The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  11. Manlove, Impulse of Fantasy Literature, p. 57.

  12. E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904; London: Puffin Books, 1978), pp. 221 and 223.

  13. Nesbit, Phoenix and the Carpet, pp. 223, 225 and 232.

  14. Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973; New York: Puffin Books, 1995), p. 186.

  15. Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, ed. Sarah Winkle (1906; London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 58.

  16. Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy, in Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 316.

  17. Charles Dickens, A Holiday Romance, in Holiday Romance and Other Writings for Children, ed. Gillian Avery (London: Everyman, 1995), pp. 428–9.

  18. A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928; London: Egmont, 2004), pp. 169, 175, 159 and 176.

  19. Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age (1895; London: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 195.

  20. Eleanor Estes, The Witch Family (1960; San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), p. 220.

  21. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson, Oxford World’s Classics (1726; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 111 and 130.

  22. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962; New York: Dell, 1987), pp. 122, 187 and 188.

  23. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Ballantine, 1995), p. 28.

  24. Pullman, Golden Compass, pp. 33 and 43.

  25. Pullman, Golden Compass, p. 350.

  26. Madeleine L’Engle, ‘Childlike Wonder and the Truths of Science Fiction’, Children’s Literature, 10 (1982), 102–10 (p. 105).

  27. Pullman, Golden Compass, p. 35.

  15 Animal and object stories

  David Rudd

  The association of animal and child in children’s books is so common that it is easy to forget the figurative nature of this alliance – the way we have penned the animals in – whether it be Kermit the Frog, Rupert Bear, Bugs Bunny, the Cat in the Hat, Peter Rabbit or Toad of Toad Hall. In this chapter I want to explore this relationship, showing how it has been used in children’s literature both to support the dominant order, and also to subvert it. There are wider issues to explore too, for the word ‘animal’ has its etymological roots in ‘breath’ and ‘soul’, which link it to that which is ‘animate’, and this is exactly the transformation that writers and illustrators so readily perform, making animals live in all manner of anthropomorphic ways. And not only animals, for other ‘things’ are just as easily animated: from puppets and dolls (Pinocchio, Winnie-the-Pooh, Woody in Toy Story) to more everyday objects such as coins, peg-tops and looking-glasses.

  So, first of all, we need to ask why there is such a close association between animals and children in narratives for children. Perry Nodelman suggests that, in terms of ‘humanized animals’, the association happened ‘more or less by accident’, in so far as Aesop’s fables provided a suitable early example of didactic literature for children, which was then emulated by others.1 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, on the other hand, sees the key association being forged by the Romantics, where the child is linked to nature, existing outside culture and language in some Edenic space.2 But the association is surely far older. Aristotle, for example, in the fourth century BCE, claimed that a child differed little from an animal. Clearly, there is no innate connection, but the persistence of the link seems to arise from the fact that those at the top of the human ladder wish to see themselves as most distant from animals, as civilised, with ‘lesser’ beings automatically coded as closer to nature. Hence it is not only children to whom animals are linked: they are also linked to women, slaves, peasants, the working class, the mad, ethnic minorities, migrants – in fact, to anyone seen as ‘other’. For example, in the nineteenth century the Irish were regularly represented as simian: in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) we are informed that the ‘wild Irish’ who did not listen to St Brandan were ‘changed into gorillas, and gorillas they are until this day’.3

  Associating ‘lesser’ beings with animals, however, is fraught with problems, which can be traced back to two of the earliest forms of animal story: the fable and the folktale. Very broadly, the former tends to be associated with teaching moral lessons, which make far more palatable reading when mediated via animal figures. The folktale, on the other hand, is anything but a didactic form, often undermining traditional figures of authority (as demonstrated in the many animal-hybrid tricksters, such as Anansi the spider or Joel Chandler Harris’ Br’er Rabbit).

  One might, then, trace a line of development from the fable, and later the bestiary, to more modern anthropomorphic animal stories, all of which exhibit an impulse to control behaviour, both human (through the edifying example of animals) and animal (by seeing beasts in human terms, as ours to command). Although this impulse can be traced back to the Old Testament, where God has Adam name the animals, it is most famously consolidated in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Here ‘man’, with his sovereign ego, dependent on his rationality, is seen as superior to all other species; not only that, but animals are viewed simply as machines (‘things’, in fact). However, this attempt by man to distance himself from the rest of creation is always open to challenge. For, in that children are so regularly associated with animals (‘kids’, ‘little beasts’), one can argue that they are thereby given licence to behave so (as not properly human); yet, if this is the case, adult humans are themselves compromised, especially when they seek to use animals as exemplary figures. William Rankin commented on this predicament in A Mirrour of Monsters (1587): ‘A shame it is . . . to humanitie, that brutish beasts, wanting reason, should instruct men’. Its significance, Erica Fudge argues, lies in the implication that ‘it is through the animal that human-ness can be found. This lays bear [sic] the problem. There is no human without an animal present, but the presence of the animal can itself disrupt the status of the human.’4 The unintended ursine interloper amusingly demonstrates, almost like a Freudian slip, just how disruptive animals can be. Penning in the animals is therefore never a simple, straightforward process; rather, it points to the anxieties of writers and illustrators who try to contain and distance them – and, by implication, those with whom the animal is linked: in this case, children.

  Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) provides one of the most famous examples. To create his rural, riverbank, English idyll, he turns away from humans to animals, for, Clayton Hamilton reported him to have said,

  Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature. Thereby he lives wisely, and betters the tradition of mankind. No animal is ever tempted to deny his nature. No animal knows how to tell a lie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is true – and is, therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good.5

  However, in effect, Grahame does no such thing. Rather than the nature of animals, we learn instead about the anxieties of the middle-class Edwardian male: specifically, Grahame’s fear of the ‘other’ in the shape of women and the working-class (or even worse, both together!) – anxieties that are wittily reworked and exposed in Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1981), giving us the others’ perspective, for example the animals whose labour makes Toad’s life of privilege possible.

  Precisely because of the ease with which we can anthropomorphise animals, some authors have tried to represent them more realistically – albeit suggesting an underlying, anthropocentric commonality of feeling and suffering. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), selling a million copies in its first two years and reputedly the most popular children’s animal story ever written, provides a rich example.6 At the literal level, Sewell attacks the then-current cruel treatment of horses, especially the use of the bearing rein, which kept horses’ heads high, making breathing hard, and shortening their lives. However, as Moira Ferguson has demonstrated, Sewell also invokes the discourse of slavery and misogyny. Aside from the protagonist’s name (and elsewhere Black Beauty is re
ferred to as ‘Darkie’), he is born on a ‘plantation’ by ‘our master’s home’, separated from the rest of his family, and broken in. In the hunt scene, runaway slaves could easily be substituted for the pursued hares: ‘One of the huntsmen rode up and whipped off the dogs, who would soon have torn her to pieces. He held her up by the leg, torn and bleeding, and all the gentlemen seemed well pleased.’ Likewise women might find their situation reflected in passages in the book, particularly exhibited in the way that the spirited mare Ginger is treated:

  ‘Several men came to catch me, and when at last they closed me in . . . then another took my underjaw in his hard hand and wrenched my mouth open, and so by force they got on the halter and the bar into my mouth; then one dragged me along by the halter, another flogging behind, and this was the first experience I had of men’s kindness.’7

  The attack sounds very much like gang rape, a sexual molestation.

  So, in Sewell’s novel protesting about the treatment of horses, other marginal groups find their situations voiced. As I said above, it is easy to see how those who are oppressed can here find common ground, including children, with whom the book has been perennially popular. There are (again) obvious parallels between their respective treatments: children, like horses, were also ‘broken in’. And the child’s bridling involves, besides harnessing, swaddling and withholding of food, the infamous non-sparing of the rod, lest one spoil the child. Furthermore, children suffered as badly as cab horses in their employment, and often in their schooling too.

  Sewell’s book is also a good example of the animal autobiography genre (the title-page declares that it is ‘translated from the original equine’), which had originated in the eighteenth century, along with the life stories of other objects, like pincushions and hackney coaches (which have their own view of horses!). Finally, Sewell is an early writer in what would now be known as ‘animal rights’ literature – which also originates in the eighteenth century, one of the most famous examples being Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786), later known as The History of the Robins and subtitled ‘for the instruction of children on their treatment of animals’.

  One would have thought that pictorial illustration would have increased the impact of Trimmer’s message, but she forbade this for, although she strove to create a realistic picture, she was also aware that, in having her birds speak, she was dangerously close to the kind of fantasy she strongly disapproved of (talking animals were most commonly found in fairy tales, which Trimmer decried vociferously). Again, the ambivalent nature of anthropomorphism, mentioned earlier, is ineluctably present: hearing the conversations of Robin, Dicky, Flapsy and Pecksy might help readers understand and identify with the little birds, but it thereby compromises their difference, their otherness; moreover, in suggesting affinities, we thereby query our own species’ (or specious) claim to distinction. So while Trimmer’s book clearly underwrites the class and gender inequalities of her time, she cannot help but destabilise that very order in her fictional natural history. On the one hand, then, the robins’ behaviour celebrates family values, but on the other, we learn that each parent had a previous mate and earlier broods of children, effectively undermining the nuclear family.

  While it would be easy to be critical of Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories nowadays, its animal rights message is little different from contemporary examples such as Anne Fine’s The Chicken Gave It to Me (1992). In Trimmer’s work it is an adult, Mrs Benson, who champions the animals’ cause, holding that some creatures ‘have been expressly destined by the Supreme Governor as food for mankind’, but she maintains that we should still make ‘their short lives as comfortable as we can’, and elsewhere a farmer even speaks of his animals being ‘entitled to wages’, which rather undermines their divinely ordained position!8 In Fine’s work, it is aliens – little green men who liberate the Earth’s chickens and cage the humans for food instead – who draw attention to our lack of humanity: ‘If it doesn’t smile a lot / Then it won’t go in my pot’, as a radio slogan has it. The anonymous chicken narrator (whose written memoir the child protagonists, Gemma and Andrew, have discovered) is content with this outcome: ‘they were caring; they were sensitive; they were humane’. In other words, eating other species is not in itself an issue.

  However, one key difference between The Chicken Gave It to Me and Fabulous Histories is that, in Trimmer, it is a knowing adult who instructs potentially cruel children, whereas in Fine it is the children who rail against a cruel adult establishment. They tellingly speculate on what would be the adult reaction if they were to dress up and chase animals to their death, or to start ‘poking about at an animal as if it were just a toy’, wanting ‘to look at the clockwork inside’. Moreover, it is not personal cruelty in The Chicken Gave It to Me, but an anonymous, institutionalised one, a fact reinforced by the children discussing these issues clandestinely, in school – where they tellingly contrast the chicken’s story with a more stereotypical picture book about animals. Gemma explodes: ‘Why do they try and trick us into thinking everything’s fine and hunky-dory? This book is as bad as a lie!’9 It is a comment that brings to mind the noble horses, the Houyhnhnms, of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), who are amazed how humans can speak of ‘the thing that was not’. It is also worth noting that Fine’s story, in having humans become the caged food, draws on the tradition of the ‘world-turned-upside-down’, where the animals take up arms against humans and treat their former masters as subject beasts; for instance Ann and Jane Taylor’s Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern (1810) and Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger (1966) are both animated by this trope.

  All these works are successful in drawing attention to the plight of animals, and calling for their better treatment, but none is radical in modern animal rights terms (that is to say, concerned with the sanctity of all life). Even in works that do move closer to this position, the focalised creature tends to be treated as an exception – as, for instance, is Wilbur in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), in which Fern protests on behalf of the runt while the bacon sizzles unheeded. Nick Park’s 2000 animated film Chicken Run, although it addresses similar issues to Fine’s book, also seems to fall short in this respect, for the chickens are pictured as being kept under concentration camp conditions simply because of Mrs Tweedy’s regime rather than this being seen as the lot of chickens everywhere. Hence the ‘great escape’ the film depicts cannot be to some ‘normal’ farm, for this would necessitate an acknowledgement of the near-universal cruel treatment of chickens, but must be to an island on a lake; effectively a utopia, a no-place.

  The situation is no different in ‘realistic animal stories’, where the animals are not given the power of speech. In Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet (1935), for instance, where the horse Pi is very much loved, the girl protagonist Velvet Brown’s father is a butcher, blithely processing all manner of other animal flesh. So although these texts might be considered ‘a form of protest literature’, Kathleen R. Johnson’s analysis shows how this is compromised by the pet status of most of the animals.10 Pets, of course, are by definition property, required to be submissive to the ‘owners’ for whom they exist, like the hound that patiently waits years for his master’s return in William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969). The expendable nature of the animal is then consolidated, often, by having its death mark a rite of passage into adulthood for the human protagonist, as in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller (1956).

  But the issue of realism – that is to say, trying to avoid the anthropomorphism that Johnson makes central – seems less certain to me. Although there are undoubtedly degrees of anthropomorphism (from the animalised humans in Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World in the 1960s to attempts to represent creatures in their natural habitats, such as Ernest Thompson Seton’s 1898 Wild Animals I Have Known and Henry Williamson’s 1927 Tarka the Otter), we need to question what, exactly, characterises this ‘anthropos’ (man) that morphs. For while it might be a fantasy to imagine we can capture th
e essence of any animal, this fantasy extends to humans, too. So, when ‘man’ is referred to, it is generally a very specific version that is implied: a modern, Western, adult male – not a woman, not a child and not a Native American (the latter, indeed, being renowned for refusing to separate the human from the landscape and its fauna in the West European manner).

  Rather than anthropocentrism, then, it is actually what Jacques Derrida called ‘logocentrism’, the rule of the Word, that is at issue. Words – what Jacques Lacan termed ‘the Symbolic’ – create our reality; but, as he added, they do so by the murder of the thing itself (what he termed ‘the Real’). One of the most famous examples of this is of Freud’s grandson playing in his cot, throwing away a cotton reel and then retrieving it, saying ‘Gone’ and ‘There’, showing the child finding a symbolic substitute for his absent mother: the Real is thus replaced by the reel, an object. However, as Slavoj Žižek emphasises, the Real still obtrudes, as demonstrated in Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch’s The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it was None of his Business (1989) when the mole pokes his head out of his hole, secure in his Symbolic universe, only to have another animal defecate on him. Language, then, creates the very categories through which we experience the world, and, to a certain extent, we are forced to genuflect before these. The ‘bad news’ is that, though we are free of alien cages, we are nevertheless trapped in the alienating prison-house of language, so can never capture the real animal (any more than our real selves). The Symbolic is thus, in many ways, associated with death (we murder the thing itself). Somewhat paradoxically though, the Symbolic also seems to confer life (the ‘good news’), allowing us, imaginatively, to animate any ‘thing’: animals, certainly, but also vegetables, flowers, dolls, clocks, wooden peg-tops, pincushions – even Dr Seuss’s Things One and Two. So, although the Symbolic frequently reduces marginal people to things – hence children and animals are frequently described using the neuter pronoun, ‘it’, as, indeed, were slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, was originally to be subtitled ‘The Man Who Was a Thing’) – the process of signification cannot preclude disruption and subversion, producing an anti-Cartesian world where animism rules, where all things are democratically, anarchically even, given voice. In fact, a tacit awareness of this vital, excessive power of language is often epitomised in alphabet books, where individual letters, even punctuation-marks, exhibit signs of life.