The darker side of Peter Rabbit
AS A boy, I never had much regard for the story books written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter in the first decades of the 20th century.
Her watercolours were treacly and her tales too simple-minded and rustic. I lived in a world of plastic and plenitude; What use did I have for wayward rabbits, riddling squirrels and foppish frogs? I preferred the brighter and bolder books of Doctor Seuss, whose humour was sharper to my ear, satirising the fragility, chaos and absurdity just under the surface of daily life.
I have long since changed my mind.
A smart and compelling exhibition, Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, at New York’s Morgan Library, paints her as a multidimensional talent. It surveys her work as an artist and author of children’s books, beginning with the 1902 release of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But it also covers the larger trajectory of her life, from her privileged middle-class childhood in London to her later years as a farmer, preservationist and advocate for the landscape she loved best, the Lake District of England.
That larger perspective helps clarify the peculiar mix of charm and unsentimental menace in her work, a sense that there are worlds not contiguous with our own, subject to friction and conflict when they come into contact. That friction can be potentially deadly, whether it is a rabbit stuck in garden netting or tempting fate from a farmer’s gun (at the cost of its whiskers and tail). It can also be comic, and often, it is hard to tell where the comedy levels off and the potential tragedy begins.
Consider an admonition to avoid the garden of Mr Mcgregor delivered to Peter and his siblings in the opening pages of Peter Rabbit: “Your father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by Mrs Mcgregor.” And then we see, like one of the guests at the banquet of Titus Andronicus, Mr Mcgregor with his knife and fork poised over a steaming, rabbit-sized pie.
The understatement “father had an accident” suggests this is a comic moment, as does the sceptical look on the farmer’s face and the reference to Shakespeare. But for the rabbits, it’s a dark memory of trauma and loss. So, too, in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck (1908), a scene in which a naive and attractive young fowl is seduced into the clutches of a wily fox seems comic, yet it is gendered to feel like the set-up for rape.
The menace in Potter’s work feels different than the usual dark allegories in classic fairy tales. Part of the distinction lies in Potter’s drawings, which are never incidental or merely illustrations of the text. Potter’s storybook illustrations were informed by her deep observation of the natural world. Well before she invented Peter Rabbit – in a private 1893 letter sent to the 5-year-old son of her former governess
– Potter was making detailed and meticulous drawings of plants, animals and mushrooms. By the late 1880s, she had evolved into a sophisticated amateur mycologist, and in 1897, one of her scientific papers was read at the Linnaean Society in London (read by a man, because women were not allowed to present their own work).
The primary difference between the animal drawings she made before her literary career and the illustrations for her children’s books is the addition of sharper contour lines, as if going over a shaded water colour with a little ink clarifies the transition from the real world to children’s fantasy. That roughing in of a few sharper edges parallels the addition of Victorian moralism to the animal world. Her rabbits, kittens, mice and squirrels are anthropomorphised, but there is a ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest ethos always in the background, creating a surreal fusion of quaint, cosy English domesticity and stern, Darwinian rigour.
Some might say that is the definition of England at the height of its empire: well-mannered, gracious and comfortable for those at the apex; brutal for everyone below. And if you want to read Potter that way, there’s
plenty of ammunition.
The impertinent Squirrel Nutkin, who plagues a taciturn old owl with incessant riddles and rhymes, doesn’t know his place in the natural hierarchy. His punishment: he loses not only his tail but apparently his ability to speak. Among the prerogatives of power is policing the right to be heard and communicate in our preferred language.
And then there’s the life of privilege that Potter enjoyed. Her discovery of the natural world came, in part, during long holidays in the countryside, including weeks in the spring when her London house was cleaned.
The wealth she gained from writing children’s books – and selling Potter merchandise including board games, dolls and figurines – enabled her to buy vast tracts of farmland in the Lake District, where she did what wealthy city folk generally do in the country: create a fantasy of rugged domesticity, with a mix of rustic furniture, rare antiques and art.
She aligned her identity with the people she found there, joining what William Wordsworth called, a “perfect republic of shepherds”. She tended vast herds of sheep, and imagined that her family’s mercantile bloodline was
hearty and resilient, just like her ewes.
If this caricature of her life and work annoys you, as it does me, how do we redeem Potter sufficiently to indulge the charms of her palm-sized books?
For me, the revelation was roadkill, the small, furry carcasses of dead animals one finds alongside almost any highway built through fields, forest or farmland. I have at least once contributed to the slaughter, and it was an agonising experience. You realise the cost and toll your existence takes upon the world, a world that never asked to intersect with yours. Human
beings crash through nature, break it apart and leave it in ruins, just to make supper by 6pm.
Your only hope of keeping the agony of the realisation at bay is to endeavour to be gentler and better in the tiny scope of things under your control.
The literary critic Edward Said argued that many of the great novels of the 18th and 19th centuries were a symptom of imperialism, and the books of Beatrix Potter may well extend that discourse to children. But they are more than that. They enact a decency independent of their larger, historical implications.
If overthinking kids’ books annoys you, as it does me, one final thought: as part of the exhibition, the designers have created a kind of window seat to mimic the interior of a home that might resemble one Potter lived in. Sitting in it when I visited was a boy, about 10 or 12 years old, reading The Tale of Ginger and Pickles (1909), which tells of two predatory creatures, a tomcat and a terrier, who operate a shop frequented by their natural prey, rabbits and mice. The shopkeepers, salivating, struggle to focus on business: “It would never do to eat our own customers,” says Pickles the terrier.
If the boy had a cellphone, he didn’t look at it once. |