely Keeper of Truths

Overview

Cattery Spunge, called simply Nanny, is the Thropp family governess in Gregory Maguire’s Elphie (2025). Hired to mind the children, she instead becomes an accidental archivist of secrets. Born in a cow bier to a milkmaid and a shepherd, she rises above rural poverty through a keen eye and preternatural patience. Nanny is a walking compendium of “rural wives’ wit” and “stale bromides,” but her sharp observational skills make her one of the few adults who consistently tells Elphie a version of the truth. Her presence spans decades—from Elphie’s infancy in the Quadling marshlands to the girl’s departure for Shiz University—and her cautious support shapes Elphie’s self-understanding in ways no other character matches.

Plot Role

Nanny functions as the family’s institutional memory and the quiet subverter of its polite fictions. She is the first to lie directly on the adults’ behalf (passing off a human cry as a morning dove in Chapter 3), yet as the story progresses she becomes the one who dismantles the great lie her employers maintain: that the world is simpler and kinder than it is. She is rarely the focus of a scene, but she is the connective tissue between Elphie and the hidden realities of Animals, the true nature of her parents’ marriage, and the limits of her father’s religion. While Frex preaches unionist austerity and Melena fades into bitterness, Nanny looks after the practicalities—keeping the children fed, mediating squabbles, and, crucially, planting the seeds of independent thought in Elphaba.

Her role is never heroic in the traditional sense. She does not wield magic or command armies, but she wields something equally powerful: information and the willingness to share it when she deems the child ready. She is indispensable not because she is beloved—Elphie often finds her grating—but because she is the only adult who is consistently present and, eventually, consistently honest.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Nanny’s motivations are pragmatic. She would rather be in Munchkinland with a proper cup of tea, but she stays out of a combination of duty, inertia, and a growing, unspoken fondness for Elphie. Her actions reveal a character who values survival and gradual enlightenment over open rebellion. When Elphie, at around thirteen, confronts her father about the existence of talking Animals and receives a condescending dismissal, Nanny does not leap to her defense in Frex’s presence. Instead, later, in private, she acknowledges the truth. “Of course there are talking Animals. I can’t believe you need to be told,” she says, and then proceeds to fill in the gaps that Frex and Melena have left. This mixture of public caution and private candor defines her. She will not openly challenge her employer, but she will arm the green girl with the tools to think for herself.

Nanny’s own physical limitations mirror her constrained position. She suffers from “a kind of mildew in the bones,” a rheumatism that slows her movements and makes her complain. The narrative notes that this affliction will lift once she leaves the swamp, but she does not know that yet; she believes she is old, and Elphie believes it too. That circumstance subtly colours her decisions: she cannot afford to be thrown out, so she picks her battles. Yet she does pick them. She gives Elphie explicit permission to investigate the Dwarf Bears without her father’s knowledge, ordering her not to bring Nessa or Shell but to “come back and gossip to me about it.” In that moment Nanny transforms from a mere domestic into a quiet conspirator in Elphie’s awakening.

Chronological Arc

Nanny first appears in the novel’s opening moments, sitting near the infant Elphie on a blanket as war drums sound. She tries to pull the child closer, but Elphie resists touch. From the start, she is portrayed as a background noise—her voice “caws and grates like a dawn scissorjay.” During the family’s itinerant missionary years in Quadling Country, Nanny endures the discomforts and keeps the children in line. When Melena dies (offscreen), Nanny’s position solidifies; she becomes the only maternal figure left, yet she refuses to take on the domestic labour of cooking, insisting she was hired to raise children, not feed them.

As Elphie grows older, Nanny shifts from rule-enforcer to reluctant mentor. In Ovvels, she negotiates with Frex for Elphie’s education, securing the bizarre compromise of lessons overheard from outside a window. She later helps block Nessa’s attendance at first, prioritizing Elphie’s advancement—a telling act of favouritism. When the family’s financial constraints worsen, Nanny stays despite having every reason to leave. Her arc closes with Elphie’s departure for Shiz, where “Nanny weeps.” The governess who entered as a functional hire becomes the one person who has witnessed the whole arc of Elphie’s marginalised childhood and, in her own limited way, has fought to give the girl a chance.

Relationships

With Elphie: The relationship is not warm. Nanny is “cloying” to the touch-averse child, and Elphie finds her voice grating. Yet Nanny is the adult to whom Elphie most openly voices her frustrations, and Nanny’s responses—though sometimes impatient—consistently offer validation. She tells the teenager, “You always had a sly way of seeing out of the corner of your eye,” a remark that affirms Elphie’s intuition rather than dismissing it. Nanny never loves Elphie in a sentimental fashion, but she respects her intelligence, and that respect is the foundation of their bond.

With Frex: Nanny and Frex exist in a “fragile contract.” She openly appeals to the goddess Lurline during his unionist sermons “to annoy him,” and she grumbles that the Unnamed God should choose a better menu. Frex tolerates her because he cannot do without her; she tolerates him because she has nowhere better to go. She sees through his self-deceptions—noting that his “wandering eye” never went far, unlike Melena’s—but she does not directly confront him. Her rebellion is always oblique, a needle threaded silently in the corner.

With Melena: Nanny says little about the mistress directly, but her few remarks cut deep. In a late scene she muses, “Though I do wonder how Nessie came to fall in the pond in the first place,” implying a suspicion that the fall may not have been accidental. She later tells Elphie that Melena had “a wandering kirtle,” meaning loose sexual morals, and she implies that Frex knows more than he says. Nanny is the only person who treats Melena’s memory not as a saint or a cipher but as a complicated, flawed woman.

With the other children: Nanny is protective of Shell, citing his increasing misbehavior as a reason she cannot spare time for Nessa’s education. She favours Elphie, though not openly, and she handles Nessa with a kind of distant pragmatism. The balancing act is a survival tactic: she attaches herself most firmly to the child who seems to need her least and who will, in the long run, have the greatest chance of escaping the family’s gravity.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Laïng about the cry (Chapter 3). On the surface, this small lie keeps the morning calm; on a deeper level, it establishes Nanny’s complicity in the adult world’s denial of danger. The consequence is the reinforcement of Elphie’s isolation: no one tells the child the truth about the peril around her.
Revealing the truth about Animals (Chapter 31). Defying Frex’s prohibition, Nanny tells Elphie the world is full of sentient non-humans and that her father has deliberately hidden this reality. This decision opens Elphie’s eyes and sets her on a path of questioning every authority in her life—including, eventually, Nanny herself.
Negotiating education (Chapters 47–48). By arranging Elphie’s eavesdropping at the lodge and then quietly prioritising Elphie’s advancement over Nessa’s, Nanny perpetuates a family hierarchy that favours the green-skinned outcast. The consequence is that Elphie receives the intellectual tools to escape, while Nessa remains more tightly bound.
Sending Elphie to investigate the Bears (Chapter 31). This explicit encouragement of disobedience, combined with the command to report back, makes Nanny an active participant in Elphie’s secret life. It reinforces the theme that truth must often be sought outside sanctioned channels.
Staying with the family. Every time Nanny could leave—after Melena’s death, when the money runs out, when Shell’s chaos worsens—she stays. This persistence is not heroic; it is born of limited options and stubbornness, but it means that Elphie always has one adult who, however imperfectly, sees her.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Nanny embodies the theme of memory and narrative truth. She is the living archive of the family’s half-buried secrets: Turtle Heart’s killing, Melena’s infidelity, Frex’s failures. Because she outlasts Melena and out-stubborn Frex, she becomes the sole repository of the unvarnished story, a counter to the sanitized legends that the Thropps might prefer.

Her cautious support of Elphie also ties into otherness and identity. Nanny does not pretend Elphie is normal; she accepts the greenness as a given and instead focuses on practical strategies for survival. By telling Elphie about Animals, she implicitly connects the child’s own otherness to a larger, hidden community. Nanny’s own marginal status—as a domestic servant, a spinster, a woman with no romantic history—makes her a natural ally for the green girl, even if that alliance is never acknowledged aloud.

The family dysfunction thread runs through Nanny’s entire arc. She is the outsider who sees the cracks most clearly: Frex’s emotional absence, Melena’s resentment, the siblings’ rivalries. Her decision to confide in Elphie rather than in the younger children is a pragmatic judgment about who can best handle the truth and also an act of quiet sabotage against the family myth of piety.

Finally, Nanny’s own small acts of revelation link to the magic and transformation theme not in a supernatural way but in a psychological one. The “magic” she practices is the truth-telling that changes a child’s worldview. Her words transform Elphie’s understanding of the world from a place ordered by her father’s monologues to a messy, dangerous, and far more interesting reality.

Questions and Answers

1. How does Nanny’s handling of the morning cry in Chapter 3 foreshadow her later role as truth-teller?

The lie about the morning dove is Nanny’s first on-page act, and it establishes her as a figure who will default to concealment when safety demands it. But as Elphie matures, Nanny reverses this instinct: she begins to trade concealment for revelation, telling Elphie about Animals, Melena’s affairs, and the family’s deceptions precisely because the child is now old enough to need the truth. The arc from early complicity to later candour is the core of her character.

2. Why does Nanny stay with the Thropp family despite her frequent threats to leave?

The narrative offers both practical and psychological reasons. Practically, she has limited options; she was born poor and has no family of her own to return to. Psychologically, she grows attached to Elphie in a way she probably does not fully admit. Her grumbling about packing it in is a chronic performance of her own powerlessness, but every time she stays, she reasserts her indispensability. By the end, her presence is the one constant in Elphie’s chaotic upbringing.

3. In what way does Nanny’s revelation about talking Animals change Elphie’s trajectory?

Before that conversation, Elphie has been gaslit by her father into doubting her own senses. Nanny’s blunt confirmation that Animals exist—and that her father has been hiding them—is a watershed. It validates Elphie’s experience and teaches her that adults, even pious ones, systematically lie. That lesson becomes the bedrock of her critical worldview at Shiz and beyond, making Nanny’s quiet truth an act of radical permission.

4. How does Nanny’s relationship with Frex illuminate the novel’s critique of institutional authority?

Frex is a religious authority figure, but Nanny sees him as a “one-armed juggler” and a “tin bucket with a hole in it.” She pays lip service to his status while privately appealing to a pagan goddess. This duality exposes the gap between official dogma and lived reality. Nanny’s survival strategy—outward compliance, inner insubordination—mirrors the way the novel suggests that institutional power is often hollow and must be quietly subverted.

5. What is the significance of Nanny’s rheumatism and her belief in her own old age?

The “mildew in the bones” is both a literal affliction and a metaphor for the stunting effect of the family’s environment. Nanny believes she is old and spent, but the narrator explicitly says the condition will lift when she leaves the swamp. She never learns this, and her self-image as an old woman limits her sense of agency. Yet within that limitation, she still finds ways to act powerfully on Elphie’s behalf, demonstrating that even truncated self-knowledge can coexist with meaningful resistance.