Plus, inevitably, a short digression on the English and Flemish rabbit.

Hope you like it – and decide to read some Willa Cather! And if you already have, do please post a reply and tell us what you think. Who knows, a conversation may result…

Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck is 100 years old this year and to mark the occasion publisher Frederick Warne has released a special collector’s edition of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck with a shiny gold cover. Potter herself was a practical and forthright woman whose abilities as a farmer and land manager helped invent the English Lake District as it exists today. She favoured conservation, but was also committed to the idea of the countryside as a living and working place.

Now though the most visible aspect of the Potter legacy is soft-focus nostalgia, with an emphasis on a ‘Beatrix Potter experience’ of cuddly talking animals and home decoration. Potter’s stories and the characters she created have become big business and her pretty illustrations have made marketing the brand easy. What’s not to like, after all, about a picture of Peter Rabbit on a tea towel, Jeremy Fisher casting his rod on a scented notelet, or the venerable duck herself recreated as a china figurine? I love the Lake District and I spend as much time there as I can, but this aspect of it drives me crazy.

It is probably inevitable that the Potter industry should be more interested in the nostalgic sheen of her drawings than the stories themselves, because as anyone who has actually read them will know, violence and death are everywhere in the books. They also appear in much more realistic ways than in regular fairytales. So for instance Mr McGregor really does want to put Peter Rabbit in a pie, and it will be a real pie with a real rabbit in it. When Tommy Brock the badger makes off with the Flopsy Bunnies, and plans to eat them, it isn’t a metaphor for something else.

As if the immediate threat of being snuffed out were not enough, Potter’s readers also learn distinctly adult existential lessons about mortality and fertility. The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is a case in point. Jemima is charmed by a ‘foxy-whiskered gentleman’ to attend a dinner party at which she is to be the main course. So far, so much good advice for naive Edwardian girls. But another life lesson comes at the end of the story, when Jemima’s rescuers, the foxhound puppies, eat her eggs before Kep the collie can stop them.

Potter’s own childlessness may well be tied up in Jemima Puddle-Duck’s efforts to raise a family. Having ‘rescued’ her from what they believed was a bad match, Potter’s parents condemned their daughter to a childless future. Looking back at her life as she wrote the book in middle age, perhaps Potter saw herself, like Jemima, as a ‘simpleton’ who had made bad choices. Jemima Puddle-Duck goes on to lay more eggs of course, but only four of them hatch because ‘she had always been a bad sitter’.

It is a shame that the softer side of Beatrix Potter’s stories has come to dominate the landscape around her reputation. For me one of the most attractive things about her books is their balance of vulnerable fluffy bunny rabbits and hungry foxes. Realism is part of their charm and many of the stories are explicit about the animals’ human qualities being a fantasy. Mrs. Tiggywinkle is nothing more than a hedgehog at the end of her tale and in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter loses his clothes and becomes just another frightened animal on the run.

Whether or not the Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is a rueful reflection by Potter on her own life, it is certainly a tough and disturbing story that is only partially softened by the gentle prettiness of the illustrations. Of course it is important that children should realise that not everyone has their best interests at heart. But it is the casual violence of the eaten eggs, and Kep’s stoic indifference as Jemima is ‘escorted home in tears’, that makes this story so wonderful and so chilling. Children can take it, even if the Potter industry would rather not think about it.

by Chris Routledge

We are celebrating National Rabbit Week here at The Reader and in honour of the occasion our featured poem this morning is Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Milestone by the Rabbit Burrow’, which is actually written from the point of view of a rabbit. Without wishing to disparage the whole tribe of lagomorpha, rabbits have simple worries. Still, as long as gin is allowed, who wouldn’t want to live ‘where no gins are’?

The Milestone by the Rabbit-Burrow

(On Yell’Ham Hill)

In my loamy nook
As I dig my hole
I observe men look
At a stone, and sigh
As they pass it by
To some far goal.

Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.

Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?

–By Thomas Hardy

Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

Eight thirty this morning found me at the vet’s with a frantic dog who was desperately trying to be somewhere else. During a brief lull in between his barking and tugging I saw a notice on the wall announcing that next week is, believe it or not, National Rabbit Week. Later, after the dog and I had had our shots–he of anti inflammatory stuff and me espresso–I started to think about rabbits in literature.

Rabbits have done what rabbits do best all over children’s literature. There are dozens of them: Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Rabbit ( plus friends and relations), Miffy, Velveteen Rabbit, Brer Rabbit and so on. They appear fairly frequently in crossover literature too: Bigwig, Hazel and of course the White Rabbit. But apart from an excellent, if grim, short story called ‘The Little Pet’ by Dan Jacobson, I just can’t think of an adult book featuring rabbits. Dogs, cats, horses by the score but adult literature, as far as I know, is a rabbit free zone. Surely there is at least one rabbit reference somewhere in Shakespeare?

There is John Updike’s Rabbit of course, but that is cheating.  So what about poetical rabbits?  I am drawing a bunny blank here as well. I can only come up with Alan Brownjohn’s ‘Going to See the Rabbit’ which is really a poem for children but has an adult theme. And I think there is something by D.H. Lawrence, but it is not in any of my anthologies.

The dog is much better and fast asleep beside me dreaming, no doubt, of racing up Watership Down so I leave you to ponder with this quotation from John Steinbeck no less:
‘Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen’.

__

By Angela Macmillan

Powered by ScribeFire.