INFORMATION TO USERS

This manusaipt has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directfy from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in ^pewriter face, while others may be from any type of conqmter printer.

Hie quality of this reproduction is dqiendoit upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photogr^hs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and inçrqper alignment can adversety affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note win indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., m^>s, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing ffom left to right in equal sections with small overl^is. Each original is also photogr^hed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the bade of the book.

Photograqihs included in the original manuscrqxt have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9” black and white photogr^hic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this cc^ for an additional charge. Contact UMI directty to order.

UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313.-761-4700 800/521-0600

Order Number 9516987

A tale of animals: The changing imagesaniinals of in animal fantasy for children from Aesop’s Fables through 1986

Duan, Shu-Jy, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1994

UMI SOON.ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

A TALE OF ANIMALS:

THE CHANGING IMAGES OF ANIMALS IN ANIMAL FANTASY FOR CHILDREN

FROM AESOP'S FABLES THROUGH 1986

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Shu-Jy Duan, B. A., M. A.

The Ohio State University

1 9 9 4

Dissertation Committee: Approved by:

Janet Hickman

Rudine Sims Bishop Advisor Depbftment of Educational Theory & Practice Theresa Rogers College of Education Copyright by

Shu-Jy Duan

199 4 To My Parents, My Husband Sherwin, and My Newborn Son Justin

To All The Animals That Have Instructed and Delighted Us, and Will Continue to Do So ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I enjoy animal fantasy, enjoy writing on it, and enjoy taking pains over it. During this process there are many who support me in one way or another. I would like to thank my dissertation committee. My sincerest thanks go to my mentor and fairy godmother Dr. Janet Hickman, who helped me solidify the problem, purposes, and framework of the study in the early stage, offered timely feedbacks on the formulation in the middle stage, and provided helpful advice in the final stage. Dr. Rudine Sims

Bishop and Dr. Theresa Rogers also deserve special appreciations for their recommendations and comments.

My friend Melanie Myers should be thanked for her editorial help and enthusiasm to assist in every aspect. Dr. Roy Wilson's sense of humor and Dr. Beth Smith's warm heart should not go unacknowledged. Meanwhile my parents, my husband Sherwin, my mother-in-law all assisted me substantially. And my new-born son Justin needs special mention for his cooperation and the joy he brings me. Indeed few women would have the chance in their life to nurture two babies at the same time-one in the womb and the other in the brain. This dissertation came to full being, approximately corresponding to the growth of my son Justin, and it is surely one of the most adorable gifts I can give him in his life.

Ill VITA

Shu-Jy Duan

October, 26, 1961 Born in Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

1 9 8 0 -1 9 8 4 B. A. in English, National Taiwan University

1 9 8 4 -1 9 8 7 M. A. in English, National Taiwan Normal University

1 9 8 7 -1 9 8 8 Lecturer of English, Kwang Wu Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

1988-1991 Lecturer of English, Shien Chien College, Taipei, Taiwan. ROC

1 9 9 1 -1 9 9 3 Fulbright Scholar, US Information Agency, USA Fellowship, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, ROC

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Education

Children's Literature: Janet Hickman Rudine Sims Bishop Theresa Rogers

Folklore: Daniel Barnes

Literacy: Becky Kirschner

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

VITA ...... iv

LIST OF FIGURES...... ix

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

Men and Animais ...... 1 Animais and Children ...... 2 Animal Fantasy: A Typological Approach ...... 3 Writers' Challenge in Animal Fantasy: Fact or Fiction? .. 6 Animals in Literature...... 8 Didacticism in Children's Literature...... 11 Statement of the Problem ...... 13 The Purposes of the Study...... 16 Definition of Term s ...... 18 Selection of the Books ...... 19 P ro ced u re...... 22 Organization of the Study ...... 23 Limitations of the Study ...... 25 Contribution...... 26

II. AESOP'S FABLES...... 27

Introduction...... 27 Ancient and Medieval Beliefs Regarding Animals 28 The History of Fables in England ...... 30 John Locke on Fables ...... 31 The Fable in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.. 33 Rousseau on Fables...... 35 The Fable Explicated ...... 37 Aesop's Fables as "A Rude Graffiti of Human Nature" .. 40 C o n clu sio n ...... 43 PAGE

III. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY...... 46

Introduction...... 46 Charges Against and Apology for the British Didactic S c h o o l ...... 47 Social Background for the British Didactic School 50 John Locke on Cruelty to Animals...... 52 The Fad for Fictional Biographies of Animals and Inanimate Objects ...... 53 Introduction to Three Fictional Biographies of A n im als ...... 55 Mrs. Sarah Trimmer. Fabulous Histories (1786) . 59 Dorothy Kilner. The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse (1783-4)...... 65 Dorothy Kilner. The Rational Brutes or Talkino Animals (1799)...... 68 C o n clu sio n...... 71

IV. VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ANIMAL FANTASY 75

Introduction...... 75 An Overview of Victorian and Edwardian Children's Literature...... 76 Introduction to Victorian and Edwardian Animal Fantasy 79 The Romantic Image of the Child in Victorian Period 81 The Romanticization of Animals in the Nineteenth C e n tu ry...... 83 Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) . 87 Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows (1 9 0 8 )...... 91 Anna Sewell. Black Beautv (1877)...... 96 Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book (1893)...... 100 C o n clu sio n...... 102

V. THE ROMANTIC IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY...... 105

Introduction to the Romantic in Twentieth-Century Animal Fantasy ...... 105 The River Bank Scene ...... 107 Thornton Burgess. The Adventures of Reddv Fgx ( 1 9 1 3 ) ...... 107

VI PAGE

Russell Erickson. Warton and Morton Series 109 Arnold Lobel. The Frog and Toad Series ...... 112 The Barnyard Scene ...... 114 Walter Brooks. The Freddy Series ...... 115 E(lwyn) B(rooks) White. Charlotte's Web (1952) 117 Dick King-Smith. The Barnyard Series ...... 120 Sidelights on Other Animal Fantasies ...... 122 C o n clu sio n...... 127

VI. THE RIGHTEOUS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY...... 129

Introduction...... 129 The Satire in Literature...... 131 Three Satirical Animal Fables in Adult Literature 133 Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels. (1726)...... 133 George Orwell. Animal Farm. (1946) ...... 134 William Kotzwinkle. Doctor Rat. (1976)...... 136 The Theme of the Righteous in Animal Fantasy in the Twentieth Century ...... 137 Hugh Lofting. The Storv of Dr. Dolittle. (1922). The Vovaoes of Dr. Dolittle. (1923) 139 Erich Kastner. The Animals' Conference. (1949) 144 Dodie Smith. One Hundred and One Dalmatians. (1 9 5 6 )...... 145 Russell Hoban. The Mouse and His Child. (1969) 146 Robert O'Brien. Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH (1 9 7 1 )...... 149 Richard Adams. Watershio Down. (1972) ...... 151 Neil Hancock. Dragon Winter. (1978)...... 156 Robin Hawdon. A Rustle in the Grass. (1984) ... 158 Walter D. Edmonds. Beaver Valiev. (1971) ...... 160 N. M. Bodecker. The Mushroom Center Disaster. (1974) ...... 162 Sandy Landsman. Casta wavs on Chimp Island. (1 9 8 6 )...... 164 Sidelights on Righteous Animal Fantasy ...... 169 C o n clu sio n...... 170

VII PAGE

VII. SUMMARY AAND DISCUSSION...... 174

Introduction...... 174 A Succinct History of Animal Fantasy ...... 175 Entertainment Versus Didacticism: A Thorny Issue in Children's Literature...... 178 Animal Nature and the Art of Animal Fantasy ...... 183 C o n clu sio n...... 189 Recommendation ...... 190

APPENDIX...... 191

Works Surveyed But Not Included...... 191

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 207

Works Analyzed ...... 2 0 7 Reference Sources Cited...... 215

VIII LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURES PAGE

1. Historical Evolution of Animal Fantasy ...... 176

2. Didacticism in Children's Literature...... 182

3. The Spectrum of Animal Fantasy in Terms of Anthropomorphism ...... 185

IX CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Men and Animals

From the earliest times, animals have served humankind in practical ways. The drawings of animals on cave walls around the Mediterranean Sea date back to the Ice

Ages. Animal bone fossils excavated near human dwellings millions of years ago further attest to the fact that animals were part of the lives of primordial men: Animals provided the cavemen with meat as the primary food source of survival. Their skin and fur were to protect men from coldness: their bones were conveniently made into tools or weapons. Later on, animals were still captured by men as game, but not so much for food as for sport and fun. Such animals as cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs, and cats were domesticated for food or as pets. Such other animals as horses or donkeys were tamed and trained as beasts of burden or vehicles of traffic. Nowadays some species of wild animals are caged in the zoo or kept in the circus, and some marine animals are in aquariums or amusement parks such as Sea World, to provide instruction in natural history and delight for humans.

Additionally, animals offer their service in our daily communication. A great variety of zoological phrases persist in flowery speech, colloquial expression, or poetic metaphor. Animal names are customarily borrowed to recount human actions or personality traits. Joseph D. Clark's Beastiv Folklore (1968) has collected

1 2 approximately five thousand such phrases that use animals as various parts of speech: to outfox, to parrot, to chicken out, quiet as a mouse, busy as a bee, to make a pig of yourself, to play possum, to be dog tired (P. Shepard, 1978). Animals not only offer their meat, skin, fur, wool, or feathers, but also provide inspiration for fashion designers. It is not uncommon to find that animal totems are ethnically associated with a clan and thus become a cultural emblem for that clan. The Chinese are identified with the dragon, and among the Native Americans, the raven is connected with those on the Northwest Coast and the coyote with those on the Great Plains.

Animals and Children

Stories of talking animals have been around for a long time. They tend to be the very first stories given to young children. How animals came to be associated with children has to do with two historical phenomena. One is the discovery of childhood in the seventeenth century, which caused a profound change in attitude toward children beginning in the following century, and eventually culminating in the nineteenth century (Aries, 1962). In Victorian England, childhood came to be deemed as a distinct period of life which was noted for its innocence and purity, and in which it was acceptable to believe in the imagined world of the magical and in talking animals. According to Sale (1978), the child is also believed to possess an instinctive sympathy with animals. The other phenomenon is the growing sentimentality and romanticization of animals in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were two reasons for this phenomenon. The first one is that animals were no longer a focal point in human life but relegated to pets or zoo residents as a result of the Industrial

Revolution (Berger, 1980). Meanwhile Romanticism rose to idolize animals for their 3

naivete and simplicity, it is in such a historical context that the child and the animal

seemed to beckon each other for their shared qualities.

The other reason to link animals with children is that animals aptly assume the

didactic function of imparting moral lessons to the child. In addition to the amusement

animals might bring, they can be made into spokesmen for almost every possible

lesson that adults wish to teach. That is, animals serve well as palatable bait for

didactic purposes. For instance, beast fables such as Aesop's Fables have long been

deemed appropriate for young children-both for the instruction and entertainment that talking animals can provide (Blount, 1975; Molson, 1989). These, then, are the

invisible forces that draw children and animals close to each other. It is not surprising that animal stories have become one of the mainstays of children's literature.

Animal Fantasv: A Tvooloaical Approach

As a literary genre, fantasy has habitually been classified into sub-genres by subject

matter, setting, degree of seriousness in treatment, or writer's gender (R. Lynn, 1989).

However, one common cutting-line is proposed by J. R. R. Tolkien (1965) in his seminal essay, "On Fairy-Stories," which divides fantasies into two kinds: Those set in the "Secondary World" (the other world, the world other than our own), and those in the "Primary World" (our world, the real world). By the same token, Tymn,

Zahorski, and Boyer (1979) group fantasy according to the types of world described.

High fantasies are those set in the other world, which "manifest a consistent order that is explainable in terms of the supernatural (i. e. deities), or in terms of the less definable (but still recognizable) magical powers of faerie" (p. 5), such as Tolkien's

Middle Earth, C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Alexander's Prydain, or Le Guin's Earthsea. In 4

contrast, low fantasies are those set in "the primary world-this real world we live in.

It too demonstrates a consistent order, but its order is explainable in terms of natural

law" (p. 5).

But the division of high and low fantasy is still crude; we need a more detailed map

for fantasy land-a map with a key to guide us so that we won't be lost. Different

critics have provided various road maps. A comparison of their work may yield fruitful

insights into the essence of fantasy. First of all, it is instructive to start with Ruth

Nadelman Lynn's Fantasv for Children (1st ed. 1979; 2nd ed. 1983), later enlarged

into Fantasv Literature for Children and Young Adults (3rd ed. 1989). The changes in

category headings have exemplified what a murky, fuzzy zone this fantasy land is. In

Fantasv for Children (1979), Lynn charts fantasy land into thirteen areas: 1) allegory

and fable; 2) collected tales; 3) ghosts; 4) good versus evil; 5) alternative worlds and

imaginary lands; 6) magic adventure, 7) magical toys, 8) mythical beings and

creatures, 9) talking animals, 10) tall tales, 11 ) time travel, 12) travel to another world, and 13) witches, wizards, sorcerers, and magicians.

Probably aware of the overlapping between the categories, Lynn in her second edition (1983) merges several headings. While many headings are retained, new ones evolve to accommodate the merging of several less-inclusive categories. For instance, secondary world fantasy takes into account alternative worlds or histories, fairy tale kingdoms, mythic fantasy, and travel to other worlds. Additionally, the heading of animal fantasy arises to encompass beast fables and talking animal tales. It is in her third edition (R. Lynn, 1989) that a well-delineated, concise chart appears. The headings retained are 1 ) allegorical fantasy and literary fairy tales, 2) animal fantasy,

3) fantasy collection, 4) ghost fantasy, 5) high fantasy, 6) humorous fantasy, 7) magic 5 adventure fantasy, 8) time travel fantasy, 9) toy fantasy, and 10) witchcraft and sorcery fantasy.

Another competing system of classification is offered by Sheila Egoff (1981,

1988). Her headings include the literary fairy tales, epic fantasy, enchanted realism, stories of magic, animal fantasies and beast tales, past-time fantasy, science fiction fantasy, ghost stories, and light fantasy. A somewhat vague guide to fantasy for children comes from Francis J. Molson (1989), including fairytales, mixed fantasy-

"children's fiction which intermingles in various ways and proportions fantasy and realism" (p. 28), and heroic-ethical fantasy. Mixed fantasy can be further categorized into journey fantasy (both in time and place), transformation fantasy, talking animals, and magic fantasy.

The sub-genre of animal fantasy can be approached through different routes. R.

N. Lynn (1989) offers a sketchy chart to designate animal fantasy as "any tales in which the animal characters think or talk in a humanlike manner" (p. 61). John Locke of the seventeenth century very likely would not consider animal tales as fantasy, otherwise he would not include Aesoo's Fables into his reading curriculum for the child at all (Egoff, 1981). Tolkien (1965), perhaps in a similar vein, discriminates beast-fable from fairy-story (where fairy-story is understood as a category of modern fantasy):

But in stories in which no human being is concerned; or in which the animals are the heroes and heroines, and men and women, if they appear, are mere adjuncts; and above all those in which the animal form is only a mask upon a human face, a device of the satirist or the preacher, in these we have beast-fable and not fairy-story (p. 15).

Tolkien's stringent distinction seems out of favor with recent critics. The more widely-accepted classification of animal fantasy comes from Sheila Egoff, and is 6 shared by Ruth Nadelman Lynn. They both envision animal fantasy as a joint residence of beast tales-"more serious, often didactic stories of 'realistic' animals" (R. Lynn,

1989, p. 61)--and talking animal fantasy-"lighter in tone, featuring dressed-up, anthropomorphic animals" (R. Lynn, 1989, p. 61). More explicitly, the former is the beast fable, dating back to Aesop in genealogy, usually with a serious moralistic purpose and sometimes a rolling thunder of misanthropism in recent years (Egoff,

1981, 1988). The latter, loosely named animal fantasy and rooted in the Edwardian

Age, tends to target younger children, with a more light-hearted tone and featuring dressed-up, anthropomorphic, droll talking animals (Egoff, 1981, 1988; R. Lynn,

1989). In such a classification, Egoff gives Tolkien his due credit.

However, one should be cautioned that characters of talking animals or other non­ human creatures do not automatically make the stories animal fantasy. Such stories as C. 8. Lewis's tales of Narnia or Tolkien's Middle-earth novels belong to epic fantasy due to their epic qualities, the high purpose and the never-ending battle between Good and Evil (Egoff, 1981, 1988). Egoff's typology on various sub-genres of children's fantasy has been widely accepted by critics and bibliographers of children's literature.

For instance, Ruth N. Lynn (1989) advocates Egoff's terminology in her annotated bibliography on children's fantasy. This study essentially follows Egoff as well, as both the beast fables and animal fantasy will be considered and discussed here.

Writers' Challenoe in Animal Fantasv: Fact or Fiction?

Animal fantasy is fantasy-of a particular kind, for it seem s to be a borderline piece.

Here Molson's (1989) system of fantasy sheds a significant light on the nature of animal fantasy. As a sub-genre of mixed fantasy, talking animal fantasy presents "special problems of credibility and plausibility because it mixes two ordinarily incompatible orders or universes" (Molson, 1989, p. 28)~the realistic and the fantastic.

Molson (1989) is even bolder to announce the thorny nature of talking animal fantasy:

"Talking animal fiction is not fantasy, but realism or exists in a very gray area" (p. 51).

This is the big hurdle that writers of animal fantasy must wrestle with.

An accomplished writer of animal fantasy does more than grant the animal characters linguistic skills or dress them up in human attire. One of the challenges the

writer encounters is the issue of anthropomorphism or the degree of humanization.

Like their counterparts in other sub-genres of fantasy, writers of animal fantasy must entice their readers to suspend disbelief. Human speech and apparel do seem to draw the animal characters closer to the readers. However, paradoxically, "humanization can only be successful if something is preserved of the animal nature" (Egoff, 1981, p. 106); or, the more humanized the animal characters are, the less convincing and successful the stories will be (Egoff, 1988). Then, the golden maxim for a successful animal fantasy is "in different ways, that animals behave like themselves masquerading as humans; the animal nature must never masquerade" (Egoff, 1981, p. 106)-the fancy shall never preside over the true nature of animals. It is in this sense that a writer of animal fantasy is said to be caught in a dilemma, or a dual challenge. On the one hand, unlike the writer of imaginary beasts such as the unicorn, dragon, or phoenix (despite a shared lore on these imaginary beasts), the writer of animal fantasy cannot let his fancy fly so freely as to take liberty with the natural history of the animals. In some ways he is circumscribed by the facts of natural truth of the animals.

On the other hand, he is not a writer of non-fiction books on animals; he needs to imagine and fictionalize the animal life stories so as to go beyond presenting the mere 8 facts of natural history. More explicitly, how can a writer of animal fantasy juggle the demands of realism (fact, natural history) on the one hand and those of fantasy

(fancy/make-believe) on the other? How can he sketch the animals up to the point that they can be recognized and yet there is still some elbow room for fancy to fly?

Indeed as R. Lynn (1989) proclaims, sometimes there is merely a thin, fine line between the realistic and fantastic portrayal of animals. Even so, the writer has to decide on what is fact and what is fiction about the animal; how far he can go along the scale of humanizing animals; how to present his animals except being a chatterbox in human language; where is the cutting line or dividing gap between humans and animals; and whether there is such a line or gap at all. In more metaphysical terms, what is human nature, opposed to animal nature? In what way is human nature superior, inferior, or equal to animal nature? Rendered as such, how does animal nature reflect, or deflect, human nature?

Animals in Literature

In the huge body of folk tales around the world animals divide themselves between two camps: The enchanted animals in the fairy tale world of magic, and the talking animals in the realistic world of the beast fable. Fairy tale animals either perform as testers or helpers for the questing heroes, or are under the spell of magic and can only resume human shapes through disenchantment. Fairy tale animals move around in the human world, and the breach between humans and animals can be bridged back and forth through enchantment and disenchantment (Sale, 1978).

The beast fable animals, in contrast, mostly live on realistic, daily-life terms all by themselves with minimal or negligible involvement of humans. In fairy tales true 9

human nature is usually beguiled under a mask of animals. In beast fables animals talk

and behave like humans: Animals are humans or represent human types (Sale, 1978).

Also, if the enchanted animals in fairy tales open up to a gilded, celestial world, then

the talking animals in beast fables lead to a down-to-earth, mundane world. By all

means, the line is not always easy to draw. Some animals in fairy tales demonstrate

no magic but the ability of speech. For instance, what magic does the big bad wolf

in "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood" possess except his

cunningness?

Enchanted creatures continue to frequent modern children, such as fairies, elves,

ogres, trolls, leprechauns as well as other talking animal characters, either in children's

books or in various forms of toys, games, cartoons, or animated movies. In addition

to the cast of Disney animal characters, Barney the dinosaur, and the Teen-Age Mutant

Ninja Turtles are conspicuous ones.

The images of animals in literature can be further explored according to the

functions they serve. To the ancient and medieval minds, animals were often used as

an allegory for the monstrous, unconquerable force of nature, in opposition to human

civilization (Abell, 1966). Suffice it to cite Grendel to make the point. Decidedly

Beowulf is more than an epic to extol the life history of a cultural hero; it is a war

between man and beast, between civilization and wilderness, with Beowulf on this side

and Grendel on the other.

Another possible function for animals is to be the didactic vehicle for instruction

or a living text from which to learn moral lessons, as evidenced in the fables since

Aesop on. These talking animals are essentially humans in disguise or human surrogates, or more appropriately, abstractions of human nature, though probably on 10 a superficial level. The fable and the bestiary, popular in the Renaissance, additionally promote the typecasting of certain animals with human nature (Cohen, 1987). Jean de La Fontaine utilizes fables probably more as social/political comments on his contemporaries rather than on human nature in general (Magee, 1980; Powell, 1985).

The same is also true of John Gay. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) employs talking animals as exotic spices from other worlds and scrutinizes on human foibles in this world. The animal biographies of the British didactic school turn to talking animals for moral instruction. For instance, the robin family in Mrs. Trimmer's

Fabulous Histories (1798) and the mouse brothers in The Life and Perambulation of a

Mouse (1783-4) undertake the task of moralizing.

Almost a century later, in 1877, Anna Sewell, a Victorian humanitarian, wrote

Black Beautv. For the very first time the realistic, convincing voice of an animal was heard. The first-person narrative from the point of view of an animal, a horse in this case, was nothing novel, for it had been used by writers of animal biographies in the previous century. What strikes us in Black Beautv. however, is that here animals shake off the attire of human nature and resume their animal nature; they can really be themselves. Ever since, animal fantasy has evolved in a different direction and marched toward a new horizon, where animal nature is to preside over human nature.

An examination of animals in the history of children's literature will betray the ever- changing faces of animals perceived over time, and the waxing and waning of humanity and animality in animal fantasy. To give an analogy, if animal nature and human nature were to be installed on two ends of a teeter-totter, then over time the locus of gravity would move along with the changing image of animals in children's literature from the side of human nature to the side of animal nature. For instance, in 11

Aesop's Fables, animals are humans in disguise or human surrogates. The moral tagged to each fable comments on human nature in general, rather than animal nature.

In the eighteenth-century moral tales, animals retain their animal shapes and, after all, function as spokesmen for the ideal in human nature, though the theme of animal rights is also vaguely hinted, as in The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals (1799) by

Dorothy Kilner.

Around the late nineteenth century, the tables were turned: Animal characters were to preside over human characters, who were either adjunct, subordinate, or marginal.

Social foibles in human society were rebuked, and animals asked for the right to be free from human prosecution and to exist "like an animal." Anna Sewell's Black

Beautv is a piece that exemplifies the change. Around the mid-twentieth century, there has been a surge of animal rights stories, asserting that animals are entitled to the rights of existence of which they are deprived by human civilization, science, and technology. After the 1980s animals continue to frequent children's literature, plainly shifting from the camp of fiction to that of non-fiction. In addition to books about animals and their habitats, non-fiction (informational) books on animal rights address larger issues of environmental conversation/conservation.

Didacticism in Children's Literature

One of the debatable issues in children's literature is that of didacticism. In the pragmatic tradition of literature since Plato, the function of literature is to disclose, to inform, and to persuade, in a palatable, gratifying, enticing manner. The didactic nature of literature is thus taken for granted, and even extolled as one of the sublime qualities exclusive to true, good literature. It was after the rise of Romanticism and 12

Aestheticism in the nineteenth century that didacticism fell out of favor as injurious to the true value of art, and the term has thence been used in an unfavorable, or even pejorative sense (Baldick, 1990).

Didacticism in children's literature is related to the historical evolutions of the notion of childhood and children's literature. As Philippe Aries indicates in Centuries of Childhood (1962), the notion of childhood is a very recent invention-dating from the seventeenth century. With the distinct qualities of innocence, purity, and lack of reason, the child was polarized from the adult world, no longer seen as miniature man or woman (Shavit, 1986). At least in part as a result of this emerging notion of childhood, children's literature has been persistently associated with didacticism: It is the recognition of the existence of childhood and a consequent concern for the spiritual well-being of the child that underscore the need for discipline and instruction in order to safeguard children's innocence and strengthen their weakness (Aries, 1962).

Looking back, most modern historians of children's literature tend to despise the past, particularly the didactic literature of the Puritan period and the eighteenth century. Suffice it to cite from Cornelia Meigs (1969),"... the unwholesomeness and morbidity of the books of the Puritan era, the stultifying quality of the utilitarian pedanticism of the didactic age" (p. 308). Penelope Lively (1978) also announces the death of didacticism: "It is only fairly recently that we managed to shake off the yoke of nineteenth-century didacticism in children's literature" (p. 18). In saying this. Lively seems to imply that we are better off now. Nonetheless, if Harvey Darton (1982) is right to say that there is only one "text" in the history of children's literature, "that children's books were always the scene of a battle between instruction and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and 13 spontaneous happiness" (p. vii), he is still very right today. The battle is still going on.

What John Townsend declared as early as 1976, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that didacticism is still very much alive" (p. 56), is still true today.

Children's literature is likely to fall prey to didacticism as a result of the adult's inevitable impulse to impart values and ideology to the next generation. For better, the adult imparts under the banner of social responsibility or social conscience-the adult simply cannot prevent himself from telling the child what is good and what is bad. For worse, didacticism can degrade to propagandism; that is, when the sole purpose of a literary work is to bolster in a forceful, explicit manner a particular religious, social, or political doctrine (Baldick, 1990), its literary qualities are sacrificed and forsaken. An old example is Dorothy Kilner's The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals (1799). which is no more than a treatise on kindness to animals. Also in rewriting Cinderella, George

Cruishank (1854) is a propagandist of teetotalism. But within the realm of propagandism, there exists a wide range of intents and effects. How the Nazis utilized children's literature to educate children in the spirit of National Socialism (see

Kamenetsky, 1984) is the most horrifyingly dogmatic and destructive case that propagandism can degrade to. On the other hand, a recently published series of children's books on homosexuality and lesbianism by Alyson Publications, for instance.

Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and Daddv's Roommate (1990). though persuasive in intent, are benign in tone.

Statement of the Problem

Animal fantasy has a long-standing genealogy, dating back to Aesoo's Fables. It is one of the literary forms persistent in literary history since the Middle Ages. It 14 functioned as the mouthpiece for virtues and morality in the late eighteenth century.

It thrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unprecedented splendor. Remarkably, in the mid twentieth century a number of post-war writers employed animal fantasy with considerable skill and variety and also won phenomenal publishing successes. It is deplorable, therefore, that animal fantasy has been so inadequately dealt with-both under-treated and under rated.

There has been no extended study thus far devoted exclusively to the development of animal fantasy. Three classics in the criticism of children's literature serve as examples. The mention of animal fantasy for children in these three is merely sporadic and fragmentary. Harvey Darton in his Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of

Social Life (1932.1st ed.) duly addresses fables as one of the legacies from the Middle

Ages. However, the animal biographies prospering in the late eighteenth century are grouped with other moral tales. Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, and Kenneth Grahame are briefly accounted in "Victorian and Edwardian Times." The linear descendance of animal fantasy abruptly ends here with Darton's decease, and the revised edition by

Brian Alderson does little to extend it. In A Critical Historv of Children's Literature by

Cornelia Meigs et al (1969, rev. éd.), animal fantasy is meagerly scattered in "The

Multiplying Leaves" (Aesop), "The Little Female Academy" (Mrs. Trimmer), "The Great

Originator" (Rudyard Kipling), "Classics in Miniature" (Beatrix Potter), "A Landmark in

Fantasy" (Kenneth Grahame), and "Worlds Without Boundary" (Walter de la Mare,

Hugh Lofting, Walter Brooks, E. B. White, and so on).

Of course, Darton and Meigs might be justifiably excused for either not living long enough to witness the blossoming of animal fantasy in the mid-twentieth century, or being so close in time as to lose sight of a clear historical perspective. Though the 15 status of animal fantasy is unduly low in Darton's and Meigs' books, it wins some justice from John Rowe Townsend's Written for Children (1987, 3rd rev. ed.). Here two whole chapters are devoted to animal fantasy: "Articulate Animals" and "Modern

Fantasy (I): Just Like Us." Nonetheless, the serious purposes of animal fantasy writers, especially those in the 1970s, and their contribution to children's literature in general and fantasy in particular are not sufficiently acknowledged.

Several book-length critical studies on fantasy can be found to amplify our understanding of animal fantasy in one way or other. First of all, Ann Swinfen's In

Defense of Fantasv: A Studv of the Genre in English and American Literature Since

1945 (1984) departs from Tolkien's "On Fairy Story" to tackle different layers of contemporary fantasy from the angles of parallel worlds, and symbolism to idealism.

One chapter on talking beasts is especially pertinent to the present study of animal fantasy. Roger Sale's Fairv Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White (1978) is another critical study to pin down the significance of talking animals as a pivotal bridge between fairy tales and modern children's literature. This link is legitimate and well-put, and the convention of fairy tales is adequately underlined. However, the beast fable tradition, being equally manifest from ancient times to modern children's literature, is not given the attention it deserves.

Fortunately, two critics, Sheila Egoff and Margaret Blount, contribute to the criticism of animal fantasy as a legitimate sub-genre in fantasy. Two book-length studies by Egoff Thursdav's Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemoorarv Children's

Literature (1981) and Worlds Within: Children's Fantasv from the Middle Aoes to

Todav (1988) are insightful and influential. The former dissects children's fantasy into five sub-genres and also examines the genre of fantasy through a synchronic overview 16 of contemporary children's literature. The latter treats children's fantasy diachronically from its deep roots in the Middle Ages through 1980s.

More remarkable is Margaret Blount's Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's

Fiction (1975), surveying animals (both real-life and imaginary) and toys in children's fiction in a most comprehensive manner. She accomplishes a typological panorama of creatures in children's fiction. Unfortunately, her approach is a kind of "tossed salad," regimenting animal figures of similar characteristics together and interspersing them into chapters. Namely, a clear historical focus is missing to situate animal figures in children's fiction and to interpret them against each other. And the animal fantasy of the 1960s and 1970s is handled too hastily and sketchily.

To sum up, relatively little has been offered as a historical survey of animal fantasy for children. A response to this lack gives rise to this current, in-depth study of animal fantasy from a historical-comparative perspective from Aesoo's Fables in the Middle

Ages to the deluge of animal fiction in the twentieth century through 1980s.

The Purposes of the Studv

Animal fantasy demands examination as such for good reasons. First, a linear descendance is needed to do justice to particular writers and their animal fantasies which are commonly under-treated. Secondly, this study attempts to determine if there are some patterns for animal fantasy, and how precisely these patterns reflect society's wants and needs.

Third, this study intends to rectify misconceptions revolving around low fantasy in order to offer a balanced view on animal fantasy. In the arena of fantasy, high fantasy-epic or heroic fantasy-usually receives more attention in any prolonged 17

studies on fantasy than does low fantasy, such as talking beasts or toy characters.

The terms "high" and "low" grossly mislead one to associate the former with

prestigious and profound, and the latter with debased and shallow. But "high" and

"low" are merely used to denote the different worlds presented, rather than an index

to a hierarchy of status.

In addition, animal fantasy may well serve as a probe by which to examine such

a prolonged obsession in children's literature as didacticism. Aesop's Fables with their

propensity to moral instruction and numberless followers over time deserve a full

treatment of their own. Hence this study attempts to demonstrate that animal fantasy

since Aesop on is more or less imbued with a moral purpose, and also displays a

concern either for humanity in general or for topical social/moral problems in particular.

Finally, considering animal fantasy as a hybrid of the realistic and the fantastic can

shed light on both-this world and the other world. What are the choices a writer of

animal fantasy may have in creating animal characters? Why does animal fantasy

continue to be written, published, read, and enjoyed, even in this age of empiricism

and reason that discredits the magical and the unreal? The techniques of writers of

animal fantasy and their possible effects are enumerated. A literary assessment of a group of animal tales is offered to applaud their strengths and to lament their

weaknesses. However, the overall spirit is appreciative and admiring. With this

assessment, a view on the historical evolution of animal fantasy can be achieved.

In short, this study attempts to defend animal fantasy- low fantasy- having a substantial, dignified place in the canon of children's literature, to tackle the issue of didacticism in children's literature through the lens of animal fantasy, and to investigate the element of anthropomorphism in animal fantasy. 18

Definition of Terms

This study basically follows Sheila Egoff's and R. N. Lynn's classifications of fantasy types in discussion, for instance, epic/heroic fantasy, beast tales or animal fantasy. The following definitions also apply.

Animal Fantasy: Any stories that feature talking or humanized animals narrated either on fantastic or realistic terms.

Animal Fiction: Interchangeable with animal fantasy.

Animal Rights: The rights of existence that animals are entitled to, just like human rights, such as freedom from fear, utilization, and persecution; the right for animal dignity; the right to live "like an animal."

Animal Story: The most crude label for animal fantasy.

Anthropomorphism: In the most crude sense, the technique of rendering animals or inanimate objects able to talk or in other ways human-like, for instance, they may be dressed up in human apparel, to walk on their hind legs, or to possess human sentiments.

Didacticism: The practice of being instructive or aiming at the conveyance of instruction. The didacticism is assumed to be in the natural grain of children's literature. There is no connotation of disapproval as the term is used in this study.

Fable: A short story devised to convey some useful lesson, especially one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or actors.

Propagandism: The tendency to compose literary works chiefly to serve the purpose of propaganda, that is, writing to persuade people to support a particular religious or political cause. Dogmatism will be an extreme case of propagandism. This term carries a negative connotation in this study. 19

Selection of the Books

Precise periods and landmarks in the evolution of animal fantasy were chosen with care and caution. Aesop's Fables were selected to herald this historical retrospective because they serve well as a springboard in discussing the issues of didacticism and anthropomorphism in children's literature. The animal biography prevalent in the late eighteenth century can be linked to Aesop's Fables for their shared moral vision. The

Victorian and Edwardian Periods witnessed a flowering of animal fantasy, for instance,

Anna Sewell's Black Beautv (1877), Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book (1894), Beatrix

Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the

Willows (1908). However, it is in the twentieth century that animal fantasy achieved a considerable expansion in terms of quantity and quality.

Since there is no standard corpus for Aesop's Fables, the term Aesop's Fables is used generically without reference to a specific version or text. Animal fantasies from the British Didactic School, and the Victorian and Edwardian periods are treated in an all-inclusive approach in the sense that almost all the major animal fantasies produced within the time periods are dealt with. With the exception of Kilner's The Rational

Brutes or Talking Animals (1799), the animal fantasies prior to the twentieth century selected are all classics or masterpieces, according to prestigious studies on children's literature such as those by Harvey Darton, Cornelia Meigs, or Sheila Egoff.

However, due to the flood of animal fantasy in the twentieth century, a different method of selection had to be adopted for the sake of practicality and convenience.

The primary sources for identifying animal fantasy of the twentieth century were the bibliographies of Animal Land (Blount, 1975), Thursdav's Child (Egoff, 1981), and

Worlds Within (Egoff, 1988). Two extremely helpful and handy reference guides are 20

The Horn Book Guide and Fantasv Literature for Children and Young Adults: An

A nnotated Biblioaraphv (R. Lynn, 1989).

The net to catch samples of animal fantasy was cast as broadly as possible, but in order to make this study as meaningful as possible, strict criteria were applied in determining what twentieth-century titles should be included:

1) All selections are works for children or young adults. No works written

exclusively for adults are listed, unless the works are cross-border pieces which

are adopted by children. And no modern picture books are included.

2) All selections are books accessible through the public libraries in the City of

Columbus, Ohio. It is assumed that if the public library system continues to

circulate the books, it very likely indicates that these books are well-reviewed

and continue to be read by teachers and parents to children or by children

themselves, and it follows these books need our attention.

3) All selections are written in English, primarily published in the English-speaking

world.

4) All selections were published before 1986. That is, this historical survey of

animal fantasy ends with Sandy Landsman's Casta wavs in Chimo Island.

Three other criteria for selecting animal fantasy of twentieth century were also included.

5) Works chosen are well-accepted by critics and practitioners of children's

literature. That is, highly acclaimed or award-winning animal fantasies are

included.

6) An effort was made to include works which are the first or the most

representative in a series of animal fantasies by a single writer. It is assumed 21

that if a writer is able to produce a series of animal fantasies over a long period

of time in the children's books market, he should not be neglected, regardless

of the literary merits in his series. But for the sake of brevity only the first or

the most significant one is mentioned, unless the whole series compels a more

detailed investigation on its own.

7) Works which are not-so-famous but are different, influential, or novel in a

certain way and therefore pertinent to this study in terms of the overall trend

or development of animal fantasy have been included.

After the above initial stage, the list of primary sources for the twentieth century was further scanned according to the following criteria. First of all, the animal characters must talk. Their power of speech is the first condition to be considered.

Instead of indirect speech, the animal characters have to reveal their thought through direct speech. The choice was arbitrarily made for the convenience of this study.

Such humorous animal stories as Beverly Cleary's Ribsv (1964) and Socks (1973) were omitted, because the two animal protagonists-a dog in the former and a cat in the latter-do not speak, even though the stories are narrated largely through their respective points of views. Walter Farley's The Black Stallion series was also left out for the same reason. But the chimps in Castawavs on an Island (1986) should be considered "talking" in the sense that they use sign language to communicate among themselves and with human scientists. In addition to possessing human speech, animal characters in the chosen books may also in other ways act like human beings; for instance, they may walk on two legs instead of four, or they dress up in human apparel instead of their natural coats. However, the presence or absence of human trappings was not a deciding factor in classifying a book as animal fantasy. 22

Secondly, animals should be the protagonists of the stories, either with or without human presence. If human beings are present, they are either as secondary characters or background for the animals, and their interference bears little on the plot.

Thirdly, since this study focuses on low fantasy, the scene of the animal fantasies included here is set in the primary world, in this primary world, there is nothing really magical, except in a very loose sense of the term. Acts of magic, wizardry, and sorcery rarely, or almost never, appear. Of course, it would not be possible to examine all the animal stories ever written for children, nor even to include those known and cherished by the researcher. The list of primary sources thus is limited, though every effort was spent to render the representation as comprehensive as possible.

Procedure

The procedure of this study admits of two parts. The first part is the sorting process. Those animal fantasies prior to the twentieth century chosen in this study are widely-agreed upon as classics, with the exception of The Rational Brutes or

Talking Animals. For those published in the twentieth century, a different selecting method was applied for the sake of practicality. An initial scanning of the bibliography of the major critical studies on fantasy or children's literature provided a skeleton of titles of animal fantasy to be considered here. A consultation of The Horn Book Guide and Fantasv Literature for Children and Young Adults offered more entries. The list of titles was then narrowed according to such extrinsic factors as availability from public library, reception from reviewers, and such intrinsic factors as narrator's point of view, choice of protagonists, and setting. Through this two-stage selection, a manageable number of titles arose to fit the scope and purpose of this study. 23

The second part of the procedure is interpretation and evaluation. To render the animal fantasies chosen here into a meaningful pattern, this study largely combines two types of traditional critical approaches to literature, namely, the historical- biographical and the moral-philosophical. The historical-biographical approach views

"a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work" {Guerin et al, 1979, p. 22). The moral-philosophical approach contends that "the larger function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues" (Guerin et al, 1979, p. 25). In combining these two approaches, this study endeavors to interpret various animal fantasies within their social context and examine their degree of moral import. Yet, choosing these approaches does not rule out aesthetic considerations in the appraisal of the books. Such common critical concerns as form, plot, characterization, and literary devices are also included within the analysis.

Organization of the Studv

The purposes to be achieved naturally dictate the format and organization of this study. Since the issues involved in different time periods are various, there is no reason to impose a uniform fashion in discussion. The format of each chapter, therefore, varies with the requirements of each one.

Chapter I (Introduction) provides a background for this study by relating animals to children, defining animal fantasy, and discussing various concerns on animal fantasy and children's literature. The purpose of this study, its limitations, and definitions of terms are also presented, along with a description of the process by which the books were selected and the procedures followed in the study. 24

Chapter II (Aesop's Fables) narrates the classical tradition of animal fantasy. A brief history of the fables in Europe is followed by a synopsis of fables and bestiaries in England. To demonstrate Aesoo's Fables as a book of moral lessons, a presentation of animal characters and moral teachings constitutes the main body of this chapter and hence lays the foundation of discussion for the ensuing chapters. One specific fable, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," is cited for demonstration of the functions of fables.

Chapter III (Eighteen-Century Animal Fantasy) attempts to explain the British

Didactic School in terms of its social/moral background. Three pieces, Mrs. Trimmer's

The Fabulous Histories. Dorothy Kilner's The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse, and

Kilner's The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals are discussed as exemplars for fictional biographies of animals. Issues such as their didactic import, the attitude toward fantasy, and their individual merits are also examined.

Chapter IV (Victorian and Edwardian Animal Fantasy) investigates the historical factors which gave rise to the new face of animal fantasy -the sentimentalization and romanticization of animals. What follows is a narrative of how this new face manifests itself in two romantic fantasies, Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Kenneth

Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. How Anna Sewell's Black Beautv relates to the tradition of the moral tale is also discussed. Rudyard Kilping's The Jungle Book is included as well. The overall concern in this chapter is how these books fit within the historical evolution of animal fantasy.

Chapter V (The Romantic in Twentieth-Century Animal Fantasy) covers a selection of animal fantasies which manifest a romantic vision of animals and nature in the pastoral tradition. Those in the lineage of The Wind in the Willows (the river bank 25 scene) are Thornton Burgess's Bedtime Story-Book series, Russell Erickson's Warton the Toad series and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series. Those in the lineage of The

Tale of Peter Rabbit (the barn yard scene) include Walter Brooks, E. B. White, and Dick

King-Smith. A sidelight on additional titles is provided at the end.

Chapter VI (The Righteous in Twentieth-Century Animal Fantasy) attests to the ever-widening scope of animal fantasy in the twentieth century from the post-war period through 1986. This chapter begins with a description of the satirical tradition and how it manifests itself in three adult fantasies, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

George Orwell's Animal Farm, and William Kotzwinkle's Dr. Rat to herald the discussion of a number of "righteous" animal fantasies around mid-century. Hugh

Lofting's The Storv of Dr. Dolittle is a transitional piece. The Mouse and His Child.

Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH. Watershio Down. Beaver Valiev. The Mushroom

Center Disaster. Draoon Winter. A Rustle in the Grass, and Castawavs in Chimo Island are discussed in terms of thematic concerns and artistry.

Chapter VII (Summary and Discussion) provides a summary of what has been achieved in this study, including the major ideas and patterns in animal fantasy from

Aesop's Fables through 1986. The discussion focuses on the concerns of didacticism in children's literature and the art of animal fantasy.

Limitations of the Studv

This study is circumscribed and restricted in the following senses:

First, this study is limited to books published in England and America, excluding those published outside the English-speaking world, for instance, Selma Lagerlof in

Sweden, Kate Seredy in Hungary, Johanna Spyri in Switzerland, and de Brunhoff in 26

France. On that account, the generalizations made in this study only apply to animal fantasy for children in the English-speaking world.

Secondly, this study is limited to a subjective, arbitrary, contingent selection of books. Total objectivity is unattainable and impractical in any sort of critical study, and certainly the researcher's own biases are reflected to some degree in book selection and in the discussion of some impassioned controversies on children's literature.

Thirdly, this study is limited by its focus on the genre of modern fantasy in the form of novels for children. Although it looks at fables as historical antecedents of animal fantasy, it ignores other genres such as modern picture books, poetry, myths and folk tales, historical fiction, and informational books. In fact, picture books and informational books about animals with their particular characteristics deserve a separate whole body of study of their own.

Contribution

This study is intended to enrich the academic understanding of historians, researchers, practitioners, and librarians of children's literature, and also to invite the interest of folklorists in animal tales. It is also hoped this study can function as a reference guide for teachers, librarians, and parents interested in children's literature. CHAPTER II

AESOP'S FABLES

Introduction

Almost every anthology of masterpieces in children's literature or textbook on children's literature either includes or mentions Aesop's Fables. For example,

Masterworks of Children's Literature (Cott, 1983) contains a selection of Sir Roger

L'Estrange's Aesoo's Fables. A Treasury of Children's Literature (Eisen, 1992) offers

Aesoo's Fables along with folk tales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. One separate section in Children's Literature in the Elementary School (Muck, Hepler & Hickman,

1993) is devoted to fables. Indeed fables have a prolonged history full of twists and turns. They appeared in the ancient papyrus. They circulated from mouth to mouth in ancient Greece. They were versified, recast, or selected into various collections over the ages. They were used by the medieval grammarians as primers and textbooks for composition. They were employed as books of courtesy for genteel society.

Nowadays, twentieth-century children are likely to be familiar with Aesop's Fables in the formats of videos, cartoons, or picture books of either retellings or creations of new fables. Then, what are fables? What are other genres relevant to fables? What are Aesop's fables perse? When and how precisely did they come to be affiliated with children from ancient to modern? What service did they offer to the society? In terms of the historical evolution of animal fantasy, what role did they play?

27 28

Ancient and Medieval Beliefs Regarding Animals

A glance at the animal lore prevailing from antiquity to the Middle Ages shall justify the popularity of Aesop's Fables at these times. Primitive people revered animals- mysterious beings seen either as replicas of themselves, creatures who could speak and act as they did, or as lively incarnations of spirits, formidable and unfathomable.

Prior to the Middle Ages, books of natural history and theology (which were virtually interchangeable) accumulated a corpus of animal lore, using animals as a living text to teach wise conduct of life and to discover God's truth (Rowland, 1971). One such book is Aristotle's Historia Animalium. purported to be a record of knowledge of animals based on actual observation; however, through our modern eyes, it is little more than an amalgamation of fact and fancy (Rowland, 1971). An additional example is Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), a remarkable collection of tales, fables, and myths in Latin compiled about 1290. Full of theological allegories, this collection was used by the clergy as a resource book of moralized, entertaining tales to enliven sermons (Darton, 1982).

More remarkable is the bestiary, "a genuine cousin of fable" (Darton, 1982, p. 27).

As Mermier (1991) reminds us, the bestiary was largely modeled on Phvsioloous. an anonymous compilation of moral and theological treatises in Greek, probably composed in Alexandria in the second century. By its nature, the bestiary is an illustrated history of animals, somewhat akin to the modern encyclopedia of animals or an illustrated dictionary of animals. But, unlike today's writers of informational books, the bestiarists were not interested in displaying animals perse. Rather, the bestiary, later falling to the hands of the Christian Church, was used to drive home theological doctrines and exemplify ethical lessons to the congregation (Darton, 1982; Mermier, 29

1971). In short, the bestiary and Phvsiclcaus endured in their prevailing didactic religious and moral strains: To teach the Christian doctrines, to inspire the faithful, and to admonish the unfaithful (Mermier, 1991).

A look at the format of the bestiary will shed light on how animals served as mouthpieces for the clergy. Each chapter is composed in almost a formula. Take the chapter of the lion in A Medieval Book of Beasts (1991 ) as an example. First the life habits of the lion are charted: "when he sleeps his eyes stay wide open keeping watch for him" (Mermier, 1991, p. 4). Next, this trait is exploited as a religious allegory: "my

Lord slept on the cross, but his divine nature kept w atch.. . . This means that he will never sleep nor let the believers lose their faith" (Mermier, 1991, p. 4).

In so doing, the animal nature of the lion is utilized for humans as a symbol of lucidity-the divine nature of God. It is in the same fashion that certain animals have come to be stereotypically associated with specific traits, either as a result of pseudo­ scientific observation, superficial speculation, or pure imagination. Each animal was thus dramatically affiliated with either a virtue to extol or a sin to decry. For instance, the lion was a symbol of Christ and vigilance, and the night owl a symbol of unrepenting Jews. It is in this sense that from the ancient to the medieval times, animals were thought to offer their service for men, either as food or as a medical remedy; or if nothing else, at least they should teach a moral lesson. Their anatomical traits were exploited to instruct the medieval congregation. Animal tales were thus used as concrete examples for the uneducated populace to appreciate abstract precepts from the Old and New Testaments (Mermier, 1991). Near the end of the

Middle Ages the bestiary as a literary genre began to decline, and now it is only extant as a rare printed text in the library. 30

The Historv of Fables in England

It is in such a moralized, humanized context that Aesop's Fables came to the scene. The fable as a genre is typically associated with the name of Aesop, an alleged slave at Samos in the sixth century B. C. He was not responsible for inventing fables,

whoever he was. At best, he is credited with a wider circulation of fables (usually in

a political setting), since fables had been an age-old form of narrative long before his time. It needs to be emphasized that amusement was not the initial function of fables.

In Aesop's time fables were primarily used as a mask for free speech to make a point,

usually in a political setting. When free speech was later established for self- expression, fables gradually became a rhetorical device in debates or arguments

(Jacobs, 1964; Zipes, 1992).

Being a rudimentary composite of instruction and amusement, fables were one of the prevalent literary forms and susceptible to continual rehashing and editing throughout the Middle Ages. What follows is to highlight several illustrious printers and writers of fables in England from Caxton onward to the eighteenth century. For anyone who is interested in the text history of Aesop's Fables, Ben Perry's monumental Studies in the Text Historv of the Life and Fables of Aesoo (1936) and

Barbara Quinneam's concise Fables from Incunabula to Modern Picture Books (1966) should be consulted. Caxton's Aesoo (1484) was not printed with children in mind, but probably simply as good literature for Englishmen to read (Darton, 1982).

Caxton's Aesoo can also be seen as a historical record of medieval society in the sense that in the fifteenth century the fables meant variously to a wide range of readers, ranging from folk belief, folktale, and pedagogical device to sermon exemplar

(Lenaghan, 1967). 31

According to Darton (1982), Aesop's Fables had two lines of descendance in

England: one as the grammar schoolbook, the other as a courtesy book for fashionable society. The rhetorician and grammar teacher were principally responsible for the

medieval currency of Aesop's fables as a schoolbook on reading and composition. For

all their didactic, instructive content, Aesop's Fables were well suited for a reading

primer or for paraphrase exercise in composition. Explicitly, fables were used by the pedagogues to teach grammar and syntax in Latin and rhetoric in English to the scholars in the grammar school (from age seven to fifteen) after they finished the ABC

and primers, and before they entered the university (Darton, 1982).

John Locke on Fables

Aesop's Fables as a combination of instruction and entertainment were only half realized by the medieval grammar teacher and rhetorician. With their didactic intent to instruct the young, they probably lost sight of the amusement aspect of fables.

Meanwhile there was a group of literary men and printers who happily excavated and exploited this other function of Aesop's Fables. Their spokesman is John Locke, the great philosopher of the seventeenth century.

Locke's Some Thoughts on Education (1693) served as the parent guide and teaching manual not only in England but throughout Europe. His passage on fables requires a quotation to clarify the functions of these tales, and to delineate what educators of his time envisioned a children's book to be:

[As soon as a child learns the ABC], some easy, pleasant book suited to his capacity should be put into his hands, wherein the entertainment that he finds might draw him on and reward his pains in reading. . . . To this purpose I think Aesoo's Fables the best, which, being stories apt to delight and entertain a child.... If his Aesoo has pictures in it, it will 32 entertain him much the better and encourage him to read when it carries the increase of knowledge with it. . . Revnard the Fox is another book I think may be made use of to the same purpose (1693, p. 190).

This quotation denotes Locke's theory concerning childhood education and reading in the following ways. First, the educational approach underscoring his advertisement of Aesoo's Fables is rational, empirical, and environmental. Founded on Cartesian dualism of human mind and body, Locke proposes the mind of a newborn infant to be a tabula rasa (blank slate). In contrast to Descartes's theory of innate ideas, he dictates that knowledge is acquired through experience and learning. Given that, the child is inherently neither good nor evil, but the mere product of environment and rearing. The child, rather than a midget adult, is virtually the father of the man

(Pickering, 1981, 1993). Instead of material reward or corporal punishment, Locke propounds, learning should be enhanced through examples and playing (arousing interest and pleasure to engage the child). Aesoo's Fables as an illustrated text of animals stories should, therefore, be extolled as an enticement to enhance the instruction through the pleasure elicited.

Secondly, Locke pronounces an efficient method in the reading program. Like the medieval grammarian and rhetorician, Locke envisages the goal for Aesoo's Fables to convey instruction. And yet, unlike them, he ingrafts "playfulness" as bait to lure the child into the instruction. The animal characters and pictures in Aesoo's Fables and

Revnard the Fox are thus exploited as "playthings" or "magnets" to entice the child to reading and spelling. This advice to employ animals as baits or bribes has been far- reaching. It flickered in the eighteenth-century animal fictional biographies to exhort virtues. Moreover, with their usage of animal characters in picture books (and also in fiction) for children, modern authors and illustrators are probably not very far from 33

Lockean doctrine as they engage the child reader through animals as pleasant baits or rew ards.

Lastly, Locke was influential in terms of the history (or more accurately the pre­ history, in Darton's timeline) of children's literature. At the time when the Puritans were falling from power, "the harsh hand with a rod" somehow gave way to a more benign practice of child-rearing fostered by Locke. His push for pleasant education and learning through playing catered precisely to the appetite of the middle class, who were affluent and concerned with the education of their offsprings. It also directly boosted the demand for amusing books appropriate to the child's level. Providing such books quickly became a marketing strategy and Aesoo's Fables furnished a convenient, lucrative market item by which publishers gratified the public demand. In "Trade and

Plumb-Cake Forever," to borrow John Newbery's slogan, education and commerce went hand in hand from the first appearance of children's books, to the benefits of everybody involved-children, educators, parents, and publishers (Goldstone, 1984;

Muir, 1954).

The Fable in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In the Middle Ages Aesop's Fables were primarily utilized for a pedagogic function as readers and rhetoric textbooks. In the seventeenth century they still wore the mantle of didacticism, shifting from reading and rhetoric instruction to moral preaching. Prominent editors/compilers of Aesop's Fables have expressed this social function of fables in their prefaces. For instance, in The Fables of Aesoo and other

Eminent Mvtholooists: with Morals and Reflections (1692), Sir Roger L'Estrange reveals his social conscience: 34 This I propounded to digest into a compendious abstract of instructive precepts and counsels, to be still ready at hand, for the use and edification of children: which I look'd upon as a work highly necessary for a common good (p. 57).

Subscribing to Lockean theory of childhood education, L'Estrange deems fables as a useful engine of instruction to write good sentiments on the blank slate of the young mind. If Aesoo's Fables served as pedagogic textbooks for the young, they were also seen as books of courtesy for the elegant to enjoy. John Ogilby's The Fables of

Aesoo. Paraphras'd in Verse, and Adorn'd with Sculpture (1651). a sumptuous fine-art book, was clearly intended to delight readers outside school for pleasure. Samuel

Croxall's Fables of Aesoo and Others. Newlv done into English with an Application to each Fable. Illustrated with Cuts (1722) was meant "to be read with pleasure and for pleasure, with profit and for profit," to borrow Darton's words (1982, p. 19).

Amusing are Croxall's complaints on the improbability of plot in fable. To cite "The

Fox and the Sour Grapes" as an example:

Foxes do not eat grapes.... Perhaps Aesop, like L'Estrange, was really writing for the nurseries of Turkey, Persia and Morocco. At any rate, the strange circumstance must be explained in the Application . . . : This Scene being laid in a foreign Country, where either the Appetites of Foxes or the Texture of Grapes may differ from those which are peculiar to these islands, it makes the fact not improbable (quoted from Darton, 1982, p. 19).

Croxall's uneasiness with the fictitiousness (and hence improbabilities) of the fables surely finds him companions in the lady writers of animal biographies near the end of the eighteenth century.

John Newbery in his preface to Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the Young and the Old (1757) claims the volume to be useful and entertaining, a claim clearly 35 commercial in intention. One more remarkable text of Aesoo's Fables is Selected

Fables of Aesoo and other Fabulists (1761 ) by Robert Dodsley. In a preliminary "Essay on Fable," Dodsley ascribes a code of decorum to fables, which lends itself to a lasting tradition in animal fantasy. He prescribes that the style of fable should be elegant:

By elegance, I would exclude all coarse and provincial terms; all affected and puerile conceits; all obsolete and pedantic phrases. To this I would adjoin, as the word perhaps implies, a certain finishing polish, which gives a grace and spirit to the whole; and which, tho' it have always the appearance of nature, is almost ever the effect of art (quoted from Darton, 1982, p. 21).

Therefore, the beasts in Dodsley's fables always have "the appearance of nature," which means the acknowledged animal nature filtered through human eyes-pretty much in the same manner as those medieval bestiaries, only on more secular terms.

Then the lion is regal and proud, the owl is pompous and erudite, and the animals are so tenaciously associated with a specific trait of "nature," that they must find it difficult to play any other character parts "except wrenching themselves perhaps unhappily into the roles allotted" (Blount, 1975, p. 37).

Rousseau on Fables

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed both active translations and revisions of the traditional fables, and also the abundant sprouting of new fables by many full-time fabulists. The fable, respected as a legitimate literary genre, was either used by political hacks and satirists aiming at the general public, or by pedagogues in education

(Noel, 1975). In terms of the educational functions of fables, Locke is decidedly the champion of fables as pleasant baits to lure children to learning. Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, on the other hand, takes another approach to fables. His Emile (1762), a 36 hybrid of novel and treatise on education, illuminates how he envisages a fictionalized curriculum of rearing and tutoring a male French child from infancy to adolescence.

His condemnation of "The Fable of the Crow and the Fox" by La Fontaine can be gratifyingly understood in light of his notions of childhood education.

Distinct from the Lockean tabula rasa model of the child on the one hand, and the

Puritan view of the child born with original sin on the other, Rousseau deems child development as a process through which the innate life forces unfold themselves naturally at due time in due courses. He articulates the child as Noble Savage, born naturally good and moral only to be corrupted later through exposure to civilization and society: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man" (Rousseau, 1762, p. 37). It is the role of the tutor to protect the child from the sins and vices of society. If Locke mildly reformulates educational practices into a rational, benign mode, Rousseau goes even further to prescribe a new approach to education, stressing the naturalness, simplicity, and sentiments of the child-in short, a romantic view of childhood evolved from the ideal of Noble Savage (Goldstone, 1984; Patterson, 1971).

Emile consists of five books stipulating the guidelines for the physical and intellectual development of the first four stages of life. It is in Book II that Rousseau attacks the premature treatment of the child as a miniature adult, against the law of nature. Concerning the reading program, he insists that Emile should not be prematurely taught to read. In truth, no formal reading is prescribed for Emile prior to the age of fifteen: "Emile will never learn anything by heart, not even fables, not even those of La Fontaine" (Rousseau, 1762, p. 112). According to Susan Shell (1992),

Rousseau charges fables mainly because the morals in them will "lead them [the 37 children] more to vice than to virtue" (Rousseau, 1762, p. 113). This moral charge has to be put back in Rousseau's scheme of child development. The animals in La

Fontaine are social beings, conveying various codes of morality in human society.

They are also concerned with the opinions of others and try to conform to the social code in order to procure applause and approval (Shell, 1992). This is exactly opposite to the goals of Emile's education, at least prior to entering society at puberty. The fables, through their didactic messages of conformity to the morality and decorum of society, in fact, lead Emile away from self-esteem, self-sufficiency and wholeness in character. It is in this sense that Emile shall be guarded and shielded from the fables, from the pollution or corruption of society at large (Shell, 1992). To sum up, Rousseau decidedly recognizes the didactic and amusing elements of fables, and justifiably views fables as a codebook for social behavior. Yet the young Emile shall not encounter the fables or society at large until the threshold of adulthood, when he is mentally and morally well-developed to profit from fables without being corrupted and polluted.

Emile is thus a paragon of natural man and social being, morally independent but also aware of the social values that offset and reconcile his self-value.

The Fables Explicated

The elements of fables in terms of form and theme shed much light on how precisely fables can be viewed as animal fantasy and what didactic messages fables generally promote. In the fifteenth century, Heinrich Steinhowel in his Aesop collection defined fables as a combination of a fiction, a literary entertainment, and a moral tale, usually studded with animal characters. In short, the fable is a moralized animal tale intended to amuse and instruct (Lenaghan, 1967). Another stringent definition comes 38 from Pack Carnes (1992): The fable is a short narrative, with a fairly regulative structural format, generally with a single motif.

One of the attributes of the fable is its brevity. Almost without exception, the fable is a terse rendition, like a stanza in a poem, a vignette in a novel, a tableau in a play, or a slice of life. Another attribute is its formulaic structure. The general formula of the fable is to present a thorny situation, a predicament, or a dilemma, which, through fast-paced action and pointed repartee, resolves quickly with a witty, pithy moral, either tacitly understood or explicitly stated. A loose definition is that the fable admits of "any narrative form that employs non-human characters and results in a moral lesson" (Noel, 1975, p. 1 ). Thus the fable, being of brief length and simple plot action, is inevitably associated with young children. As a chief antecedent of children's literature and as a literary genre blending instruction and amusements it serves well as a focal point for considering the nature of children's literature.

Admittedly, one of the appealing features of fable is the animal characters. Plainly

Aesop's Fables are an inventory of animals. There are domestic animals (the dog, cat, sheep, cock, hen, horse) and wild animals (the fox, wolf, bear). There are mammals

(the goat, camel), reptiles (the snake, viper, tortoise), fish (the whale, goldfish), birds

(the crane, hawk, eagle, pigeon, dove, stork, swallow), and insects (the ant, bee, gnat, grasshopper). There are large carnivorous animals (the lion, boar, bear), and small vegetarian animals (rabbit, hare). In addition to animals, the characters in fables also include plants (grape, peach, apple, reed, blackberry), inanimate objects (wheel, candlelight), and natural phenomena (moon, sun, wind). Human presence is occasional, either as leading characters (such as in "The Farmer and His Sons"), or co­ existent with animals ("The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf"). There are also mythological 39 figures (such as Satyr, Jupiter, Hercules, Neptune, Minerva, Mercury), and abstract concepts (such as Life and Death). Given that, it is not entirely sensible to equate fables with animal or beast tales; probably it is more appropriate to define the fable as a didactic narrative, frequently, though not exclusively, employing animal characters to act out lessons on human foibles.

Animal nature is thus yoked to the service of human nature. This strikingly reminds us of the tradition of the bestiary, with the distinction that animal nature in the fable is an allegorical presentation of human nature, while animal nature in the bestiary is a parable of divine nature. The fable and the bestiary join hands to formulate a correspondence between animals and human characteristics. To cite several common examples, the fox is cunning and opportunistic; the wolf is ravenous and avaricious; the ant is industrious; the grasshopper is idle; the frog is puffy and self-ballooned; the crow has a voracious appetite; the peacock is vain; the crane is kind-hearted; the ass is dumb-witted. These correspondences have stood so steadfast that they are almost taken for granted in any animal stories. This is exactly the legacy that the fable, along with its cousin the bestiary, has bequeathed to later generations. Historically speaking, fables are animal fantasy in its primitive stage. The plot is so brief that it is almost underdeveloped. There is hardly any characterization. The animal characters are assigned only their generic names, for instance, the dog, the wolf, the lion, and so on.

No humanization is indicated in their appearance or dwelling, or any other aspect.

It is instructive to note, as Darton (1982) reminds us, that during the Middle Ages and onward, fables, bestiaries, and romances, with all kinds of real-life or fabulous, talking or humanized animals, were virtually close cousins, but their respective destinies greatly varied from each other. Fables were utilized for pedagogic (as 40 schoolbooks) or moral, secular purpose (as behavioral code-books). Bestiaries were of a divine, didactic nature, imparting natural history and religious doctrines to the illiterate public. Romances, pitiably, were the least fortunate, being frowned at as light reading, recreation, an utter waste of time, and, consequently, relegated to underground literature in the chapbooks circulating among the young and the uncouth.

The social climate at that time was certainly moralistic and utilitarian for both the publishers and readers. Undeniably there was a clear-cut line between fable and fiction, natural history and leisure reading. And the fates of fables, bestiaries, and romances hinged on their respective social values (Darton, 1982). It is attestable that the social function of a genre determines its destiny.

Aesop's Fables as "A Rude Graffiti of Human Nature"

Though fables are moralized animal tales, the morals attached are not applicable exclusively to the animals involved. They comment on animal nature in general, but, more often than not, they comment on human nature. The morals tagged to the fable are usually drawn in big strokes. That is, human nature is presented in broad outlines as a generalization. It is in this light that Joseph Jacobs terms fables as a "rude graffiti of human nature" (1964, p. 110). The fable functions as an allegorical presentation of human nature (or more properly, the ideal human nature) to offer tips on how people should behave and conduct themselves.

"The Ant and the Grasshopper" is an example that clearly represents the interlacing between animal nature and human nature. Two contrasting life philosophies, work and play, are affixed to the ant and the grasshopper. Namely, a difference in anatomy is employed to explain a difference in life habits in human term s-hard working for the ant 41 and pleasure-seeking for the grasshopper. Human traits are thus embedded into the natural history of animals. Consequently now we find every ant is working hard, and every grasshopper is chirping merrily. But, does the ant actually work hard or does the grasshopper seek pleasure? Probably not. This piece of information is likely to result from "a spurious natural history" (P. Shepard, 1978, p. 170) through human interpretation, and therefore only misleads our conception of insect behavior. But so long as the fable can make its didactic points in order to function as homily, the reader probably will not be bothered by the biological invalidity.

In a nutshell, animals in the fable are used to clarify social experience in human nature. The fable as a dictum, a cautionary tale, or a moral code, though probably leading us to some misconception of animals, helps the reader recognize and adjust to social expectations. Through analogy, every species is assigned a human trait, and a web of human-animal stereotypes comes as a result. Loaded with human nature, the animals in the fables can barely be themselves; they are no more than living admonitions about virtues and vices.

The recurrent morals or messages from the majority of the fables can be epitomized as "survival of the fittest." The priority is survival, including feeding and mating. The fittest means the strongest, largest, fastest, or nimblest, and physical valor is the source of might. In the jungle of "survival of the fittest" and "might makes right," justice is performed in the name of nature. For instance, the wolf devours the lamb not because the former is good and the latter is evil, but because that is the way of nature. In this world of exploitation, the only possible reversal of "might makes right" for the weakling is to exercise his wits to outfox the powerful to survive. Sometimes, there is even a turn of logic when the little may come to the aid of the mighty. 42

Amoral is the fable world, where opportunism, might, or dupery presides over morality. But this is a world of justice, in which no one really prevails; everyone barely survives. Only with cunning and caution can one escape the fate of death or offset the powerful. The downfall of the victims to the predators is usually incited by their follies, such as stupidity, foolery, self-conceit, arrogance, avarice, and so on. For instance, the tortoise aspires to fly like the eagle, instead of crawling. The frog induces the mouse against his own nature, only to victimize himself in the end. One has to be well-advised, resourceful, and smart to survive this dog-eat-dog world. This is also how every fable ends in a sort of dark vision of life, quite unlike the rosy

"Happily ever after" fairy tale, and without the humor found in other forms of folklore

(Zipes, 1992). Assuredly, the fable speaks to the experience of the oppressed, the disadvantaged, the underdog in the face of a powerful prosecutor. This attribute of the fable can be fully understood in the historical context of ancient Greece, where the form served as an outlet for the oppressed (Zipes, 1992).

Through our twentieth-century modern eyes, the indirect, allegorical demonstration of human nature in Aesoo's Fables is much too simple-minded and naive. The world presented here is outmoded and quaint, projecting an agricultural and/or hunting society, judging from the occupations of human characters, for instance, farmer, woodcutter, hunter, shepherd, physician, charcoal-burner, and butcher. There seems to be no specific social class distinction for the human characters, while for the plants the oak is on the top, and the lion is predictably the king for the forest animals. The prevailing attitude nowadays is probably to relegate the fable to children's literature.

However, there are still a handful of modern fabulists either revising the traditional

Aesop's Fables or creating new fables. Among the former, James Thurber's Fables 43 for Our Time (1940) is one outstanding example, and among the latter, Arnold Lobel is one accomplished fabulist for children. His Fables (1980) won the 1981 Caldecott

Medal. Mitsumasa Anno's Aesoo: A Book of Fables (1989) is both a retelling and a creation out of Aesop's Fables corpus for children. Leo Lionni is another picture book author of fables whose books for children are worthy of mention.

Conclusion

The fable's contribution to the historical development of animal fantasy has been twofold. Aesop's Fables portray human nature in animal terms to convey moral lessons. The eighteenth century widely subscribed to Aesop's Fables and yet insisted they were make-believe. L'Estrange, Croxall, and Dodsley all variously helped regiment animals as stock characters with human attributes, and this regimentation eventually became a pot of story for subsequent writers of animal fictions to savor. The fad for fables brought out the blooming of animal stories in the nineteenth century (Darton,

1982), and indirectly contributed to the flowering of animal fantasy in the Golden Age of children's literature in the Victorian and Edwardian Ages. From the Middle Ages onward, fables were either edited for schools (for the young) or decked out for fashionable society (for the elegant). The fable as a printed text demonstrates that a good children's book is a lucrative asset for publishers and printers. Nowadays collections of fable are widely circulated, but more as a book of manners and courtesy than as a primer or textbook of rhetoric. Indeed, what can be more palatable sugar- coating for the age-old wisdom of mankind than Aesop's Fables?

Aesop's Fables have thus become a permanent resident in the canon of children's literature with good reasons. In terms of the historical evolution of animal fantasy. 44

Aesop's Fables have a lot to offer subsequent writers. The issue of didacticism is the priority. It seems from the very beginning, didacticism-the relentless intention to teach and preach-is a natural ingredient of children's literature. The moral stance, however, doesn't tarnish the value of the fable. In fact, along with the appeal of its animal characters, it is this insistent stance toward conveying moral messages that has sustained the fable from pre-history into the history of children's literature. And didacticism never dies out. This persistent stance continues to make its way into twentieth-century children's literature, as we shall see later.

Also in terms of animal fantasy, Aesop's Fables provides a means for studying the portrayal of humans through animals. The animals in the fable have been humanized, not in the sense of fully donning human apparel, but characterized with human sentiments and behavior. They are meek actors playing out the respective roles allotted to them in the human drama. Once the typecasting begins, it is difficult to shake off. Ever since Aesop, animals have been unnaturally imagined to be something probably other than their true identity. The purpose of being a mirroring image of the human world is chiefly satirical and didactic (Blount, 1975). And this typecasting has almost sunk into our collective unconscious concerning men and animals, even though not every writer of animal stories would buy into that; for instance, Richard Adams rejects the whole set of ideas (see his Introduction to Lockley's The Private Life of the

Rabbit [1964]). The animals in Aesop's Fables seldom are themselves; at best they are moral emblems for the purpose of human edification. Animals have to wait until the nineteenth century to reveal their true identity-in Anna Sewell's Black Beautv.

From ancient to modern, the functions of Aesop's Fables have changed over time, ranging from a mask for free speech, a reading textbook, a grammar book, a code book 45 of nurture, to a hilarious, topsy-turvy picture book (for instance, Mitsumasa Anno's

Aesoo: A Book of Fables). Mostly peopled with talking beasts, Aesop's Fables obtain a funny, humorous effect and appeal more to children than would the same plot featuring human counterparts. Although the fable is an ancient genre, it is not outmoded; in the messages of a weakling struggling to offset the powerful and in all kinds of life struggles, the fable still speaks to us adults as well as children. As "a dark side of human beings portrayed as animals in a dog-eat-dog world" (Zipes, 1992, p.

283), Aesop's Fables ask an everlasting question, which human beings have been asking themselves from time immemorial: How precisely can human beings rise above animals? Where is the line between humanity and bestiality? Is there a line as such?

In his fables, Aesop does not provide us any gratifying answer. CHAPTER III

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY

So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.

--Genesis 2: 18-20-

Introduction

Fables as a literary genre enjoyed a welcome prevalence and much attention from adult literary circles throughout eighteenth-century Europe. Meanwhile England witnessed an unprecedented sprouting of publications and writings for children. John

Newbery with his renowned Prettv Little Pocket Book (1744) and Goodv Two-Shoes

(1765), rendered children's literature a respectable genre for writers and a lucrative market for publishers and printers. The writings for children during the last quarter of the eighteenth century are generally overshadowed either by the preceding prosperity and vitality achieved by Newbery, John Marshall, and other publishers several decades before, or by the subsequent blooming and flowering of children's literature in the

Victorian and Edwardian Periods. The writers for children in this period, grouped as the British Didactic School (Goldstone, 1984), have usually been accused of stilted language, tedious lessons, and heavy-laden morals. They-with no exception, a group of female writers-have been typically disregarded and discredited by modern literary

46 47

historians. This chapter endeavors to defend this group of didactic writers for children

and to evaluate three moral tales by two of them as animal fantasy.

Charges Against and A do Ioqv for the British Didactic School

The didactic tale began in the seventeenth century when the Puritan writers

composed the "Good Godly books" with a heavy dose of didacticism to salvage the

child from the fires of hell. Three popular titles will suffice to illustrate this point, for instance, James Janeway's A Token for Children (1671), and John Bunyan's The

Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and Divine Emblems or Temporal Things Spiritualized (1686).

The didactic tale continued to flourish into the eighteenth century.

Through our modern lenses, the eighteenth-century didactic tales are antiquated, outmoded scraps. Some modern critics justifiably find fault with these tales. For instance, Harvey Darton denounces.

They were very much of a pattern. . . . Their very themes made for feebleness of plot. . . . Most of the heroes and heroines [of the moral tales] . . . were no more than those brats of the movable-head books: the same waxen face fitted into a succession of still bodies (1982, p. 165).

Cornelia Meigs and others (1969) rebuke:

the stultifying quality of the utilitarian pedanticism of the didactic age, the barriers to freedom and liberality of thought, idea, and form erected by any age that rates ulterior motive higher than literary excellence (p. 308).

Isabelle Jan (1974) deals a severe blow to these tales:

These books have nothing that could appeal to a child, no plot and a purely social-therefore dated and absurd-moral outlook and are equally 48 devoid of style. They are totally lacking in charm and lightness of touch. ... (p. 22).

In short, it is the single-minded obsession with promulgating moral lessons, tenacious distrust of imagination and emotion, shallow treatment of characters as mouthpieces of dogmatism, and lengthy moral discussions, that ruin both the style and the plot.

More precisely, these writings have been found faulty in their style, plot, theme, and characterization for being insensitive to the child's interest, and consequently suffocating the child's imagination and damaging the amusing elements in children's literature (Goldstone, 1984).

By all means the eighteenth-century moral tales, for instance, the three animal tales presented later, are not classics either in children's literature in general or in fantasy for children in particular. And yet, just because they are not classics, they can only be fairly appraised in their native land on their own terms (Goldstone, 1984). In truth, as

Peter Opie (1975) shows us.

[A children's book is often) separated from the times and conditions in which it was produced; in short that we are beginning not only to be unable to see the wood for the trees, but unable to see even the ground in which the trees have their roots (pp. 263-264).

This is exactly the twofold pitfall for the critics of eighteenth-century moral tales, or children's literature in the past. For one thing, these critics tend to uproot the books from their historical time frame and transport them into another alien land to make an assessment. For another, they tend to apply-or misapply-the straitjacket of current criteria onto the books of the past. The most notable case is the misfortune of the

Puritan writings for children. Every so often they are dismissed as religious treatises that can hardly be deemed books for children. This is only partially fair, for they were 49 children's books, if put back in their own time and place. Seen through a Puritan eye in the seventeenth century, these were children's books intended for pleasure and enjoym ent—

the pleasure of studying and enjoying the will of God. . . no other happiness was conceivable. They were to be the recreation of leisure, no schoolbooks .... [The Puritans didn't] separate the didactic .... from the enjoyable (Darton, 1982, p. 53).

Puritan writers believed reading such books could entice an exaltation surpassed by no other human sentiments. However, this type of sentiment and the logic behind the creations for children are so foreign to us that, through our anachronistic perspective that separates instruction and amusement, we are apt to devalue them due to their serious lack of amusing elements. Likewise, the critics deplore how the eighteenth- century didactic tales impaired the child's enjoyment with lengthy moral scrutiny, but the charge is valid only in terms of our current criteria that enjoyment and imagination are the two essences of children's literature.

We would do well to remember that children's literature, more than anything else, is susceptible to the entwined web of social, cultural, ideological, political forces on the axes of time and space. For the writers in late eighteenth-century England, their agenda on children's literature was evidently different from our twentieth-century one:

For them, exemplary children's books were to inculcate the virtues of kindness, restraint, and adherence to established rules, to make a useful future denizen of society out of the child reader. The moralists trumpeted this intent in the preface to their tales, and it was regarded as appropriate and decent. These moralists should also be forgiven of their poor literary achievement, because, as Margaret Blount (1975) interprets, "the authoresses cared more for the moral than the story" (p. 44). The 50 moralists tended to uplift precepts at the expense of the artistic qualities of the story.

Still the moralists were pragmatic enough to discern the necessity of amusing elements to entice the child. And certainly what an eighteenth-century English child enjoyed would seldom be the same as what our twentieth-century American children enjoy.

There are attestably different kinds of enjoyment, and to compare the enjoyments of the eighteenth century against our current review criteria is unfounded and ill-advised.

Three animal tales. Fabulous Histories by Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, The Life and

Perambulation of a Mouse and The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals both by Dorothy

Kilner, were chosen here to reveal the historical import of both the moral tales and animal fantasy. For one thing, these animal tales serve as a showcase of the mediation between the adult's didactic purpose and the need to appeal to the child. For another, these three moral tales lay bare how precisely animal fantasy evolved from Aesop's

Fables' "rude graffiti of human nature" to the budding of memorable, outspoken animal characters in later ages. It is, consequently, the purpose of this chapter to bring this historical import to light, to validate the presence of didacticism in these animal tales, and to appraise these tales as animal fantasy. Of course the artistic flaws found cannot be hidden, but, for the most part, these tales will be interpreted in an appreciative manner. In order to achieve this, the ethos of the upper-middle class women who were the chief purveyors of these didactic tales, shall be sketched first, followed by an analysis of the animal tales themselves.

Social Background for the British Didactic School

The latter half of the eighteenth century in England can be characterized by two interlocking beliefs: A steadfast reliance on reason, and a divinely ordained chain of 51 being. As believed, society was built on a universal hierarchy of beings, with every walk of life pre-ordained to its respective rank. All the members of society understood and accepted their assigned social status without complaints (Lovejoy, 1961;

Goldstone, 1984). This was an age of contrived rationality and moderation.

Imagination and unrestrained emotion were banished from good sense. This was also an age of great progress through the Industrial Revolution and social advancements.

Humanitarian attitudes were the mainstay of social improvement, bringing about a fashion of social conscience and the establishment of societies of all sorts for the physical and spiritual welfare of mankind, for example, the Society of Bettering the

Condition of the Poor, the Religious Tract Society, the Christian Tract Society, the

Church Missionary Society, the Sunday School Union, Protectors of Children and

Animals, along with temperance societies, slavery abolitionists, and many church- related groups. These groups also provided thousands of didactic publications, including magazines, books, and tracts to inculcate religious and social beliefs

(Bingham & Schlot, 1980; Goldstone, 1984). The most admirable of them was the

Sunday School movement, which produced numerous publications for poor families.

Evidently didacticism was not exclusive to children's books; it was indeed the spirit of the time, manifesting itself in writings both for adults and children.

Also relevant to the British Didactic School is the status of women at that period of time. Often nicknamed "the female academy," the members of the English didactic school were mostly indefatigable female moralists and educators, either mothers or aunts writing for their children or younger relatives. These female writers were also respectable members of the upper-middle class intelligentsia, noted for their modesty and humility. Writing for children was deemed proper for such women of higher rank 52 because of the social function it denoted, in keeping up with the narrow social parameter imposed on women, however, they commonly either wrote anonymously

(for instance, Dorothy Kilner under the pseudonym of M. P., and Mary Ann Kilner under

S. S.) or assumed an apologetic pose. These tales were not intended for mercenary ends, though they certainly brought a considerable degree of fame. Their composing was primarily derived from a social conscier»ce, not from a desire to entertain, but to make useful, functional members of society out of the young (Goldstone, 1984).

John Locke on Crueltv to Animals

John Locke's educational theory was also relevant to the rise of fictional animal biography. Being the theoretical educational umbrella for all seasons in the eighteenth century, Locke was readily and eagerly picked up by writers and publishers of children's books. Newbery embraced Locke's recommendation of learning as play/recreation into his marketing strategy. In Some Thoughts on Education (1693),

Locke promoted kindness to animals as a part of character education, and this stance definitely legitimized the fictional animal biographies of the eighteenth century. In the section on character education, Locke lists cruelty as one defect of character, and notes that children "are apt to . . . torment and treat very roughly young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure" (1693, p. 153). This cruelty masked as pleasure or mischief should be noted.

for th e custom of torm enting and killing of b easts will by degrees harden their minds even toward men; and they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind (p. 153). 53

In order to offset this cruelty, Locke recommends that from early years children should

be instructed "not to spoil or destroy anything, unless it be for the preservation or

advantage of some other that is nobler" (1693, p. 154). And children should also be given the chance to care for animals in order to nourish humane sentiments such as

compassion, benignity, and diligence, instead of doing mischief and taking pleasure of

it (Locke, 1693). We can hear a lot of echoes within the moral tales later.

The Fad for Fictional Biographies of Animals and Inanimate Obiects

As Darton (1982) reminds us, the battle cry of the guardians for moral uplifting

almost succeeded in exiling fairies and pleasure from the nursery. Locke and Rousseau did not meddle with the issue. The didactic writers fulminated against pleasure

reading. Meanwhile, fictional biographies of animals and inanimate objects arose. The fad for this type of tales in England probably started with Tobias Smollett's The Historv

and Adventures of an Atom (1749), followed by Francis Coventry's The Historv of

Pomoev the Little: Or. The Life and Adventures of A Lao-Doo (1752). More popular

were two memoirs of inanimate objects: Charles Johnson's Chrvsal: or. the

Adventures of a Guinea (1760) and Thomas Bridge's The Adventures of a Bank-Note

(1770-1771). From the 1780s onward, fictional biographies geared to edify the child

became faddish, and invariably animals or inanimate objects served as perceptive

mouthpieces. As Mrs. Trimmer said in The Guardian of Education (1789), "Every thing, animate or inanimate, may, by means of reflection and ingenuity, be made subservient to moral instruction" (quoted from Pickering, 1981, p. 96).

The prevalence of fictional biography at that time is fully understandable in terms of the social function it was thought to serve, in addition to its flexible narrative 54 structure and freedom of ingenuity. As Mary Wollstonecraft pleads in Thoughts on the

Education of Daughters (1787), the typical attitude toward animals is to use animals as a bait, as Locke says of animals in Aesop's fables:

I think little stories about them [animals] would not only amuse but instruct at the same time, and have the best effect in forming the temper and cultivating the good dispositions of the heart (quoted from Pickering, 1981, p. 92).

Fictional biography was further endorsed by John Marshall the publisher. In an advertisement for A Father's Advice to His Son by Dorothy Kilner (1784), Marshall distinguishes fictional biography from fairy tale and romance through the mouth of Mr.

Goodwin: The former appeals to understanding and the latter to imagination. As Mr.

Goodwin notes, these biographies are, "if not in fact at least in spirit, true" (quoted from Pickering, 1981, p. 91), and they are "true in all but name" (quoted from

Pickering, 1981, p. 92). More precisely, fictional biography was regarded more as fact than as fiction, and also it served as a feasible alternative for the fictitious, frivolous fairy tales or romance (Pickering, 1981). The line was thus drawn between fictional biography and fairy tale and romance, and their respective destinies hinged on their social function-fairly akin to the case of fable, bestiary, and romance in the Middle

Ages. This is another proof that the social function of a literary genre determines its fate.

The 1780s saw the rise of many distinguished fictional biographies, such as Mary

Ann Kilner's The Adventures of a Pincushion (c.1780) and The Memoirs of a Peo-Too

(c. 1781), Mrs. Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786). and Dorothy Kilner's The Life and

Perambulation of a Mouse (2 vols, 1783-4?). Less renowned works were written around the turn of the century, such as The Life and Adventures of a FIv (1780), 55

Dorothy Kilner's The Adventures of a WhioDina-ToD (1784), Edward Augustus

Kendall's Keener's Travels in Search of His Master (1798), Elizabeth Sandham's The

Adventures of Poor Puss (1809), Further Adventures of Jemmv Donkev: Interspersed with Biographical Sketches of the Horse (1821), Mary Belson's Of Confidential

Memoirs: or. Adventures of a Parrot, a Grevhound. a Cat, and a Monkev (1821), to name several.

Drawing near the turn of the century, fictional biography was so rampant that some examples deteriorated into a display of absurd sentiments lavished onto animals. Mrs.

Trimmer criticizes The Life and Adventures of a FIv (1789) in The Guardian of

Education: "... in this book, as in many others of modern date, humanity toward animals is carried to an extreme" (quoted from Pickering, 1981, p. 96). These biographies were generally artistically crude, with children as mannequins of "good or evil qualities packed into little bodies to be praised or blamed by measure. . . .

(animals] too were often mere moral dummies" (Darton, 1982, p. 166). Memoirs or travelogues of either animals or inanimate objects continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century. And yet the fictional biography of animals as "lessons of instructions in the agreeable forms of tales" (Pickering, 1981, p. 103) in the late eighteenth century, once shiny as a silver penny, now lie dusty. Animal fantasy had to wait until the Victorian Age to revive and thrive again

Introduction to Three Fictional Biographies of Animals

Three fictional biographies of animals were selected to fulfill a twofold mission, to discuss didacticism in the British Didactic School and to appraise them in terms of the evolution of animal fantasy. The three animal tales in question are Mrs. Trimmer's 56 much acclaimed Fabulous Histories (1786), and Dorothy Kilner's The life and

Perambulation of a Mouse (2 vols, 1783-1784) and the less known Rational Brutes

(1799). The first two had a considerably long span of printing and were widely enjoyed by the young prior to the twentieth century. The last one, though less artistically accomplished, bears much thematic resemblance to the first two. These three diversely reveal the variety of animal fantasy in late eighteenth-century England and also foreshadow some of the themes recurrent in later animal fantasy.

To name these three fictional biographies as animal fantasies is manifestly an anachronistic error. As a matter of fact, fantasy/fancy is the last thing in the world that Mrs. Trimmer and Dorothy Kilner would have wanted to associate themselves with, because anything fanciful or imaginative was the enemy of society, an enemy everyone should denounce. These two literal-minded writers were unwilling to take the poetic license of suspending the reader's disbelief, and they even intentionally demolished the illusion of make-believe. For instance, in the introduction to Fabulous

Histories. Mrs. Trimmer proposed that "the sentiments and affections of a good Father and Mother, and a Family of Children, are supposed tobe possessed by a Nestof Red-

Breasts” (1786, p. 274; italics in original). In order to acquit herself from the anthropomorphism or humanization of the birds, she further prescribed how the story should be approached:

[The story is] not as containing real conversations of birds (for that it is impossible we should ever understand), but as a series of FABLES, intended to convey a moral instruction applicable to themselves, at the same time that they excite compassion and tenderness for those interesting and delightful creatures, on which such wanton cruelties are frequently inflicted, and recommend Universal Benevolence (1786, p. 274; italics in original). 57

Dorothy Kilner in the preface to The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse, disclosed the same intent.

Before you begin the following history, which is made believe to be related by a Mouse, I must beg you will be careful to remember, that the author's design in writing it, was no less to instruct and improve, than it w as to amuse and divert you (1783-1784, p. 224).

She goes on to address her solemn intent of composition to destroy the alluring illusion of fancy:

in earnest, I never heard a mouse speak in all my life; and only wrote the following narrative as being far more entertaining, and not less instructive. . . . (1783-1784, p. 225).

Thus these writers felt obliged to make it clear that there existed a distinct line between fable and fancy/fiction. So long as the animal can be made into an emblem of virtues to extol, or drive home a moral message, the story is a fable; otherwise it is an offspring of fancy or a kin of the fairies, and, therefore, should be excluded from nursery reading. These hard-headed lady writers seemed to see no contradiction in their handling of talking beasts and their protest against fairies. Nonetheless, we need to be reminded that the novel was a mere newborn, and fantasy for children was still in its fetal stage, awaiting the development of animal fantasy in the Victorian and

Edwardian Ages. Also these writers should not be blamed too much as seen from the social/historical milieu of which their writings were the natural products.

Mrs. Trimmer and Dorothy Kilner apologized for their composition for two conspicuous reasons. First, this was probably a common pose adopted by female writers at that time. Eighteenth-century English females were supposed to be meek, virtuous, and humble. Though writing was considered acceptable and decent for 58 women, the female writers in the manner of their sex at that time, customarily adopted a pseudonym to efface their identity from the writings. Second, in order to provide antidotes against the crude fancy in the popular chapbooks of romance or fairy tale, these resolutely moral ladies had to make such a pretense and drive home their serious purport to the readers. It would be unjust to accuse them of being blind to the imaginative elements of their composition. On the contrary, they were fully aware of the alluring appeal of this flight of fancy to the readers. This is why they had to adopt an outspoken stance to dictate to the reader how to approach the text, for fear that the reader might miss the messages spoken through the mouths of talking animals.

It is the dictatorial pose and the obsessive concern for instruction that win the name of the British Didactic School and also incur the most blame from modern critics.

Despite the writers' affected pose and their awkward handling of talking animals.

Fabulous Histories. The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse, and The Rational Brutes are listed here as animal fantasy for good reasons. First, the animal characters do talk.

The robin family in Fabulous Histories converse with the other feathered race, though not with the Bensons or any other human. In The Life and Perambulation of A Mouse

Nimble articulately communicates with his siblings and also reveals his life story to the narrator. The animals in The Rational Brutes are all eloquent in expressing their concerns. In this light. Keeper's Travel in Search of His Master (1798) by Edward

Augustus Kendall is disqualified, since Keeper the dog does not talk at all, though the story did enjoy a wide acceptance at the turn of the century. Second, the animals are protagonists in having the whole story to themselves. Though in the case of Fabulous

Histories, the narrative switches back and forth from the humans (the Bensons and their acquaintances), to the feathered race (the robin family and other birds), the robins 59

are the focal point to be noted. The emphasis is on how men will treat the animals or

what is the appropriate attitude toward animals. Third, animals in these three tales are

humanized in the sense that they are tinged with human sensibility, rather than

donning any human apparel.

Mrs. Sarah Trimmer. Fabulous Histories (1786).

Fabulous Histories. Designed for the Instruction of Children. Resoectino Their

Treatment of Animals is probably the best-known of the three books under study and

enjoyed a long life either as a moral tale or as a fictional biography of the eighteenth

century. Mrs. Trimmer, the outspoken delegate for the British Didactic School, was

famous for her formidable rebuke against the fairies and rigorous literary review in The

Guardian of Education, disclosing her moral conviction that the young should be

safeguarded from harmful books. She was prolific in writing, but Fabulous Histories

was her only piece of fiction. This tale presses for a detailed discussion, because it typifies the moral tales in the eighteenth century in three aspects. First, it demonstrates the social function that moral tales fulfilled in eighteenth century

England-to preach and rectify. Second, the moral instruction is addressed through comparison and contrast, and analogy. Third, the story exemplifies the man-animal relationship in relation to the Great Chain of Being, and also the proper attitude toward animals. In a sense Fabulous Histories is a culminative thesis on the man-animal relationship prior to the nineteenth century, before there was a great shift caused by the Industrial Revolution.

The first issue to be noted is the social function of children's literature. As epitomized by Mrs. Trimmer's moralistic stance, writing for children in this period had 60 a definite social mission, with a strong pedagogic slant. Mrs. Trimmer stands up to preach virtues and to rectify defects in characters. The proper treatment and attitude toward animals is the mainstay of her teaching goal. In fact, the recurrence of kindness to animals as an exhortation in the Georgian moral tales very likely indicates there was rampant savagery as recreation for Georgian youths, for instance, pulling the wings off flies, stripping birds of their feathers, destroying the egg-shells, tossing young birds, tormenting puppies and kittens, or flogging donkeys and horses. These examples of cruelty masked as mischief were all the more shocking and disturbing to the moralists, because they ran counter to the notion of the superiority of humans as enlightened and rational beings. How did children come to be so cruel or cold-blooded?

It must not come from nature to take such cruelty as pleasure. The only convincing reason is a lack of parental instruction to inform the children. This is the argument these didactic writers take up onto their shoulders. Children's literature is not for pure enjoyment and diversion; it has the social mission of preaching and rectifying. It is also in this sense that the moral tales were written as much for the adult as for the child. These didactic tales are a book of nurture for the child, and a parenting guide for the adult-the upper-middle class parents. The ultimate goal is to make a well- behaved gentleman or lady out of the child in eighteenth century England.

Second, in order to achieve the social function envisioned by the writers, the methods of comparison and contrast and analogy are employed. Mrs. Trimmer knows well that in order to drive home a point, lessons have to be repeated and reviewed through various angles so that they can be compared and contrasted. The characters are in sets and serve as either accompaniments or foils to each other so that they reflect back and forth like a mirror. For example, Frederick Benson is indulgent in 61 animals, and Harriet Benson behaves appropriately toward animals. Edward Jenkins is atrocious to animals, and Lucy Jenkins is insensitive toward animals. Betsy Wilson is the exemplar of universal benevolence toward animals. How these children behave assuredly comes as a result of a variety of parenting. Mrs. Benson, a Rousseauian mentor, provides Harriet and Frederick with ever-ready help and advice. Lucy and

Edward have no parental instruction to cultivate their humanity and humility. Mrs.

Addis denies Augusta and Charles maternal love because she is so enraptured in her pets. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are the enlightened, well-informed parents, providing sensible advice. Thus Mr. Jenkins, Mrs. Addis, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson serve as sets of parents for comparison and contrast-the first too hard, the second too soft, and the third just right.

Mrs. Trimmer provides a look at various styles of parenting and their ensuing results and also a spectrum of modes in treating animals to urge the reader to make the best choice, to decide which to follow or which to shrink from. That is, the point of comparison and contrast is to find the golden mean: How to behave moderately and appropriately toward animals. The self-evident paragons of character are Mr. and Mrs.

Wilson, a virtuous, industrious farmer couple, and their child Betsy, who all show exemplary treatment toward animals, neither too harsh nor too indulgent.

In addition to comparison and contrast, analogy is another device in presenting the theme. As seen from the Introduction, Mrs. Trimmer distributes human sentiments to the robin family and other feathered creatures so that her moral messages can be amplified to the maximum. For instance, the robin parents display unremitting affection and devotion to their offspring. The redbreasts are never gluttonous, never take more than they need. The feathered race are generally submissive and contented. 62 sustaining an injury rather than take violent revenge. Sometimes negative sentiments are manifest in the redbreasts, including sibling rivalry, envy and jealousy. Fortunately, their misconduct always ends in repentance after the robin parents' inspiring speeches about rules of conduct, much in the same manner as Mrs. Benson lectures Harriet and

Frederick. This is where the anthropomorphism lies: The animal characters share the same sentiments as their human counterparts. The reader not only learns from the human characters, but can take advice from the animals as well.

Last, Fabulous Histories has great bearing on the development of animal fantasy- not so much in its artistic techniques as in its thematic matter, for it succinctly summarizes the relationship between man and animals prior to the nineteenth century.

One notion relevant to the man-animal duet is that of the Great Chain of Being.

Through eighteenth century eyes, the universe was in an orderly hierarchy: in the

Christian mode of creation, God was the Supreme Governor, then the angels, succeeded by humans, and animals at the lowest dominion. This is a man-centered world; in Mrs. Benson's words, "The world we live in seems to have been principally designed for the use and comfort of mankind, who, by the divine appointment, have dominion over the inferior creatures” (Trimmer, 1786, p. 349). In order to exercise that dominion to the utmost, the human with his reason is to discover the different natures of brutes and how the brutes may serve the human world.

The human-brute duet can be best considered through Mr. Wilson, who speaks for the enlightened, rational attitude toward animals. Pragmatic and sensible, he considers every beast in his farm as his servant, and in return for their service, he renders their lives as comfortable as possible and never misuse or abuse them. On the other hand, animals are in service to humans' use and pleasure. For those brutes apparently of no 63 use to mankind, at least they can offer themselves as a life text to humans to learn,

"to furnish our minds with contemplations on the wisdom, power, and goodness of

God" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 350), or "a variety of useful hints for the conduct of human affairs" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 298). For instance, we learn industry from ants, loyalty from dogs, and obedience from bees. In this light, animals in the eighteenth-century fictional biography were not very far from their ancestors in the medieval bestiary; both were meant to admonish and instruct, only the former in secular terms and the latter in religious terms. In a nutshell, animal nature is an emblem of the virtue that man aspires to achieve.

A further concern in the relationship between man and beast is the necessity for proper treatment of animals. Mr. Wilson is a full-hearted humanitarian toward animals.

His first belief is to act "toward all dumb creatures, as I would to mankind, upon the principle of doing as I would be done by" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 337). He goes on to emphasize: "As there are no Courts of Justice in which they can seek redress, I erect one for them in my own breast, where humanity pleads their cause" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 338). His sympathy is echoed by Harriet Benson: "I am sure I shall never kill any thing without first magnifying it in my mind, and thinking what it would say for itself if able to speak" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 330), or Mrs. Benson, "I shall, on all proper occasions, be ready to lend my tongue to the dumb, and to speak for those who cannot utter their own sorrows and injuries" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 338). This is exactly what the latter-day writers of animal fantasy are doing-erecting a Court of Justice for the animals and lending tongues to the dumb creatures. For the animals of today are characterized as having sentiments, both suffering and enjoyments, similar to human's; the only difference is they are dumb and cannot make their complaints. Also the 64 writers of animal fantasy, with Mrs. Benson's magnifying glass, amplify what the animals would feel and lend tongues to them in one way or another.

The dominant attitude toward animals in Fabulous Histories is a plea for their due status in the chain of being and for the decent treatment to which they are entitled.

However, this plea is not founded on an acknowledgement of animal rights, at least in our twentieth-century understanding of the term. The overall approach to animals is still man-centered, for the purpose of treating animals properly is less for the sake of animals, than for man "to imitate the supreme Lord of the Universe, by being merciful to the utmost of their power" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 349).

As expected of any moral tales, there are quite a few weaknesses in Fabulous

Histories. Poor structure or loose plot without coherence is the most frequently noted fault. Lack of character development is another major defect. Most, if not all, characters are flat and one-dimensional, either good or bad, and remain so through most of the pages. Lacking development in personality, the characters seem to exist merely for moral preaching. Another drawback is excessive stress on moral edification, sometimes at the expense of the artistic organism. For instance, in a lesson on the natural history of native birds in England, the Mocking-Bird, a native of

America, is awkwardly inserted for the sake of the moral, "mimicry was a fault to which young birds were too apt to incline" (Trimmer, 1786, p. 324). The moral intent obviously takes precedence over any artistic or logical concern.

Still, Fabulous Histories is contributive to the artistic development of animal fantasy, in terms of the ways animals are portrayed. In Aesop's Fables, animals all appear in a crude sketch, with animal nature bent toward human nature. That is, for their brevity, Aesop's Fables are like snapshots of human nature in a human drama 65 acted out by animal characters. In Mrs. Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, the four nestlings are drawn with precise and minute strokes. Robin is imprudent and trustful;

Dicky is timid; Flapsy is of elegant shape; Pecky is amiable and sweet. Flapsy clearly is the apple of her robin parents' eyes, while Robin is the negative example, taking no heed of parental instruction and only learning his lessons In bitter tears. The nestlings make mistakes, repent, learn lessons, and reconcile, and thus have much appeal to the child reader.

Dorothv Kilner. The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse (1783-4).

The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse shares a lot with Fabulous Histories, for both were composed in the 1780s by zealous women writers. Both share similar morals: Filial devotion, contentment with one's station in life, and proper treatment of animals. Both are remarkable in the history of animal fantasy, but in different ways, for Fabulous Histories is significant in its thematic interest, and The Life and

Perambulation of a Mouse should be noted for its artistic advancement in making animals and its moral interesting (Blount, 1975). This is exactly where Kilner breaks new ground in animal fantasy. Fabulous Histories is a moral treatise in the sense that the feathered race furnish stock mouthpieces to advocate virtues, with much talk but not much action. This mouse tale, on the other hand, is a well-told story, full of suspense and exciting incidents to drive home its moral points. In this light, Kilner should be credited as the first to pay respect to an animal through entering its head and heart to imagine what it would feel like to be that animal.

Also as Gillian Avery (1965) pronounces distinctly. The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse ranks higher than Fabulous Histories in terms of the entertainment it provides. 66

Indeed this mouse biography is remarkable in the history of animal fantasy especially

with regard to the advancement of artistic techniques, and it is also influential to later animal fantasy in terms of characterization and thematic development. To begin with, it is probably one of the pioneering first-person narratives intended for children featuring wild animals as the protagonist (Goldstone, 1984). Second, the tone of the narrative is distinctive. In Fabulous Histories the human narrator speaks with a definite

condescending tone toward the feathered race; while in this mouse tale, the tone is intimate and cordial-a sort of reciprocal fondness enjoyed by Nimble and the narrator.

This is a real tribute to the animal, unlike most fictional biographies around the turn of the nineteenth century, in which humans usually appear as the patronizing benefactors of animals with the bestial creatures subservient to him (Goldstone, 1984). Kilner's tone continued into the twentieth century and is typical of what we now know as animal fantasy.

Moreover, in spite of delivering moral lessons. Nimble is an early example of an absolutely flesh and blood mouse, retaining many of the innate traits befitting the rodent-nimble, restless, timid, shy, cunning, and voracious. The moral lessons (about human nature) delivered from his mouth do not seem to negate his animal nature

(Goldstone, 1984); this is much unlike animals in other moral tales. It is in this sense that Nimble is so much the true prototype for subsequent mouse tales (Blount, 1975), and also for later true-to-life animal characters in children's literature in general. This advancement in characterization from the crude sketches of animals such as in

Aesop's Fables greatly influences animal fantasy in the Victorian and Edwardian period and even to this day, for it upgrades animal tales to what we know as animal fantasy: a tale of some length which retains the innate habits of animal characters authentically. 67

To see Kilner's impact, we just need to call the roll of a few beloved animal characters.

For instance, Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, and other Beatrix Potter animal characters never forsake their respective animality, even though they do talk and are so stylishly dressed. Anna Sewell in Black Beautv is even more realistic in the horse's habitat and true nature, though she is so much concerned with human sentiments.

The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse has additional merit to offer to later writers of animal fantasy: It shows how to render the story moving and powerful. As in other moral tales, this mouse tale seeks to urge the readers to action. This purpose is accomplished through a spontaneous overflowing of powerful emotions, including maternal love, anguish and excitement for departure from home, curiosity for adventures, filial devotion, the pathos of being unable to save siblings from death, and all the trials and tribulations Nimble experiences in his peregrinations (Goldstone,

1984). We are pulled by the ways the mouse brothers manage to evade traps, dodge human contact, and take shelter in the gamekeeper's cottage and garden. We also share much of the happiness and worry when the mice brothers search for a safe, secure home. These emotional powers grip us with concern for the hapless mice brothers and also arouse our rage at the insensible torments of humans. The result is we are much moved to take the action not to set a mouse trap and to treat animals humanely. This power of story to move readers to action has great impact, for instance, Anna Sewell in Black Beautv succeeded in influencing readers against the use of the bearing rein (Blount, 1975).

A brief comparison between The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse and The Tale of Peter Rabbit shows how Nimble can be seen as a forerunner of Peter Rabbit.

Clearly there are parallels concerning the plot and characterization between Nimble and 68

Peter Rabbit. These two tales are both of filial disobedience. Nimble neglects the mouse mother's admonition to never be seen, never return to the same place twice.

Likewise, Mother Rabbit cautions Peter not to go into Mr. MacGregor's garden. The warnings are neglected anyway, and disobedience brings retribution as expected. But the adventures are full of excitement and suspense. Both Nimble and Peter Rabbit are very animal-like to have their stature in animal fantasy.

Drawbacks there surely are. The pedantic, affected language is common to the eighteenth century moral tales. The greatest fault, however, is that sometimes the narrative drags into extended, tedious lectures. For instance, one mother instructs her daughter on overwrought, irrational fright of animals by citing example after example, and the lecture lasts for six full pages. Nonetheless, overall. The Life and

Perambulation of a Mouse should be considered the most accomplished animal fantasy that the English didactic school has to offer, and "the nearest approach to fantasy that the era was to produce" (Avery, 1965, p. 30).

Dorothv Kilner. The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals. (1799)

Dorothy Kilner is habitually remembered for her mouse tale rather than this medley of animal gossips about humans, for the evident reason that The Rational Brutes cannot live up to the artistic achievement of either Fabulous Histories or The Life and

Perambulation of a Mouse. To be frank. The Rational Brutes is an inferior, clumsy creation in plot, narration, and characterization. The trigger and closure for the narration is pitiably weak and contrived. Mrs. Benfield picks up a little silly book of a

"gossiping assembly of dumb animals" (Kilner, 1799, p. 5) and reads to amuse her children. As the plot proceeds from one animal to another complaining about their 69

maltreatment by humans, abruptly, Mrs. Benfield holds back, "for the leaves are so torn, I cannot make out what the lamb, the duck, or the squirrel said, though I

remember it was something to the same purpose" (Kilner, 1799, p. 105), thus relieving the author (and the reader as well!) of the burden of going on any longer.

The narrative is slow-paced and lifeless. The Rational Brutes is a circus of animals,

where every animal proceeds to the podium to tell his or her life story and charge

against humans. There are barely logical connections between this string of tales.

Very little action happens-only one narration after another. What the animals would

say is almost predictable, even before they open their mouths. The same tune goes

on playing so many times that the reader is soon tired of it. This is the didactic tale

at its worst, when there is not any artistic formulation and the message is driven home

in such a crude, insensible manner that the tale falls into propaganda.

If one is critical enough, one can find more awkward contrivances throughout the

plot. For example, how different beasts and birds all leave their respective houses and

cages to meet together to converse is not logically explicated. Kilner, however, simply dismisses the topic, "if you have been entertained with the conversation when they were assembled, we will not mind by what means they got together" (Kilner, 1799, p. 106), and shifts our attention to the moral that we should never tease or torment any living creatures.

Artistically awkward. The Rational Brutes is impressive for its thematic interest.

This tale strikes a blow to the prevalent notion that man is a rational animal, and it also attacks the maltreatment of animals by man for no other reason but his conceit that he is the lord of creation. In this light. The Rational Brutes provides a scene in the

Court of Justice for animals to seek redress, where the prosecuted animals are on the 70 offensive, no one is present for the defense, and we readers serve as the jury. Kilner's conspicuous intent is to induce the reader/jury to a condemnation against cruelty toward animals.

A few delegates from the brute world proceed to give testimony on the irrationality of human. As the hog charges.

They [Humans] seem, I think, to take pleasure in tormenting every creature that comes within their reach; and instead of trying to make animals fond of them, endeavor to make themselves hated, and abhorred by every one (Kilner, 1799, p. 18).

As the title indicates, the animal characters are talking and, what's more, rational-an attribute supposedly exclusively belonging to humans. Here lies the irony of the tale:

Animals appear to be more rational, are more apt to logical reasoning than the human.

For example, the hog, though unsatisfied with the barbarity of the human to the hogs, does not whitewash the vandalism done by his species in the garden. The pigeon, on the other hand, warns the animals of the danger of hasty generalization:

Some of them [humans], I know, are cruel, and misbehave themselves. But surely it is doing great injustice to condemn themall. . . . But becausesome of the species are bad, is it just to condemn the whole? (Kilner, 1799, p, 24).

Since mankind is being accused of maltreating all the brutes without distinction, the pigeon admonishes: "But let us not imitate them in this part of their character. Let us

. . . be just. Let us be generous" (Kilner, 1799, p. 24). The dog echoes:

If I had been blessed with reason, I would have used it to assist and make comfortable poor dumb creatures who could not help themselves, and not behave with less kindness to them than they do to mankind (Kilner, 1799, p. 73). 71

The tables are subtly turned here. In the past the human used to learn lessons from animal nature and the human was capable of improvement. Now the animals behold the human as a life text to learn from. Since animals are free of the mistakes committed by humans, they are morally superior to human. This satire on the human- animal relationship finds many imitators in animal fantasies of the twentieth century.

In such a world of malevolence and malice, animals seem to have nowhere to go.

The only feasible solution is to wish for an animal land where there are no people. No wonder the ass confesses.

I have most heartily wished that there was not a human creature in the world; and have thought that the universe would be much more perfect without any such unjust and cruel beings in it (Kilner, 1799, p. 31).

However, the severest accusation from these fellow sufferers of humans in general or mischievous boys in particular comes from the mouth of an ass: "I think it would be the happiest thing for this nation that ever yet was thought of, if some plan could be contrived to destroy every boy upon the island" (Kilner, 1799, p. 15). Then, one may wonder: How precisely can man claim himself the ruler of the universe? Is he the benefactor or persecutor of animals? Given the testimonies of the maltreated animals.

The Rational Brutes or Talking Animals, despite all its artistic defects, foreshadows two of the major concerns in later animal fantasy-the animals' rights to exist as they were created to do, and the superiority of animality to humanity.

Conclusion

From the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century animals had not been animals. Fables used real-life animals as actors in human dramas. Newbery, at 72

Locke's advice, invoked animals in books for children, using them both as a bait to lure children to read, and as a potentially effective mouthpiece for moral edification. The didactic tales that flourished from the seventeenth century onward into the nineteenth century further made everything, including animals, into an emblem of either virtue or vice. The natural history of animals was utilized only to point at a human moral. This is particularly true of the fictional biography of animals in the eighteenth century, in which animals "are not animals dressed in man's clothes, but rather humans in animal skins. They were devoid of charm and animal characteristics" (Goldstone, 1984, p.

184), and their animal nature was often bent toward human behavior.

In terms of characterization, the animals in animal fantasy can be either bent toward human nature (when animals are bent toward human traits and sentiments) or depicted in animal nature (when animals are presented as real-life animals in their nature setting). And, if human nature and animal nature are installed on the two sides of a teeter-totter, the pivot of gravity seems to shift from the side of human nature in Aesop's fables a bit toward animal nature in the fictional biographies of animals of eighteenth century England. In the time of Aesop's Fables there was only general animal nature, "might makes right" and "survival of the fittest," without specific reference to individual animals. Human nature was high above for animal nature to look up to. For instance, the biological, anatomical reasons why the ant works industriously and the grasshopper seeks pleasure shall be ignored, so long as the ant and grasshopper can be interpreted into the moral: idleness brings want. Does the ant actually work hard? Is the grasshopper really idle? It is humans who interpret the one animality as industriousness and the other as idleness. The animals are used as human sym bols. 73

In the fictional biography of animals, on the other hand, the animal characters are usually made into emblems of virtue to follow or vice to shun. Mrs. Trimmer's robins and Kilner's mice brothers are two examples of animals in parables of human behavior on how animals should be treated. And the Mocking-Bird is introduced to demonstrate the moral "mimicry was a fault to which young birds [humans] were too apt to incline"

(Trimmer, 1786, p. 324). Though the animality of these animals serves humanity, at least the animality is attended to.

Mrs. Trimmer and Dorothy Kilner are surely didactic, they knew it well, and they were not abashed to admit it. Their moral tales admittedly have many defects in plot and characterization. However, these tales can be appreciated for the intention behind their creation. Writing for children was a happy, social duty, derived out of relentless love for the younger generation. This devotion to children is probably without compare even in this century. Therefore, if the moralists, along with the Puritan writers, are so much misunderstood, it is because modern critics are unable to appreciate them as passionate social workers committed to the child's spiritual well-being.

The eighteenth century was an age in which animal fantasy made great advancement in terms of thematic interests and artistic techniques. For instance, the plea for proper treatment of animals is the central concern in Fabulous Histories and

The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse. This plea is further connected to the concern for animal rights, which probably made its first appearance in Rational Brutes, or

Talking Animals. Also the mice brother's quest for a safe home free from worries has been shared by many animal fantasies in the twentieth century. To modern readers accustomed to animal fantasy or even animal science fiction, these three books may seem affected, phony, or contrived. But the authors were vividly aware of imaginative 74 and appealing qualities in their writings, and even worried that readers might be so diverted as to totally miss the instructive points.

One danger of the historical approach to these eighteenth-century moral tales of animals is that we tend to look through our modern lenses, spying all the defects while being blind to the merits begging to be discovered, and in so doing we tend to slight the past and laud the present. However, we have to bear in mind that in the eighteenth century both children's literature and the novel as a literary genre were in their infant stages. The time for them to thrive and bloom was yet to come. CHAPTER IV

VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ANIMAL FANTASY

Introduction

The nineteenth century in England was an age of machines, technology, and progress. The Industrial Revolution started in the eighteenth century found its full expression in this century. It was an age of affluence and prosperity. Mechanization brought about mass production in the factory and increased productivity enormously.

A sky-rocketing in population and industrialization resulted in large-scale urbanization.

It was an age of social reform, with the Factory Act (1833), the Education Act (1870), the Ballot Act (1872), and the Public Health Act (1875) passed to improve the well­ being of mankind. It was an age of prosperity in publishing. Paper-making, printing, binding, typography, and illustration all had undergone great improvement (Bingham

& Scholt, 1980). As literacy spread, the call for quality reading materials was high.

It is in such a scene that children's literature came to its Golden Age.

The latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, that is, the years between the publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice's

Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and World War I, are habitually designated as the

Golden Age of children's literature. Prior to that time children's literature was considered primarily as a didactic implement for imparting social norms or moral precepts. Books were usually appraised not on how well they were composed

75 76 artistically, but on how well they could serve to teach, exhort, or reprimand. There were occasional calls for amusements, but only to the extent that amusement could serve to make a moral point. Imagination, being frivolous, was trammeled; it had to hide underground to hold its own, and wait for the Victorian Age to rehabilitate.

The fifty years of the Golden Age formulated the development of fantastic fiction for children, particularly the sub-genre of animal fantasy. Looking back, neither in

Aesop's time, nor in the eighteenth century did animal fantasy come close to what is known as the genre today. Yet the sprouting of animal fantasy in the Golden Age has its roots firm in the historical soil on which both child and animal came to be sentimentalized and romanticized. This chapter attempts to explicate precisely how animal fantasy evolved in its historical context; how the shifts in the nature of children's literature, the notion of child/childhood, and man's attitude toward animals all came to bring animal fantasy to its full manifestation, and how Victorian and

Edwardian animal fantasy served as a pivotal transition from Aesop's fables and fictional biography of the British Didactic School to the twentieth century. To achieve this, an overview of children's literature of the Golden Age and an account of the historical milieu on the notion of childhood and attitudes toward animals will precede an examination of Victorian and Edwardian animal fantasy, namely Beatrix Potter's The

Tale of Peter Rabbit and other tales for the nursery, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Anna Sewell's Black Beautv. and Rudyard Kipling's The Junole Book.

An Overview of Victorian and Edwardian Children's Literature

The fate of fancy as manifested in fairy tales is highly relevant to how fantasy came into being, for the fairy tales offered the inspiration for the rise of fantasy in the 77 late nineteenth century in England. As Darton (1982) pronounces, the opening years of the nineteenth century were "the dawn of levity" (p. 199). With the publication of a jolly picture rhyme book, William Roscoe'sThe Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's

Feast (1807), the first non-moral fantasy starring animals characters, a breeze of spontaneity, hilarity, and gaiety wafted in the air. Numerous imitations were released, including Mrs. Dorset's The Peacock "at Home" (1807), W. B.'s The Elephant's Ball

(1807), and The Lion's Masquerade (1807). These verses shared an invitation to feast and merriment. For instance. The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast begins thus:

Come take up your hats, and away let us haste To th e Butterfly's Ball, and th e Grasshopper's Feast, The Trumpeter Gad-fly has summon'd the Crew, And the Revels are now only waiting for you (Roscoe, 1807, p. 146; italics in original).

Rhyming texts provided a fete of mirth and cheer for the feathered folks in Peacock at Home, for the quadrupeds in The Elephant's Ball, or for both in The Lion's

Masquerade. Meanwhile, a pageant of animals accompanied by musical bands marched on.

Pitiably, these joyous verses were merely fitful gleams flickering only once in a while. At least the first half of the nineteenth century was still dominated by the didactic school sprawling from the previous century. Books for children were uniformly preoccupied with instructive purposes, either for moral earnestness or common sense. Tract books stuffed with Christian values offered examples of virtues to follow and of vices to avoid. Also popular were the matter-of-fact tales cramming children with basic information (Egoff, 1980). Most of the nineteenth century witnessed the coming and going of many unremarkable moral tales and matter-of-fact 78 writers, although there were also such literary talents as Thomas Day, Mrs. Barbauld,

Maria Edgeworth, and the less celebrated Samuel Goodrich and Jacob Abbott. The genuine breakthrough did not come until the year of 1865 when Alice fell into the rabbit hole.

For most of the eighteenth century, fantasy or imagination was the last thing that writers for children wished to meddle with. Fairy tales were much frowned upon and excluded from the serious reading of the child. Near the middle of the nineteenth century, approximately with the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837, a new attitude appeared as plain good sense began to give way to sensibility (Avery,

1965). Once the tight hold on morals and matters-of-fact loosened, the fairy tale was sure to creep back. Collections of fairy tales such as Benjamin Tabart's Collection of

Popular Stories for the Nurserv (1804), the Grimms' German Popular Stories (1823),

Henry Cole's Felix Summerlv's Home Treasurv (1843), and Hans Christian Andersen's

Wonderful Stories for Children (1846) heralded the return of fairy tales after a century- long exile. Charles Dickens' defense of fairy tales added further momentum to the appearance of many accomplished literary fairy tales. The flight on the wing of fantasy was to take off on the English soil.

Paradoxically, though the literary fairy tale or fantasy was inventive in form, in content it was not (or would not be) far away from the moral tale of the previous age.

In some instances the literary fairy tales were ingrained with a strongly moral, didactic slant, and fairyland was furnished with a pulpit for moral lessons. Catherine Sinclair's

Holidav House (1839) and Francis Paget's The Hope of the Katzekoofs (1844) were two early attempts to combine the fairy tale framework with the teaching of moral maxims. John Ruskin's The Kino of the Golden River (1851) illustrates a lesson on 79

true wealth. Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) and George Mcdonald's At

the Back of the North Wind (1871) are a sort of religious allegory on goodness and

grace. Given that, it seems that the literary fairy tales and fantasy in the early

Victorian Age were a conscious, inevitable mediation between the tradition of moral

inculcation, and that of the fairy tale, mingling magic, and enchantment with moral,

religious instruction (Avery, 1965).

Introduction to Victorian and Edwardian Animal Fantasv

The long span of the nineteenth century brought a deluge of literary fairy tales,

collections/translations of fairy tales from foreign countries (Germany, France, and

Netherlands), nonsense verse, adventure stories, family stories, and fantasy. It is said

that the Victorian Age (1837-1901) and the ensuing Edwardian Age (1901-1910)

marked the blooming of animal fantasy. However, is was almost the end of the

Victorian and Edwardian Ages before genuine masterpieces of animal fantasy were

produced. The major part of the Victorian Age was marked by realistic animal stories

or less accomplished animal fantasies overshadowed by later books.

Two early examples of the Victorian realistic animal stories are Richard Jefferies's

Bevis: The Storv of a Bov (1882) and Wood Magic: A Fable (1881). Two writers

about animals in the New World are worthy of mention. Wild Animals I Have Known

(1900) by Ernest Thompson Seton, a Canadian nature writer, presents a vivid drama

of wild animals through the close, authentic observations in the real-life environment

(Blount, 1975). Jack London in The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fano (1905) offers one of the first American animal adventure stories, dramatizing the wretched entanglement between man, wild animals, and nature. These two writers' stress on 80 authenticity, objectivity, and sympathy in presenting real-life animals has a great bearing on twentieth-century animal stories. Another title is Edgar Rice Burrough's

Tarzan of the Aoes (1906), which bears some resemblance to Kipling's The Junole

Book but in a shallow scope. L. Leslie Brooke's three picture books of nonsense verse,

Johnnv Crow's Garden (1903). Johnnv Crow's Partv (1907), and Johnnv Crow's New

Garden (1935) are a jolly animal carnival. This sense of hilarity and fun is certainly reminiscent of The Butterflv's Ball and The Peacock at Home a century before. In The

Golden Goose Book (1905). Brooke tells of three bears in a charming house, having all their life necessities transferred into bear equivalents, though they remain in fur instead of human trappings (Blount, 1975). Walter de la Mare's The Three Mulla Muloars

(1910), later reprinted as The Three Roval Monkevs. depicts a quest of three monkeys to trace their roots of royal heritage; the story is noted for the assumed monkey intelligence and sensibility, and their invented language (Egoff, 1988).

If fantasy is the treasure of Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, animal fantasy is unmistakably the gem from that treasure box. Victorian and Edwardian animal fantasy flourished on the native soil of didacticism and romanticism. These two traditions continue to manifest themselves in animal fantasy in this century. Since the time of Aesop, didacticism had embedded itself into the grain of children's literature in general and animal fantasy in particular, as we have seen in the last two chapters.

On the other hand, romanticism, the result of the Romantic Movement in England, was a new arrival, which declared its manifesto in the last several years of the eighteenth century, and triumphed in the first three decades of the nineteenth. Romanticism with its cult of childhood and the sentimentalization of the wild and uncouth had much to do with how the child came to be associated with animals, and how these two came 81

to be romanticized and sentimentalized in children's literature. An understanding of

this historical context is necessary to the appreciation of the romantic presentation of

animals in the Victorian and Edwardian Ages and also in the twentieth century.

Four pieces of animal fantasy were chosen to be highlighted here: Anna Sewell's

Black Beautv (1877), Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), Kenneth

Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Rudyard Kipling's The Junole Book

(1893). All four have been influential children's classics, are often included as basic

texts in the canon of children's literature, and are still circulating among children. They

stand well the ordeals of time. On the one hand, they either inherit the deep-seated

tradition of didacticism or echo to the romantic manifestation in the broad historical

context. On the other hand, they prefigure the two predominant thematic strands of

animal fantasy in the twentieth century-the Romantic and the Righteous. More

precisely. The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Wind in the Willows, lingering on the sentimental-romantic image of animals dated back to the turn of the century, have

much to teach later writers of animal fantasy in the romantic camp. Black Beautv.

resonating in the moralistic, didactic tradition of both fable and fictional animal

biography, would find quite a few companions in subsequent writers of righteous

animal fantasy. Kipling's The Junole Book, belonging to neither camp, stands on its

own with fresh reflections on the duality of man and animals.

The Romantic Image of the Child in the Victorian Period

The Victorian period saw a definite change in attitude towards children. How the

writers of the Victorian period came to idealize and sentimentalize the child goes back to Rousseau and his educational theory. 82

Deviating from the Lockean tabula rasa model of the child on the one pole, and the

Puritan view of the child born into original sin on the other, Rousseau posited that the

child was a Noble Savage, born naturally good and moral, with innate ideas of justice,

fairness, and conscience. The innocent, moral child was corrupted only later through

exposure to civilization and society: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the

Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man" (Rousseau, 1762, p.

37). He also denounced the deep-seated perception of the child as a miniature adult:

"They [the men in the past] were always seeking the man in the child without thinking

of what he is before being a man" (Rousseau, 1762, p. 34). Therefore, what

Rousseau promotes is to see a child in a child, rather than to seek an adult in a child.

Also the child's development was a process through which the innate life forces would

unfold themselves naturally at due time in due courses, free of any interference from

extraneous factors. What the adult could do was to be an ever-ready tutor to protect the child from the sins and vices of society. He went further to prescribe a new

approach to education, stressing the naturalness, simplicity, and sentiments of the

child-in short, a romantic view of childhood evolved from the ideal of the Noble

Savage (Goldstone, 1984; Patterson, 1971).

Rousseau wasn't the first one to adore the child. In truth, he merely revived the

medieval cult of the child's purity and innocence (Cole & Cole, 1993) and continued to glorify the child as the image of an angel or the infant Jesus, a clear connection to the cult of Christ (Aries, 1962). One certainty, however, is that the child under

Romanticism was far better off than his counterparts in the Middle Ages or in Puritan

England. A medieval, upper-class child might be sent to a wet nurse in early years, to

a monastery school at six or seven, and to a feudal lord's manor house to learn 83 manners in his teens. A lower-class child terminated his childhood at seven to share the household work and community duties (Tucker, 1977). Renaissance children were generally considered "miniature but troublesome men and women" (Bingham & Scholt,

1980, p. 53) and were not much valued at home or in society. In the seventeenth century the notion of childhood as a distinct stage in life emerged in Enlightened

Europe. In the wake of Locke's respect for the child as a rational creature, and

Rousseau's idolizing of the child as a Noble Savage, a humanistic attitude had appeared. The notion of childhood culminated in the late Victorian period when it was a recognized stage of development; childhood was the golden age or the dream days, when innocence was untrammelled.

According to Avery (1965), the image of the child as a pious, noble, impeccable being first presented itself in temperance tract stories published by the Religious Tract

Society. The romantic vision of the pure, innocent child made a further appearance in the late nineteenth century, particularly in Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Aoe

(1895) and Dream Davs (1898). It is at this moment that childhood as a stage of immaturity and irrationality in Locke's scheme finally gave way to the supreme innocence of childhood derived from Rousseau's romantic viewpoints of the child.

The Romanticization of Animals in the Nineteenth Centurv

For most of the eighteenth century, animals were believed to be subservient to human dominion, and humans benevolent to animals in return. However, near the end of the eighteenth century, there was an emerging tendency of lavishing sentimentality on animals. Take The Life and Adventures of a FIv (1789) as an example. Jackie rescues the fly hero stuck in a jar of honey. Sukey strokes the fly with a feather. 84 warms it on her bosom, kisses it tenderly, sets it free outside the window, and bids it farewell (Pickering, 1981). As expected, Mrs. Trimmer disparaged this lavish sentimentality towards animals. In reviewing The Life and Adventures of a FIv she condemned, "Humanity towards animals is carried to an extreme" (quoted from

Pickering, 1981, p. 96), in that "[animals were] elevated to the rank of human beings, they are our fellow creatures, ourequals if not superior in virtue" (quoted from

Pickering, 1981, p. 96), and judged it wrong "to ascribe feelings to the lower creatures, any farther than the sense of present pain extends" (quoted from Pickering,

1981, p. 37), not to mention to assign virtues to inferior creatures. However, in spite of Mrs. Trimmer's opposition, near the turn of the century, with the sway of the innocent child, the romantic image of animals as noble being seemed inevitable and natural. Such an equation between child and animal seemed to rest on their shared innocence and naivete. Animals began to adopt new faces, to be sentimentalized and romanticized, in the late Victorian period. Historically there are three strands of thought to explain this emerging attitude toward animals.

The first strand owes much to Rousseau's Emile. If Locke was the one to prescribe how animal characters should function in children's books of the eighteenth century,

Rousseau was the cosmetician who shaped the new face for animals in the following century. In the very beginning of Book I of Emile. Rousseau rejected man's mutilation and thence tended to sentimentalize the natural world:

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters (Rousseau, 1762, p. 37). 85

Instead of being the Lord of Creation, man was the source of disturbance, upsetting the natural order, while animals in their innocence bore the benevolence of God.

Rather than that of master-servant, the man-brute relationship envisioned by Rousseau was a reciprocity, based on equal terms. This vision finds its fullest manifestation in

Thomas Day's "The History of Little Jack" (1788), in which a foundling was brought up by a decrepit soldier and the milk of a goat named Little Nan. The reciprocal amity between Little Jack (man) and the nanny goat (brute, and hence the natural world) was the unspoiled, uncorrupted harmony that Rousseau prescribed for a Natural Man. In this scheme animals were elevated from their inferior place as things made for man's use, to the status of nurturingbeings sharing equal terms with man. Far from excessive pity and immoderate tenderness toward animals, Rousseau's followers in children's books tended to romanticize and sentimentalize the animal characters in various degrees (Pickering, 1981).

Secondly, the rise of English Romanticism contributed to the changing image of animals in children's books in pronounced terms. As Wordsworth and other

Romanticists began to sentimentalize the peasantry or the child as paragon or noble savage, the sentimentalization of animals was a natural follow-up. Peasantry and children were like animals in their shared or similar state of rough simplicity, and rough simplicity was equated with truth and beauty in the eyes of the romantic beholders.

Since there is "a beauty within every beast" (Pickering, 1981, p. 34), animals were invariably portrayed favorably to provide the inspiration of purity and naivete.

The writers of children's books continued to plead for kindness to animals, but their motivation was not so much to advocate universal benevolence as to speak for the natural rights of animals. For instance, in An Essav on Humanitv to Animals (1798), 86

Thomas Yonge contended that animals were entitled to rights of existence like those of man. Edward Augustus Kendall's preface to Keener's Travels in Search of His

Master (1798), narrated the emerging changing attitude toward animals:

[We shall exert] to obtain our compassion for the various animals for whom, in common with ourselves, the rain descends, and the sun shines; . . . I cannot help anticipating the time, when men shall acknowledge the Rights, instead of bestowing their compassion upon the creatures, whom, with themselves, God made, and made to be happy! . . . yet these creatures possess virtues that deserve our esteem, a s[ua]vity of deportment that wins our love, and talents that demand our respect... I address this book; not for him [Keeper] alone I plead, nor for the race of Dogs only, but for the whole breathing world! (Kendall, 1798, pp. 192-93).

Kendall's appeal for the happiness of man's fellow creatures and the levelling system including the rights of animals may seem a cry in the wilderness falling on unheeding ears, or at least precocious for his contemporaries. He would find more colleagues among the group of writers of righteous animal fantasy one century later.

Last, the sentimentalization and romanticization of animals in children's books can be further understood in terms of historical evolution of the man-animal duet. Within the classical tradition, that is, prior to the Industrial Revolution, men and animals lived in intimate proximity. "They [animals] are both like and unlike" men (Berger, 1980, p.

2), and also "an intercession between man and his origin" (Berger, 1980, p. 4).

Animals were admitted into the pictorial art, rites of celebration (both religious and secular), and daily language either as metaphor or as extended allegory, as in the bestiary or beast fable. All these denoted the rapport between man and animals-until the nineteenth century, the modern times (Berger, 1980; Marcus, 1983/4).

The modern times heralded by the Industrial Revolution witnessed the rupture or disintegration of the intermediation between man and the natural world, including the 87

animals. This rupture can be primarily ascribed to Descartes and the economic/social

arrangements brought about by the Industrial Revolution. According to Descartes's

dichotomy of body and soul, animals, being soulless and in the mode of machine,

should be set apart from humans (Berger, 1980). Thus the rapport between man and

animal was broken and the gap was opened. Also, the Industrial Revolution replaced

animals with machines in many jobs. Animals were gradually marginalized and

eventually passed out of man's life, except as a source of food or household pets.

With the retreat of animals from man's vicinity, by the mid-nineteenth century, public zoos, realistic-looking stuffed animal toys, and animal picture books, all came to gratify the nostalgic longing of an adult, especially a middle-class adult, for a lost paradise,

where man and animal (or child and wild animal) enjoyed a bucolic, idyllic life in rapport

before the advent of industrialization, urbanization, and mechanization (Berger, 1980;

Marcus, 1983/1984). This is a historical loss, irredeemable forever. Thus the life of a wild animal becomes a romantic ideal to be sentimentalized.

Thus explicated, the romantic tradition (with animals sentimentalized and humanized) made its debut in some of the fictional biographies of animals around the turn of the century. It was in the Victorian and Edwardian periods that the tradition presented itself in The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901 ) and other tales, and The Wind in the

Willows (1908). But it was the twentieth century that witnessed the splendor of the romantic animal fantasy.

Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901).

Potter's legacy to children's literature is a notable collection of small-format picture books meticulously written and illustrated, carefully designed in layout and size, which 88 remain unrivaled nursery classics even today. But her significance in the development of animal fantasy should also be remembered. The perennial charm of Potter's nursery tales of twenty-three volumes comes from the creation of a special world peopled with original characters. The locale of her tales is the Lake District of England. Potter transforms this real scene into a timeless countryside, a rural world free of modern technology (Stott, 1984), where animals live in harmony. Historically, Potter was part of the trend of preserving and idolizing rural life. As she offered her service to the

National Trust to preserve the unspoiled, undeveloped virgin land in trust, so her tales for the nursery obliquely idealized a landscape and a lifestyle, and this idealization has become part of the nostalgia that predominates in her tales and other romantic animal fantasies. Her evanescent watercolor illustrations also contribute to the romantic vision in her books, lauding the country life and cozy country homes (Lane, 1968).

The primary source of Potter's charm is her new cast of animal characters, quite unlike most animal characters of her time, which were humans with animal heads in animal forms. Instead, her characters are a mixture of realism and fancy. Many were modeled on her pets, for instance, the hedgehog, mice, or rabbit. However, her observation of natural truth is often transformed by fancy-her animals are generally dressed in the trappings of their human counterparts. As Egoff (1981, 1988) reminds us, humanization can be successful only if something from the animal nature is maintained. Therefore, it is the combination of realism (a naturalist's observation of animal life) and fancy (an imagination of the animal's character) that results in Potter's unerring match of animals with appropriate human trappings. The clothes of her characters contribute to our imaginative understanding of their characters, however obliquely. For instance, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle wears a print gown, a striped petticoat and 89 an apron; Jeremy Fisher wears a mackintosh and galoshes, and a flowery coat. But these human trappings do not distort their animal nature (Stott, 1984; Crouch, 1961).

This is exactly what Lane (1968) argues.

There is nothing grotesque or misleading, however fabulous. All her little hedgerow, farmyard and wainscot animals are conceived with imaginative truth, and though they are shrewdly humanized, and their stories told throughout in human terms, there is, imaginatively speaking, not a word of falsehood (p. 116; italics in original).

It is also in this sense that Potter does not ridicule or caricature her characters or distort their features with human expressions (Messer, 1968). Indeed, Potter was an accomplished writer of animal fantasy.

From the series of twenty-three animal picture-story, miniature books exquisitely illustrated by Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was chosen for discussion here because it is the first and most famous, and, therefore aptly speaks for the whole set of animal stories. This rabbit tale, inspired at least in part by the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris (MacDonald, 1986a), appears first in a letter by Potter to five- year-old Noel Moore to entertain him during an illness. Though brief, it bears much resemblance to The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse in matters of theme and character, though with a different treatment of the humanization. First, thematically, both are stories of filial dis/obedience. Nimble's three m ouse brothers all die in hum an hands for failure to take their mother's admonition, and he eventually learns the bitter lesson at the expense of his brothers' lives. Peter's father was put into a pie by Mrs.

McGregor because he had an accident in Mr. McGregor's garden.

In terms of plot, in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the concern of parental care and discipline is perfectly calculated for such domestic animals as rabbits. Unlike his three 90 docile sisters, Peter decides to go into Mr. McGregor's garden for the mere reason that

Mrs. Rabbit has forbidden it. The logical outcome of this disobedience and escapade is a retribution. But we cannot but be sympathetic with him, or even envy him for having such eventful adventures (MacDonald, in Bingham, 1988). What an adventure

(or disadventure) he has-at the expense of his two shoes (clogs or pumps), his blue jacket with brass buttons, and going to bed taking camomile tea without supper.

Second, while Kilner's Nimble is a prototype for later animal characters, credible and life-like with his rodent nature intact, Peter Rabbit is one of the most influential animal celebrities ever created in children's books. Peter, though dressed, remains pretty much a rabbit; he is both a human boy and a rabbit. When he slumps against the locked door, finding no way out, and cries pathetically, he is an endearing little boy. As Margaret Lane (1986) contends, when the animals appear without clothes, it is to stress and recall their true natures. Thus, when Peter wriggles out and bounds away, leaving his jacket behind, he is less boy than an agile rabbit (Sendak, 1988).

Yet Peter is different from Nimble in many ways. Nimble is humanized merely through his speech, and he is depicted with little distinction from his brothers. Peter wears a blue jacket with brass buttons, visually in contrast to the short, deep pink cloaks worn by his sisters-a sex differentiation by color handed down from ancient

Romans (MacDonald, 1986b). In this aspect, Peter, in his human trappings, is much closer to a human child. The blue jacket with brass buttons is definitely an extension of his personality. The jacket causes much trouble, but Peter surely would not lose it, especially since it is quite new. This is perhaps why the child reader can identify with

Peter so readily, while Nimble for all his sensibility and compassion appears remote beyond the immediate reach of the child reader. 91

Additionally, Nimble and Peter live a different life. Life is tough for Nimble.

Feeding and safety are the priorities for survival; caution is the password, otherwise death will befall at the next moment. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a scaled-down human world with a warm, intimate feeling. The sun always shines; rain never pours. Sex, politics, death, rivalry, and tension do not exist. The animals live in a generally harmonious, interrelated manner, and stick to their natural habitats (Blount, 1975). But

Potter does not deny hazard, danger, or near tragedy in her stories. Even when there is occasional predatory behavior, it is usually treated in a matter-of-fact tone (Blount,

1975). For instance, Mr. Rabbit's tragedy is briefly narrated by Mrs. Rabbit as "your

Father had an accident there [in Mr. McGregor's garden]; he was put in a pie by Mrs.

McGregor" (Potter, 1901, p. 10). Her characters usually show such childhood traits as mischievousness, foolhardiness, or defiance of convention, while remaining true to animal nature (Senick, Vol, 19,1990). In all their youth, innocence, and inexperience, her animals are much like the child reader. Given that, this is a vision of a lost childhood, a lost Arcadia, in which the readers, especially adults, are convinced

"sometime somewhere life was like this, [and] in some miniature animal community, life was better" (Blount, 1975, p. 135).

Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows (1908).

Contemporary to Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other tales, Grahame's The

Wind in the Willows is part of the Victorian/Edwardian legacy to later generations of children. A winner of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (1958), The Wind in the Willows occupies an unrivaled status in children's literature in general and animal fantasy in particular. It has been illustrated by well-known artists such as Ernest Shepard (1931), 92 and Arthur Rackham (1940), made into play by A. A. Milne (Toad of Toad Hall, 1929), and a Walt Disney movie. Like Potter, Grahame also springs from the romantic tradition in animal fantasy. The Wind in the Willows can be approached as a marvelous piece in the romantic tradition in matters of structure, theme, and character.

Structurally, there are three threads of plot in The Wind in the Willows. The first is the "wanderlust" (Philip, 1985, p. 101), the madcap adventures on the highway and open road, as represented in Toad; the second is the homesickness and nostalgia, that of friendship, home life, and simple joys messing about in the boats, as told by Mole,

Rat, and Badger (Mendelson, 1988). Between these two strings of disparate narratives are two inserted chapters of nature mysticism, "The Piper at the Gates of

Dawn" and "Wayfarers All", which are so extraneous to the plot that their presence is questioned by some critics; for instance, Blount (1975) wishes there had been no such chapters. Even so, strangely, the montage of these seemingly loosely connected vignettes creates a riverbank idyll of both domestic and pastoral pleasure-a celestial, unearthly world. As Gillin (1988) has pointed out, there are abundant references to the romantic poets such as Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth in the two inserted chapters, and the pervasive nature mysticism can be generally traced back to Richard

Jefferies's Wood Maaic (1880) (Philip, 1985).

The Wind in the Willows is a piece of nostalgia (longing for home) and "the sweet epic in Acadia" (Poss, 1975, p. 81) on three levels-personal, social, and cultural

(Watkins, 1984). It originally took shape in the form of bedtime stories and letters told to Grahame's only child Alistair before it was published, though the elements of the book had been whirling around in his mind for years (Haining, 1983). Perhaps it is such a book of nostalgia on the personal level because it reflects a father's longing to 93 reconstruct a lost childhood to share with his son. But it functions more than on the personal level, for it resonates on a social note. The Wind in the Willows specifically refers to its historical context, to the social, economic, and industrial changes in late nineteenth century England. It was the age of the Industrial Revolution and of its by­ products: The collapse of agricultural society, scientific revolution, religious skepticism, social mobility, and disintegration of social structure (Green, 1959). No wonder

Grahame, along with other romanticists, watched over these changes, especially the decline of rural life, with a deep regret at what was lost and an utter horror at being helpless to do anything. What is envisioned in The Wind in the Willows is a river bank scene as Grahame thinks it should be: his ideal of a true golden age (Scott, 1984), and also a nostalgic wish to preserve the agricultural, pre-industrial, aristocratic society.

"The Wild Wood and the Wide World represent areas in which the residents are dominated by extreme lawlessness and extreme civilization, respectively;" in contrast,

"the River Bank is the ideal happy medium" (Stott, 1984, p. 127). As the rioting middle class mob seeks violence in the city, the subversive working-class of the Wild

Wood, stoats, weasels, and ferrets, conflict with the genteel River Bankers and threaten Toad Hall (Hunt, 1988), but they are driven out by the spokesmen of the ordered world of nineteenth-century England: Rat as private gentleman, Badger as country squire. Toad as landed aristocrat, and also Mole (Zanger, 1977).

But what Grahame presents here goes further than a satire on contemporary society, a sublimation of his personal fear over social changes, and the construction of an ideal good life (Steig, 1981). As the River Bankers live peacefully and close to nature. The Wind in the Willows is an emotional entanglement of cultural nostalgia for

"home, sweet home." Here home is a place to be regained (Toad Hall), a place of 94 strong feelings (Mole End), and a felicitous space (Badger's kitchen). What is restored in the end is a vision of the good life, order, tranquility, and harmony (Watkins, 1984).

Home as a felicitous space and the special anchor of one's existence is a dominant theme in the cultural myth of the English way of life (Watkins, 1984). What follows the cordiality in this sweet home is naturally friendship, respect for each other, and readiness to help others in need.

Just as the gallery of animal characters in Potter has been well-received,

Grahame's River Bankers are equally unforgettable. They speak, wear clothes, scull, pack cold lunches, and wish they could afford black velvet jackets. They don't have an age, they don't grow old, and they don't have a future to think about. Thus they stand for idyllic peacefulness and pleasantness, totally unconcerned with sex, money, or politics. Nature is presented as romantic and benign, rather than "red in the tooth and claw" (Green, 1959)

The animal characters initiated by Potter are a mixture of natural truth and fancy.

Most of her animals are humanized in a way that does not contradict their natural shapes and habitats. Grahame recounts that Rat is observant, wearing a blazer, and rowing a boat, while Mole is shy, living in a comfortable underground home. But sometimes Grahame seems to lean more to fancy in his creation of characters, rather than paying meticulous attention to his animals in natural truth as Potter does. In many cases his animals seem physically larger than they are in real life. For instance. Toad can drive a motor-car and jump onto a train, and Mole can ride a horse by the reins.

This discrepancy of size between Toad and his motorcar or Mole and the horse is often criticized as Grahame's major drawback (Williams, 1976). It seems that the size of the animals varies as the scene commands. It is instructive to note that in the first edition 95 of The Wind in the Willows, there was a frontispiece by Graham Roberston, not a single illustration on the animals. Grahame is said not to have wanted illustration because of the size difficulty. When asked if Toad was life-size or train-size on the escape from the train, Grahame slyly answered that Toad was both and neither, that is. Toad was train-size and the train was toad-size (Green, 1959). This is perhaps also why Ernest Shepard (1968) said, "'There are certain books that should never be illustrated' is true in many senses, and I had felt that The Wind in the Willows was one of these" (p. 273), because no pictures can be fully satisfactory.

Toad, "the impossible and lovable," (E. Shepard, 1968, p. 273), is the focal point of criticism, because there is nothing, or very little, toadlike in his behavior. He is manic with the motorcar, he walks into the pub, he is tried in court, and later escape through disguising as a washerwoman. His size compared with Mole and Rat is also doubtful. In fact. Potter, who is scrupulous in matters of humanizing animals, censures Grahame for giving Toad hair to comb. She thought it was certainly "a mistake to fly in the face of nature-a frog may wear galoshes, but I didn't hold with toads having beards or wigs!" (quoted from Carpenter & Prichard, 1984, p. 354).

However, Toad can be explained as a comic, as an exaggerative extension of the grotesque appearance of a toad. As Blount (1975) suggests, Grahame himself may be so carried away by Toad that he is forgetful of the nature of his hero. In any case.

Toad contributes so much to the humor in this tale that he is surely hard to forget.

The essence of The Wind in the Willows is "snugness," including finding one's way home, a comfortable bed, simple pleasure, friendship, and so on. All these are also manifest in varying degrees in later animal stories by such authors as Arnold Lobel, and

Russell Erickson. Adaptations or sequels to The Wind in the Willows include The Wild 96

Wood (1981 ) by Jan Needle, examining the events from the point of view of the Wild

Wooders, and A Fresh Wind in the Willows (1983) by Dixon Scott, an unworthy

sequel.

In picking the form of talking animal tale, he places himself in a tradition that

highlights the long-lost harmony between humans and animals, and thus allows himself

to invoke a romantic, idealized vision of a past golden age (Kuznets, 1987). If Potter

primarily makes her claim in animal picture books, Grahame leaves his mark in

establishing the genre of animal fantasy as what we know today.

Anna Sewell. Black Beautv (1877).

While The Wind in the Willows and The Tale of Peter Rabbit point to the romantic

camp of animal fantasies in this century. Black Beautv says much about the righteous

camp. Black Beautv. "probably the most successful animal story ever written,"

(Chitty, 1971, p. i), is a long-lived horse story, running through endless editions,

reprintings, and revamped or illustrated versions. It has seen numerous sequels, films,

and television adaptations, and has been widely translated around the world.

Black Beautv can only be fully understood and appreciated within the context of

mid-Victorian England. It was the heyday of horse transport. Despite the rise of the

railway, horses were much needed for short-distance or private transport, or wherever the railway did not reach. During this time, animals were widely maltreated either out

of ignorance, stupidity, or fear. Due to her life-long love of horses, her Quaker

upbringing, and the encouragement of her mother Mrs. Mary Sewell (a prolific, successful writer of moral tracts for the poor), Anna Sewell came to the writing of

Black Beautv (Baker. 1957). 97

The historical significance of Black Beautv as a transitional landmark piece in animal fantasy lies in its being, as Blount (1975) contends, "the first real animal novel" (p. 18) and "the last of moral tales, the last great first-person narrative in Listen-to-my-life style" (p. 249). Black Beautv's relationship with the moral tales can be discussed through The Adventures of a Donkev (1815) by Arabella Argus, a direct ancestor of

Black Beautv in many aspects (Blount, 1975). First, in early fictional animal biographies, the animal characters are almost impeccable, perfect as paragons. The

Adventures of a Donkev offers a more balanced view of the human-animal relationship.

Animals are not morally all good; some of them are good, others bad, just as there are the good and the bad in mankind. In the same vein. Black Beautv portrays both good and bad among horses as well as men.

Moreover, as Jemmy the Donkey writes down his autobiography, so is Black

Beautv a life story by a horse, as indicated by the original title page:

Black Beautv His Grooms and Companions The Autobiography of a Horse Translated From the Original Equine By Anna Sewell (Sewell, 1 989, p. xii).

Sewell is merely a translator from the equine terms to the human ones, including language, emotion, and sentiment. The function of this pretense is to entice the reader to attend closely to the animal character's point of view. Thus Sewell puts herself inside a four-footed beast and imagines what it would be like to be a horse.

Third, as Jemmy's mother advises him to be docile and obedient, so Black Beauty's mother instructs him in compliance and endurance. This meek, submissive pose on the part of suffering animals renders them all the more pitiable, when opposing to the 98

maltreatment and cruelty shown on the part of humans. In this way. Black Beautv

possesses moral resonance and emotional appeal to the reader. Finally, Black Beautv

and The Adventures of a Donkev. as in other moral tales, are strings of cautionary tales chained together without logical links. Nearly every chapter ends with a moral,

pointing to the theme of humane treatment of horses (Wells & Grimshaw, 1989).

Still Black Beautv is a greater achievement and of more impact than The

Adventures of a Donkev. Intrinsically, Black Beautv is a good story, begging to be read

and enjoyed. Some dramatic scenes are unforgettable, for instance, the midnight

gallops to the doctor, the fire at the inn, the escape at the flooded bridge, and the

death of Ginger. Black Beautv also epitomizes all possible equine lives in the Victorian

period, ranging from the pony for children of the leisured class, the hunter, and the

heavy coal wagon draught horses to the army charger (Wells & Grimshaw, 1989).

Undeniably, the character of Black Beauty is the most appealing, with his gentleness, handsomeness, and sensitivity. Never before nor afterwards in any other children's

book has a horse been so marvelously drawn. Black Beauty experiences all types of riders and drivers, from the compassionate, sensible Farmer Thoroughwood; the kind, thoughtful coachman John Manly; the poor but considerate cabdriver Jerry Barker; the drunken, uncouth Reuben Smith; to the groom stealing food from the stable, and other dishonest grooms. For such a comprehensive representation of the Victorian London

and the author's artistic skills. Black Beautv should be placed far above most of the other moral tales of animal (auto)biography starting one and a half centuries ago.

Extrinsically, Black Beautv succeeds as a practical manual of horse care. One harness expert, Edward Fordham Flower, wrote, "It [Black Beautvl is written by a veterinary surgeon, by a coachman, by a groom; there is not a mistake in the whole 99

of it" (quoted from Sewell, 1989, p. xiii). We should be reminded that it was originally

written as a moral tract, being adopted as juvenile fiction only later (Blount, 1975;

Wells & Grimshaw, 1989). As a sort of handbook of horse-lore. Black Beautv emerged

from a historically auspicious time noted for its fervor of kindness to horses. As in the

moral tale tradition. Black Beautv was meant to preach and rectify: to preach horsemen

into the humanitarian treatment of horses; to rectify their maltreatment of the horses

on account of ignorance or stupidity. What it protests against is the improper

treatment of working horses, in particular the use of the bearing rein and the practice

of docking tails for the sheer reason of fashion (Chitty, 1971).

It is by no means an accident that Black Beautv succeeded as a campaigning moral tract. Historically, the rise of concern for animal welfare approximately corresponded to that of interest in child welfare. Starting from the 1830s, the use of the bearing

rein became a topic of debate. By the 1870s, it brewed into the humanitarian

movement of the middle class, a political force working for the benefits of animal

rights. It is in such a timely climate that Black Beautv came onto the scene. Black

Beautv also came to be associated with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In early British editions, a note on the title page read

"Recommended by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" and at

the endpage a note was appended to suggest the reader consult a pamphlet. The

Horse Book, published by RSPCA.

Black Beautv also found a receptive audience across the Atlantic. In America

George Angell, the founder of the M assachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, published it as a reference to The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse (1890)

Manifestly Angell adopted it as an equine version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle 100

Tom's Cabin (Chittv. 1971 ; Senick, Vol. 17,1989). The American audience saw Black

Beautv as a humane tract, used by middle-class parents and church teachers for moral edification. Black Beautv also indirectly inspired the publication of Beautiful Joe (1894) by Marshall Saunder, a canine version of Black Beautv.

Therefore, what Mr. Wilson of Fabulous Histories envisions as a Court of Criminal

Justice for the dumb animal is successfully erected here to give the dumb animal a chance to speak to humans. What would it feel like, if one were to pull and carry more than one could bear, if one were in the suffocating blinkers and the bearing rein, if one were to be treated foolishly and ignorantly but could not answer back, nor take revenge for cruelty? Black Beautv in spirit is thus closer to the moral tale tradition of animal biography in the eighteenth century; yet in techniques it is closer to the modern righteous tradition of animal fantasy in the twentieth century. It is in such a pivotal position that Black Beautv stands as a historical landmark of animal fantasy.

Rudvard Kipling. The Jungle Book (1893)

The gap between human and animal, and the functions for each have always interested writers of animal stories. In Fabulous Histories Mrs. Trimmer claims that man is the lord of creation and the brute was created for the service and pleasure of humans. The man and brute in Thomas Day's The Historv of Little Jack are on a reciprocal amity, with man and the brute on an equal give-and-take terms. Still no writer had attempted to answer: can man cross the gulf to join animals? Can he leap over the differences between man and animal? What would that be like?

The Jungle Book is an unprecedented piece in that, before Kipling, perhaps no other writer had ever attempted to enter the brute world, the world of the jungle animals. 101

Mowgli is an attempt at such a leap, with civilization on one side and the jungle on the other. He crosses the gulf by being brought up by a pack of wolves amidst jungle animals, and having a clear gaze that no animals dare look into. But the crossing is only partially successful, for however hard Mowgli tries to engraft himself among the ingroups of wolves, they do not accept him as of one blood. When Mowgli turns back to befriend the Indian villagers, he is rejected there also. In this way he is suspended in a sort of limbo, with one foot in the animal kingdom and the other in the human world. Is he a human boy or a wolf-cub? Is he in either-or, both-and, or neither-nor of the human and brute worlds? Most probably, he is a misfit or an outcast from both, forever being denied entrance to either one. The desire to leap the gulf between man and brute worlds does not incidentally occur to writers of animal fantasy; it is, in fact, a deep-seated, perpetual human wish to return to the long-lost past, when humans still could understand animal language, when man and animal lived happily together. If

Mowgli is a result of such a wish, he clearly indicates that man and animal can never meet, for there exists an unbridgeable gulf between them, no matter how much man wishes it to be the other way round (Blount, 1975).

As the first attempt to explore the man-joins-animal theme. The Junole Book is an elegy for the irreconcilable dichotomy between man and brutes. It is also unique in terms of characters and theme. First, the jungle is made as the foreground, with vividly drawn animal residents: Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, and Kaa the serpent, while men are negligible supernumeraries, depicted as a hazy mob, without individual differences at all. Second, the jungle is full of beauty and order, for all kinds of animal passwords, battle cries, rules, signs, and laws. In contrast, men live on the outskirts of the jungle, in ruined, deserted habitats (Blount, 1975). Tarzan of the Aoes 102

(1914) by Edgar Rice Burrough launched a popular series that depicted man as the lord of the jungle, but in a shallower way. E. B. White's Stuart Little (1945), on the other hand, goes on exploring the theme of a misfit between human and animal worlds.

Conclusion

In the history of children's literature the Victorian and Edwardian periods saw manifold achievements. This golden age of some fifty years adds a gallery of animals to the cast of unforgettable personalities in children's literature, including Grahame's

River Bankers, Mole, Badger, Rat, and Toad; Potter's Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny,

Jemima Puddleduck, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Jeremy Fisher, Squirrel Nutkin; Sewell's eloquent, noble Black Beauty, and Kipling's Mowgli and his jungle friends. They are still alive today due to the marketing strategies of publishers, editors, film producers, and so on. For instance, the longevity of Potter's nursery classics results from the so- called "Potter industry" (McDonald, 1986, p. 128)-the nonliterary, commercial spinoffs of her books, such as toys, stationeries, ornaments, board games, figurines, videos, or films, to name just a few. Additionally, these animal stories have been through many reprintings that still find wide circulation and acceptance among children.

Merely creating new, novel characters will not justify the euphony of the "golden age" or the "transition," unless something virtually significant has been contributed.

Admittedly, this short fifty years constituted an age of invention and refinement with new genres invented and old ones refined. It is in this sense that the Victorian and

Edwardian periods have been an age of transition. Looking backward, this age inherited the venerable form of moral tale in the didactic tradition, which probably 103 germinated in the time of Aesop, was highlighted in the eighteenth century Georgian

British Didactic School, and realized itself to the fullest in Black Beautv. Approximately at the same time that the old form of the moral tale was refined, animal fantasy in the romantic, sentimental tradition was begotten as a result of the change of attitude toward animals and children. And this new tendency to romanticize and sentimentalize animals manifested itself marvelously in Potter's nursery classics. The Tale of Peter

Rabbit and other tales, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

These writers all deserve to take a place among the major creators of children's books. Their works had a seminal influence on later fiction. Potter and Grahame look forward to many romantic animal fantasies in this century. Sewell is a conclusive and germinal figure at once, for Black Beautv shares much in spirit and intention with the moral tale, and yet looks forward to the emotional intensity in later righteous animal fantasy. Kipling's Mowgli transcends the contemporary context to the universal concern-the dualism of man and animal.

The import of these writers goes beyond the issue of thematic concern.

Respectively they all say something to later generations of writers of animal stories.

For instance. Potter teaches us how to portray animal characters with a mixture of human (fancy) and animal (natural truth) qualities, allowing the animal characters to take on distinct, unique identities of their own. Thus her characters serve as a proof to what Sheila Egoff (1981, 1988) says, that humanization can be successful only if something from the original animal is kept. As Ruth MacDonald (1986) argues, fidelity to animal nature is the very strength and vitality of Potter's work. The usage of animal characters faithful to their animal natures yet human in their thoughts and action, can be additionally found in Kipling, whom Richard Adams celebrates as "the greatest 104 children's writer who ever lived" (Wintle, 1974, p. 138). Grahame enlists Rat, Mole, and Badger as imaginary figures into the golden age of Great Britain that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution, an Arcadian past. Therefore, in the matters of thematic interest and art in animal fantasy, the Victorian and Edwardian periods both look backward and forward, a transition point in the historical evolution of animal fantasy. CHAPTER V

THE ROMANTIC IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY

Introduction to the Romantic in Twentieth-Centurv Animal Fantasy

A list of all twentieth-century animal fantasy would be amazingly long and diverse in matters of thematic interests and techniques. These talking animals, the so-called anthropomorphic animals, retain a place in the corpus of children's literature.

Historically, few of these characters have survived more than one generation, and deservedly so. There are, however, a handful of exceptions. It is the attempt of this and the following chapters to offer two theme-centered descriptions of selected animal fantasies in the twentieth century-the romantic and the righteous. These two themes are by no means new. They have their roots firmly set in the past. The righteous animal fantasy is a mixture of the moral tale and the satire, while the romantic animal fantasy extends the nineteenth-century tendency to romanticize and sentimentalize animals and reflects the pastoral tradition dating back from ancient Greece.

The pastoral tradition in children’s literature is traceable as far back as Aesop's

Fables. The fable as a genre, at least prior to modern times, is pastoral in essence

(Shannon, 1989). For example, the setting is an agrarian society, indicated by the professions of the human characters, such as farmer, hunter, fisherman, miller, or merchant. It is in such an agrarian society undefined in time and place that the anthropomorphized animal characters move. With the arrival of industrialization and

105 106 urbanization, the pastoral changed its character, evolving into a nostalgic longing for a "time past,” not a time of shepherds and shepherdesses, but the robust rural life of the peasants (Chatton, 1982). Meanwhile the pastoral landscape was also expanded from the Arcadian pastures to the countryside in general. Around the nineteenth century, in the face of increasing modernization and civilization, the rural, simple life style-either in an undefined past and landscape, or in the imminently vanishing peasant society-became the lost Eden to be glorified (Chatton, 1982). This "looking-back-in- nostalgia" attitude was further joined with the tendency to sentimentalize and romanticize animals, which had been increasingly marginalized away from the center of human life. This was the historical context in which such romantic animal fantasies as The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The Wind in the Willows, and many others appeared.

Compared with the previous periods, the sampling of animal fantasies for the twentieth century is far more selective and limited, due to the large number of animal fantasies published in this century. It is true that recent books have not yet undergone the test of time. What has been achieved here, therefore, is an arbitrary selection and narration of a thin slice of modern animal fantasy on the part of the researcher. For books surveyed but not included, see appendix A. Well-recognized masters such as

E. B. White or Richard Adams are introduced as expected, while some minor, junior writers are included for the following reasons: If they have composed a series of animal fantasies, if their works have won well-acknowledged prizes, or if their work has been influential in terms of the tradition of animal fantasy. Since this study focuses on animal fantasy in the format of novel, modern picture books are generally ignored, unless they can shed significant light on thematic issues in animal fantasies.

This chapter consists of exemplars of the romantic theme. These are further classified 107 into the river bank and the barnyard scenes for the sake of discussion. The works are presented generally in the order of their year of publication with an emphasis on relating them to animal fantasies in previous ages and to each other in this century.

The River Bank Scene

Out of the river of modern animal fantasy run two mainstreams: the romantic and the righteous. From the "romantic" stream, two major brooks flow: The river bank scene and the barnyard scene, judging primarily from the setting of the story. These two are more alike than different, and to divide them is simply for the sake of discussion. The river bank and barnyard have already been a common stage for animals in fairy tales and folk tales. Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is the masterpiece, offering a portrait of Mole, Badger, Rat, and Toad. These River

Bankers must be glad to find their descendants in so many romantic animal fantasies, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to the cast of riverbank residents, the features common to these animal fantasies are light-heartedness, simplicity, and almost a naivete in tone and in story. Lyrical passages of natural beauty often appear.

Among the writers of romantic animal stories to be discussed here, Thornton Burgess is an early contributor to the riverbank scene. Russell Erickson's Morton and Warton, the toad brothers, and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad are two celebrated pairs who appear in series of animal stories for young readers.

Thornton Buroess. The Adventures of Reddv Fox (1913)

Thornton Burgess makes a good beginning for the discussion of modern animal fantasy, in the sense that his stories cross the border between romantic and righteous 108 animal fantasy. He is also the author who made animal stories available to a wide audience in the early twentieth century (Stott, 1984). His major publications for children include Mother West Wind. The Bedtime Story-Books, and Wishino-Stone

Stories.

The Bedtime Story-Book series is a collection of twenty adventures of Reddy Fox,

Johnny Chuck, Peter Cottonball, Jerry Muskrat, Grandfather Frog, Danny Meadow

Mouse, Old Mr. Toad, and many others—a mishmash of Grahame's The Wind in the

Willows, and Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other nursery tales, but an undistinguished imitation. The whole series is patterned; each volume features a single animal, with one or several human traits highlighted. For instance, in The Adventures of Reddv Fox Reddy Fox is self-conceited and bold. He laughs at Bowser the Hound, steals eggs from Farmer Brown's yard, and pays no heed to Granny Fox's advice. Into the narration are interspersed occasional didactic verses: "He comes to grief, however fleet. Who doesn't watch his flying feet" (Burgess, 1913, p. 15), and "Words can never make black white; / Before you speak be sure you're right" (Burgess, 1913, p.

42). There are also moral asides: "Now it is the worst habit in the world to think too much of one's self" (Burgess, 1913, p. 11), and "Now when people think that they are very, very smart, they like to show off" (Burgess, 1913, p. 12). Reddy Fox seems more a teaching aid for moral lessons than a real-life fox. Therefore, though almost contemporary with Beatrix Potter, in spirit Burgess seems closer to the lady writers from the British Didactic School in the late eighteenth century than to modern writers portraying their animals true-to-life.

With uncomplicated plot, unambiguous moral codes, and overly humanized animal characters, Burgess's stories appear out-dated to our 1990s eyes. In fact, he is often 109 criticized for his excessive sentimentality and humanization of his animals (Stott,

1984). However, his promotion of environmental conservation and wildlife protection is certainly topical at the present time. Today the Thornton Burgess Society is greatly involved in environmental education on Cape Cod, his birth place, through reprinting his books in paperback and publishing newsletters and bulletins to inform readers about preservation of the natural environment. In addition to the moral, ecological

messages, Burgess's animals live and play in a pastoral landscape, reflecting a longing for a simple life in the past (Chevalier, 1989). It is in this sense that Burgess is a germinal writer for both the romantic and righteous animal writers to come.

Russell Erickson. Warton and Morton Series.

Russell Erickson's Warton and Morton the toad brother series has seven books: A

Toad for Tuesdav (1974), Warton and Morton (1976), Warton's Christmas Eve

Adventure (1977), Warton and the Kino of the Skies (1978), Warton and the Traders

(1979). Warton and the Castawavs (1982). and Warton and the Contest (1986). The first one, A Toad for Tuesdav. is the best-known; it was named a notable children's book by the American Library Association and included on the list of best books for the year by School Librarv Journal.

Erickson cannot compete with the literary achievements of either Arnold Lobel or

E. B. White in terms of romantic animal fantasy. Nonetheless, he is noteworthy, for his toad brother series is distinctly in the tradition of the river bank with its adventures of a couple of loveable toad brothers in a miniature world full of rustic charm.

More explicitly, A Toad for Tuesdav is drawn to illustrate the major features of the river bank tradition (the setting, plot, characterization, theme, and humor), or on a 110 larger scale, the romantic tradition in animal fantasy. The setting is noteworthy. The toad brothers never roam away from their biological habitats. In this small-scale river bank world, large, fierce animals never show up; only small, generally peaceful animals such as chipmunks, woodchucks, muskrats, weasels, beavers, rats, and mice appear in this small-scale pastoral life. A Toad for Tuesdav begins with a description of the dwelling of the toad brothers. At once we have a humanized world, in which the toad brothers enjoy every aspect of the human world. The humanization and civilization are particularly reflected in clothing and diet. For instance, Warton wears his heavy coats, tightly-knit sweater, thick mittens, and warm cap with the ear flaps on his trip to Aunt

Toolia. Morton the gourmet cook is ingenious in his transcription of human diet into amphibian tastes. Suffice it to cite a few dishes: gnat relish, caterpillar chili, pickled dragonfly, sweet and sour snails (Warton and the Traders).

Like his settings, Erickson's plots are representative of the river bank tradition.

Home-adventure-home is the recurrent formula for this series of toad tales. The story always starts with the toad brothers cozy at home, and then for some reason, they are drawn out in the wide world for adventures. But there are no serious tensions. Even the life-or-death matter of the threat of the Owl is presented with a mild, light touch.

There are generally no real disasters-merely deplorable mishaps, for instance, getting lost in the woods, or taking a tumble in the snow. Far from being gloomy, a sense of joviality prevails; for instance, the Muskrats' Spring Dance and Festival is a carnival full of mirth and glee. Occasionally a current of romanticism and escapism surges out.

For example, the land-bound toads aspire to be the hovering hawks drifting in the breezes high over the treetop in the burning summer afternoon (Warton and the Kino of the Skies). Ill

Romantic as this river bank may be, there are still predators. There are hawks in the sky, the owl in the forest, and herons in the ponds to devour toads. They are generally social outcasts, but not villainous enough to be antagonists. For instance, the owl is nasty, mean, sullen, and friendless (A Toad for Tuesdav). But the predator and the prey generally grow from foes to friends. This is where the romantic strain lies. All that's well ends well. Warton and the owl are good friends. Morton arrives home safe and sound. Strife between beavers and muskrats is resolved (Warton and

Morton). Order and peace are restored. A good ending befalls everyone. The River

Bankers live happily ever after.

Attention to characterization shows the well-chiseled personalities of the toad brothers are the primary source of charm here. Warton is a house organizer and cleaner, while Morton is a gourmet baker and cook. Warton is impulsive, rash, determined, and adventurous, while Morton is wary, practical, and sensible. Warton is resourceful, clever, and handy enough to make a contraption with a hot-air balloon from a wooden washtub and snakeskin tubes (Warton and the Kino of the Skies).

Morton is sedate, usually looking at the dark side, contrary to W arton's optimism. The toad brothers are generally cheerful and carefree, always ready to help anyone in need.

The theme underlying this series is the neighborly spirit; Be friendly and helpful; give ready hands to whoever needs aid. It is daily habit for the toad brothers, for they exhibit this spirit wherever possible. For instance, Warton offers a refuge for two wood rats (Warton and the Traders). Morton helps the muskrats cook. The spirit of unselfishness and generosity runs contrary to self-interest and utilitarianism, the Trader code: "Traders don't do anything unless it's for a trade. It's this for that, and that for this," and "Do me a favor and let me give you something in return" (Warton and the 112

Traders, p. 55). As a result of the neighborly spirit, mutual affection and friendship

are highly valued and the negative characters are eventually reformed. For instance, the sullen, selfish owl would like to have Warton as a friend in the end.

Overall, this is a series of felicitous, hilarious narratives of the toad brothers. The

animals here lead a fairly easy life, like the middle-aged in early retirement, doing

nothing particular, earning no money, enjoying the good-to-be-alive blessed days. The setting is usually the riverbank, with nostalgia for the lost idyllic, bucolic life. In this purified world, there is no serious threat of death and few complications in life. There are many simple pleasures such as riding down the hill on sleds, boating on the river for weeks, having tea and cake by the fire, and visiting relatives and friends for a chat.

Dangers there are, but mostly they are minor, mild mishaps, rather than live-or-die matters. Even in the face of death, the characters are generally optimistic and cheerful, knowing something will save them. All these qualities place the tales of

Warton and Morton in the lineage of the river bank scene and the camp of romantic animal fantasy.

Arnold Lobel. The Froo and Toad Series.

Arnold Lobel started his Frog and Toad series as early readers in the 1970s, and earned wide acclaim from critics and readers. Froo and Toad Are Friends (1970) was a 1971 Caldecott Honor book for its depth and clarity of text and its excellent illustrations. Froo and Toad Together (1972) was a 1973 Newberv Honor book. With two companion books, Froo and Toad All Year (1976) and Davs with Froo and Toad

(1979), Frog and Toad established themselves as lively, cherished characters in children's literature to be enjoyed by generations of children. 113

It is instructive to compare Lobel's Frog and Toad with Erickson's toad brothers, not because they were published close in time, but because they are both in the romantic/pastoral tradition of The Wind in the Willows in terms of setting, theme, and characterization. Although the setting for Warton and Morton is an undefined time and place. Frog and Toad live in Victorian-style cottages with lattice windows, surrounded by flowers and shade trees. This is an Arcadia, a pastoral world, with felicitous homes and gardens. And there is no Wild Wooder of stoats and weasels or the owl, herons, and hawks to threaten the tranquility in this Arcadia; Frog and Toad live in a space untouched by the outer world. In their secluded world, time seems to come to a stasis. This is the timeless, everlasting nature of the pastoral (Shannon, 1989).

Thematically, this series forms an ode to friendship, with all the resonating details of daily life. A sense of joviality intersperses with lyrical songs and light chuckles to celebrate the joy of friendship (Shannon, 1989). Frog and Toad are equals and they do things together, ranging from fireside story-telling in a plump armchair, reading beneath a shade, or going for a walk in the garden.

As for characterization. Frog and Toad, like the toad brothers, are antithetic to each other in personality. Toad is a slug-a-bed, bucolic, impulsive, melancholy, insecure, and innocent. He hates housework. Frog is always on the go, jubilant, secure, worldly, and a good gardener. The complementarity of impulse and reason, innocence and experience tells what friends are for--to share and learn from each other. Frog and

Toad are child substitutes, free from the adult's worries, enjoying the child's interests.

Just as Mole and Ratty "mess about in boats" for days, there is a sense of idleness in the things Frog and Toad do, as in Toad's list for a day; Wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to Frog's house, take walk with Frog, eat lunch, take nap, play games with 114

Frog, eat supper, go to sleep. This is a life of simple pleasures in childhood (Shannon,

1989).

Frog and Toad are often compared with Potter's Jeremy Fisher and Grahame's

Mole and Rat (Shannon, 1989). The most conspicuous similarity that Lobel shares with Grahame and Potter is the pastoral setting, and romantic characters dressed in human clothing. Among the three. Potter is the most faithful to the natural truth of the characters. Her animals, though dressed, act especially as they would in their natural skin. In contrast, Grahame's Mole and Rat, and Lobel's Frog and Toad are in a greater degree of humanization, for they enjoy all types of human activities, particularly civilized food such as tea, cookies, and ice cream. While Potter and

Grahame both introduce danger, suspense, and strife from the human world into their stories, Lobel's Frog and Toad live in a world, secluded, innocent, full of peace and tranquility. The overall tone is set by the cover design of this series-a pastoral scene of flora and fauna in gentle, muted greens and browns in pencil shadings and a lightly sketched ink line. Lobel's illustration certainly adds charms to his series-a perpetual time in a pastoral landscape (Shannon, 1989).

The small-scale romantic, rustic world of the Frog and Toad series also finds its way into other early readers by Lobel: Mouse Tales (1972), Mouse Souo (1977), Owl at Home (1975). Grasshopper on the Road (1978). and Uncle Elephant (1981). All these books are of high quality and enjoy great popularity.

The Barnvard Scene

In addition to the riverbank, animals also make their appearance in the barnyard.

The barnyard tradition of animal fantasy can be tracked back to Aesop's Fables and 115

Revnard the Fox as well. Over the years, there seems to have developed a set of conventions for the barnyard scene. For instance, where there is a hen, there is a fox around the corner, and the fox and the chanticleer are in a perpetual tug of wit. In children's literature The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other tales by Potter anticipate many of the animal fantasies in this century. In this farm/barnyard scene, small animals such as chickens, mice, dogs, cats, or even spiders, or large animals such as cows, and pigs, are generally capable of a wide range of human emotions and experiences. The tone is comic and light, and there are occasional witticisms and mild irony. Three writers are the focus for this section. Walter Brooks is a precursor in the barnyard scene in the early years of this century. E. B. White is the acknowledged master for his style and artistry in Charlotte's Web. One emerging writer in our generation is Dick

King-Smith in Britain.

Walter Brooks. The Freddv Series.

Walter Brooks's Freddy series of twenty-five books were written between the late

1920s and the early 1960s. All the stories happen on Mr. Bean's farm--a small town world. The characters are all typical farmyard animals. In the first two of this series, all animals receive equal treatment, but from the third book, Freddy comes to assume the leading role through his resourcefulness.

Structurally, as Sale (1978) contends, the Freddy books are a series of loosely-tied, low-keyed episodes featuring a group of farm animals. The whole series is formulaic.

At the outset of each book, there exists a problem to be solved. For instance, in

Freddv Goes to Florida, what if the farm animals all go to Florida for one winter? Who will wake the Beans up if Charles the rooster goes along? Who is going to give milk 116 to the Beans if all three cows go? The problem, once established, furnishes the momentum to start off the story, but not enough momentum to keep it going. That is. Brooks does well in creating piquant problematic situations for the animals to solve, but he has difficulty in maintaining the momentum until the end. In Freddv Goes to

Florida, after all kinds of arrangements have been made and the initial problems are resolved, the group of animals head for Florida with nothing left to accomplish. What will the animals do during the journey? Brooks seems to be at his wit's end to invent incidents to engage the animals (and the readers as well!). The journey is episodic; each incident is discrete, without logical ties to the others (Sale, 1978). In fact, the best of Brooks's Freddy series was published in the 1930s, and he never again achieved the same quality.

In the cast of animal celebrities in children's literature, pigs are seldom given heroic stature. Freddy the pig is charming and clever, endowed with human feelings and intelligence. This is why Roger Sale (1978) judges Freddy as one of the two celebrated pigs in this century. The other is White's Wilbur, as expected. He organizes the farm animals into the Barnyard Tours, a group package tour for sightseeing. He is literate, a bibliophile. He keeps a library of books, magazines, and newspapers in his pig pen. He is intelligent enough to figure out what culprit is raiding the garden, stealing the bikes, and breaking into the houses (Freddv and the Draoon).

He is also a jack of all trades (from detective and magician, to politician and much beyond) but master of none. Thus, Freddy is humanized -apparently so thoroughly humanized that sometimes his creator forgets he is a pig after all, and the humanization seems carried to the extreme in some cases. For instance, Freddv and the Dragon begins thus. 117 Freddy, the pig, and Jinx, the black cat, in their cowboy clothes, were riding down through Main Street in Centerboro toward their home, on the Bean Farm. Freddy was astride Cy, his western pony, and Jinx rode Bill, the goat (Brooks, 1958, p. 3).

When Mr. Bean came out to greet them, "he pulled Freddy off his horse and hugged him and waltzed him around” (Brooks, 1958, p. 6). A pig in cowboy clothes rides on a pony and waltzes around? Brooks seems to fall into the same trap as Kenneth

Grahame-being carried away so much by his characters that he forgets the true nature of his animals.

Thus the Freddy books have severe limitations in structure and characterization.

It is understandable that in the 1980s when these books were reissued, they generated little interest among readers. Despite that. Brooks should be credited with upgrading the genre of animal fantasy to a higher level in the 1930s and 1940s in terms of the barnyard tradition.

E(lwvn) B(rooks) White. Charlotte's Web (1952).

E. B. White was distinguished primarily as an adult writer and produced only three children's tales. But all three are highly acclaimed, especially Charlotte's Web, which has generally been lauded as the American classic of the twentieth century. Out of the three, Charlotte's Web is indisputably the best, winning both critical acclaim and a prominent place in children's reading on both sides of the Atlantic. It was named a

Newbery Medal honor book (1953) and was granted the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award

(1959).

Charlotte's Web, an acknowledged landmark not merely in animal fantasy but in children's literature in general as well, should be noted for its themes of the pastoral 118 and of death, for the barn characters, and also for White's ability to balance the fancy and natural truth of his animals. As Neumeyer (1994) notes, the pastoral allusions permeate throughout Charlotte's Web. That the tale is in the romantic, pastoral tradition is plainly indicated by W hite's confession in a letter to Gene Deitch (a director wishing to adapt Charlotte's Web into an animated film version), "It [Charlotte's Webi is a straight report from the barn cellar, which I dearly love, having spent so many fine hours there" (Guth, 1976, p. 614), and he goes on to explain.

It celebrates life, the seasons, the goodness of the barn, the beauty of the world, the glory of everything. . . [it] should be a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung (Guth, 1976, p. 614).

Lyrically evocative passages are much in the pastoral tradition as they celebrate the seasons and extol nature and country life (Neumeyer, 1994). Passages on summer days, swallow songs, or barn life are so expressive and poetic that no wonder Wilbur does not want to die; he wants to enjoy what life offers.

In this pastoral setting, nature has its own course. Charlotte is carnivorous on flies, Wilbur is destined for the bacon factory. But, through Charlotte's wise talk,

Wilbur is made to understand and accept the inevitable destiny of death for everyone.

Not afraid to die, but giving a meaning to her life, Charlotte ennobles herself through her devotion to Wilbur. As she says.

A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that (White, 1952, p. 164).

Charlotte's Web is an honest, sensitive treatment of death as a fact of life, where self- worth and friendship are valued against the pathos of loneliness (Griffith, 1980). 119

Regarding the characters. White says: "The characters in Charlotte's Web were based on the animals I happened to be living among-the spider, the rat, the pig, the geese, the sheep" (in Wintle, 1974, p. 130). Unquestionably Wilbur is the most well- developed. Born the runt in a litter on Mr. Arable's farm one spring night, he is affectionate and sensitive. Being saved from slaughter for Christmas, he wishes to continue to live. He wants to embrace life as much as he can and to savor the simple life from day to day in the barn. He is humanized to possess a wide range of human sentiments and aspiration. He cries, sobs, laments lack of a friend, is naive about the world, and pathetic in the face of his destiny of slaughter. But all these human moods are portrayed without being facetious or sentimental (Fisher, 1975). Wilbur is surely some pig, terrific and radiant.

Pigs as protagonists in animal fantasy were not unknown before White's Wilbur; we can be reminded of Potter's The Tale of Piolino Bland (1913) and The Tale of Little

Pig Robinson (1930), and Brooks's Freddy, the Jack of all trades. But the choice of a spider for the heroine is original and novel (Ruskin & Ruskin, 1987), particularly as a remarkable integration of repellent cannibalism with loving devotion. The ingenious, heroic Charlotte comes to apply modern American advertising strategy on behalf of

Wilbur to spin the words "Some Pig," "Terrific," "Radiant," and "Humble" into her web to make him famous (Lanes, 1971). Charlotte dies alone of exhaustion and old age, leaving a sac of eggs to hatch. Life still goes on, both for Wilbur and for Charlotte's babies. It is in this sense that White's barnyard witnesses a process of change, either in seasonal change or a cycle of life-birth, growth, death, rebirth (Sale, 1978).

On the issue of anthropomorphism and the art of animal fantasy. White says in a letter to Gene Deitch, 120 I discovered that there was no need to tamper in any way with the habits and characteristics of spiders, pigs, geese, and rats. No 'motivation' is needed if you remain true to life and true to the spirit of fantasy (Guth, 1976, p. 614).

What he means by remaining true to life and true to the spirit of fantasy is best demonstrated in the case of Charlotte. Being bloodthirsty and carnivorous, as E. B.

White says, "Charlotte does what she does. Perhaps she is magnifying herself by her devotion to another, but essentially she is just a trapper" (Guth, 1976, p. 614).

Charlotte's Web is a heartfelt plea for a runt. Mr. Arable intends to kill Wilbur simply because he is born a runt. But Wilbur doesn't want to die. He tells Charlotte:

"I just love it here in the barn. I love everything about this place" (White, 1952, p.

62). He expresses his passion for life, "I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all my friends. I want to breathe the beautiful air and lie in the beautiful sun" (White, 1952, p. 51). And this passion for life, the love of early summer days, should be well respected, though life is transient and everyone will die.

Charlotte's Web is thus a mild charge against the devaluing of animal rights to live, with Charlotte as a prosecutor against the injustice in the Criminal Court of Justice.

Despite pathos, sadness, and death, there exist humor, happiness, and life, and

Charlotte's Web is essentially positive, affirming and soothing. This is perhaps part of the reason why it is so popular with young children.-

Dick Kino-Smith. The Barnvard Series.

Prior to the twentieth century, the scene of animal fantasy was mainly located in

England, while the New World offered nothing significant or, at best, mere imitations of what had been popular in England. After the Victorian and Edwardian periods, there 121 was a Copernican change; the United States witnessed a sprouting and flowering of animal fantasy and has ever since presided over England both in quality and quantity of these books. Within the camp of the barnyard scene in romantic animal fantasy, however, one British writer is worth special mention. That one is Dick King-Smith.

After farming and teaching for quite a few years, he became a full-time freelance writer in 1982. His animal fantasies for children have received critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Daooie Doofoot was the Guardian Award runner-up in 1981, and, under the title of Pios Mioht FIv. was named an American Library Association

Notable Book. The Sheeo-Pia won the Guardian Award for Excellence in Children's

Literature (1984), and, under the title of Babe, the Gallant Pic, won Boston Globe-Horn

Book Award honor book (1985), and was also a notable selection of the Junior Literary

Guild.

King-Smith has been prodigiously productive, almost a book a year. He used to stage his animal stories within the entire farm yard. His debut book. The Fox Buster

(1978) seems remotely related to Revnard the Fox, the forefather of barnyard animal fantasy. The fowls of Foxearth Farm have to band together against the menace of local foxes. Much of the humor derives from his first-hand observations on the daily life of farm animals-a natural result of his years of farming experience.

King-Smith's subsequent animal fantasies feature a single hero, who fights desperately against an enemy in a genuinely exciting plot. He seems to particularly favor pigs, and his fame is primarily built on his three pig tales. In Babe, the Gallant

Pig, the piglet, mothered by a sheepdog. Fly, learns to make himself a sheep-pig, befriends the sheep by behaving politely, later saves the sheep flock from rustlers, and eventually wins recognition in the Grand Challenge Trials. The mother-son affection 122 between Fly and Babe strikes a chord in the heart of the reader. With his tales set in the farm yard, King-Smith is often compared with E. B. White. Babe, the Gallant Pio. or the later Pios Mioht FIv cannot equal Charlotte's Web, for they lack of a deep theme. But Babe, the Gallant Rio is by no means imitative, and surely possesses a charm of its own (Helbig & Perkins, 1989).

Pios Mioht FIv. however, is reminiscent of Charlotte's Web. A deformed, undersized piglet, Daggie first manages to escape slaughter, later becomes a porcine prodigy on the farm, and eventually saves other pigs in a rainstorm. The readers could be empathetic toward this deformed underdog. Ace: The Verv Important Pio (1990) is a sequel to Babe: The Gallant Pio. narrating how a special pig, Ace, makes his way into the farmhouse, and eventually becomes a media star. The humor in this pig tale primarily lies in how Ace devises a set of signals to inform Mr. Tubb of what he wants, a proof that he is a worthy descendant of his intelligent great-grandfather Babe.

Overall, King-Smith's animal fantasies are packed with fast action and impressive character treatment, especially in the underdog heroes. His animal tales generally promote the value of friendship and courage. Though not a rival to E. B. White, King-

Smith's barnyard animals are the current benchmarks against which other animal stories, especially of barnyard animals, can be measured.

Sidelights on Other Animal Fantasies

As is the case with every literary classification, there are expected overlaps from category to category. This chapter has as its subject the romantic animal fantasy of the twentieth century, yet it seems relevant to mention some other animal fantasies- those also studded by talking animals, though not strictly romantic in theme or 12a treatment of character-to illustrate the variety of possibilities in the realm of animal fantasy.

Toy (animal) fantasy features toy animals that talk or exhibit other magical abilities.

In Egoff's words, "In a related area of animal fantasy, toys are used as characters because they are very real to children as an imaginative outlet for children's fantasies"

(1988, p. 108). One early toy animal is Margery Williams Bianco's The Velveteen

Rabbit (1922), a sample of the transformation fantasy, in which "the inanimate state of the protagonist is altered into an animate one" (Molson, 1989, p. 45). In this toy tale, a velveteen rabbit is loved into being by a little boy. Another toy, a toy bear of very little brain, also much loved by children, is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh in

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). One more snug toy bear, Paddington, the honey-bear from Peru, first appeared in Michael Bond's A Bear

Called Paddington (1958), and has achieved long-lasting popularity on both sides of the Atlantic with a large number of sequels published in rapid succession.

Paddington's descendants as Teddy Bears in the droll, comic tradition are Margaret

Baker's The Shoe Shoo Bears (1963) and Alison Jezard's Albert (1968).

Other animal fantasies feature different animals, ranging from as large as a monkey, to as small as a mouse, a rabbit, or even a cricket. Walter de la Mare's Three

Roval Monkevs (originally titled The Three Mulla-Muloars) (1910), one of the few animal fantasies published in the early twentieth century, is a quest of three monkeys for their roots. In addition to their human garb, these three royal monkeys are granted intelligence and sensibility.

The mouse seems to be a favorite subject in animal fantasy, with the delight of smallness deriving from its minute size and diminutive nature. There are many mice 124

notable in animal fantasy. For instance, Margery Sharp's aristocratic, sophisticated

Miss Bianco, and the plebeian, vulgar Bernard engage themselves in the Mouse

Prisoners' Aid Society to rescue the prosecuted in the wholly humanized world of the

Miss Bianca series, starting with The Rescuers (1959). One more famous mouse is

Michael Bond's Thursday in Here Comes Thursdav (1966), an adventurous mouse,

adopted by the Peck family, leading them into various escapades, and sometimes far­

fetched events. A more recent mouse hero in animal fantasy is Beverly Cleary's Ralph,

the boyish, down-to-earth mouse in The Mouse and the Motorcvcle (1965), Runawav

Ralph (1970), and Raloh S. Mouse (1982). Rumer Godden's The Mousewife (1951 )

and Mouse House (1957) are two more mice tales. Nicole, a lady mouse from France

in Sandy Clifford's The Roquefort Gang (1981), conducts an adventure in the dreaded

Wild-berry Lot, and is later saved by three tough, brave mice, resourceful at getting in

and out of trouble in a manner that anticipate the Teenage Ninja Turtles. Pearl is an

adventurous, resourceful mouse in Frank Asch's Pearl's Promise (1984) and Pearl's

Pirates (1987). Betty Baker's Danbv and George (1981) prescribes the three rules for

mice to live by in the zoo: Never go out in daytime, stay out of the animals' cages, and

stay away from the monkeys, all of which are fit to rodent nature and their habitation

in the zoo. The mouse has starred in animal fantasy since Dorothy Kilner's Nimble,

continuing on in Potter's mice stories to the abundance of mice tales in this century.

In these tales of humanized mice, their success generally hinges on the fun and humor

derived from their rodent nature, such as quick movements of dashing and darting or

the prodigious multitude of the mouse community.

Robert Lawson's Ben and Me (1939). I Discover Columbus. (1941 ). Mr. Revere and

1 (1953), and Captain Kidd's Cat (1956) are four comic fantasies, in which loquacious 125 animals reveal the foibles of four notable historical figures-Benjamin Franklin,

Christopher Columbus, Paul Revere, and Captain Kidd-thereby casting them in a different light. Here Lawson does not claim himself to be author, but a historian-the mere one who discovers, edits, and illustrates the text. His other series in animal fantasy stars rabbit characters, including Rabbit Hill (1947), Robbut: A Tale of Tails

(1948), Edward. Hooov and Joe (1952), and The Tough Winter (1954).

George Seldon's The Cricket in Times Square (1960) features Chester the cricket from Connecticut, Tucker the mouse, and Harry the roving cat; all live in a drainpipe near a news stand in the station at Times Square. The friendship between these scavenging animals is itself pretty much a fantasy, considering the natural antagonism between cat and mouse (Blount, 1977).

William Steig, a long-established cartoonist and cover designer for The New Yorker, has published several animal fantasies in the tradition of droll, anthropomorphized animals, for instance, Roland the Minstrel Rio (1968), Dominic (1972), The Real Thief

(1973), and Abel's Island (1976). Structurally, all these stories are a sort of quest, with the animals (a pig, a dog, a goose, and a mouse) plunged into a journey for various reasons, but all ending happily (Chevalier, 1989).

As a parallel to the canine community, there are also animal fantasies devoted to felines. Esther Averill's Captains of the Citv Streets: A storv of the Cat Club (1972) depicts how two tramp cats seek to join the cat club by fulfilling all the requirements and following the rules and obligations. Similar plots recur in Phyllis Reynolds

Naylor's The Grand Escape (1993), with two house cats' escape into the outside world to pass three challenging adventures before they can be accepted as members of the

Club of Mysteries. What breaks away from formulaic animal fantasy is Clare Bell's 126

Ratha's Creature (1983), winner of the International Reading Association Children's

Book Award in 1984. Its two sequels. Clan Ground (1984) and Tomorrow's Sphinx

(1986), are also highly acclaimed. This series is a sort of character study of a wild cat in an alternative world of a forest twenty-five million years in the past. Here the animal fantasy becomes pseudo-science fiction.

Janwillen Van de Wetering's Huoh Pine (1980), Hugh Pine and the Good Place

(1986), and Huoh Pine and Something Else (1989), make up another series of light fantasy featuring a droll, erudite porcupine, with pungent conversations of succinct but gentle truths.

One more writer engaged in animal fantasy is Nathaniel Benchley, who is noted for

Feldman Fieldmouse: A Fable (1971), Snip (1981), and Demo and the Dolphin (1981 ).

Feldman Fieldmouse is especially memorable for several beautifully described passages about the night trips to the pond. Snip is an uninteresting story of friendship between an old beagle and a frisky young poodle. Demo and the dolphin almost belongs to space and time travels, with the dolphin taking Demo back to ask the oracle at Delhi.

Deborah Howe and James Howe's Teddv Bear's Scrapbook ( 1980) doesn't achieve much of the stature of the earlier Bunnicula (1979), which has been the recipient of many awards, including an American Library Association Notable Book Designation

1979. From Bunnicula the team of authors developed into the Bunnicula series, presenting a team of dog and cat to solve vampire and werewolf mysteries.

Jane Yolen's The Acorn Quest (1981) is in the tradition of King Arthur's round table, but reduced to a comical, almost farcical extent. Patricia Wrightson's Moon

Dark (1987). winner of the 1986 Hans Christian Andersen Award, is an animal fantasy from the wild land of Australia, with all kinds of exotic animals such as kangaroos. 127 bush rats, bandicoots, possums, and foxes. This tale of an Australia animal community, at one level, narrates the war between bush rats and bandicoots, and, on another level, displays intimate knowledge of Australian wild life.

This sidelight of some animal fantasies in twentieth century serves to demonstrate a wide range of themes and techniques present in modern animal fantasy, and also to glance into the thousand faces that a certain animal, for instance, mouse or rabbit, can assume in modern animal fantasy.

Conclusion

This chapter brings into light how selected animal fantasies are related to the literary tradition of the romantic and the pastoral, and how, as touchstone books, they extend and enhance this same tradition. Twentieth century animal fantasy, at least in the romantic camp, generally impresses the readers with its decidedly endearing and enduring characters, for instance, Burgess's river bankers, Brooks's Freddy, Erickson's

Warton and Morton, Lobel's Frog and Toad, King-Smith's Babe, and, of course.

White's Wilbur.

Animals in folk tales and fairy tales are magical beings, with a variety of powers to cast spells on people or to transform themselves to cross the line between the human and the bestial. Animals in the fables are people in fur, feather, or scales, engaging them selves in all kinds of hum an activities. Like their cousins in th e medieval bestiary, they are exemplars of all kinds of virtues to extol and vices to shrink from.

Those were the days when the beasts could speak, and man and beasts were equals or partners -both humans and beasts inhabiting the same piece of land on equal terms.

After the Industrial Revolution, the scene changed for humans and the beasts as well. 128

Gone were the days when humans and beasts were in close contact. Gone were the days when humans and beasts were on reciprocal terms. Gone was the two-way

communication between humans and beasts. We still have a vague image of Eden

before the Lapse. We still have a longing for the idyllic, pastoral life, the simple

country life before industrialization and modernization came to dominate our life.

Presenting animals as innocent, carefree creatures in bucolic settings, either in the river

bank or the barnyard, is a nostalgic attempt to bring back the pre-Lapsian state of

Eden. Seen through such a romantic lens, the modern Eden seems to admit animals only, excluding humans from such a pleasant land.

Friendship as an inherent element of the pastoral idyll reoccurs in a variety of shapes in the romantic animal fantasy series. In White, friendship presents itself through the bond between Charlotte's healing attention and Wilbur's will to live. For

Erickson's Warton and Morton, friendship demonstrates itself in a series of adventures,

where each gives a ready hand to anyone who needs it. Friendship is dramatized in the daily life of Lobel's Frog and Toad. The friendship, warm-heartedness, and love of home of the animal characters invite us into an Arcadian garden. And these major themes enrich the genre of animal fantasy, and play themselves out in different amplitude. CHAPTER VI

THE RIGHTEOUS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ANIMAL FANTASY

Introduction

Although animal fantasy has one of the longest and strongest traditions among the varied sub-genres of fantasy, it often incurs indiscriminate hostility from critics. It is charged with being shallow, sentimental, and childish, and it should be relegated to the nursery library. It is impossible to deny the existence of some pulp fictions among animal stories, ones which are duly accused of being out-dated, lachrymose, and inferior. In contrast, fresh twigs also sprout from such an old, battered branch of literature, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. Thematically, animal fantasy in this century is divided between two major camps, the romantic and the righteous.

The romantic animal fantasy only accounts for half, or a bit more than half, of modern animal fantasy. Others can be aptly grouped under the banner of the "righteous." In terms of quantity, the righteous camp is a minority in the whole population of animal fantasy, but by no means should it be deemed inferior in quality. These righteous animal fantasies speak much louder, sometimes with a thundering voice that broadcasts pessimism with the heat of a prophet (Hodgart, 1969).

Undeniably, to turn from the romantic scene, be it the river bank or barnyard, to the righteous stories in the other group is like watching a color TV suddenly switched to a black-and-white one, or turning from a jolly spring afternoon in a sunny garden to

129 130 a snowy winter night, bleak and treacherous in iife-or-death matters. Writers of righteous animal fantasy have a persistent moral vision; they raise their hands and speak in a voice of righteous fervor. The recurrent themes of this type of writing include animals' right to exist in general or in the laboratory in particular, animals' quest for home, and environmental preservation and ecological concerns. These fantasies attempt to wrestle with the complexities of the relationship between animal and man, and the triangular relationship of man-nature-animal. This triangle is played out in many guises and sometimes in a thoroughly didactic voice.

Animals have always worn a practical face for man. For instance, in pre-industrial society, animals functioned as machines, while after the Industrial Revolution, animals were physically marginalized as individual household pets and zoo residents. In literature, animals have one special mission: to be "the Mirror of scorn and pity toward

Man" (Tolkien, 1965, p. 26). More explicitly, animal fantasy is used to mock or tease humans, to expose human folly by substituting animals with humans or assigning animal masks for humans to wear. Thence, through a counterpoint, utopia (the animal world) sheds light on dystopia (the human world). That is, animal disguises are to show the human race in caricature, either in mild mockery or with a bitter bite. This is the theme of "animal vengeance" surmised by Blount (1975): Animals outwit, overpower, or achieve an upper hand over humans. This is not a novel theme at all, for it has been manifest at least in many folk tales, "The Bremen Town Musicians" being a case in point. Moreover, a combination of "animal vengeance" and "animals as humans in caricature" leads to the satirical use of animals as the moral superiors of man. For instance, the Houoyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or the animals in Erich Kastner's Animal Conference play this role. In fact, the practice of 131 using animals to represent facets of human nature, the roots of the humanization of animals, can be dated back to Aesop's fables, in which animals take the place of humans and act out human dramas. This device has been revived in various ways throughout the ages, from Jonathan Swift of the seventeen century to George Orwell in this century, to show man indirectly how he ought to behave (Blount, 1975). It is in this sense that the flood of righteous animal fantasy around mid-century can be placed in the larger context of the satirical tradition in English and American literature.

What follows is an introduction to the satirical tradition, and how it manifests itself in three animal fantasies in adult literature, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. George

Orwell's Animal Farm, and William Kotzwinkle's Dr. Rat, and a sampler of righteous animal fantasies for children in this century. Considering these three adult fantasies helps us understand righteous animal fantasy in the light of satire, and also the didactic tradition in children's literature.

The Satire in Literature

The history of satire is generally dated back to antiquity, to the Greek Aristophanes and Menippus, and the Roman Seneca, Juvenal, and Horace. In terms of technique, there is always a judgement of faults in satire (Leyburn, 1969). The satirist is a malcontent critic, conscious of the follies in his society but unable to bring himself to let them pass by easily. This is the vein of moral superiority that Pollard (1970) suggests; the satirist appears to be superior in morality to the targets he assails. The ultimate goal is to convince and move the reader to do the same. In order to achieve the goal, the satirist often adopts a certain persona to be a mask (Leyburn, 1969). A recurring image for this effect of masking is that of a mirror; it yields a reflection of 132 reality. Through a moral judgement of faults and an adoption of the mask of a persona, the satire exercises its function as an instrument of social and ethical reform

(Worcester, 1940).

Among various devices used in satire, allegory is most relevant to the later discussion of righteous animal fantasy. The use of allegory, a metaphorical representation of or a metonymy of something for something else, particularly flourished in the Middle Ages (Hodgart, 1969), and was generally applied in sermons to drive home a moral point. Used in this light, allegory serves as a decoration of unpalatable truth, a sugar coating of the pill, which might be too bitter to swallow

(Leyburn, 1969). This is why a persuasive, strong vein of didacticism generally runs through the majority of satire.

Satire is relevant to our discussion here because the satiric vision as allegory is so much present in righteous animal fantasy. To cite from Highet (1962), the satiric vision generally finds its fullest expression in the travels to another world (to strange lands, extra-terrestrial visits, vision of the future, fantastic voyages), and animal tales or fables. The essence of these two types of tales is comparison and contrast.

Especially in fables humans are depicted as animals by way of reduction, or the animal nature is revealed under the pretension of a human body. It is true that not every fable can be tagged as satire, but there exists at least quite a corpus of fables, which are pointed enough to be defined as satire. Animal fantasy, especially that in the righteous group, employs two satirical devices-an insistence of moral superiority and adoption of animal persona as an allegorical form. That is, animals are used as a metonymy for humans, as a vehicle of political/social comment, for the purpose of didacticism, and, as we shall see later, in animal fantasies both for adults and children. 133

Three Satirical Animal Fables in Adult Literature

If not all, at least a large number of satires recruit animals who are virtually people in disguise. The Houyhnhnms in Swift's Gulliver's Travels are not horses. In Orwell's

Animal Farm, it hardly seems to be boars who hire dogs as bodyguards, drink beer, and play cards with human farmers. The pompous, cynical Dr. Rat of Kotzwinkle's Dr. Rat is by no means an ordinary rodent resident in the college laboratory.

In a sense, these beast fables are allegorical satires, holding up a mirror of men, a mirror of scorn and pity toward humans in the physical disguise of animals (Highet,

1962). In order to make a mirror image of man, the beast fables employ the principles of inversion and reduction to reverse humans and animals in the Great Chain of Being.

Animal fantasy is a ready-made form to be employed to comment on men in animal terms. Thus animal fantasy is used to reveal human nature by means of concealing the human in an animal body. The process of concealing-revealing indicates the parallel and divergence between human and animal, and this contrast is further applied for moral instruction and edification, much reminiscent of the medieval bestiary.

Three animal fantasies in adult literature were selected for the twofold purpose of demonstrating some basic techniques used in satire and paving the way for the subsequent discussion of righteous animal fantasy for children in this century.

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels. (1726).

Gulliver's Travels is in the tradition of utopias, dating back to Plato's ideal

Republic, and to traveller's tales. Swift combines these two ideas to frame four travels to exotic places in order to look back on his own land. Out of the four travels. Book

IV most concerns us for its use of inversion in the status of human and beast. In the 134 realm of Houyhnhnm, neither the equine Houyhnhnms nor the simian Yahoos are animals. Both are types of human beings: the former as the rational minority and the latter as the ignorant majority. Both may also stand for conflicting aspects in human nature-rationality and impulsiveness (Highet, 1962). The Houyhnhnms utilize highly- developed human rationality to build up a society much superior to the human's.

Yahoos, the apes that are close to man in anatomy and intelligence, well personify bestiality and ignorance. It is in this sense that Gulliver's travel to the Houyhnhnms is a story that turns the tables; animal and man switch their status, with the horses disguised as people and the people disguised as animals (Blount, 1975).

It is through these inversions that Swift calls our attention to two prevailing tenets in the Age of Reason with the view of devaluing or denouncing humans. The first one is the Great Chain of Being, in which beasts are beneath men in the order of the cosmos, while men are placed next to the angels. The second one is the belief that man is a rational animal. Swift presents man as an underling of the beasts to show that there is a combination of rationality and bestiality in human nature-probably more of the latter than of the former.

George Orwell. Animal Farm. (1946).

At first sight. Animal Farm is a talking animal fantasy with a group of farm animals ousting their master in order to have their own government. On a deeper level, it is about types of people, only in animal guises. These talking beasts within the fences of the farm are assuredly portrayals of humans, all types of humans that can be found in a political body (Lejeune, 1983). As critics have found. Animal Farm in its historical context is a bitter attack on the communist revolution in Russia and its betrayal by 135

Stalin and the Communist bureaucracy. But the messages are universal enough to apply to any revolution which has been betrayed (Highet, 1962).

What concerns us here is the waning and waxing powers of animality and humanity, and their eventual blurring. These farm animals start as real-life animals as they gather in the barn to hear Old Major's dream vision (a brave new world?), in which all animals are equal, free of human masters. As the revolution proceeds, some animals retain their nature. The horse continues to pull loads, the cow continues to be milked, the hen continues to lay eggs. In contrast, the three boars forsake their true nature (animality) to adopt human behavior (humanity) (Lejeune, 1983). In the end when the farm animals peep into the windows, and they "looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" (Orwell, 1946, p. 128). The sense of grotesqueness and incongruity from the beasts' human like behavior brings about a sense of terror and disgust. As the seven commandments from the rebellion gradually break down to allow animals to resemble humans, the original nobility in animals gives way to a moral degradation like that of humans.

On a universal level, each of the farm animals reveals a predominant human trait, and this typecasting can go back to the bestiary, zoographical symbology (Lejeune,

1983), with Boxer the loyal horse, Benjamin the cynical donkey, Mollie the dull mare, and the three avaricious boars. But the three boars are more than avarice; they, especially Napoleon, are humanized to an extent never before in literature. They wish to become members of the human race by behaving human-like, for instance, drinking surplus milk, doing no work, sleeping in bed, drinking with men, and selling other animals to human slavery for personal profit. Napoleon is such a figure of lust for 136 power and cunningness that he is never an animal but a man at all times, a fully humanized pig. Animal Farm is thus a beast fable portraying how animals can fall to the level of humans, in addition to its decrying of the politics of authoritarian society

(Pollard, 1970).

William Kotzwinkle. Doctor Rat. (1976).

If Animal Farm is "the most impressive political fable of our time" (Hodgart, 1969, p. 187), Doctor Rat, in contrast, presents an equally macabre, bleak vision of humanity, only switching from political cynicism to the moral morbidity of science and technology in the post-war society.

The choice of the rat is a clever irony in characterization and plot as well. To elevate the rat, commonly regarded as the nastiest, most despicable of animals, to the level of humans is an outfront blow against the superiority and supremacy of human.

It is instructive to compare Doctor Rat with the three pigs in Animal Farm, particularly

Napoleon. As Napoleon utilizes other farm animals in his own interest, so Doctor Rat renounces his species to assume the persona of a learned scientist. Both Napoleon and Doctor Rat deny their nature to aspire to be humans. Napoleon apes man through his behavior. Doctor Rat through his intellect. While Napoleon parodies any dictator.

Doctor Rat satirizes the dedicated scientist, totally immersed in a dehumanizing pursuit of knowledge and progress (Lejeune, 1983). While Napoleon at the end almost blurs

with the human without physical distinction. Doctor Rat unleashes every virulent bacteria and chemical toxin known to him to save the lab.

Another thematic interest is the issue of animal rights. In Doctor Rat animals suffer voluntarily for the welfare of humans-in the pompous name of science and 137 technology. One day it dawns on them that there may be more to life than suffering in the laboratory for the good of mankind and they themselves too have worth and dignity as living beings on earth. It is this awareness of their worth that leads them to rebel. They exert their rights to a decent existence, believing they have worth as themselves, rather than as mere specimens for lab experiments or suppliers of food and comfort for man. However, Doctor Rat goes beyond being a plea for laboratory animals. It challenges essential assumptions about man's role on earth (Lejeune,

1983). Doctor Rat is an ominous animal fable, a social satire that challenges the role of humans in the universe and questions the very values on which our society is founded.

Overall, these three animal fantasies are relevant to our present concern of the righteous animal fantasy for their satirical vision, the theme of animal rights, and the technique of inversion and reduction.

The Theme of the Righteous in Animal Fantasv in the Twentieth Centurv

The mid-twentieth century witnessed social, ethical and cultural changes and disillusionment on a large scale. Discontentment with old systems led to a crisis of traditional values. At this juncture fantasy became a tool to mold a critique on society in flux, both in the fields of adult literature and children's literature. The beast fable is particularly employed to fashion a mirror image of man. A strong vein of didacticism frequently runs through the narrative. The message is simple and direct; the animals act out a drama assuming the roles of men, reminding man of his bestial nature.

It was also at this moment that animal fantasy in children's literature seemed to take a new turn. The animal characters in romantic animal fantasy are, generally 138 speaking, cute little people. Like Peter Rabbit and Mr. Toad, those animal characters are adventurous and curious, though they may be reckless and heedless sometimes.

Also like Rat and Mole, those animal characters are essentially hedonists, either as children free of any obligation or as middle-aged folk in their early retirement, doing almost nothing except enjoying what life has offered them. With the rise of righteous animal fantasy, this scene changed from the jolly, carefree picnicking and boating in a sunlit, breezy summer afternoon along the riverbank or in the barn yard to a trudging journey full of hardships. Gone are the sunlight, gone are the felicitous activities of life. The scene seem s to change to a cold winter night, with deadly, bloody combats, sometimes tinged with a sense of triumph but more often with an overtone of sadness.

As satirists, writers of righteous animal fantasy believe that others are purblind, insensitive, or perhaps anaesthetized. They usually find something wrong with our human society, and wish to remorselessly expose these follies, which are habitually ignored (Highet, 1962, p. 19). Animal fantasy is a useful tool for social and/or political criticism, because it provides the writers a frame for examining the human society from without, from a distance; that is, to place themselves outside and to describe society through the eyes of the human counterparts-animals. Also the animal world can be a metonymy for social and/or political idealism in the human world. The effect of distancing is thus achieved to induce a sense of awe, absurdity, amazement, and perhaps even anger. In fact, righteous animal fantasy can be accurately placed in the tradition of satire for the use of anger as a tool to direct the reader's response, because animals are often rendered wretched and hapless, and unable to gain revenge for what has been done to them by humans, either through environmental pollution or the laboratory experiment. In this light the righteous animal fantasy may be aptly 139

termed as "the engine of anger," to borrow from W orcester's term on social satire in

general (1971, p. 118).

The righteous animal fantasists are remarkably united or closely related in what

they condemn or what they wish for, although their approaches and concerns may be

different. In various ways all address themselves to the question of what is deplorable

and what can be improved in society. Somewhat akin to romantic animal fantasy, there is usually a general longing for the pre-industrial period in the righteous animal

fantasy. The difference lies in that the former is content to portray a paradise, while the latter chooses to depict the result of a paradise lost, for instance, how the environment has been changed by interference of humans, or how animal rights have

been invaded in the name of human welfare. Through presenting an admonitory vision of the undesirable forms-a paradise lost, a dystopia, the writers outline a desirable vision for the present social/political structure. Namely, it is through the process of mirroring and deducting, that a paradise or utopia is established, however indirectly

(Swinfen, 1984). More often than not, the dystopia is presented as a bitter, bleak vision. Sometimes there is the hopeful, flickering light of a paradise; other times there is utter desperation and furious passion.

Hugh Lofting. The Storv of Dr. Dolittle. (1922). The Vovaoes of Dr. Dolittle (1923).

Regarding Hugh Lofting's books, there are many issues worthy of discussion, for instance, how the characters of Dr. Dolittle and Tommy Stubbins change through the series (Schmidt, 1987,1992), how the narrative style changes as the series continues

(Schmidt, 1987), and the charges of racism and ethnocentrism in terms of epithets, storyline, and illustration (Chavalier, 1989). What concerns us most here, however. 140 is the belief in and promotion of animal rights and a society of animals parallel to the hum an one.

Humphrey Carpenter in his Secret Gardens (1985) is at once right and wrong to enroll Lofting among the Golden Age figures in children's literature. Chronologically,

Lofting belongs to the late Victorian and Edwardian generation, and his series of Dr.

Dolittle books (twelve of them altogether) manifests a romantic longing for the mythical garden. One merely needs to turn to Chapter Nine of The Vovaoes of Dr.

Dolittle to find Tommy Stubbins, a cobbler's son and Dr. Dolittle's apprentice, narrating the garden of dreams:

It [The garden] had everything. There were wide lawns with carved stone seats, green with moss. Over the lawns hung weeping willows, and their feathery bough tips brushed the velvet grass when they swung with the wind. . . .

There was a lovely marble fishpond with golden carp and blue water lilies in it and big green frogs. A high brick wall alongside the kitchen garden was all covered with pink and yellow peaches ripening in the sun. There was a wonderful great oak, hollow in the trunk, big enough for four men to hide inside.

Many summerhouses there were, too. . . . and one of them was full of books to read. In a corner, among some rocks and ferns, was an outdoor fireplace. . .. There was a couch, as well, on which he used to sleep, it seems, on warm summer nights when the nightingales were singing at their best. . . . (There was also] a tiny little tree house high up in the top branches of a great elm, with a long rope ladder leading to it (Lofting, 1923, p. 44).

Tommy goes on to his (and also everybody's) wish to be sheltered in this enthralling garden:

It was the kind of a garden where you could wander and explore for days and days-always coming upon something new, always glad to find the old spots over again. The first time that I saw the Doctor's garden I was so charmed by it that I felt I would like to live in it and never go 141 outside of it again. For it had everything within its walls to make living pleasant-to keep the heart at peace. It was the garden of dreams (Lofting, 1923, p. 45).

This lengthy quotation serves to illustrate the romantic debris in animal fantasy and arcadian writing for children, and, what's more, admits the Dr. Dolittle series into a group of idyllic, rurualist fantasies in pre-war England (Carpenter, 1985).

On the other hand. Carpenter seems blind to the fact that Lofting is much closer to the mid-century righteous animal fantasy in terms of his thematic concerns and characterization of Dr. Dolittle. Assuredly the Dr. Dolittle series lacks the literary merits of those animal fantasies in the Golden Age of children's literature, roughly from

1860 to 1930. However, the character of Dr. Dolittle evidently shall stand on his own stature, not just for his linguistic skill but also for his humanitarian kindness toward animals. Given that. Lofting can be deemed as a transitional figure in the thematic evolution of animal fantasy.

The link of the Dr. Dolittle series to the righteous animal fantasy can be viewed through the origin of the storyline and the character of Dr. Dolittle. Lofting once related how the vision of the agonizing death of army horses led to the story of Dr.

Dolittle:

They [The army horses] took their chances with the rest of us. But their fate was far different from the men's. However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.

This did not seem quite fair. If we made the animals take the same chances as we did ourselves, why did we not give them similar attention when wounded? But obviously to develop a horse-surgery as good as that of our Casualty Clearing Stations would necessitate a knowing of horse language. 142 That was the beginning of the idea: an eccentric country physician with a bent for natural history and a great love of pets. ... He is challenged by the difficulty of the work-for obviously it requires a much cleverer brain to become a good animal doctor (who must first acquire all animal languages and physiologies) (Lofting, 1934, pp. 198-99).

Evidently Lofting's concern about the suffering of the army horses, or of animals in general not only links him with the eighteenth-century British Didactic School of moralists in Chapter III, but also typifies other fellow writers of righteous animal fantasy, whom we shall see later.

One of the endearing, enduring characters in children's literature. Dr. Dolittle is a stubby, square-nosed animal doctor from Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. With his pedestrian nature but enormous optimism and self-confidence. Dr. Dolittle always believes that all that's well ends well, and he always comes up with ingenious, sometimes lunatic solutions (Chevalier, 1989; Schmidt, 1992).

Indeed the character of Dr. Dolittle is an ingenious invention, and at once allows

Lofting to express his ethical and moral concerns within the mainstream of animal fantasy in children's literature (Blishen, 1968). Also the Dr. Dolittle books realize our secret wish: "if only the animals could speak." In fact, myths and folktales tell of a time when the animals all held speech among themselves. It was humans who lost sight of the communicative channel with the bestial creatures. For ages the bestial world has been waiting to be understood by the first human with the luck, intelligence, and willingness to study the animal languages (Blount, 1975). John Dolittle is the one they waited for. As an animal lover, he would like to attend exclusively to animals, and henceforth finds his true mission in life. When Polynesia the parrot teaches him animal language, starting with the ABC of bird language, that is an epoch-making moment in human-animal communication. As the channel is re-opened between 143 humans and animals, the doctor can directly communicate with the animals to learn what ails them, rather than guessing or making assumptions. This is clearly respect for the right of animals to exist.

Moreover, since Mowgli of The Jungle Book fails to leap the gap between man and beast, however he surmises himself to be a member of the jungle world. Dr. Dolittle is the first human who successfully enters the animal world without any resistance from the animals, and is generally beloved by them. Once able to converse with all animals, he travels around the world to right the wrongs done by humans, for instance, to cure the sick, to rescue captives, and to found an animal sanctuary on an island off

Africa where humans are never allowed to trespass (Blount, 1975). And what underscores the whole series is Dr. Dolittle's passionate belief in decent respect for the rights of others, both humans and animals. He does not just doctor animals; he believes in their worth. His magnanimity to the animal world manifests itself in numerous instructive examples of tolerance, generosity, and kindness, and is also extended to humanity. This is why the Dr. Dolittle series is usually regarded as a promotion for world peace and understanding (Serick, 1990, Vol, 19, p. 102).

Though Dr. Dolittle is the focal point of the series, the animal characters are not to be dismissed. They are generally brisk, gentle, and uncorrupted. Contrary to our prejudices about animals, they are not only much nicer than most people, they are also more intelligent. It is important to remember that it is humans who cannot make out the animal languages, while Polynesia the parrot is bilingual, speaking both the animal and human languages. The whole series features a variety of animals that are anthropomorphic yet true to their animal nature. Every one of these animals has a distinct personality. For instance, Chee-Chee the monkey is nervous, Too-Too the owl 144

is ready to give advice, Dabdab the duck is a fussy housekeeper, Gub Gub the pig is

greedy, and so on (Shenk, 1955). The animals are basically good-natured and

characterized by all kinds of virtues, for instance, loyalty, fortitude, justice, and

concern; it is humans who are villainous, engaged in all kinds of vice, ranging from

stealing, fighting, and capturing, to exploiting (Schmidt, 1992).

It is Lofting's belief in humanity's incredible capability for evil and the essential

good nature of animals that links the Dr. Dolittle books with later generations of

righteous animal fantasy.

Erich Kastner. The Animals' Conference. (1949).

Erick Kastner's The Animals' Conference is an exception to the criteria in selection of books, for it was originally published in German and only later translated into

English. However, it should be enlisted for the theme on animal vengeance and the device of inversion used in the satire. As the animals gather to oust Farmer Jones in

Animal Farm, so the animals of the world unite and force the humans to make peace in The Animals' Conference. In these two animal fantasies animals copy human institutions of their own, a social structure in Animal Farm, a bureaucracy of decision­ making and communication in The Animals' Conference. Both have the theme of animal vengeance: The animals on the farm dismiss Mr. Jones to run things by themselves, and, similarly, it dawns on the animals around the world that it is the human race (the adults) that spoils the planet and makes life impossible for animals and innocent children in every nation. In order to save themselves and the children, the animals convene to take action to remedy world affairs. To counter the hegemony of the human race, the animals copy the human design of conference, committee. 145 parliament, or summit talk. Thus the irony is that the animals turn man's own game against him. Ironically, things go so well in the hands of the animals. The overall victory is achieved not by any force but through the joining effort of the animals to destroy clothes and written communication-two emblems of human civilization

(Blount, 1975). This provokes us to ponder on the dividing line between man and beast and to question the superiority of human civilization.

Unlike the boars in Animal Farm, who wish to and eventually do ingraft themselves into the corrupted human race, the animal delegations of the conference remain uncorrupted, staying clear of the human race. Also unlike other farm animals, who remain stupid and ignorant, and allow themselves to fall prey to the manipulative boars, the animal delegations are well-advised and efficient. Moreover, unlike most sullen, heavy-duty righteous animal fantasy, Ernest Kastner's The Animals' Conference is light-hearted. Its liberating gaiety runs contrary to the oppressing pessimism of

Animal Farm. The message from Kastner is direct and simple: "If the world were in animals' hands, things would all go right" (Blount, 1975).

Dodie Smith. One Hundred and One Dalmatians. (1956).

While the mice society in animal fantasy primarily enjoys its lilliputien pleasure in a rosy glow, there is a tendency to give animals a holiday-that is, to give them a chance to be dominant, to be on the upper hand. In this inverted world, animals are more important than people and can do well if left alone in their place (Blount, 1977).

For instance, what is unique about Dodie Smith's One Hundred and One Dalmatians

(1956) and The Starlight Barking (1967) is not just the events seen through the eyes of animals, a community of dogs in this case (a community of animal beings common 146 to most of the animal fantasy), but this is a world of dogs, with dogs in the center and humans far away at the margin. One needs only to read the beginning.

Not long ago, there lived in London a young married couple of Dalmatian dogs named Pongo and Missis Pongo. . . . They were lucky enough to own a young married couple of humans named Mr. and Mrs. Dearly, who were gentle, obedient, and unusually intelligent-almost canine at times. They understood quite a number of barks.... Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them (Smith, 1956, pp. 3-4)

All the canine characters are good and virtuous, while the humans are, in one way or another, stupid or even ill-intended. Of course. Smith is not wholly original in presenting this animal-centered world. The Yohaoos and Houyhnhnms in Swift's

Guilliver's Travels already depict a world of inversion in the status of human and beast.

Smith's dog community is assuredly light and humorous in tone, in contrast to Swift's witty, cynical, sometimes biting tone. Ane also in Black Beautv. animals are intelligent enough to talk to and understand each other, but it is the stupid humans that do not reciprocate (Blount, 1977).

Russell Hoban. The Mouse and His Child. (1969).

The Mouse and His Child is a definite departure from Hoban's early picture books, anthropomorphic tales of Frances the badger. But, as Blount (1975) observes, it is difficult to classify "such a strange, haunting and distinguished book" (p. 186). Indeed

The Mouse and His Child is a borderline piece: for it includes mechanical toys, as well as animals, birds, and amphibians.

It is also instructive to note that The Mouse and His Child was originally written for adults; the publisher, however, decided to market it as a children's books for no other 147 reason that it is about talking animals and toys (Rees, 1984). It is tempting to think that a story featuring talking animals and toys is expected to be somehow shallow and easy. In fact. The Mouse and His Child is replete with philosophical or mock philosophical reflections, and some of them are very existential, for instance, how one can face his existence and what is his value and worth in this hostile world. Evidently

Hoban feels that this existential leap of faith can best be probed through the form of anthropomorphized animal fantasy (J. Lynn, 1986; Bowers 1980).

As many critics have reminded us. The Mouse and His Child sets its background in a modern pastoral. But unlike the idyllic pastoral of rural life in romantic animal fantasy, the nature here is unrelentingly portrayed in its cruelty-a remorseless "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (Bowers, 1980, p. 89). As Joanne Lynn (1986) and A. Joan

Bowers (1980) indicate, anthropomorphic fantasy is a common vehicle for the modern pastoral in children's books. The story begins in a toyshop, where there used to be a shiny harmony among the toys, the mice, the elephant, the seal, and a doll's house.

Gone are the golden days, for the mouse father and child have been broken and thrown away to the city dump-an apt metaphor for modern urban existence, in which everything is expendable and dispensable. The scene henceforth changes to a rural landscape, but the rural scene is not Arcadia, for all its meadow, woodland, stream, and pond. Rather than a shelter, nature is a brutal lesson to be learned.

The central theme is the individual's quest for self-knowledge and psychic wholeness (Branscomb, 1986). The mouse and his child are motivated by three human needs: to become self-winding, to possess a home of their own, and to find what lies beyond "the last visible dog." All these are resolved near the end of the story. There is nothing beyond infinity, beyond the last visible dog; a secure. 148 comfortable doll's house is renovated to accommodate the homeless animals/toys; no one is completely self-winding and that's what friends are for (Chevalier, 1989).

Homelessness is another thematic concern. Not only do the mouse and his child, the tramps, seek a place to settle down, but also the shrews and woodmice engage themselves in a war for territory (Lenz, 1979). The concept of territory thus plays a vital part in the struggle for survival in learning how the individual can make a home out of a strange and frightening world (Ruskin & Ruskin, 1987).

Self-winding serves as a trigger for the quest of the mouse father and child, surging out here and there like an undercurrent. In one sense, self-winding means freedom, independence, personal fulfillment. The two broken mechanical toys-the mouse and his child, are helpless when not wound up. When they are repaired and wound up by a tramp to walk again, they can only walk straight and cannot stop. Aren't these two wind-ups and we as well slaves to technology in the commercial society (Lynn, J.,

1986)? Are they not fated like all mechanical things, to move, to go on until breakage, rust and disintegration (Blount, 1975)? The overall tone is sad and lamenting, and even the books's happy ending does not dispel the sense of loss.

Besides the self-winding freedom, the mouse and his child, especially the latter, also seek what humans want: a home, an extended family. The mouse child says, "I want the elephant to be my mama, the seal to be my sister, and I want to live in the beautiful house." This longing for a home and a family is remembered from the mouse child's early days in the doll's house of the toy shop, where a stuffed elephant sang a lullaby and a seal was chosen as adopted sister. The toyshop thus functions as a paradise with warmth, security, comfort, and companionship. What drives the mouse and his child to endure the dangers is their longing to redeem the paradise lost, a lost 149 haven of peace and love (Swinfen, 1984). Meanwhile the mouse child's vision of a family and a home grows into an extended family, resulting from the marriage of his father and adoption of one sister and three uncles (a frog, a kingfisher, and a bittern), and the redemption of the arch-foe Manny rat (Ruskin & Ruskin, 1987).

Robert O'Brien. Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH (1971).

Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH by Robert O'Brien (pseudonym for Robert Conly) was the winner of the 1972 Newbery Medal and a 1972 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.

It also won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award and was on the National Book Award list. It was filmed as The Secret of NIMH, and has two sequels by his daughter, Jane

Leslie Conly, Rasco and the Rats of NIMH (1986) and R-T. Margaret and the Rats of

NIMH (1990).

O'Brien once confessed his serious attempt at science fiction for young readers:

I have been, and still am, concerned over the seeming tendency of the human race to exterminate itself If we should vanish from the earth, who might survive us? What kind of civilization might follow ours? ("O'Brien Newbery Award Acceptance Speech", in Kingman, 1975. p. 84).

Then, based on his wide reading in science and biology, he surmises that rats might be the best candidate for this surviving civilization, for

rats are tough, highly adaptable to a changing environment, and enormously prolific. Maybe, if people should eliminate one another by means of war or pollution, rats would be the survivors (quoted from Helbig, 1985, p. 85).

Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH and The Mouse and His Child are naturally associated together for their rodent characters, but, what they share most is their acid 150 comments on our times, the former on modern technology and man's liaison with nature, and the latter on human existence in modern urban life.

Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH relates the heroic efforts of a mother fieldmouse to save her family from imminent death from the human farmer's plow. However, it is more than a talking animal fantasy, being much slanted toward science fiction. For the rats of NIMH are not common rats; they are a colony of super-rat, with increased size and longevity, intelligence, advanced communication, and technical skills. These intelligent rats from the lab of NIMH are clearly counterparts to humans in modern industrialized society, for, like humans, they face the dilemma of whether to employ technology to exploit nature for their own benefit but destroy the environment, and whether to respect the individual's right of existence and preserve natural resources

(Chevalier, 1989). This dilemma is already a familiar topic; what is novel is the employment of the talking rats in this dilemma to test out the options for humans.

Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH has literary weaknesses, for instance, the plot is poorly constructed and there is a lack of memorable characters (Helbig, 1985). The middle flashback is too lengthy, and the method used to teach the rats to read is deplorable (Kemp, 1973). The plot also lacks unity in its shift in emphasis from Mrs.

Frisby to the rats of NIMH (Helbig, 1985). Also, though credible and convincing, most, if not all, characters are flat and lack dimension. Despite the limp plot and static characters, there are some nice details that show animals in human daily activities, and a remarkable ability to evoke setting and incidents from the animal's point of view with meticulous attention to scientific accuracy and sensory details (Helbig, 1985).

In addition to the themes of courage, respect, and cooperation, Mrs. Frisbv and the

Rats of NIMH carries the message of ecological concerns and comments on human 151 mores (Helbig, 1985). The messages are demonstrated in the determination of the rats to give up the traditional rat method of theft and filching from humans, to stay away from humans, to live and let live, instead of exploiting the environment and consuming what nature offers without respect (Helbig, 1985). This is a parable of the choice between a destructive technological society and the natural life. While Mrs. Frisby with the assistance of the rats, rescues her family from the farmer's plowing, the rats are bold enough to implement "the Plan" to depart for a garden valley, free from humans, free from any modern facilities and natural menaces (Morse, 1983), to build a self-sufficient society over the hills in Thorn Valley. The fate of the compassionate, moral, idealistic rats remains open-ended, but what they did and plan to do tugs at our emotion and intellect anyway.

Richard Adams. Watershio Down. (1972).

Turned down by three literary agents and four publishers, Watershio Down eventually became one of its decade's best sellers, and brought international fame to its author. It was awarded the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award in 1973.

Recent years have witnessed the accusation that Watershio Down is an anti-feminist piece due to its glorified male characters and petty female characters (Thomas, 1974), comments about the alleged sexist interpretation of a male-dominated community with the does only as breeding stock (Serick, 1990), and criticisms of a "didactic, overly- indulgent work" (Senick, 1990, p. 10). Generally speaking, Watershio down is viewed as a deeply moving story which successfully blends realism and imagination to create a credible life story of a band of rabbits. Its plotline is simple: a valiant band of rabbits try to establish a home where they can live in peace. Despite various accusations, the 152 book is a modern classic and almost inexhaustibly discussible. It is remarkable at least in th e following w ays.

Watershio Down is a literary achievement, a work of exceptional originality and scope. Rabbits are not unfamiliar characters either in folktales or in children's literature, as seen in Uncle Remus' Brer Rabbit, Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, or Alision

Uttley's Gray Rabbit. Like children, rabbits in the garden, the field, and the warren endear themselves by their innocent, carefree nature and their simple way of life

(Lockley, 1964/1974). But never before have rabbits been made into the heroes of an epic tale of leadership and the struggle for survival. Assuredly Watershio Down is the first book to make anthropomorphical rabbits into truly heroic figures (Senick, 1990).

Adams's portrayal of his rabbits is worth some discussion, for it is the backbone of this novel. To establish his rabbits as credible heroes his first task is to grant them linguistic capability. But he also take pains to establish his characters' lapine credentials. His knowledge of the hard facts of rabbits in the wild comes both from his own observations on the Berkshire Downs, and from the narrative of naturalist

Ronald Lockley. His meticulousness about the rabbits discloses how an animal fantasy, or fantasy in general, has to base itself on factual cornerstones. His profound knowledge of the territory and of animal behavior dictates his artistic fidelity, and allows his rabbits, within certain physical limits, to think, feel and act as human beings. His presentation of realism and imagination convinces us that if rabbits were capable of conceptualizing their existence, this would be how they would think of themselves and the rest of the world (Prescott, 1974). The authentic elements are so persuasive and the distinction between fact and fiction so blurred that a child reader might believe that rabbits could and would rescue another rabbit from a snare or 153 escape from an enemy by floating down a river on a punt released by gnawing through a rope (Hammond, 1973).

With his insistence on authenticity on the natural truth of animals, no wonder

Adams is surprised to discover how much the world has misunderstood the true nature of rabbits:

rabbits . . . had dignity and "animality"--the quality corresponding to "humanity" in men and wom en... Far from being childishly cute, they possessed by nature great courage and resourcefulness within, as it were, the ambit of the limits, strength, and qualities given them by the Creator.... They have been anthropomorphically maligned. They were not usually promiscuous, and in many instances retained the same mate ("Introduction", in Lockley, 1964/1974, p. 5).

Lockley's contribution to Watershio Down is not merely his naturalistic behavioral observations in his The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964). He particularly challenges the anthrop-centered view on animals. In narrating the kinship between human and rabbit, he describes the structure and birth practice in the rabbit community, and concludes provokingly, "Rabbits are so human. Or is it the other way round-humans are so rabbit?" (Lockley, 1964/1974, p. 144). Which is right? Or which better depicts the relationship between humans and rabbits (or animals in general)? Does this kinship explain why we tend to humanize animals, to see animal behavior through our eyes and judge animals according to our moral standard? In this way Lockley daringly challenges the supremacy of homo sapiens over other species on this planet.

Therefore, one of Adams's achievements is that he portray his rabbits from within

(the lapine nature), rather than from without (the human nature). His authenticity of the narrative is in its faithfulness to the lapine eyes, through an ankle-high perspective on the English countryside; a world of plants, burrows, and natural enemies, such as 154 man, machines, dogs, stoats, and weasels (Hannabuss, 1973). Adams builds an entire world of rabbits, a credible civilization complete with its own history, language, mythology, and government (Serick, 1990).

However, the rabbit perspective of Watershio Down is not without its critics.

Flanagan accuses Adams of the flaw of humanizing rabbits to such an extent as to deprive them of lapine nature:

The rabbit characters talk-through human language-rather than having a social life, in which rabbits communicate with each other by the smell of urine and fecal pellets. If these are offensive to us, that is not the fault of the rabbits (in Lockley, 1964/1974, p. 152).

He further suggests, "If we seek to understand another animal and its role in the same natural system to which we belong, we must allow it the dignity of its own way of life

(Flanagan, 1974, p. 152). However, one may wonder, if the rabbit characters were to be portrayed only through sensory stimulus and response, rather than linguistic skills to converse, how could this animal fantasy successfully be read? Therefore, to grant the rabbits speech, or at least pay more attention to speech than to their sensory experience, is probably an artistic choice, not deliberate disrespect for the dignity of true rabbit nature.

Moreover, Peter Hunt (1980) complains that Adams sometimes puts aside his band of valiant rabbits to allow his authorial voice to preach. Hammond (1973) agrees that

Adams is "stepping out of the impersonal omniscient narrative stance to address the reader direct" (p. 56), because Adams often sounds like a science teacher expounding on lapine knowledge through didactic asides. It is true that in Watershio Down much of the inserted rabbitology is crammed in almost at the factual textbook level, sometimes at tedious length, rather than synthesized into the sensory world of the 155 rabbits to work on the imagination of the reader. However, the inclusion of excerpts on rabbitology from Lockley's book probably demonstrates Adams's efforts to de- anthropomorphize the rabbit characters (Senick, 1990). That is, this helps to establish rabbits as rabbits.

Adams is certainly a moralist in his vision of the encroachment of man's industrialization on the natural environment of the countryside (Swinfen, 1984). When speaking of the origin of the story, Adams indicates it was told on the spur of the moment to his two daughters on the way to Shakespeare's Twelfth Nioht. and only later expanded into a novel (Green, 1979). Despite the fact that Adams describes

Watershio Down as only "a little story about rabbits which I wrote for my children"

(quoted from Wintle, 1974, p. 142), it clearly betrays his moral vision on man's mission toward animals and nature. His moral stance on the crisis between human and other species on this planet is revealed through one of his talks:

.... most people have rightly become highly conscious of our danger that we may spoil the world in this way. But since we are the most powerful of the world's inhabitants and therefore the world is our responsibility We need to learn more fully how to understand and respect the animals, with whom we share the world (Adams, in Lockely, 1964/1974, p. 6).

Adams is by no means a sentimentalist; rather, his approach to animals is definitely rational:

Certainly we should control them [animals] and surely we may make use of them, but we should do these things thoughtfully and we must learn not to abuse or waste the animals. . . . Yet it would be no good tackling our task merely by being sentimental; an animal is an animal and not a sort of human being dressed up. Before we can act wisely we must appreciate the facts and see the animals as they really are (Adams, in Lockley, 1964/1974, p. 6). 156

What he suggests, therefore, is an understanding of animals and nature, derived from

patient, hardheaded observation, and a keen, shrewd, feeling mind, and only through

this manner can one become a true lover of this beautiful earth (Adams, 1974).

Therefore, his motivation behind writing is to stand for and have an influence on the

preservation of wildlife. His dream would be "the creation of a World Wildlife Council.

. . I am determined to exercise it [the persuasive power of my books] to see the

animals on this planet included, not out" (quoted from Green, 1979, p. 82).

However, Watershio Down is not Adams's only book which betrays him as a fierce

champion of animals. The Plague Poos (1977), an angry piece about animal

vivisection, is a narrative of the adventures of two maltreated dogs, Rowf and Snitter,

who escape from the animal-research station in the Lake District. This book, though

less popular, led Adams to greater concerns for animals, as he was invited to become

a vice president of Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and

offered his service for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Green, 1979).

On the continuum of anthropomorphism, Watershio Down is accomplished for its

characterization of rabbits in plausible situations with none of the sentimentality of

cute bunnies. Each member of the valiant band of rabbits is unique in his own way:

Hazel as a determined leader. Fiver as a visionary prophet. Bigwig as the brave

prankster. General Woundwort as the rabbit dictator. And most remarkably, they have their own history, culture, language, and tradition.

Neil H ancock. Draoon W inter (1978).

The theme of the quest for a homeland in which to survive and settle down in the tradition of Watershio Down also is shared by several other animal fantasies, merely 157

with a twist and turn of the quest theme and the ecological concern. Draoon Winter narrates the story of a band of forest animals, including an otter, an beaver, a badger, a muskrat, a squirrel, and two pups, who travel in late summer to avoid the harsh

winter.

Like the folk tradition of rabbit hero El-aharairah in Watershio Down, the forest otterdom also possesses a tradition of folklore. Indeed Draoon Winter is in the format of a folk tale in the oral tradition, for the otterlore serves as a frame to the story,

beginning with Bramble-Branch-Bumble the otter turning the pages of an ancient lorebook. Upon the Matters of Seriousness or An Otter Primer, and the story ends with

Bramble hoping to write his adventures with his paw in the blank pages. This ancient

worn lorebook would be passed down from generation to generation. Other elements of folklore include the chart passed down from Gruff and Greystone's ledger book on their trip; the sword of the Law; the white-hot, blazing light from Erinoult, which has a mind of its own, and a pyramid-like maze, constructed by the High Clan, with dragon's hoard on the altar.

The persuasive atmosphere is gloomy and depressing. The foreboding winter, the ominous natural phenomena, worries about the food shortage and the harsh winter, the outbreak of violence from large animals and humans-all these dangers lurk somewhere in the darkness. And there is an indication that anything associated with man is considered bad and evil; for instance, Blackpaw, a badger wearing a cloak and walking like a human, and also the grand marshal (in fact the walking dog) of Olwin the red, a master of evil, are considered a disgrace to the decent animal sort.

It is also indicated that mankind is the most dangerous enemy to animals, because they are not very brotherly either to animals or to fellow humans. As Bramble says. 158 When all kinds lived together, and no one struck a blow against a brother. It seems that mankind split from everyone else, and then they even began to split from each other, until at last, they were warring among their own (p. 133).

It is in the theme that humans are morally degraded while animals are morally superior

that Draoon Winter is a righteous animal fantasy.

Robin Hawdon. A Rustle in the Grass. (1984).

The characters in animal fantasy are usually small animals, such as rabbits,

badgers, moles, frogs, toads, chickens, and so on. Hawdon's A Rustle in the Grass

is probably unique in choosing an ant colony as the setting. It is another exodus of

animals seeking a new haven. The band of animals in Draoon Winter starts in late

summer to avoid the harsh winter only to find their promised land in spring, while the

ants of A Rustle in the Grass waken from winter's Long Sleep, finding their world threatened by an army of giant red ants.

Like Richard Adams, Hawdon imparts the natural history of his animal characters.

Anatomical truth is lavished everywhere. Ants' antennae are especially depicted in a

functional, imaginative manner. Antennae are an ant's most vital and sacred

accoutrements, and can be employed diversely: "They are the instruments of his

awareness, his chief means of self-expression, the insignia of his personality" (p. 107).

Hence, to bend an ant's antennae is an act of mutilation, the most cold-blooded desecration for any ant to suffer. The antennae can almost function the same as human hands, for they can be used in salutation and respect by curling the feelers

while bowing the head at the threshold, or as an emblem of consent by inclining one's huge cranium. Also, to touch another's feelers is a signal for the other to come 159 forward. When ants are joyful, they embrace their antennae. The antennae are like moustaches, too, for Five Legs strokes a feeler ruminatively with his foreleg. The queen touches the antennae of the valiant worker-ants with her own as the royal blessing. Hawdon must have a fairly imaginative mind and a great deal of information on antlore to envision such a versatile organ as the ant's antennae.

Hawdon faces an even more difficult task than Adams, for a world of ants on the ground level is definitely more difficult to imagine than a world of rabbits from the ankle-high vantage. How to render ant characters life-like is another task. What characterizes the black ants and the red ants is not so much their biological difference as their social system and attitude toward life. In comparison with the peacefulness of the black ants, the red ants are distinctly greedy, performing wanton, indiscriminate slaughter. Furthermore, the queen of red ants has an instinctive mechanism of self- destruction: when she is too old to perform her duty, she would bring the whole colony to an end. In contrast, the queen of the black ants is a model of motherhood and devotion.

This tale of ants shares space with Watershio Down as a political treatise on leadership. While Hazel emerges naturally as the leader of the fleeing rabbits, the colony of ants spends time finding a new leader to win everybody's heart. The leaders in each of these two tales is someone of vision to bring the band through disaster.

The death of Thurderer and threat from the red ants open the discussion of the most feasible political model for the ants, ranging from anarchy, autocracy, fascism, to democracy. A Rustle in the Grass is thus about the education of a leader. Two ants are especially concerned. Dreamer, the quick feeler, is a visionary figure. His dreams of exchange dialogues with the Voice are concerned with moral issues. Still One is 160 noted as a skillful storyteller. His compelling tales function as food for thought to his fellows and enemies as well. For instance, the tale of a cedar that dominates the sun from other saplings and trees that have equal shares of sunshine and space compares the outcome of totalitarianism and democracy.

Such a political debate is the drama of this ant story. Discussions on various political bodies are based on a concern: "Does might make right?" There are obviously two opposing political systems in the course of the tale, democracy for the black ants, and totalitarianism, or at least, fascism, for the red ants. It seems that in the world of red ants, might is irrefutable right, for they adopt an alien system. It is in Spider, the arch-ant, that Hawdon strikes his blow at the dictatorship, for Spider with his monstrous physical presence and frightening omnipotence believes strength is the only quality he requires to hold his position. As a treatise on leadership and political systems, A Rustle in the Grass is unique among the righteous animal fantasies, and contains strong social-political overtones.

Walter D. Edmonds. Beaver Valiev. (1971).

Around the same time as Watershio Down. Walter D. Edmonds published Beaver

Valley, another convincing and vivid animal fantasy with a decent portion of natural history on animals. This is a tale in the pattern of paradise-disaster/paradise lost- reconstruction. Before the beavers come, the animals lead a peaceful life in Spring

Brook Valley. Beavers here are portrayed in a negative light, as ruthless engineers upsetting the delicate ecology of the meadows and valleys they invade.

The technique of irony is employed here. One irony of the narrative is that the rise of beaver valley and the downfall of peaceful Spring Brook Valley are seen through 161

Skeet, a young, inexperienced deer mouse. In his eyes, what really happens usually means more than he can interpret. For instance, he sees the new beaver construction as a game, totally ignorant of the effect it may have on the environment. Skeet is awed by what the beavers have accomplished in flooding at least a dozen homes overnight, but he is too young and naive to think of what might have happened inside the homes. As he checks on the construction every day, he realizes how the environment has been changed over a period of four months.

Skeet's grandfather instructs on the hard facts of beaver: How they construct a dam, where they live, what they eat, how they gnaw or chisel down a tree, and how they chew the trunk into lengths of about four feet each. As the grandfather once com m ents:

Beavers think they know the way everything ought to be in any place they settle down. If it isn't that way, they make it so and they don't care a bit what happens to anyone else in the process (Edmonds, 1971, p. 8).

This is a definite slant comment on the self-interest and greed of humans, who think themselves the center of the universe and take what they want as they very please.

Moreover, the yearly migrating itch of the beaver for new unexplored land and their desire for bigger and better things pretty much indicate their nature of exploitation and ambition. Humans also explore nature to their own advantage, regardless of the consequences of their acts on nature, either directly or indirectly.

A dialogue between Skeet and Seemore, a beaver, is instructive to dramatize the tension between humans and animals, and how humans would justify themselves for what they have done to nature. When the beavers begin constructing a series of dams, all the wild animals who have burrows underground, including mice, moles. 162 rabbits, and chipmunks, find that the water of the dam threatens their homes. Skeet says, "You see, it's our home, and the home of lots of mice and moles, and the water has already come into some of the bottom ones. It's already killed some mice."

Seemore answers, "We can't help that. A dam's needed here," and "If some homes get spoiled, it's nothing to do with us. Just move away" (Edmonds, 1971, p. 37).

The pose of arrogant self-centeredness is obvious. More explicitly, the way the beavers work on to achieve their goal, oblivious of the effect of their works on the environment, resembles the way in which humans destroy the virgin land or wild areas in the name of "land development."

The last chapter is very pregnant with moral teaching and didacticism. When Skeet looks at their old home at the top of a high bank, he has the uneasy feeling that it does not look like the same place, and is almost sure that the same history will repeat itself over and over again (Edmonds, 1971, p, 68). While Skeet finds everything has changed, to Seemore everything goes well, so long as he can achieve what he plans to achieve. Then what a human mother instructs her boy about the natural history of beaver pond and her words betrays man's mentality of exploitation regarding animals and the environment.

N. M. Bodecker. The Mushroom Center Disaster. (1974).

The Mushroom Center Disaster is probably one of the first animal fantasies overtly tackling the concern of environmental preservation. The characters in the mushroom center are insects, including snails, beetles, ladybugs, ants, moths, fireflies, spiders, caterpillars, crickets, and earthworms. These insects lead a totally humanized life, for instance, their mushroom houses have "brightly polished windows and a green front 163 door with a brass knocker in the middle" (Bodecker, 1974, p. 8). And the ladybug treats the beetle visitor with the teapot, jam jars, honey pots and baskets of toast and crum pets.

In terms of anthropomorphism, one might be uncomfortable to read "even the ladybug sisters rolled up their sleeves and pitched in" (Bodecker, 1974, p. 33), and

"the snail has four skates tied on him and glides over the ice with much grace"

(Bodecker, 1974, p. 48). What do ladybugs wear to roll up their sleeves? How does the snail tie skates onto his feet and glide? Our fancy must be stretched quite far to imagine what Bodecker describes. Unfortunately the illustrator, Erik Blegvad, doesn't tell us through the pictures.

A few satirical techniques are used to render an effect of exaggeration and humor in order to portray the ecological concern. The insects, originally peaceful life is disturbed by the crash of a cylindrical object, which is reported as the unidentified flying rubbish (UFR), followed by all kinds of picnic leftovers, such as catsup, ice cream, cigarette butts, potato chips, candy wrappers, tinfoil, a puddle of brown mustard, splashes of red and ocher, a tangle of long hideous plastic tubes, and a pile of dark rubble smelling of barbecue sauce. The crashing of the UFR is thus described as an earthquake, an unprecedented disaster in the life of the residents in Mushroom

Center. And this mess means a disaster to the people in Mushroom Center. The humor is derived when the residents on the Common are "too sad to talk and too grownup to cry" (Bodecker, 1974, p. 25). The reconstruction of the town is narrated in a tongue-in-cheek manner; everything in need of a brush or sponge or rag is rubbed and scrubbed and polished, till the whole town sparkles like a soap bubble and smells deliciously of beeswax and ammonia water. 164

As for the effect of accuracy, statistical figures are cited as evidence. The dill pickle has been cut into two thousand seven hundred and forty-nine pieces and put up in two hundred and thirty-two jars, fourteen bowls, and a jug. And the townspeople held a meeting on what ought to be done. Here comes the science lesson on garbage disposable and recycling. Various ways of disposal, for example, to bury or to burn, are mentioned, and which materials can be recycled. The learned Beetle comes up with a Garbage Emergency Plan, which is obviously intended to give a science lesson to the readers. The overt intention of instructing about environmental preservation is clear to see. In the end, a paradise is reconstructed after the picnic dumping disaster.

Sandv Landsman. Castawavs on Chimp Island. (1986).

One other theme in righteous animal fantasy is a plea for humane treatment of animals in the laboratory. Again Adams should be referred to as one of the originators in this appeal for animals in scientific experiments, with his publication of The Plaoue

Poos (1977). At this point, it may be useful to review the development of the humanitarian movement in the West. Looking back as far as the pre-Christian times, there had been an age-long development in human thinking to give rise to the humane movement (or the animal defence movement) (Niven, 1967). The promoters of animal defence vary from humanitarian thinkers and hard-boiled activists to sentimental animal lovers. For ages there existed a blood-brotherhood, a mythic link between man and animal back to the primordial time. What cripples this movement, however, is the theory of animal automation upheld by Descartes-animals, having no understanding and feeling, are machines, but men are thinking beings (Niven, 1967). From today's point of view, these ideas demonstrate ignorance in the field of animal psychology. 165

The notion of animal as automaton caught on and spread like wildfire. After the

Renaissance, due to Descartes, both England and France had virtually become a hell for animals (Niven, 1967). Remember the brutal, barbarian conduct depicted in the fictional biographies of the eighteenth century English didactic moralist school, such as bull-fighting or cock-throwing. All these "sports" seemed to satisfy the

Englishmen's (especially boys') insatiable appetite for atrocious cruelty. With the efforts of the didacticists and the gradual enlightenment of the mind, England emerged as a stronghold for human legislation, and a leader in the animal defence movement.

In 1895 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin broke new ground for the humane movement: For good, it offered scientific proofs of the universal kinship between man and animal, which was only vaguely sensed by the moralists and thinkers in the past.

For worse, numerous animals were favored in the scientific laboratory for tests and experiments in the place of humans. International Association for the Total

Suppression of Vivisection was formulated in 1876 (Niven, 1967). The Animal

Defence Society was founded in 1906 in England for the cause of humanity to animals. Ever since, the society has been active in campaigns against the maltreatment of animals in virtually every aspect, including farming cruelties, fur trade, performing animals, vivisection, racing, and animals in war (Niven, 1967). The awakening of human compassion for fellow animals spread to other parts of the world, and has been integrated into the modern mentality. Righteous animal fantasy is clearly part of this modern mentality.

Castawavs on Chimp Island, a story about a group of chimps and their adventures with scientists, is a particular product of this line of thinking. Four chimps (Danny,

Roger, Nibbles, and Tarzan) participate in an experiment to learn American sign 166 language, in a sense this is an animal version of Robinson Crusoe, for the chimps are released to a jungle island to return to nature. This tale of chimps from the lab going back to nature is clearly in the lineage of Adams's The Plaoue Poos and Kotzwinkle's

Doctor Rat. Like Snitter and Ruff in Adams' The Plaoue Poos, the chimps find themselves unable to adjust. They only differ in that the chimps are released by the human scientists, rather than escaping from the lab. Roger the chimp also echoes

Doctor Rat, in that he works out schemes to get off the island at the expense of his fellows, and is manipulative enough to act as a middleman between his fellow chimps and the human scientists.

As a satire on human supremacy over the brutes, this tale is full of ironies. In fact, the whole piece satirizes the difference between man and animal. The biggest irony is that these four chimps who originally come from nature are later so adjusted to human life that they lose track of the old life. What the scientists think of as back to nature means nothing but exile to the chimps. The scientists "naturalize" the island, hoping that the chimps will find it home, but the chimps wish to be back in human civilization. The ending of the tale is symbolic. Little drawings of humans, houses, cars and bicycles on the cave wall are made by Nibble so that their children can learn about human civilization. One of the drawings is Danny's favorite; a man, a woman, a little girl, a chimp, and a cat, all stand together and look at stars. Are they looking for an Eden for both human and animals?

Another irony is in the tug of wits between humans and animals. Danny is bothered by the language games and drills, and figures out a way to play dumb. He almost succeeds in fooling the scientists, only to be forestalled. The reader is led inevitably to ponder on the line dividing human and animal. One might say it is 167 language. The chimps here are intelligent enough not merely to learn sign language and computer language, but also to create and generate new structure. Danny wishes that with his sign language and Tarzan's computer language, they could develop a community of communication, both respecting each other without calling bad names.

This probably indicates a new step forward in primate communication, or a breakthrough in inter-species understanding.

In one passage from Roger we hear an animal daringly ask for rights. Addressing the issues to the other chimps, he asks.

What do we really want? Will we be content to resume our roles as lab animals for their experiments, to be probed and studied at their convenience and then discarded like so many maze-running rats? Is that what we want? (Landsman, 1986, p. 45)

No, if we come back, it must be on our own terms, as equals! We'll show them who we are. Then, when they want us back, they must let us have what we want! (Landsman, 1986, p. 46-7).

The whole brute world must be exalted to have Roger as their spokesman in asking for decent treatment from humans on equal terms. But Roger is not irrational enough to demand more than the brute deserves, he also asks animals to behave themselves; "If we want humans to treat us with the respect and dignity we deserve, then we have to show the same to humans" (Landsman, 1986, p. 192). Additionally, Roger also preaches for inter-species communication. In order to show respect and dignity to each other between humans and animals, a communication across the boundary is what is really needed. This is a lesson both for the humans and animals as well.

The chimp Roger is another ironic character. He is exploitative in taking advantage of Tarzan's ignorance of sign language to make a fool of him. He is also selfish and hypocritical in talking about being civilized and helping each other. He acts to his own 168 best interest, not ashamed of anything he does. In order to fulfill his dream of building a language lab, he first makes himself a media hero. He is fairly verbal, logical, manipulative, and determined in his plan to go back. He is also a genius for language, for human as well as animal language. He is reflective, always sharp-eyed on everything, and sometimes self-mocking. In every aspect, he is well-drawn and well- developed as a character.

In addition to Roger, Danny is characterized with human sentiments. It is true his animality is retained: for instance, he instinctively bares his teeth and jumps up and down to frighten Dr. Simeon and Brian away. But, he feels insulted at being looked at as a trained dog or a guinea pig, and also feels betrayed at being exiled to the island without previous notice. He even has stage fright before the show. Certainly these are human sentiments. It would seem that Roger and Danny are almost too humanized; they are all human, or too human. Danny goes into a rage when he overhears after the ambush that Roger suggested shooting him: "That animal was trying to kill me!" (Landsman, 1986, p. 166) One wonders if he forgets he is an animal too, if or he thinks himself something else.

Finally, it is instructive to look at Danny's dream, which is a version of the animal vengeance theme. Danny's favorite show is Jungle Man, because he is capable;

He could climb trees, jump off a cliff, swing from vines-nothing could stop him, no bad guy was too mean for him, nothing was too big for him to handle. And even if he got flattened like a pancake, a minute later he was fine again. He was the strongest, smartest, toughest guy there was. I wanted to be just like him (Landsman, 1986, p. 111).

The theme of vengeance is evident. The animals wish to be free from the encroaching oppression of humans, to be equal to humans, or perhaps even to prevail. 169

Sidelights on Righteous Animal Fantasy

Righteous animal fantasy can be further sub-categorized into several groups in terms of thematic concerns. The first group includes the exodus of animals from human encroachment for a new paradise. Richard Adams's Watershio Down (1972) is the most celebrated. Others include Barbara Dana's Zucchini (1984), Colin Dann's

The Animals of Farthing Wood (1980). Neil Hancock's Dragon Winter (19781. Robin

Hawdon's A Rustle in the Grass (1984), Guido Rocca's Gaetano the Pheasant: A

Hunting Fable (1961), and so on.

Those animal fantasies appealing for the humane treatment of animals in research labs belong to the second group, including Richard Adams's The Plaoue Dogs (1977).

John Donovan's Familv: A Novel (1976). Sandy Landsman's Castawavs on Chimo

Island (1986), and Paul Zindel's Let Me Hear You Whisper (1974).

Animal fantasies narrating life tests of the character of the animal protagonists, usually courage or wisdom, include Alan Arkin's The Lemming Condition (1976),

Nicholas Barrett's Pledger (1985), W. J. Corbett's The Song of Pentecost (1982) and

Pentecost and the Chosen One (1985).

Animal fantasy used as satire on science and technology, or human society in general, includes Jane Leslie Conly's Rasco and the Rats of NIMH (1986) and R-T.

Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH (1990), Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child.

Penelope Lively's The Vovaoe of QV66 (1978), and Robert O'Brien's Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH (1971).

Ecological concerns also make their way into animal fantasy, for instance, Walter

Edmonds's Beaver Valiev (1971 ). and N. M. Bodecker's The Mushroom Center Disaster

(1979). 170

Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle series, Erich Kastner's The Animals' Conference (1955). and Dodie Smith's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) are all examples of the animal vengeance theme with an inversion of humans and animals.

Conclusion

The romantic and righteous animal fantasies of the twentieth century are sometimes not easy to separate. The typical setting for romantic animal fantasy-the pastoral—oftentimes also makes its way into the righteous camp, as we have seen in books such as Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child and Richard Adams's

Watershio Down. Frank Musgrove (1974) explains well how the attitude toward nature in romanticism can be associated with recurrent concerns in righteous animal fantasy:

naturalism [a worship for nature] leads to a concern for environment, a conservationist attitude to the countryside, opposition to unrestricted urban growth, and frequently a distaste for urban life (p. 87).

In short, an attack on technology and science, and an ecological concern arise. And these concerns bounce back and forth with various emphasis in pieces of righteous animal fantasy. For instance, Watershio Down is studded with frequent comments from the mouths of rabbits on the vulnerability of the animals to man's insensitive destruction in nature.

Thus, although sometimes sharing the pastoral setting with romantic counterparts, righteous animal fantasies deviate from the pastoral tradition in moving toward satire, in which humans usually appear as villains. Even though humans may not show up in the plot, they are always indicated somewhere in the background. Animals are 171 victimized, but animals are morally superior to humans or even smarter than humans in certain aspects. "Up with animals and down with humans" is the slogan. Various aspects of human civilization are satirized, including the social system, political bodies, science and technology. The animal justice court initiated in The Rational Brutes or

Talking Animals is widely constructed in the righteous animal fantasy of this century, with humans as the defendants and animals as the plaintiffs. The felonies that humans commit are to deprive the animals of the natural environment that is beneficial to their existence, and to consider animals as tools rather than as beings who should also be respected and paid attention to.

Moreover, it is instructive to compare romantic and righteous animal fantasy in terms of the role of natural history. If fantasy (the fantastic, imaginative) and realism

(the natural history, the realistic) are the ingredients of a formula for animal fantasy, then the proportions of these two elements are evidently different in the romantic and righteous animal fantasy. On the romantic side, the fantastic, imaginative elements preside over the realistic, for all the human apparel, diets, housing, and so on. On the righteous side, the animals involved possess more realistic than fantastic elements.

As seen from the above sampler of righteous animal fantasies, the authors usually have to do some homework on the natural history of the animals involved to learn, for instance, their physical capability, life habits, or habitats, though the animals may perform fantastic tasks in fantastic situations.

Looking from another angle, books which merely offer hard facts won't stretch the imagination of a child. Fantasy goes beyond reciting facts to offer something extra.

In the case of animal fantasy, the something extra is the usage of anthropomorphism.

For the romantic animal fantasy the source of anthropomorphism derives from outer 172 accessories, that is, having the animals don human apparel from head to toe, or installing the animals in human living quarters and facilities transferred into animal equivalents. On the other hand, in the righteous animal fantasy human sentiment is probably the primary reservoir for anthropomorphism. In some cases, the animals can demonstrate the base, mean portions of human nature; for instance, Manny Rat in The

Mouse and His Child represents the possessiveness in human nature, and Roger in

Castawavs on Chimo Island behaves manipulatively in a human manner. In other cases, animals also take on the noble, dignified parts of human nature. The courage and leadership of Hazel in Watershio Down, and the determination and morality of the

Rats of NIMH in Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH, surely would be impressive even if the characters were humans. Therefore, for good or ill, animals teach the lessons we must learn. Either as mirror of scorn toward man, or beacon of glory to admire, it is this something extra that appeals to the child reader and the adult as well. On the part of the reader, there is something extra too-the reader has to look beyond the facts of animals and willingly suspend disbelief. In so doing he not only allows his fancy to fly, but also looks into the real nature of human and animals.

Both romantic and righteous animal fantasy have their roots back in the late

Victorian and Edwardian periods-the Golden Age of children's literature, and, both can be traced further back to the pre history of children's literature. The righteous animal fantasy probably has Aesop's Fables as fore father for all its strongly didactic, satirical vein. Animals generally function as mere mouthpieces for something other than themselves, mostly a moral code. Nonetheless, those "righteous" animals in this century are more than mouthpieces. Their animal nature shall not be ignored or sacrificed; their anatomical and biological truths are also recognized as an integral part 173 of presentation. In this way, they are granted the respect which they deserve. On some occasions, the animals are even bolder to speak for themselves, asking such rights of existence and humane treatment as their human counterparts enjoy. The

"romantic" animals, on the other hand, are the descendants of the animals in fairy tales and folk tales. They are forever weekenders, usually leading a carefree life in the forest, the riverbank, or the barnyard. Looking at these "cute little people" we have nostalgia for Eden-the old days when the beasts could speak, and man and beasts were equals or even partners.

When speaking of composing The Vovaoe of QV66. Penelope Lively confesses: "I decided to write an anthropomorphic children's book because writing about animals is one of the most satisfactory ways I know of writing satirically or otherwise about people" (quoted from book jacket. Lively, 1978). Her words probably typify the intention of most writers of righteous animal fantasy. Animals serve as a reflecting or deflecting image of man in his folly. Indeed it is instructive to consider both romantic and righteous animal fantasy in light of the literary tradition, the former with the pastoral and the latter with satire. This illustrates that animal fantasy in the twentieth century indeed has far to look back, and a lot to offer us. CHAPTER VII

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

Introduction

This study takes as its starting point two concerns: The didacticism in children's literature and the anthropomorphism in animal fantasy. These two concerns join hands to furnish the following questions: Why have animal fantasies endured and even flourished for more than two thousand years since Aesop on, and how have they been employed in the service of didacticism in children's literature? In a broad sense, the answers to these questions are significant for understanding what children's literature was and is, and its function to society in general. More precisely, through examining animal fantasy, the interrelationships among the underlying values, objectives, and literary merits of children's literature are likely to reveal themselves.

To investigate these issues from a fair perspective, a historical overview of animal fantasy on selected samples since Aesop through the 1980s has been undertaken, with special attention to thematic concerns and the characterization of animals. What comes out of such a historical survey over a long period of time are the following two observations. One is, the didactic tradition in children's literature persists to this present day within animal fantasy. The other is, looking back through the history of animal fantasy, there seems to exist a gradual shift from the emphasis on human nature over animal nature to the respect for animal nature. It is hoped that through

174 175 such a narration of historical evolution, animal fantasy is established as a worthy, legitimate sub-genre within children's literature from the ancient to the modern. In this chapter, a succinct history of animal fantasy from Aesop through the twentieth century precedes the discussions on didacticism in children's literature and animal nature in animal fantasy.

A Succinct History of Animal Fantasy

The historical development of animal fantasy through the twentieth century can be arranged under two umbrellas: the classical and the modern. The former covers from

Aesop's Fables (around the sixth century B. C.) to the Middle Ages (approximately the sixth to sixteenth centuries) through the eighteenth century. The latter starts from the early twentieth century and continues through 1986 in this study. Between these two, Victorian and Edwardian periods serve as a pivotal transition from the classical to the modern. This evolution can be shown in Figure 1.

In Aesop's time, animals in beast fables were employed as a vehicle for demonstrating appropriate conduct and ideal human nature. Beast fables were transformed into moral tales in the British Didactic School (MacDonald, 1986). This transformation has been easy and natural, in that both the fable and fictional biography in essence are moral tales studded with animal characters, with the difference that the latter is of greater length. Moreover, the animals in the fable and fictional biography are all humans with animal heads or the personification of human values. The only difference is that the moral tagged to the fable is on human nature in general, while the animal protagonists in the late eighteenth-century fictional biography predominantly preach the message of appropriate treatment of animals. (6th C. BC) (6th C.-16th C.) (18th C. (19th C.) (20th C.)

Aesop Middle The British Victorian & Romantic Ages Didactic School Edwardian Periods Righteous

Classical > < Transitional > < Modern

Figure 1 Historical Evolution of Animal Fantasy

■>1 O) 177

The insistent moral bent in the beast fable tradition continued to find its way into

Black Beauty, which appeals for the decent, humane treatment of the working horse in Victorian England. The trend of moral instruction in animal fantasy further grew into a series of thundering outcries for animal rights and ecological concerns in the twentieth century. Animals have thus been employed to teach moral values for a long while, but their faces have undergone a dramatic change in this century. They now are no longer humans disguised as animals; rather, they are animals to the fullest degree that their true nature allows. One good example come from the rabbits in

Richard Adams's Watershio Down: Their lapine nature is authentically retained without distortion or caricature. Once being lent tongues, animals in the righteous camps always have something to say, either demanding animal rights, asking for a secure shelter as home, or advocating environmental preservation.

If the righteous group of animal fantasy can be neatly related to the traditions of beast fable and satire in their thematic concern and characterization. The romantic, may be better understood in light of the pastoral tradition, traced far back to the Greek pastoral. Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is the delegate of such a romantic tendency in animal fantasy. Potter's tales for the nursery feature a group of innocent animals, moving around in the barnyard. This tradition of the romantic, with carefree, naive animals, either humanized or non-humanized, in a secluded, pastoral world, also finds its way into the twentieth century. Russell Erickson's Warton and Morton series and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series are Grahame's direct descendants. Dick King-

Smith is a celebrated writer in Potter's tradition.

Evidently, if one turns to righteous animal fantasy for its instructive, didactic messages (either on animal rights or environmental conservation), then romantic animal 178 fantasy perhaps calls more attention to its entertaining, amusing aspects. Erickson's

Warton and Morton the toad brothers series and Lobel's Frog and Toad series are certainly gripping, entertaining tales with snug, carefree characters forever vacationing and enjoying themselves. However, approaching the righteous animal tales for their moral messages does not rule out their entertainment aspect. In fact, for all their didacticism, several well-written righteous fantasies are equally enlightening and entertaining. Likewise the romantic animal fantasies certainly have their share of instruction, for instance, the value of friendship and being helpful. Largely, animal fantasies in the twentieth century continue to enroll themselves in either the righteous or the romantic camp in one way or the other.

Entertainment Versus Didacticism: A Thornv Issue in Children's Literature

While appraising the moral tales from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one inevitably wonders: Is this children's literature? And ultimately what is children's literature? What exact service can children's literature offer to society in general and children in particular? An investigation of definitions by various critics will shed light on the nature and essence of children's literature. Francelia Bulter (1983) defines children's literature in the narrowest sense to be "a literature created exclusively for children" (p. 21 ). Harvey Darton (1982) inscribes a more distinct parameter: children's literature is

. . . printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet . . . (excluding] all schoolbooks, all purely moral or didactic treatises, all reflective or adult-minded descriptions of child-life, and almost all alphabets, primers, and spelling- books (p. 1, italics in original). 179

Bennett Brockman (1982), furthermore, adds educational purpose to Darton's definition by inscribing that children's literature is "imaginative literature marketed to children and designed for their amusement as well as for their edification" (p. 1 ).

John Rowe Townsend (1983) is pragmatic in categorizing children's literature as

"those books which by a consensus of adults and children are assigned to the children's shelves" (p. 19). But he is certainly sharp-eyed to recognize the fallacy of his statement, for children's literature is not so much a consensus of adults and children as a consensus among the adults themselves, especially the publisher. And he comes to the conclusion that "the only workable definition of a children's book was

'a book that appeared on the children's list of a publisher'. .. for better or worse, the publisher decides" (pp. 19-20). It is in this sense that children's literature is adult fare; at least it is written as much for the adult as it is for the child (Goldstone, 1984).

Regardless of the definition by which children's literature is intended for the child, it is the adult who produces, publishes, purchases, and reviews it, before the book ever gets into the hands of any child. Throughout the whole process it is the adult's voices

(writer, editor, publisher, librarian, teacher, or parent) that are heard-the child reader seldom, if ever, comes into the scene. The adult element inherent in children's literature is unarguably self-evident (Goldstone, 1984; Hunt, 1991).

Most certainly, few critics or purchasers would readily accept a book contradictory to prevailing social values and the ideal image of the child. John Newbery in 1744 was already shrewd enough to recognize that unless his books carried certain moral messages, parents wouldn't buy them. Also as Gillian Avery (1965, 1988) testifies, children's literature in any given time, either consciously or unconsciously, reveals the adults' attitude towards the child, and their demands made upon him-in short, what 180 the child is envisioned to be. This is why she strongly suggests the role of children's fiction as a socializing agent imposed by the adult onto the child. Similarly Lynn Merle

Rosenthal (1974) contends that children's literature is a teaching tool, reflecting the prevalent notion of childhood and transmitting the cultural values and societal norms expected on the young. Thus, probably the more inclusive and adequate definition of children's literature is, as Goldstone (1984) depicts, "literature enjoyed by the young, which aids in the transmission of society's expectations, ideals, and goals" (p. 146).

When Harvey Darton (1982) says, there is only one "text" in the history of children's literature, "that children's books were always the scene of a battle between instruction and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and spontaneous happiness" (p. vii), he is implying that amusement, freedom, and spontaneous happiness are values superior to instruction, restraint, and hesitant morality. But the propensity for instruction has always been central to children's literature. And it seems inevitable that children's literature, by its very nature as a socializing agent, is likely to be didactic. In a loose sense, all stories are didactic in that all stories carry messages. Those who share the ideal of a literature without any element of didacticism in it with Penelope Lively (1978):

We do actually believe now that children's books need to be fun and nothing else. . . but we should not start thinking of them again as vehicle for instructing children about anything except the simple fact that to extract the maximum possible enjoyment out of life, books are going to be indispensable (p. 18). will be disappointed to realize it is merely a utopia.

Therefore, "the problem lies not with the stories or even with the messages," as

Adian Chambers (1983) argues, "but with our use of the worddidactic. We have 181 corne to abuse it" (p. 57). More explicitly, since didacticism is inevitable and almost expectable in children's literature, there seems to be no point to employ the term

"didactic" in a pejorative sense. This is why Chambers employs the word "didactic" in a positive sense and decides to rescue didacticism from the dustbin, and why this study essentially takes the same viewpoint as Chambers.

However, when the instructive, pedagogic purpose prevails over, or even subjugates, the artistic organism, then we have a piece of propaganda-didacticism in a negative sense. Dorothy Kilner's The Rational Brutes, or Talking Animals (1799) is such a case. This tale is a sort of court of criminal justice in which the prosecuted animals make their claims. Here the urge to advocate humane treatment of animals is so strong that it sacrifices artistic qualities. The beginning and ending are awkwardly designed. There is virtually no plot, no characterization, no climax-merely a series of charges by the animals against humans. This is not literature; it is propaganda. Another exemplar of propaganda is George Cruikshank's "Cinderella and the Glass Slipper" (1854), in which he rewrote the fairy tale Cinderella into a temperance tract. When a wedding banquet is planned for the Prince and Cinderella, a speech from the fairy godmother with a temperance sermon on teetotalism impedes the plot, and the King eventually is persuaded to renounce wine from then on. One can barely recognize the original face of this celebrated tale, and most of its beauty as a fairy tale is thus ravaged by this extraneous speech. No wonder Charles Dickens severely rebuked Cruikshank in his "Frauds on the Fairies" (1853). Of course, the line between instruction/didacticism and propaganda is sometimes fuzzy and murky, and the difference in the manners of presentation for didacticism and propaganda is oftentimes merely a matter of degree. Figure 2 indicates such a thorny issue. Didacticism in Children's Literature

Eniovment versus Instruction

Enjoyment Instruction Persuasion Propaganda Nonsense Dogmatism

Lewis Carroll Moral Tales The Rational Brutes Nazi Edward Lear Amazing Grace George Cruikshank Jon Scieszka Daddy's Roommate Heather Has Two Mommies

Figure 2 Didacticism in Children's Literature

00 N) 183

Most modern historians of children's literature tend to despise the past, particularly the didactic tales of the Puritan period and the eighteenth century. Cornelia Meigs

(1969) has accused "the unwholesomeness and morbidity of the books of the Puritan era, the stultifying quality of the utilitarian pedanticism of the didactic age" (p. 308).

Penelope Lively (1978) has been gloating over the death of didacticism: "It is only fairly recently that we managed to shake off the yoke of nineteenth-century didacticism in children's literature" (p. 18), and she seems to imply that we are better off now-we are not as "didactic" as the Puritans or the Anglican moralists.

However, the scene has not been changed much. The battle between enjoyment and instruction is still going on, as demonstrated in animal fantasy. What John

Townsend declared as early as 1967, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that didacticism is still very much alive" (p. 159) is still true today, for today's children's literature, far from shaking off the yoke of didacticism, is didactic anyway. We think we have got rid of didacticism in children's literature, but it has come back-disguised in modern dress, sometimes even unrecognized to us. For instance, the insistent urge to advocate animal rights and ecological conservation in a few righteous animal fantasies is not very far from the moral stance of the British Didactic School in the late eighteenth century. While others come and go, the moral tales never die, or they die hard-they existed and will continue to exist. The only things changed are probably the morals and the mode of presentation-from overtly presented to subtly suggested.

Animal Nature and The Art of Animal Fantasv

Fantasy is a genre of illusion-making, wherein the writer seems to cast a magic spell enticing the reader into willing suspension of disbelief, and also into the world of 184 fantasy--be it primary or secondary. Writers of animal fantasy face a special task: How to characterize the animals? How to render the animals true-to-life and fanciful at the same time? As Margaret Blount (1975) contends, how to cope with the barrier between fantasy on the one pole and naturalism/realism on the other is the challenge for animal fantasy writers. A meticulous balance of credibility on both poles is just hard to maintain, and sometimes it is up to the belief of writers to make his pick along the possible presentations of animals in fantasy. A spectrum of animal nature in animal fantasy is offered in Figure 3.

Richard Adams (in Wintle, 1974) furnishes an apt description of a formula to work a convincing illusion on the reader, depending on the degree of anthropomorphism.

Along the spectrum of anthropomorphism, the animal writer has to make a pick: How much is animal and how much is human. At the ultraviolet side beyond the spectrum stands something like Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter-a factual account of the life history of an otter from birth to death. It is a piece of natural history (or nonfiction according to our evaluation standard). Nest Thompson Seton's animal tales are somewhere around the middle of the spectrum: A straightforward portrayal of animals in danger, fear, and death. Seton's stories go beyond the matter-of-fact presentation of natural history of an animal, and give the reader the itching feeling that an animal is like a human being (Adams, in Blishen, 1975). At the other end of the spectrum is the infrared, the humanized animals. Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad in Kenneth

Grahame's The Wind in the Willows are barely animals for all their human attire, sentiments, and conduct. They are so vividly humanized that they are probably less humanized animals (animals with human heads) than animalized humans (humans disguised in animals' bodies). 185

K. G raham e B. Potter R. Kipling E. T. Seton H. Williamson A. Lobe! E. B. W hite R. Erickson R. Adam s

Infrared Ultraviolet

A dual challenge for writers of animal fantasy:

Fact Fiction

Animal Nature Human Nature

Natural History Fancy/Make-Believe

Anatomical Truth Imaginative Truth

Figure 3 The Spectrum of Animal Fantasy in Terms of Anthropomorphism 186

Any animal writer has to make his pick along the line. Dorothy Kilner in the late

eighteenth century is perhaps the first writer to pay a tribute to the true nature of

animal characters-in Nimble, the mouse narrator. Potter in her nursery tales also

stresses respect for animals as they are, rather than to ridicule or caricature them, or

distort their features-with human expressions (MacDonald, 1986a). This is why Peter

Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle remain pretty much themselves, in spite of their human

clothes. And they their fanciful clothes only render them all the more attractive, for

instance, Jemima Puddle Duck's poke bonnet, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle's print dress, Jeremy

Fisher's flowered coat, and certainly Peter's blue jacket with brass buttons.

The paragon for animal anthropomorphism in Adams's mind, however, is Kipling,

who attribute[s] to your animals motives and incentives and ideals that real animals wouldn't have. . .. On the other hand, their animal nature is always retained, for they never do anything of which real animals would be physically incapable (Wintle, 1974, p. 139; Adams, 1975, in Blishen, p. 172),

and the animals are always "allowed to keep their animalian dignity" (Adams, in

Wintle, 1974, p. 139). This is why Potter insists on respecting her animals in the way they are, and denounces Grahame's Toad for violating what a toad would be in the real life. This is also what E. B. White says; "Charlotte does what she does. Perhaps she

is magnifying herself by her devotion to another, but essentially she is just a trapper"

(White, in Guth, 1976, p. 614). This is also why Adams consults The Private Life of a Rabbit so that his rabbit heroes have no other motives than feeding, survival, and mating, and would not do anything the real rabbits would not do physically (Adams, in Wintle, 1974). In short, an animal writer should have the story dance to the animals, rather than have the animals dance to the story (White, in Guth, 1976). 187

Therefore, from careful observations in the historical evolution of animal fantasy,

comes the conclusion that humanization is successful, if something of the original

animal nature is kept (Messer, 1968). Looking back through the history of animal

fantasy, there seems to exist a gradual shift from the emphasis on human nature over

animal nature to the respect for animal nature. But this Copernican shift was not

achieved overnight; it took a while-from the ancient to the modern.

In Aesop's Fables, along with the bestiary flourishing in the Middle Ages, human

nature and animal nature seem to formulate into a neat and tidy correspondence--a

sense of decorum and typecasting. According to Robert Dodslely (1761), in order to

be elegant, animal characters in the fable should live up to a code of decorum both in

language and conduct. Thence, the lion speaks and walks regally, the owl is pompous

and erudite. The practice of typecasting has an enormous impact on both the reader

and writer of animal stories, as the reader expects to find the lion kingly, the owl

scholarly; and the writer either consciously or unconsciously falls into the same track.

It is in this sense that animals in the fable are meek actors playing out the respective

roles allotted to them in the human drama. Once settled, the typecasting is hard to

shake off. They are barely animals, with very little animal nature retained in their

characterization. In fact, they function essentially as spokesmen for the traits in

human nature. For instance, the ant stands for diligence, while the grasshopper

represents merriment-seeking. Still this reference to human nature is loose and crude-

in short, "a rude graffiti of human nature."

Animals in fictional biographies from the British Didactic School were primarily used

as devices subservient to moral instruction in benevolence toward animals and other virtues. The true nature of animals was portrayed only to the extent that it could point 188 at a human moral. This is perhaps why the robin family are less bird-like characters than humanized. This use of moralizing animals is true of most Georgian fictional biographies. One notable exception is Dorothy Kilner's Nimble the mouse. He is luckily allowed to retain most of his rodent nature, without being subjected to awkwardly applied human moral standards.

Starting from the nineteenth century, however, animal characters began to assume new faces. As urbanization and industrialization proceeded, the rural landscape and animal habitats were gradually idealized. Along with the tendency to sentimentalize and romanticize rural life and wild animals, came a nostalgia for childhood (McDonald,

1986). This romantic strand asserts itself in Potter's barnyard and Grahame's riverbank, and continues to find its way into a number of animal fantasies in this century, for instance, in the works of Arnold Lobel, E. B. White, Dick King-Smith, and others. The Victorian and Edwardian periods also witnessed the continuation of moral tales from Aesop's Fables through the eighteenth-century animal fictional biography and culminating in Anna Sewell's Black Beautv. A strong vein of outrage and the erection of a court of criminal justice for the dumb creatures contributed much to the

"righteous" group of later animal fantasy.

Overall, the long span of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century found animal fantasy undergoing a gradual loosening from the relentless, indefatigable, didactic moral tales of animals to the light touch and sheer joy in Victorian and

Edwardian animal fantasy. Meanwhile the long moral tradition was preserved for later generations of animal writers, it is in this sense that the Victorian and Edwardian Ages are the transitional pivots in children's literature in general and animal fantasy in particular. 189

Conclusion

As Roger Saie (1978) says, while "other kinds of literature had abandoned and forgotten [the usage of animals] before the nineteenth century," animals continue to be a "major source of power of the best children's literature" (p. 77), and constantly find their way into the classics in children's literature. Undisputably the garden of children's literature would be forlorn without the presence of the animals.

From the ancient times, animals in story have hardly been themselves. They were the actors in the human drama of Aesop's fable. They were the bait to lure the child into reading. They were the sugar to coat the pill of moral lessons, which sometimes are dull and hard to swallow. The large numbers of animals in the romantic animal fantasy are certainly humanized, enjoying their life on human terms. The true identity as animals probably first showed up in Nimble of The Life and Perambulation of a

Mouse. Their true nature glares in Black Beautv. and eventually triumphs in Charlotte's

Web. Watershio Down, and a few others.

Aesop's animals are moral teachers. Mrs. Trimmer's Robins, and Kilner's mouse brothers are emblems of virtues to follow. Sewell's Black Beauty pleads for a humane treatment of his fellow horses. Grahame's River Bankers, along with Lobel's Frog and

Toad, represent a nostalgic longing for a gilded world of innocence and naivete. A surge of righteous animal fantasy burst out around the mid-century, with the infuriated animal characters asking for animal rights, and charging humans for the vices they have done to both the animals and the environment. In recent years, animals seem to find their way into a deluge of informational books on environmental conservation and protection for endangered species. Animals have spoken to us for thousands of years, and they will continue to speak to us. 190

Recommendation

Due to the limitations of this study, the following recommendations are provided for later researchers.

1) How Aesop's fables evolved through the ages as an illustrated text, with

special attention to modern picture books.

2) Twentieth-century animal fantasy deserves a full-scale survey in Terms of

thematic concerns and techniques in anthropomorphism.

3) Modern picture books of animals should be dealt with great care in terms of

anthropomorphism.

4) Didacticism might be approached from the narrator's tone, point of view,

stance, and its effect on the reader.

5) A wide sampling of children's literature to decide on the issue of didacticism.

6) How the romantic and the righteous are presented in other genres of children's

literature, for instance, romance novel or historical fiction. APPENDIX

BOOKS SURVEYED BUT NOT INCLUDED:

Adrews, A. (1980). The pig Plantaaent. drawings by Michael Foreman. New York: Viking.

Ahlberg, A. (1986). Woof, illus. by Fritz Wegner. New York: Puffin.

Ahlberg, J., & Ahlberg, A. (1992). The bear nobody wanted. New York: Viking.

Alexander, L. (1973). The cat who wished to be a man. New York: Dutton.

Allan, T. (1973). Willie the souowse. illus. by Quentin Blake. Mamaroneck, NY: Hastings House, 1992.

Amado, G. (1982). The swallow and the tom cat: A love storv. trans. B. Shelby Mereello. New York: Delacorte.

Annett, C. (1975). How the witch cot Alf. illus. by Steven Kellog. New York: Franklin Watts.

Arkin, A. (1976). The lemming condition. New York: Harper & Row.

Asch, F. (1984). Pearl's promise. New York: Delacorte.

Asch, F. (1987). Pearl's pirates. New York: Delacorte.

Auch, M. J. (1993). Bird does can't fiv. New York: Holiday.

Baker, B. (1977). Kilrov and the oull. pictures by John Shoenherr. New York: Harper & Row.

BanI, L. R. (1993). The maoic hare. New York: Morrow.

Bond, M. (1959). More about Paddington, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1960). Paddington helps out, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

191 192

Bond, M. (1961). Paddington abroad, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1962). Paddington at large, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1964). Paddington marches on. illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1966). Here comes Thursday, illus. by Daphne Rowles. New York: Lothrop.

Bond, M. (1966). Paddington at work, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1968). Paddington goes to town, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1968). Thursday rides again, illus. by Beryl Sanders. New York: Lothrop.

Bond, M. (1969). Thursday Ahov! illus. by Leslie Wood. New York: Lothrop.

Bond, M. (1970). Paddington takes the air, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1971). Thursday in Paris, illus. by Leslie Wood. London: Harrap.

Bond, M. (1972). Paddington the bear, illus. by Fred Banbery. New York: Random House.

Bond, M. (1972). Paddington's garden, illus. by Fred Banbery. New York: Random House.

Bond, M. (1973). Paddington at the circus, illus. by Fred Banbery. New York: Random House.

Bond, M. (1973). Paddington goes shopping, illus. by Fred Banbery. as Paddington's lucky day. New York: Random House.

Bond, M. (1974). Paddington on too, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1974). Paddington's blue Peter story book, illus. by lyor Wood, as Paddington takes to TV. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1975). Paddington at the seaside, illus. by Fred Banbery. New York: Random House. 193

Bond, M. (1975). Paddington at the tower, illus. by Fred Banbery. New York: Random House.

Bond, M. (1976). Paddington at the station, illus. by Barry Wilkinson. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1976). Paddington takes a bath, illus. by Barry Wilkinson. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1976). Paddington goes to the sales, illus. by Barry Wilkinson. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1976). Paddington's new room, illus. by Barry Wilkinson. London: Collins

Bond, M. (1977). Paddington does it himself. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1977). Paddington hits out. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1977). Paddington in the kitchen. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1977). Paddington's birthday oartv. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1978). Paddington's picture book, illus. by Fred Banbery. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1979). Paddington takes the test, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: M oughton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1980). Paddington in touch. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1980). Paddington and Aunt Lucv. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1980). Paddington weighs in. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1980). Paddington at home. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1980). Paddington goes out. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1981). Paddington on screen: A second blue Peter storybook, illus. by Barry Macey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1983). Paddington's storybook, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1983). Paddington on the river. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1984). Paddington and the Knicherbocker rainbow, illus. by David McKee. New York: Putnam. 194

Bond, M. (1984). Paddington at the zoo, illus. by David McKee. New York: Putnam.

Bond, M. (1985). Paddington at the fair, illus. by David McKee. New York: Putnam.

Bond, M. (1985). Paddington's painting exhibition, as Paddington's art exhibition. New York: Putnam.

Pond, M. (1986). Paddington at the palace. New York: Putnam.

Pond, M. (1986). Paddington minds the house, as Paddington cleans u p. New York: Putnam .

Bond, M. (1986). Paddington posts a letter, illus. by Toni Goffe. as Paddington mails a letter. New York: Macmillan.

Bond, M. (1986). Paddington's clock book, illus. by Toni Goffe. New York: Macmillan.

Bond, M. (1986). Paddington at the airport, illus. by Toni Goffe. New York: Macmillan.

Bond, M. (1986). On four wheels: Paddington's London, illus. by Toni Goffe. as Paddington's wheel book. New York: Macmillan.

Bond, M. (1987). Paddington and the Marmalade maze, illus. by David McKee. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1987). Paddington's busv dav. illus. by David McKee. London: Collins.

Bond, M. (1988). Paddington's Magical Christmas, illus. by David McKee. London: Collins.

Breathed, B. (1992). The last basselooe: One ferocious storv. Boston: Little Brown.

Brooks, W. (1930). More to and again. New York: Knopf, later named as Freddy goes to the North Pole (1951). illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1932). Freddy the detective, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1937). Freddv and the clockwork twin, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1939). Wiggins for president, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf, later named as Freddv the politician (1948).

Brooks, W. (1940). Freddy's Cousin Weedlv. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf. 195

Brooks, W. (1941). Freddv and the ionormus. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1942). Freddv and the perilous adventures, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1943). Freddv and the Bean home news, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1944). Freddv and Mr. Camphor, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1945). Freddv and the Pooiniav. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1946). Freddv the pied oioer. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1947). Freddv the magician, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1948). Freddv goes camping, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1949). Freddv olavs football, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1950). Freddv the cowbov. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1951). Freddv rides again, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1951). The storv of Fredinald. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1951). Freddv and Mr. Camphor, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1951). Freddv rides aoain. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1952). Freddv and the Bean home news, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1952). Freddv the pilot, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1953). Freddv and the soace ship, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1954). Freddv and the men from Mars, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1954). Freddv and the perilous adventures, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf. 196

Brooks, W. (1955). Freddv and the baseball team from Mars, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1955). Freddv and the ionormous. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1955). Freddv's cousin Weedlv. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1956). Freddv and Simon the dictator, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1957). Freddv and the flvino saucer plans, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1958). Freddv and the draoon. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Buchwald, E. (1973). Gildaen: The heroic adventures of a most unusual rabbit, illus. by Barbara Flynn. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Burgess, T. (1910). Old mother west wind, illus. by George Kerr. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1911). Mother West Wind's Children, illus. by George Kerr. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess. T. (1912). Mother West Wind's Animal Friends, illus. by George Kerr. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1913). Mother West Wind's Neighbors, illus. by George Kerr. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1915). Mother West Wind "Whv" Stories, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1916). Mother West Wind "How" Stories, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1917). Mother West Wind "When" Stories, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1918). Mother West Wind "Where" Stories, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1913). The adventure of Reddv Fox, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1913). The adventures of Johnnv Chuck, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown. 197

Burgess, T. (1914). The adventures of Peter Cottonball. illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1914). The adventures of Une' Biliv Possum, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1914). The adventures of Mr. Mocker, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1914). The adventures of Jerry Muskrat, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1915). The adventures of Dannv Meadow Mouse, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1915). The adventures of Grandfather Froo. illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1915). The adventures of Chatterer. The Red Squirrel, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1915). The adventures of Sammv Jav. illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1916). The adventures of Buster Bear, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1916). The adventures of Old Mr. Toad, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1916). The adventures of Prickly Porkv. illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1916). The adventures of Old Man Co vote, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1917). The adventures of Paddv the Beaver, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1917). The adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1918). The adventures of Bobbv Coon, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1918). The adventures of Jimmy Skunk, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown. 198

Burgess, T. (1919). The adventures of Bob White, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1919). The adventures of Ol'Mistah Buzzard, illus. by Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burman, Ben Lucien. (1967). Three from Catfish Bend, high water for Catfish Bend, the owl hoots twice at Catfish Bend, illus. by Alice Caddy. New York: Taplinger Pub.

Burman, B. L. (1967). Blow a wild buole for Catfish Bend, illus. by Alice Caddy. New York: Taplinger Pub.

Burman, B. L. (1977). High treason at Catfish Bend, illus. by Alice Caddy. New York: Puffin.

Burman, B. L. (1977). Seven stars for Catfish Bend, illus. by Alice Caddy. New York: Puffin.

Burman, B. L. (1984). Thunderbolt at Catfish Bend, illus. by Alice Caddy. New York: Wieser & Wieser.

Carris, J. (1992). Howling for home, illus. by Judith Mitchell. Boston: Little Brown.

Cleary, B. (1964). Ribsv. illus. by Louis Darling. New York: William Morrow.

Cleary, B. (1973). Socks, illus. by Beatrice Darwin. New York: William Morrow.

Clifford, E. (1992). Flatfoot fox and the case of the nosv otter, illus. by Brian Lies. New York: Houghton.

Clifford, E. (1993). Flatfoot fox and the case of missing whoooo. illus. by Brian Lies. New York: Houghton.

Cline, L. (1976). The miracle season. Berkely Pub.

Cook, G. (1985). Doomstalker. Warner/Popular Library.

Cummings, P. (1993). Chadwick Forever, illus. by A. R. Cohen. Tidewater.

Dalgliesh, A. (1990). The bears on Hemlock Mountain, illus. by Helen Sewell. New York: Scribner.

Elish, D. (1990). Jason and the baseball bear, illus. by John Stadler. Orchard/Jackson.

Elish, D. (1992). The great souirrel uprising, illus. by Denys Cazet. Orchard/Jackson. 199

Farley, W. (1941). The black stallion, illus. by Keith Ward. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1945). The black stallion returns, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1947). Son of the black stallion, illus. by Milton Menasco. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1948). The island stallion, illus. by Keith Ward. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1949). The black stallion and satan. illus. by Milton Menasco. New York: Random Hose.

Farley, W. (1950). The blood bav colt, illus. by Milton Menasco. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1951). The island stallion's fury, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1952). The black stallion's fillv. illus. by Milton Menasco. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1953). The black stallion revolts, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1954). The black stallion's sulky colt, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1955). The island stallion races, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1956). The black stallion's courage. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1957). The black stallion mvsterv. illus. by Mai Singer. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1960). The black stallion and flame, illus. by Harold Eldridge. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1961). Little black, a oonv. illus. by James Schucker. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1963). Little black goes to the circus, illus. by James Schucker. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1964). The black stallion challenged! New York: Random House. 200

Farley, W. (1965). The horse that swam awav. illus. by Leo Summers. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1966). The great dane. thor. illus. by Joseph Cellini. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1968). The little black oonv races, illus. by James Schucker. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1969). The black stallion's ohost. illus. by Angie Draper. New York: Random House.

Farley, W. (1971). The black stallion and the girl, illus. by Angie Draper. New York: Random House.

Goodwin, H. L. (1969). Maoic number. Bradbury.

Greenway, J. (1993). A real little bunnv: A sequel to The velveteen rabbit. Ariel.

Horejs, V. (1989). Pic and bear, illus. by Friso Henstra. Four Winds.

Hanna, J. (1989). The duck and the owl, illus. by Kathi Bhend. New York: Dutton.

Howe, J. (1989). Scared siliv: A halloween treat, illus. by Leslie Morrill. Morrow.

Howe, J. (1992), Return to howlidav inn, illus. by Alan Danile. New York: A theneum .

Hurwitz, J. (1993). Make room for Elisa, illus. by Lillian Hoban. Morrow.

Jackson, N. (1991). The cat who smelled like cabbage, illus. by Anne Gavitt. M ultnom ah.

Jackson, N. (1991). The doo who loved to race, illus. by Anne Gavitt. Multnomah.

Jackson, N. (1991). The hamster who got himself stuck, illus. by Anne Gavitt. M ultnomah.

Jackson, N. (1991). The carrot who talked too much, illus. by Anne Gavitt. M ultnom ah.

Jacques, B. (1986). Redwall. illus. by Gary Chalk. New York: Philomel.

Jacques, B. (1988). Mosslfower. illus. by Gary Chalk. New York: Philomel.

Jacques, B. (1990). Mattimeo. illus. by Gary Chalk. New York: Philomel.

Jacques, B. (1992). Mariel of Redwall. illus. by Gary Chalk. New York: Philomel. 201

Jacques, B. (1993). Salamandastron. illus. by Gary Chalk. New York: Philomel.

James, M. (1990). Shoebao. New York: Scholastic.

Jarrell, R. (1963). The bat-ooet. pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: MacMillan.

Jarrell, R. (1965). The Animal Family, pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Johansen, H. (1991). A tomcat's tale, illus. by Kathi Bhend. New York: Dutton.

Jordan, T. (1991). Journev of the red-eved tree froo. illus. by Martin Jordan. Green Tiger.

Joubert, J. (1990). White owl and blue mouse, illus. by Michael Gay. Zoland.

Kerr, R. (1990). Tex's tales. Panda.

Kesey, K. (1990). Little tricker the squirrel meets bio double the bear, illus. by Barry Moser. New York: Viking.

King-Smith, D. (1981). The mouse butcher, illus. by Margot Apple. New York: Viking.

King-Smith, D. (1982). Maonus oowermouse. drawings by Mary Rayner. New York: Harper & Row.

King-Smith, D. (1984). Harry's mad, pictures by Jill Bennet. New York: Crown.

King-Smith, D. (1988). Martin's mice, illus. by Jez Alborough. New York: Crown.

Kipling, R. (1902). Just-so stories for little children. London: Macmillan.

Lang, A. (1992). Rudv visits the north: The adventures of rudv bear, illus. by Muriel Hope. New York: Hyperion Books.

Lawhead, S. (1990). The tale of Anabelle hedoehoo. illus. by Laura Potter. Lion.

Lawhead, S. (1990). The tale of Jeremv vole, illus. by Denis Ovinden. Lion.

Lewis, C. S. (1961). The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. (1962). The vovaoe of the Dawn Treader. illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. (1962). The silver chair, illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan. 202

Lewis, C. S. (1962). The horse and his bov. illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. (1964). Prince Caspian, illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. (1964). The magician's neohew. illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. (1964). The last battle, illus. by Pauline Baynes. New York: Macmillan.

Lofting, H. (1923). Dr. Dolittle's Dost office. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1923). The storv of Mrs. Tubbs. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1924). Dr. Dolittle's Circus. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1925). Dr. Dolittle's zoo. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1926). Dr. Dolittle's Caravan. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1927). Dr. Dolittle's garden. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1928). Dr. Dolittle in the moon. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1933). Dr. Dolittle's return. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1936). Tommy. Tilly, and Mrs. Tubbs. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1936). Dr. Dolittle's birthday book. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, H. (1948). Dr. Dolittle and the secret lake. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Lofting, H. (1950). Dr. Dolittle and the green canary. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Lofting, H. (1952). Dr. Dolittle's Puddleby adyentures. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Lofting, H. (1933). Doctor's Dolittle's return. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1948). Doctor Dolittle and the secret lake. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1950). Doctor Dolittle and The Green Canary. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1951). Doctor Dolittle's cost office. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1952). Doctor Dolittle's Circus. New York: Delacorte.

Lofting, H. (1952). Doctor Dolittle's Puddleby adyentures. New York: Dell. 203

Lofting, H. (1953). Doctor Dolittle's zoo. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1954). Doctor Dolittle's Caravan. New York: Dell. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Lofting, H. (1955). Doctor Dolittle's garden. New York: Dell.

Lofting, H. (1956). Doctor Dolittle in the moon. New York: Dell.

London, J. (1903). The call of the wind. New York: Macmillan.

London, J. (1904). The sea-wolf. illus. by W. J. Aylward. New York: Macmillan.

London, J. (1905). White fana. New York: Macmillan.

McClung, R. (1991). Shag, illus. by Louis Darling. Linnet.

McClung, R. (1992). Samson: Last of the california grizzlies, illus. by Bob Hines. Linnet.

McCabe, 8. (1991). Bottle Rabbit, illus. by Axel Scheffler. Faber.

Modrell, D. (1990). Tales of tiddly, illus. by Ellen Eagle. Simon.

Monsell, M. E. (1990). Crackle creek, illus. by Kathleen Garry McCord. New York: A theneum .

Nelson, D. (1991). Wild voices, illus. by John Schoenherr. New York: Philomel.

Naylor, P. R. (1993). The grand escape. New York: Atheneum.

Oakley, G. (1992). The church mice and the ring. New York: Atheneum.

Parker, N. W. (1992). Working froo. New York: Greenwillow.

Pochocki, E. (1990). The attic mice, illus. by David Catrow. New York: Holt.

Potter, B. (1903). The tailor of Gloucester. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1903). The tale of Souirrel Nutkin. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1904). The tale of Beniamin Bunnv. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1904). The tale of two bad mice. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1905). The tale of Mrs. Tioov-Winkle. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1905). The Die and the oattv-man. London: Warne. 204

Potter, B. (1906). The tale of Mr. Jeremv Fisher. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1907). The tale of Tom Kitten. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1908). The tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1909). The tale of Floosv Bunnies. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1909). Ginger and Prickles. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1910). The tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1911). The tale of Timmv Tiotoes. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1912). The tale of Mr. Tod. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1913). The tale of Pigling Bland. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1918). The tale of Johnnv Town-Mouse. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1908). The rolv-Doiv pudding. London: Warne.

Potter, B. (1930). The tale of little oig Robinson. London: Warne.

Roach, M. (1979). Presto or the adventures of a turnoit doo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Roberts, B. (1990). Waiting-for-oaoa stories, illus. by Sarah Stapler. New York: Harper.

Scheffler, U. (1993). The return of Rinaldo. the siv fox, illus. by Iskender Gider. trans. by J. Alison James. North-South.

Scott, D. (1983). A Fresh Wind in the Willows, illus. by Jonathan Coudrille. New York: Dell.

Sendak, M. (1967). Hiooletv Piooletv Poo, or there must more to life. New York: Harper & Row.

Sharp, M. (1962). Miss Bianco: A fantasy, illus. by Garth Williams. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1963). The turret, illus. by Garth Williams. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1966). Miss Bianco in the salt mines, illus. by Garth Williams. Boston: Little Brown. 205

Sharp. M. (1970). Miss Bianco in the Orient, illus. by Erik Blegvad. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1971). Miss Bianco in the Antarctic, illus. by Erik Blegvad. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1972). Miss Bianco and the bridesmaid, illus. by Erik Blegvad. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1977). Bernard the brave: A Miss Bianco storv. illus. by Leslie Morrill. Boston: Little Brown.

Sharp, M. (1978). Bernard into battle, illus. by Leslie Morrill. Boston: Little Brown.

Stevenson, C. (1992). Tiver rats. Harcourt/Yolen.

Stevenson, J. (1990). National worm dav. Greenwillow.

Taylor, J. (1992). The adventures of dudlev dormouse, illus. by Peter Cross. Candlewick.

Tinbergen, N. (1991). Kleew. Lyons.

Uttley, A. (1929). The souirrel. the hare, and the little orev rabbit, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1930). How little orev rabbit cot back her tail, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1931). The great adventure of hare, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1932). The storv of fuzzvoeo the hedgehog, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1934). Souirrel goes skating, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1935). Wise owl's storv. illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Heinemann.

Uttley, A. (1936). Little grev rabbit's oartv. illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Collins.

Uttley, A. (1937). The knot souirrel tied, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Collins. 206

Uttley, A. (1938). Fuzzvpeq goes to school, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Collins.

Uttley, A. (1939). Tales of the four oios and brock the badger, illus. by Alex Buckels. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1939). Little grev rabbit's Christmas, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Collins.

Uttley, A. (1940). Moldv warp, the mole, illus. by Margaret Tempest. London: Collins.

Uttley, A. (1940). The adventures of sam oio. illus. by Francis Gower. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1941). Sam pig goes to market, illus. by A. E. Kennedy. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1941). Six tales of brock the badoer. illus. by Alec Buckels and Francis Gower. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1941). Six tale of Sam pig, illus. by Alec Buckels and Francis Gower. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1941). Six tales of the four oios. illus. by Alec Buckels. London: Faber.

Uttley, A. (1941). Ten tales of tim rabbit, illus. by Alec Buckels and Francis Gower. London: Faber.

Walsh, A. (1990). Momma-Cat. illus. by Marilyn Dowling. Acadia.

Wilson, A. N. (1989). Stray. Orchard.

Wilson, A. N. (1992). Hazel the guinea oio. illus. by Jonathan Heale. Candlewick. BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS ANALYZED:

Adams, R. (1974). Watershio down. New York: Avon.

Adams, R. (1977). The olaaue doas. New York: Knopf, 1978.

Aesoo's fables. (1912). illus. by Arthur Rackham. New York: Gramercy.

Averill, E. (1972). Caotains of the citv streets. New York: Harper & Row.

Baker, B. (1976). Duooer. illus. by Chuck Eckarat. New York: Greenwillow.

Baker, B. (1981). Danbv and George, illus. by Adrianne Lobel. New York: Greenwillow.

Baker, M. (1963). The shoe shoo Bears, illus. by Walter Hodges. New York: Ariel Books.

Barret, N. (1985). Pledger: a novel. New York: Macmillan.

Bell, C. (1983). Ratha's Creature. New York: Atheneum.

Bell, C. (1984). Clan Ground. New York: Atheneum.

Bell, C. (1986). Tomorrow's Sohinx. New York: Atheneum.

Benchley, N. (1971). Feldman Fieldmouse: A fable, illus. by Hilary Knight. New York: Harper & Row.

Benchley, N. (1981). Snio. illus. by Irene Trivas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Benchley, N. (1981). Demo and the dolohin. illus. by Stephen Gammell. New York: Harper & Row.

Bianco, M. (1922). The velveteen rabbit: Or. how tovs became real, illus. by Michael Hague. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983.

Bodecker, N. M. (1974). The mushroom center disaster, illus. by Erik Blegvad. New York: Atheneum.

207 208

Bond, M. (1958). A Bear Called Paddington, illus. by Peggy Fortnum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bond, M. (1966). Here comes Thursday, illus. by Daphne Rowles. New York: Lothrop.

Brooks, W. (1927). To and aoain. illus. by Adolfo Best-Maugard. New York: Knopf, later named as Freddv goes to Florida (1949). illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1932). Freddv the detective, illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Brooks, W. (1958). Freddv and the draoon. illus. by Kurt Wiese. New York: Knopf.

Burgess, T. (1910). Old mother west wind, illus. by George Kerr. Boston: Little Brown.

Burgess, T. (1913). The adventures of Reddv Fox, illus. Harrison Cady. Boston: Little Brown.

Burroughs, E. R. (1912). Tarzan. Kino of the aoes. New York: Random House.

Cleary, B. (1964). Ribsv. illus. by Louis Darling. New York: William Morrow.

Cleary, B. (1965). The mouse and the motorcvcle. illus. by Louis Darling. New York: Dell.

Cleary, B. (1970). Runawav Raloh. illus. by Louis Darling. New York: Dell.

Cleary, B. (1973). Socks, illus. by Beatrice Darwin. New York: William Morrow.

Cleary, B. (1982). Ralph S. Mouse, illus. by Paul Zelinsky. New York: Dell.

Conly, J. L. (1986). Racso and the rats of NIMH, illus. by Leonard Lubin. New York: Harper Trophy.

Conly, J. L. (1990). R-T. Margaret, and the rats of NIMH, illus. by Leonard Lubin. New York: Harper Trophy.

Corbett, W. J. (1982). The song of Pentecost, illus. by Martin Ursell. New York: D utton.

Corbett, W. J. (1987). Pentecost and the chosen one. New York: Delacorte.

Dana, B. (1982). Zucchini, illus. by Eileen Chrsitelow. New York: Harper & Row.

Dann, C. (1979). The animals of Farthing Wood. New York: Elsevier/Nelson. 209

De La Mare, W. (1910). The three Mullah-Muloars (The three roval monkevs). London: Duckworth.

Donovan, J. (1976). Family. New York: Harper & Row.

Dorset, C. A. (1807). The peacock at home. In A. W. Tuer (Ed.), Forgotten children's books (pp. 154-156). New York: Benjamin Blom.

Edmonds, W. (1971). Beaver Valiev, illus. by Leslie Morrill. Boston: Little Brown.

The elephant's ball. (1807). In A. W. Tuer (Ed.). Forgotten children's books (d p . 150- 152). New York: Benjamin Book, 1968.

Erickson, R. (1976). Warton and Morton, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Erickson, R. (1977). Warton's Christmas Eve Adventure, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Erickson, R. (1978). Warton and the kino of the skies, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Erickson, R. (1979). Warton and the traders, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Erickson, R. (1982). Warton and the castaways, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Erickson, R. (1986). Warton and the contest, illus. by Lawrence di Fiori. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Farley, W. (1941). The Black Stallion. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991.

Godden, R. (1951). The mousewife. illus. by William Pene Du Bois. New York: Viking.

Godden, R. (1957). Mouse House, illus. by Adrienne Adams. New York: Viking.

Grahame, K. (1895). The golden aoe. London: Lane.

Grahame, K. (1898). Dream davs. London: Lane.

Grahame, K. (1908). The wind in the willows, illus. by Graham Robertson. London: M ethuen.

Hawdon, R. (1984). A rustle in the grass. New York: Tom Doherty.

Hoban, R. (1967). The m ouse and his child, illus. by Lillian Hoban. New York: Dell. 210

Howe, D. & Howe, J. (1979). Bunnicula. illus. by Alan Daniel. New York: Avon.

Howe, D. & Howe, J. (1980). Teddv bear's scraobook. illus. by David Rose. New York: Atheneum.

Howe, D. & Howe, J. (1982). Howlidav inn, illus. by Lynn Munsinger. New York: Avon.

Howe, D. & Howe, J. (1983). The celerv stalks at midnight, illus. by Leslie Morrill. New York: Avon.

Jacques, B. (1986). Redwall. New York: Avon.

Jefferies, R. (1881). Wood Maoic. New York: The Third Press.

Kendall, E. A. (1808). Keeper's travels in search of his master. In R. Bator (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature. (Vol. 4). (pp. 192-226). New York: Stonehill, 1983.

Kilner, D. (1783-1784). The life and perambulation of a mouse. In R. Bator (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature (Vol. 3). (pp. 224-270). New York: Stonehill.

Kilner, D. (1799). The rational brutes or talking animals. Philadelphia: Benjamin Johnson, 1818.

King-Smith, D. (1978). The fox busters, illus. by Jon Miller. London: Gollancz; New York: Delacorte, 1988.

King-Smith, D. (1980). Daooie doofoot. illus. by Mary Rayner. London: Gollancz. as Pios might fIv. New York: Viking, 1982.

King-Smith, D. (1983). The sheep-oia. illus. by Mary Rayner. London: Gollancz. as Babe. The gallant oio. New York: Crown, 1985.

King-Smith, D. (1990). Ace: The verv important oio. illus. by Lynette Hemmant. New York: Crown.

Kipling, R. (1894). The iunole book. Mahwah, NJ: Watermill, 1980.

Landsman, S. (1986). Castaways on chimo island. New York: Atheneum.

Lawson, R. (1939). Ben and me. Boston: Little Brown.

Lawson, R. (1941). I discover Columbus. Boston: Little Brown.

Lawson, R. (1944). Rabbit hill. New York: Puffin. 211

Lawson, R. (1948). Robbut: A tale of tails. Boston: Gregg.

Lawson, R. (1953). Mr. Revere and I. Boston: Little Brown.

Lawson, R. (1954). The touch winter. New York: Viking.

Lawson, R. (1956). Caotain Kidd's cat. Boston: Little Brown.

Lenaghan, R. (Ed.). (1967). Caxton's Aesoo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

L'Estrange, Sir R. (1699). Fables and stories moralized: Being a second part of the Fables of Aesop and other eminent mythologists. In F. Bulter (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature. (Vol. 1). (pp. 57-86). New York: Stonehill, 1983.

The lion's masquerade. (1807). In A. W. Tuer (Ed.). Forgotten children's books (pp. 158-160). New York: Benjamin Blom.

Lively, P. (1978). The vovaoe of QV66. illus. by Harold Jones. New York: Dutton.

Lobel, A. (1970). Froo and Toad are friends. New York: Harper Trophy, 1979.

Lobel, A. (1972). Mouse tales. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1972). Froo and Toad together. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1975). Owl at home. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1976). Froo and Toad all vear. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1977). Mouse souo. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1978). Grasshopper on the road. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1979). Davs with Froo and Toad. New York; Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1980). Fables. New York: Harper & Row.

Lobel, A. (1981). Uncle elephant. New York: Harper & Row.

Lofting, H. (1920). The storv of Dr. Dolittle. New York: Stokes.

Lofting, N. (1922). The vovaces of Doctor Dolittle. New York: Dell.

Milne, A. A. (1926). Winnie-the-Pooh. illus. by Ernest Shepard. New York: Puffin. 212

Milne, A. A. (1928). The house at Pooh Corner, illus. by Ernest Shepard. New York: Puffin.

Newman, L. (1989). Heather has two mommies, illus. by Diana Souza. Boston: Alyson Wonderland.

O'Brien, R. (1971). Mrs. Frisbv and the rats of NIMH, illus. by Zena Bernstein. New York: MacMillan.

Orwell, G. (1946). Animal farm. New York: Penguin.

Potter, B. (1987). The tales of Peter Rabbit. New York: Derrydadle.

Rocca, G. (1966). Gaetano the Pheasant: A hunting fable, pictures by Giulio Cingoli and Giancarlo Carloni. New York: Harper & Row.

Roscoe, W. (1807). The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast. In A. W. Tuer (Ed.), Forgotten children's books (pp. 146-148). New York: Benjamin Blom.

Sanders, M. (1893). Beautiful Joe, retold by Quinn Currie, illus. by Susan Heinonen. Seattle: Storyteller Ink.

Scott, 0. (1983). A fresh wind in the willows, illus. by Jonathan Coudrille. New York: Dell.

Seidler, T. (1986). A rat's tale, pictures by Fred Marcellino. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Selden, G. (1960). The cricket in Times Square, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1969). Tucker's countryside, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1974). Harry Cat's oet d u d d v. illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1981). Chester Cricket's oioeon ride, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1983). Chester Cricket's new home, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1986). Harry kitten and Tucker mouse, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Selden, G. (1987). The old meadow, illustrated by Garth Williams. New York: Dell. 213

Seton, E. T. (1949). The best of Ernest Thompson Seton. W. Kay Robinson (Ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Sewell, A. (1877). Black beauty. illus. by Walter Seaton. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Sharp, M. (1959). Rescuers, illus. by Garth Williams. New York: Dell.

Smith, D. (1956). The hundred and one Dalmatians. New York: Viking.

Smith, D. (1967). The starlight barking. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Steig, W. (1968). Roland, the minstrel oio. New York: Windmill.

Steig, W. (1972). Dominic. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Steig, W. (1973). The real thief. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Steig, W. (1976). Abel's island. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Swift, J. (1992). Gulliver's travels. Herfordshire, England: Wordsworth.

Trimmer, S. K. (1786). Fabulous histories. In R. Bator (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature (Vol. 3). (pp. 274-352). New York: Stonehill, 1 9 8 3 .

Van de Wetering, J. (1980). Hugh Pine, illus. by Lynn Munsinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Van de Wetering, J. (1986). Hugh Pine and the good place, illus. by Lynn Munsinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Van de Wetering, J. (1989). Hugh Pine and something else, illus. by Lynn Munsinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

White, E. B. (1945). Charlotte's web, pictures by Garth Williams. New York: Harper & Row.

White, E. B. (1952). Stuart little, pictures by Garth Williams. New York: Scholastic.

White, E. B. (1970). The trumpet of the swan, pictures by Edward Frascino. New York: Harper Trophy.

Willhoite, M. (1991). Daddv's roommate. Boston: Alyson Wonderland.

Williams, M. (1922). The velveteen rabbit: Or. how tovs became real, illus. by Michael Hague. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 214

Williamson, H. (1927). Tarka the otter: His iovful water-life and death in the country of the two rivers. Boston: Beacon Press.

Wollstonecraft, M. (1788). Original stories from real life. In R. Bator (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature (Vol.3). (pp. 356-406). New York: Stonehill.

Wrightson, P. (1987). Moon dark, illus. by Noela Young. New York: Margaret McElderry.

Yolen, J. (1981). The acorn ouest, illus. by Susanna Natti. New York: Thomas Crowell.

Zindel, P. (1974). Let me hear you whisoer. illus. by Stephen Gammell. New York: Harper & Row.

Zipes, J. (Ed.). (1992) Aesoo's fables. New York: Puffin. BIBLIOGRAPHY

REFERENCE SOURCES CITED:

Abell, W. (1966). The collective dream in art. New York: Schocken.

Adams, R. (1974). Introduction. In R. Locklev. The private life of the rabbit (1964). (pp. 5-6). New York: Macmilllan, 1974.

Adams, R. (1975). Some Ingredients of Watership Down. In E. Blishen (Ed.), The thorny paradise ( d o . 163-173). Boston: Horn Book.

Aries, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood, trans. R. Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape.

Avery, G. (1965). Nineteen Century Children: Heroes and heroines in English children's stories 1780-1900. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Avery, G. (1980). Children's Books and Social History. In S. Richardson (Ed.), Research about nineteenth-century children's children and books: Portrait study (pp. 23-40). Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois.

Baker, M. (1957). Anna Sewell and black beauty. New York: Longman.

Baldick, C. (1990). The concise Oxford dictionary of literary term. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bingham, J. (Ed.). (1988). Writers for children: Critical studies of maior writers since seventeenth century. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Bingham, J. & Schoit, G. (1980). Fifteen centuries of children's literature: An annotated chronology of British and American works in historical context. Westport, Ct: Greenwood.

Berger, J. (1980). About Looking. New York: Pantheon.

Blishen, E. (1968). Huoh Lofting. London: Bodley Head.

Blount, M. (1977). Animal land: The creatures of children's fiction. New York: Avon.

Bowers, A. J. (1980). The fantasy world of Russell Hoban. Children's Literature. 8. 80-97.

215 216

Branscomb, J. (1986). The quest for wholeness in the fiction of Russell Hoban. Critique Studies in Modern Fiction. 28(1). 29-38.

Brockman, B. (1982). Robin Hood and the invention of children's literature. Children's Literature. 10. 1-17.

Butler, F. (1983). Children's literature from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. In F. Butler (Ed.), Masterworks of children's literature (Vol. 1 ) (pp. xxi-xxxiii). New York; Stonehill.

Butts, D. (1989). Russell Hoban. In T. Chevalier (Ed.). Twentieth century writers. (3rd ed.) Chicago: St. James Press.

Carnes, P. (1992). The fable and the anti-fable: The modern faces of Aesop. Bestia: Yearbook of the beast fable society. 5-33. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub.

Carpenter, H. (1985). Secret garden: A study of the oolden aae of children's literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Carpenter, H. & Prichard, M. (1984). Oxford companion to children's literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chambers, A. (1983). Three fallacies about children's books. In R. Bator (Ed.), Signposts to criticism of children's literature ( p p. 54-59). Chicago: ALA.

Chatton, B. (1982). Pastoralism and pastoral romance in twentieth century children's literature. Unpublished dissertation: The Ohio State University.

Chevalier, T. (Ed.) (1989). Twentieth-centurv children's writers. (3rd edition). Chicago: St. James Press.

Chitty, S. (1971). The woman who wrote Black beautv. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Clark, J. D. (1968). Beastly folklore. New York: Metuchen, Scarecrow Press.

Cohen, M. M. (1987). The moral animal: Defining human nature in three Renaissance plays. Unpublished Dissertation: Temple University.

Cole, M. & Cole, S. (1993). The development of children. (2nd ed.) New York: Freedm an.

Commire, A. (Ed.). (1979). Something about the author. (Vol. 17). Detroit: Gale.

Commire, A. (Ed.). (1982). Something about the author. (Vol. 27). Detroit: Gale.

Crouch, M. (1961). Beatrix Potter: A Waick monograph. New York: Henry Walck. 217

Darton, H. (1932). Children's books in England: Five centuries of social life. (1st ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Darton, H. (1982). Children's books in England: Five centuries of social life. (3rd ed.) (rev. by Brian Alderson). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Egoff, S. (1980). Precepts, pleasures, and portents: Changing emphases in children's literature. In S. Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, & El F. Ashley (Eds.), Only connect: readings on children's literature (pp. 405-433). Toronto: Oxford Uuniversity Press.

Egoff, S. (1981). Thursday's child: Trends and patterns in contemoorarv children's literature. Chicago: ALA.

Egoff, S. (1988). Worlds within: Children's fantasy from the Middle Aoes to today. Chicago: ALA.

Eisen, A. (Ed.). (1992). A treasury of children's literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Fisher, M. (1975). Who's who in children's books: A treasury of the familiar characters of childhood. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Flanagan, D. (1974). To each generation its own rabbits. Wilson Library Bulletin. 43(2), 152-56.

Gillin, R. (1988). Romantic echoes in the willows. Children Literature. 16. 169-174.

Goldstone, B. (1984). Lessons to be learned: A study of eighteenth century English didactic children's literature. New York: Peter Lang.

Green, P. (1959). Kenneth Grahame: A biooraohv. New York: World Pub.

Green, T. (1979). Richard Adams's long iournev from Watership Down. Smithsonian. 10(4), 76-82.

Goldstone, B. (1984). Lessons to be learned: A study of eighteenth century English didactic children's literature. New York: Peter Lang.

Griffith, J. (1980). Charlotte's Web: A lovely fantasy of love. Children's Literature 8, 111-117.

Guerin, W., Labor, E., Morgan, L., & Willingham, J. (1979). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Guth, D. L. (Ed.). (1976). Letters of E. B. White. New York: Harper & Row. 218

Haining, P. (1983). Paths to the River Bank: The origins of The Wind in the Willows from the writings of Kenneth Grahame. London: Souvenir Press.

Hammond, G. (1973). Trouble with Rabbits. Children's Literature in Education. 12. 4 8 -6 3 .

Hannabuss, C. S. (1973). Review of Watership Down. Children's Book Review. 3(2), 43-44.

Helbig, A. (1985). Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisbv and the Rats of NIMH: Through the eyes of small animals. In P. Nodelman (Ed.), Touchstones: Reflections on the best in children's literature (Vol. 1). (pp. 204-212). West Lafayette: Children's Literature Association.

Helbig, A, & Perkins, A. R. (1989). Dictionarv of American children's fiction. 1960- 1984. New York: Greenwood Press.

Helbig, A, & Perkins, A. R. (1989). Dictionarv of American children's fiction. 1960- 1984. New York: Greenwood Press.

Highet, G. (1962). The anatomv of satire. Princeton: Princeton University.

Hodgart, M. (1969). Satire. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Huck, C., Hepler, S., & Hickman, J. (1993). Children's literature in the elementarv school (5th ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Hunt, P. (1980). The good, the bad and the indifferent: Quality and value in three contemporary children's books. In N. Chambers (Ed.), The Signal Approach to Children's Books: A Collection (pp. 225-246). New York: Scarecrow Press.

Hunt,P. (1991). Criticism, theorv. and children's literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Jacobs, J. (sf lected and retold). (1964). The fables of Aesoo. illus. by David Levine. New York: MacMillan.

Jan, I. (1974). On children's literature. New York: Schocken Books.

Kamenetsky, C. (1984). Children's literature in Hilter's Germanv: The cultural Dolicv of national socialism. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Kemp, G. (1973). The best children's books I read during the last year. Children's Literature in Education. 11. 45-6.

Kuznets, L. (1987). Kenneth Grahame. Boston: Twayne Pub.

Lane, M. (1968). The tale of Beatrix Potter: A biooraohv. (rev. ed.) New York: Frederick Warne. 219

Lanes, S. (1971). America as fairy tales. In Down the rabbit hole: Adventures & misadventures in the realm of children's literature. New York: A theneum .

Lejeune, S. G. (1983). The world up-so-down: Pabular satire in the English language. Unpublished dissertation. University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Lenaghan, R. T. (Ed.). (1967). Caxton's Aesoo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lenz, M. (1979). Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child and the Search to Be Self-Winding. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Children's Literature Association (pp. 64-69). Harvard University, March 1978.

Ley burn, E. D. (1969). Satiric alleoorv: Mirror of man. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lively, P. (1978). Children and the art of memory. The Horn Book. 54. 17-23.

Locke, J. (1693). Some thoughts concerning education. New York: Barron's, 1964.

Lockley, R. (1964). The private life of the rabbit. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

Lovejoy, A. (1961). The great chain of being: A studv of the historv of an idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lynn, J. (1986). Threadbare utopia; Hoban's modern pastoral. Children's Literature Association Quarterlv. 11 (1). 19-24.

Lynn, R. N. (1979). Fantasv for children: An annotated checklist. New York: Bowker.

Lynn, R. N. (1983). Fantasv for children: An annotated checklist and reference guide. (2nd ed.). New York: Bowker.

Lynn, R. N. (1989). Fantasv literature for children and vouno adults: An annotated bibliooraohv. (3rd ed.) New York: Bowker.

MacDonald, R. (1986a). Beatrix Potter. Boston: Twayne.

MacDonald, R. (1986b). Why this is still 1893: The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Beatrix Potter's Manipulations of Time into Timelessness. Children's Literature Association Quarterlv. 10(4). 185-87.

MacDonald, R. (1988). Beatrix Potter. In J. Bingham & G. Schoit (Ed.), Writers for children: Critical studies of maior writers since seventeenth centurv. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 220

Magee, W. (1980). The animal story: A challenge in technique. In S. Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, & L. F. Ashley (Eds.) Only connect: Readings on children's literature (2nd ed.), (pp. 221-232). Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Marcus, L. S. (1983/1984). Picture book animals: How natural a history? The Lion and the Unicorn. 7/8. 127-139.

Meigs, C., Eaton, A., Nesbit, E., & Viguers, R. (1969). A critical historv of children's literature (rev. ed.). New York: MacMillan.

Mendelson, M. (1988). The Wind in the Willows and the plotting of contrast. Children's Literature. 16. 127-144.

Mermier, G. R. (1991). A medieval book of beasts: Pierre de Beauvais' Bestiarv. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Messer, P. (1968). Beatrix Potter: Classic novelist of the nursery. Elementarv English. M O ), 325-333.

Molson, F. (1989). Children's fantasv. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, Inc.

Morse, B. (1983). The novels of Robert C. O'Brien. Signal: Approaches to Children's Books. 40. 30-35.

Muir, P. (1954). English children's books: 1600 to 1900. New York: Frederick Praeger.

Musgrove, F. (1974). Esctasv and holiness: Counter culture and the open society. London: RKP.

Neumeyer, P. (1994). The annotated Charlotte's Web. New York: HarperCollins.

Niven, C. (1967). Historv of the humane movement. New York: Transaltanic Arts.

Noel, T. (1975). Theories of the fable in the eighteenth centurv. New York: Columbia University Press.

O'Brien, R. (1975). Newbery award acceptance. In L. Kingman (Ed.), Newberv and Caldecott Medal books. 1966-1975 (pp. 83-92). Boston: The Horn Book.

Opie, P. (1975). John Newbery and his successors. The Book Collector. 24. 259- 26 9 .

Patterson, S. (1971). Rousseau's Emile and early children's literature. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. 221

Paulson, R. (Ed). (1971). Satire: Modern essavs in criticism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Perry, B. (1936). Studies in the text historv of the life and fables of Aesoo. Haverford, PA: American Philological Association.

Philip, N. (1985). Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A comparable vitality. In P. Nodelman (Ed.), Touchestones: Reflections of the best of children's literature (Vol. 1) (pp. 96-105). West Lafayette: Children Literature Association Pub.

Pickering, S. Jr. (1981). John Locke and children's books in eiahteenth-centurv England. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Pickering, S. F. Jr. (1993). Moral instruction and fiction for children: 1749-1820. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Pollard, A. (1970). Satire. New York: Methuen.

Poss, G. (1975). An epic in Acadia: The pastoral world of The Wind in the Willows. Children's Literature. ^ 80-90.

Powell, K. H. (1985). Tradition and transformation: The fables of La Fontaine and their nineteenth-century illustrators and caricaturists. Unpublished Dissertation: Colimbia University.

Prescott, P. (March 18, 1974). Rabbit read. Newsweek. 83(11). 114.

Quinnam, B. (Ed.). (1966). Fables from incunabula to modern picture books. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.

Rees, D. (1984). Beyond the last visible dog: Russell Hoban. In Painted desert, green shade: Essavs on contemoorarv writers of fiction for children and voung adults (pp. 138-151). Boston: The Horn Book.

Rosenthal, L. M. (1974). The child informed: Attitudes toward the socialization of the child in the nineteenth-century English children's literature. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University.

Rousseau, J. (1762). Emile or on education, (intro, and trans. by Allan Bloom). New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Rowland, B. (1971). Blind beasts: Chaucer's animal world. Kent: The Kent State University Press.

Ruskin, M., & Ruskin, M. (1987). The narrative of love and loss. New York: Verso. 222

Sale, R. (1978). Fairy tales and after: From Snow White to E. B. White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schmidt, G. (1987). The Craft of the Cobbler's Son: Tommy Stubbins and the Narrative Form of the Doctor Dolittle Series. Children's Literataure Association Quarterlv. 12. 19-23.

Schmidt, G. (1992). Huoh Lofting. New York: Twayne Pub.

Sendak, M. (1988). Caldecott & Co.: Notes on books & pictures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Senick, G. (Ed.) (1989). Children's literature review. (Vol. 17). Detroit: Gale

Senick, G. (Ed.) (1990). Children's literature review. (Vol. 19). Detroit: Gale.

Senick, G. (Ed.) (1990). Children's literature review. (Vol. 21). Detroit: Gale.

Sewell, A. (1989). The annotated Black Beautv. (intro, and annotated by Ellen B. Wells and Anne Grimshaw). J. A. Allen & Co., London.

Shannon, G. (1989). Arnold Lobel. Boston: Twayne.

Shavit, S. (1986). Poetics of children's literature. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Shell, S. (1992). Eating crow: Rousseau on the fable. In B. Bennani (Ed.), Bestia: yearbook of the beast fable society (pp. 75-86). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub.

Shepard, E. (1969). Illustrating The Wind in the Willows. In E. Field (Ed.), Horn book on children's books and readings selected from eighteen years of the Horn Book Magazine (pp. 273-275). Boston: Horn Book.

Shepard, P. (1978). Thinking animals: Animals and the development of human intelligence. New York: Viking.

Steig, M. (1981). At the back of The Wind in the Willows: An experiment in biographical and autobiographical interpretaiton.

Stott, J. (1984). Children's literature from A to Z: A guide for parents and teachers. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Swinfen, A. (1984). In defense of fantasv: A studv of the genre in English and American literature since 1945. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Thomas, J. R. (1974). Old worlds and new: Anti-Feminist in Watership Down. The Horn Book Magazine. 50(4). 405-8. 223

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1965). Tree and leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Townsend, J. R. (1976). Didacticism in Modern Dress. The Horn Book. 52. 159- 164.

Townsend, J. R. (1983). A wholly pragmatic definition. In R. Bator (Ed.), Signposts to criticism of children's literature (pp. 19-20). Chicago: ALA.

Townsend, J. R. (1987). Written for children: An outline of Enolish-lanouaae children's literature (3rd rev. ed.). New York: J. B. Lippincott.

Tucker, N. (1977). What is a child? London: Open books

Tymn, M., Zahorski, K., & Boyer, R. (1979). Fantasv literature: A core collection and reference guide. New York: Bower.

Warlow, A. (1989). Robert O'Brien. In Chevalier (Ed.). Twentieth centurv children's writers (3rd ed.). (pp. 733-734).

Watkins, T. (1984). Making a break for the real England: The River Bankers revisited. Children's Literature Association Quarterlv. 9, 34-35.

Wells, E. & Grimshaw, A. (1989). The annotated black beautv. London: J. A. Allen.

White, T. H. (ed. & trans). (1984). The book of beasts: being a translation from a Latin bestiarv of the twentieth centurv. New York: Dover.

Wintle, J. (1974). Richard Adams. In J. Wintle. & E. Fisher (Eds.). The pied oioers: Interviews with the influential creators of children's literature ( p p. 132- 146). New York: Paddington Press.

Wintle, J. (1974). E. B. White. In J. Wintle, & E. Fisher (Eds.), The oied oioer: Interviews with the influential creators of children's literature (pp. 124- 131). New York: Paddingion Press.

Williams, J. (1976). Reflections on 'The Wind in the Willows.' Sinoal: Approaches to Children's Books. 21. 103-107.

Worcester, D. (1940). The art of satire. New York: Russell & Russell.

Worcester, D. (1971). The art of satire. In R. Paulson (Ed.). Satire: Modern essavs in criticism (pp. 115-134).

Zanger, J. (1977). Goblins, morlocks, and weasels: Classic fantasy and the Industrial Revolution. Children's Literature in Education. 8(4). 154-162.