Watho is a powerful and enigmatic witch who serves as the instigator of the novel’s central experiment. Driven by an obsessive desire to gain ultimate knowledge, she devises a radical plan to shape two children from birth by tightly controlling their environments — one to embody perpetual daylight and the other perpetual night. To accomplish this, she lures two pregnant women to her castle under false pretenses and then manipulates their births and upbringing.

Watho raises the boy, whom she names Photogen, in sunlit splendor, ensuring he knows only light and strength, while the girl named Nycteris is confined to a dark interior chamber, with only a dim lamp for illumination. Her intellectual ambition and willingness to treat human lives as objects of study transforms her into a figure who is not naturally evil, but becomes cruel and manipulative — described in the text as having "a wolf in her mind" that has hardened her heart and warped her nature.

As the story progresses, Watho becomes increasingly frustrated when her experiment does not unfold as she intended, particularly when Photogen and Nycteris begin to defy her imposed limitations and meet each other for the first time, eventually falling in love. Ultimately, her obsessive control and cruelty lead to her undoing when the two reject her manipulation and attempt to escape her castle, prompting her to undergo a ritualistic transformation into a massive red werewolf. In an ironic fate, Watho is symbolically defeated as Photogen shoots her dead with one of his arrows, and her human remains are consumed by the beasts of the field.

* The Day Boy and the Night Girl (1880)

*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Boy_and_the_Night_Girl Wikipedia]

Category:Literary Characters
Category:Villains
Category:George McDonald - Creator
Category:1880 Debuts
Category:Female Characters
Category:Female Villains
Category:Surname Unknown
Category:Magic Characters
Category:Witch Characters
Category:Scientist Characters
Category:Shape-Shifting Characters
Category:Werewolf Characters
Category:Red Themed Characters
Category:Dead Characters
Category:Fairytale Fantasy Characters