Aunt Sponge

"How dare you disagree with us!"

- Aunt Sponge to James

Aunt Sponge is James' aunt, Spiker's sister, and one of the main antagonists from James and the Giant Peach. It is unknown whether Spiker and Sponge are the sisters of James' father or mother.

Background
After the death of James' parents, the two had no choice but to take in James and "raise" him. Instead of caring for him, they force him to do all the work around the house, they had a tendency to beat him when he disagrees with them or backtalk, and almost always make him go into his room without dinner.

Personality
Aunt Sponge is a greedy, selfish, and morbidly fat woman, who is equally cruel and repulsive as her sister Spiker, and presumably the younger of the two. Both she and Spiker are vain, each singing praises of their imagined beauty while they are in fact repulsive, but each usually ends up attacking the other's repulsiveness. Dominated by Spiker, Sponge is apparently a bit more dim-witted and gluttonous, thinking of eating the peach while Spiker seizes the moneymaking opportunities it will bring to make them rich. Sponge attempts to save her own life instead of Spiker's when she notices the giant peach rolling towards her. However, they trip up over each other and both meet the same end.

James and the Giant Peach
In the movie, after James' parents get eaten by a rhinoceros, he is sent to live with his mean aunts, Spiker and Sponge, who adopt him. In the beginning of the film, when James awakens from being asleep in his room, Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge come into his room, and Sponge calls him a lazy little bug, and along with her sister, orders him to get up and get to work. They are both very abusive and treat him like a slave, forcing him to do hard labor and feeding him nothing but fish heads. They also have a terrible hatred of insects and bugs and kill them in a variety of awful ways, and are thus hated by them as well.

Later on in the movie, Aunt Sponge is seen sitting next to Aunt Spiker in a chair and tells her sister that if she takes off both her socks, she'll see her dainty toes, to which Spiker tells Sponge not to forget how much her tummy shows. Later, Sponge notices James reading his travel map to New York City and asks why he isn't working, to which James replies, "I've finished the wood." When she and her sister realize that James plans on leaving, Spiker and Sponge threaten him with beatings and the mysterious rhino if he tries to leave, and Sponge tears up James' travel map. Both aunts then demand James to get back to work.

Sometime later, Spiker and Sponge discover a peach on a withered old tree and watch it grow to immense proportions in a matter of seconds. Spiker and Sponge use the giant peach as an attraction, making lots of money as James watches from the house, not allowed to leave or play with the other children. That night, Spiker and Sponge send James outside to pick up the garbage dropped by their customers.

Later, when James escapes on the giant peach, he is followed by his two persistent aunts all the way to New York, apparently somehow managing to drive their now crushed car under the ocean and reach New York covered in seaweed and crabs, where they try to convince the authorities that James is a liar and that he be released to them. However, James, now no longer afraid of his cruel aunts, stands up to them and reveals the truth about their horrible treatment of him. Unable to believe that James dares to stand up to them, they furiously attack him with firemen's axes until the sudden reappearance of the insects came to James' rescue. James and the bugs then ties them up with Miss Spider's thread, and the beat cop has them taken away on a crane.

After the credits, there's a scene showing an arcade-like game which consists of controlling a rhinoceros to attack replica models of the aunts.

Book
In the book, when the peach gets loose and rolls, it flattens Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, killing them both, and they subsequently do not reappear at the end.

In the 1996 film, they survive and pursue James to New York City in their beat-up car (in the Ice World, James and Miss Spider see a shipwreck with figureheads, having a terrible resemblance of the two aunts). Upon arriving in New York, both are soaked as if they had been driving their car across the seabed. They attempt to kill James but are tied up with Miss Spider's silk and arrested.

Trivia

 * When James and Miss Spider were searching for both Mr. Centipede and a compass, one of the sunken ships had both Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge on the mast for unknown reasons.
 * Aunt Sponge has similarities to Lady Tremaine, as both of them force the protagonists of their respective films to work like slaves.
 * Coincidentally, Sponge and Spiker also resemble Belle's sisters, in particular the fat and lean one, respectively.
 * Sponge's name is most likely derived from the slang word "Sponge", meaning to absorb a lot of wealth without actually earning it.