Nostalgia for Mud written thesis to accompany exhibition for MFA degree by Shannon Robinson May 2006
Flipping through boxes of family photographs, I came across a fantastic visual to illustrate my lifelong frame of mind. Because it embodied my recollection of childhood, I removed it from the carefully catalogued file of years and stuck the photograph under my mother’s nose. I was in a frenzy. Here was proof of the early death of my innocence.
“What?” she noted sweetly, “you were having fun.”
It’s just less than three by five inches with the classic round edges of early Kodak. The muddy water of the Atlantic Ocean is tumbling as oncoming waves. Perfectly centered in the lapping foam is a face – eyes tightly shut, baby blonde hair plastered to forehead, a grimace. The angle of the head suggests the body is on its stomach, legs flailing out of control with arms rigidly waving in front. The grimace says fight.
It is the ageless drama on dated color film. Sink or swim. The struggle to stay afloat while the tsunami of life crashes on top of you, dragging you under, pulling you back. Sand in your pants. And loved ones document it, citing prosperity, nostalgia, and good summer fun. Though perhaps the grimace is a joyful squeal. Cool water on hot skin and the adrenaline of keeping your head held high. The thrill of feeling your own strength and that baby step toward independence. And loved ones document it, citing prosperity, nostalgia, and good summer fun.
I showed this photograph to everyone, proudly displaying the potential suffering of growing up. No one questioned the fear on my young face, captured so long ago. Even my mother admitted it looks as though I may have been scared, but who could know panic from pleasure? The strength of the image is in its ambiguity, its ability to intend delight yet suggest horror.
One last time I picked up this object, this snapshot that instantly captured the enduring obsession with my misery and that tragic feeling I was born with my glass half empty. And for the first time, I turned this image over. It read: Shawn, Seaside Heights, 1982.
It is my brother.
When I acknowledged my discovery (and disappointment) to my mom she suggested, “Well, it could have been you.” Could have been. That darling little photo that served my memory, pride, and artistic vision was not my own.
Nostalgie de la boue is French, though it is an American invention given a romantic tongue. Nostalgia for Mud. Transliterated it expresses a longing for the gutter, the obsession with self-degradation, the lowly, the primi- tive. It is the swan that wishes for the life of a duck. I find it not only relevant that my response to the photo- graph confirms I am such a swan, but that I spent my youth playing in the mud. My Barbie collection consumed the downstairs closet; my games remained in the toy chest; my playhouse went uninhabited. I preferred mud pies and mud patties. I was a digger and filled the backyard with holes. I would find a dead bug and show it to my mom. “Oh,” she’d remark, “it’s dead, but isn’t it pretty?”
Yes, pretty. On Collecting
Peering into the china cabinet in my friend’s home, a towering structure of dark wood and glass, I associated the trinkets within as her parents’ subtle suggestion of status and luxury. The cabinet was in the formal dining room, visible from the home entrance and always off limits to our play. A chill of excitement ran up my spine each time I ran by the room, listening to the rattle of the fragile porcelain figurines. Unnoticed, sometimes we would sneak into the room, mimicking adults while playing house. We would always creep, voices low, so as not to disturb the energy of sophistication radiating from behind the glass doors. The cabinet entranced me. I wanted my own.
At my mother’s suggestion, I began amassing thimbles, the quilter’s thumb protector available in ceramic, leather, or steel. But I was more interested in the display box of tiny dark wood compartments with a glass screen. A few years later, I again attempted the role of the collector, announcing my passion for bells, decorative ones shaped like Disney princesses, a tiny jingle echoing from underneath their billowing dresses. I received many as gifts, except the idea of being given these ceramic figurines left me without a quest and I became bored. It was then I realized I had already amassed a collection that would consume a lifetime. Before all else, I am a reader. My parents read to me every bedtime, long before I realized words had sound, let alone meaning. In school, after my classwork was complete, my sanctuary was sneaking a book out from underneath my desk and reading a few more pages. At home, I curled up in bed and continued reading, chapter after chapter, unaware of day becoming night. As a timid and mostly sad little girl, I found solace in other people’s narratives. As I grew older, torn between the inhibition of my shyness and the anger of my depression, I continually returned to my books. I never reread a text, but would pull a certain book from the shelf, reacquainting myself with its age, its smell, its memory. Reorganizing the books, I placed ones currently deemed much loved on the most accessible shelf.
My collection has grown with me, from two shelves in my childhood room to filling its entire wall, two free- standing bookshelves, and various piles on the floor. I have read all of them, able to recall that moment’s reason for leafing though each one. I am proud of every book, the creased binding and dog-eared pages as evidence of my time spent within its pages. Perhaps it is now large enough to be called a library.
“So much is bound up with objects and their history, so many feelings, hopes and delusions we need to preserve in order to preserve ourselves (1).”
Before the sixteenth century, collecting was associated with royalty. Wealth and education held life’s answers. However, when Europe encountered the New World, the exhilaration of the unknown trickled down the social ladder (2). Simultaneously, science was discovering new answers to questions that religion’s replies no longer satisfied. The printing press took literature out of the hands of the elite. A social revolution was beginning, driven by a sense of wonder.
Philipp Blom notes that, with Renaissance wonder, economy’s walls tumbled down and “for the first time it became accepted that a fish market may be a better place to gather wisdom than a library (3).” Columbus’ voyage to the Americas enticed ordinary citizens to collect objects of mystery, as if a grouping of the unexplainable would, through careful observation, reveal its secrets (4). In particular, wonders of the natural world were a prime possession for many amateur collectors. New understandings of the earth, physics, and especially of human mortality, led to a fascination of all things unusual within these subjects. These collections of the marvelous, sorted, labeled and placed within display cases for adequate viewing, became known as wunderkammern, cabinets of wonder.
As Renaissance life accelerated at an unprecedented speed, the wunderkammern outgrew their homes and hence the museum was created. This new institution reflected its origins; visitors would wander through crowded rooms of seemingly unrelated objects, order given to them by their curators. One such example of organized chaos was the Anatomical Museum in Leiden whose two-headed cat was displayed alongside a split carrot and conjoined apples under the title type of defect (5). Stranger still, the Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was an avid collector of biological specimens. His fascination with the human body dissolved the brick wall between subject and object, allowing human specimens to be viewed objectively and aesthetically (6). Known for his proficiency in preservation, Ruysch applied this skill primarily to children’s bodies. For preservation, he arranged still lifes, formally and traditionally composed, made from the oddities of his collection of human anatomy and the like. While these delicate presentations did not survive, the Russian tsar, Peter the Great, bought most of the rest of his collection (7).
Blom notes, “the poignancy of death and rebirth, of excess and vanitas are all embodied here (8).” The idea of presenting mortality aesthetically, as Ruysch achieved, is still expressed today. The current exhibition Body Worlds at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (October 7, 2005 – April 23, 3006) displays more than 200 human beings in various ways: sliced into strips, poised in muscular action, and individual organs. While walking through the exhibit, I began to realize that, though these were the bodies of once living people were before me, I had no sense of individuality or identity. Stripped of facial skin (and often more) with no illustration or photograph of the body as a whole, I did not see people, but objects. Emphasizing the artistic rather than scientific quality of the show, Dr. Gunther von Hagens had titled many of the bodies displayed in motion. Printed on sleek metal affixed to the pedestal, the nameplates bore the year of creation as well as his signature.
Though museums may be considered the world’s greatest collections, individuals such as Ruysch continue to amass private displays of natural history and cultural phenomena. In a time of Feng Shui conferences and Clean Sweep reality television, we cannot stop accumulating. We hold onto hard-worn clothes, obsolete equipment, and relics of our youth while reading self-help paperbacks on organizing our lives. We turn on PBS four times a week to watch Antiques Road Show, hoping our hoarding tendencies will lead to six figures and fifteen minutes of fame. Then, in a rage of cleanliness, we deem our belongings excessive. In a spirit of giving, we drop off garbage bags of attic and basement jumble, only to run into the thrift store next door to the collection bin, seeking out new treasures. I have witnessed the panicked aggression of a collector on the prowl. I am a collector and I attest: we are as obsessed with the hunt as we are with the kill.
Like our sixteenth century ancestors, a new world is upon us. This is a time of tsunamis and hurricanes, earthquakes and political shakeups, genocide and unresolved war. Technology and economy have made the world smaller, and therefore seemingly more crowded. Medicine permits us to live longer, making our mortality more evident. Science has proven not only that we forget, but what we remember modifies itself with each recollection. Wired communication allows us to know everything, leaving us to discern truth from fiction. As the Internet, international news, and nonstop flights bring the continents closer, we are losing ourselves to the communal whole.
In response, our innate desire for individualism kicks in. Collecting is an inherently human answer to the timeless question of place. Overwhelmed by mass production, globalism, and sheer chaos, we seek ownership, wanting to unveil an identity and claim profession as life’s witness within our private structure of logic. Possession, character, and organization are made visible in the practices of collecting.
Almost all of my books are second-hand. They are not first editions (print’s version of ‘the original’). Only a few are signed, local authors unknown and undervalued. Though these texts had previous owners, I claim them as mine when I read them. For example, I lent my copy of Siddhartha to a now ex-boyfriend and will likely never see it again. I will, at the next used book sale, purchase another copy of this classic. However, to make this copy my own, and part of the collection, I will read this just-purchased copy. Only then will the jacket’s illustration, the text’s font, the smell of the paper, be mine (9). Phillipp Blom understands this when he writes that books “are at once relics of a different era and personalities forever in the prime of their life (10).” In terms of new books, print and digital media have made reproduction easy, accessible and, perhaps most importantly, affordable. Everything is available at a mouse click. “The liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage” is seen as the disintegration of authenticity (11). Autonomy is gone. Consumerism is the new self-rule. In The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste Olalquiaga states that, once we realize that our objects lack uniqueness, it loses value. Without value, it cannot remind us of the past, it has no place in our future, and it is useless in the present (12).
Yet, we have chosen not to retrace our steps, to a time when the Mona Lisa was only a painting. Within our homes, we cannot have Mona Lisa, the original, but we can have Mona Lisa, the poster, sweatshirt, or coffee mug. The uniqueness of the object, lost in reproduction, is found again when the object becomes part of a collection, within a personalized scheme of hierarchy and display. In such an environment, the object regains value as a trigger for memory, bringing the part into the present and therefore shaping our future. To see fifty Mona Lisa mugs on a shelf in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop renders each image meaningless. To see one, among a cluster of Mona Lisa mania or within an entire cabinet of gift store mugs, the object recovers it value as memory (13). We regain legitimacy in multiplicity.
Regularly, I empty my bookshelves, resorting the texts in news ways – by author, genre, size, or most beloved – and arranging them anew. The act is one of meditation, where I am in control of the process and the implications of the result. Often, my childhood collection of picture books finds its way to the highest or lowest shelf, difficult to reach but always accessible. Poetry and plays are cramped into the corner, not as cherished as my novels. The collector’s attempt at organization and structure “is a testament of defiant optimism, of the hope that order has not yet surrendered to chaos, justice to injustice, meaning to chance, entirely (14).” The organization is not merely a necessity of spatial clearness but of mental clarity as well. We begin organizing our possessions as children, such as when we name objects and animals or claim ownership to certain toys in the nursery school playroom. As we become acclimated to our surroundings, we make efforts to control what we can as a means of security. Creating and maintaining a system of order for our possessions provides a private solace amidst public chaos.
The long gallery that held Charles Wilson Peale’s (1741-1827) collection (which would become America’s first museum) is the perfect example of metaphor for organization. Lining the walls, near the ceiling, were his portraits of great Americans. Below them, filling the rest of the walls and cases on the floor were taxidermy animals and nature’s other organisms. Besides this hierarchical display, Peale also organized his collection within a prearranged system. He stated that, within a collection, “should be seen no duplicated, and only the varieties of each species, all placed in the most conspicuous point of light, to be see to advantage without being handled (15).” In this manner, he sought to create a miniaturization of the natural world. Peale, having lost many children and eventually his wife, sought to preserve what he could as a means of leaving his mark for other generations.
Listening to NPR while watching news clips on the web, I can enter a chat room with people across the oceans. In accordance with university’s policies, an identification number specific to me now accompanies my social security number. I have currently discovered I am a victim of identity theft. Feeling lost in cyberspace and unknown in my own community, I turn to my books. My shelves echo my character. I have read each one. Another copy of the same text will not suffice. Susan Pearce refers to objects, like my books, as external souls (16). While they are physically apart from us, we project meaning into them, therefore providing inanimate objects with an identity. In this manner, memorabilia, childhood relics, and other trinkets of nostalgia, serve as an autobiography. A collector does not see the shelf of trinkets, but chapters of a life story. Walter Benjamin, in Unpacking My Library, emphasized that the passion of a collector is memory, ordered and labeled. Accumulating texts does not make a library. Rather, the organization of the collected volumes, a process carefully developed by the collector, completes the compilation. Collecting is about the memory the object resurrects. Place and time are detailed by the weather, smell, an encounter. The collector relishes these mo- ments as testimony to an accomplished life. The object allows us to remember, yet not relive. Because of this, Pearce refers to collections as “the tears of things (17).”
In concluding her thoughts on the individual as collector, Pearce give five circumstances that complete a collection: completing a series of an object, filling a certain space to capacity, creating an aesthetically balanced display, manipulating the scale of an object, and/or obtaining the desired object in absolute perfection (18). However, none of these options suit my library. Granted my books have outgrown their space and, with the shelves full for a harmonious arrangement, I find beauty and comfort amid the walls. But I have never reconciled the fact that my library has always been too large to leave my childhood room. Until my books surround me, I will not be home.
1 Blom, Phillipp. To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting.Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2003, 200. 2 Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995, 77. 3 Blom, Philipp. To Have and To Hold, 15. 4 Stephen Greenblatt, in his Marvelous Possession: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), suggests that amassing trinkets from the New World helped overshadow the uneasiness at the heart of Columbus’ voyage – that Europe was decimating this newly discovered culture. This notion can further be applied to the growing industrialization and scientific discoveries within Europe at this time. People’s interest in collecting natural objects and souvenirs reflects their desire to preserve what was slowly being lost to social progress. 5 Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, 83. 6 Blom, Philipp. To Have and To Hold, 62. 7 Rosamond Wolff Purcell explores Peter the Great and his collection in the first chapter of her book, Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History (New York: Norton, 1992). She touches on the relationship of Ruysch and the tsar while providing an insightful account of Peter the Great’s quest for knowledge. 8 Blom, Philipp. To Have and To Hold, 68. 9 During the writing of this paper, I received an unexpected Saturday visit from this ex-boyfriend. He returned Siddhartha, along with presenting me with four brand new books (rare for my second-hand collection). Merrily, I slipped Siddhartha back into his place on the shelf, fashioning a tight, seamless row of beloved books. 10 Blom, Philipp. To Have and To Hold, 200. 11 Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 51. 12 Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998, 84. 13 Olalquiaga notes this phenomena when she states that “with the advent of industrialization, the lack of uniqueness of mass produced objects was offset by the spectacularity of their presentation,” Ibid., 31. 14 Blom, Philipp. To Have and To Hold, 210. 15 Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, 206. 16 Pearce, Susan M. Museums, Objects, and Collections. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992, 45. 17 Ibid., 72. Also, Olalquiaga expands on this notion when distinguishing between reminiscence and remembrance. In remembrance, the loss of the experience causes sadness because an event of the past is unable to be relived. 18 Ibid., 54. On Memory Elizabeth Loftus is not well liked (1). While her peculiar demeanor often urges others to keep their distance, it is her experiments in psychology that have given her a bad name. She has not only told us, but has given us proof, of what we do not wish to hear.
Our memory is unreliable. Our memory is subjective. Our memory will forgo reality in favor of a good story, leaving us not knowing truth from fiction.
In the early 1990’s, after Loftus began doubting the accuracy of an individual’s memory, she wondered if it was possible to develop completely false memories. She devised an experiment where her university students would try and plant an invented memory in their siblings’ minds while at home over the Thanksgiving holiday. Loftus asked each student to develop a minimally detailed story, and give no material evidence, of his/her sibling being lost in the mall as a child. Some of her students’ siblings, reacting only to suggestions and cues from the student and their surrounding family, recalled the incident. Furthermore, the siblings embellished the experience with details about strangers never encountered and parental responses during reunions after never being separated.
Though 75% of Loftus’ uninformed subjects did not concoct a false memory, Loftus prefers to dwell on the 25% that did. To Loftus, it is a large enough majority for her to imply that we cannot know when truth, in the form of memory, is true. In essence, Loftus surmised that the mind creates false memories because “the tendency toward invention is strong and encompassing. It is a tendency so strong it overrides self-preservation (2).” When we recollect, we naturally fill in the blanks, preferring fallacy to forgetful honesty. A more clear understanding of Loftus’ radical view of memory may be extorted from the studies of emotional and inventive memory.
Emotional Memory Jean Piaget’s study of mental development in infants led to the understanding that there are two primary stages of memory: motor and sensory. Motor memory is thought of as a cyclic reaction in infants as they explore the world. As he moves about, the child begins to correlate an action with a reaction. If the reaction is pleasant, the child repeats the action. In sensory memory, the action causes a reaction based on the child’s senses rather than his body. An emotion is associated with an action. If he repeats an action, it is because of the memory of the feeling he had when last engaged in that action. Edmund Blair Bolles, in his exploratory study of memory, provides a clarifying example of the distinction between motor and sensory memory. An example of motor memory is thumb sucking, where the motion of the arm to the mouth becomes associated with the pleasure of sucking. An instance of sensory memory is shaking a rattle. The action is shaking and the reaction is the rattling, a rewarding sound (as opposed to bodily gratification) that the infant’s hearing must detect to feel pleasure. In both, pleasure is the end result of the action, but in sensory memory, the result is an additional step further away from the initial action (3). These two beginning stages of memory are essential to further development, known as emotional memory.
Emotions are often associated, in psychology’s language, with flashbulb memories. These are memories instantly imprinted in the brain by the shock of a traumatic event. The stress and emotion of such an event, whether it occurs in personal or public life, appears to create a memory more accurately for a longer period of time than an ordinary experience. This is why people can recall, with vivid detail, where they were when they heard John F. Kennedy had died or can describe minutiae from their wedding ceremony. Often, a per- sonal emotional experience will be more effective in establishing a flashbulb memory than a public event. This is likely because we will replay the event often during the days and months that follow, making imprint more practiced for future recollections.
Yet, even flashbulb memories are subject to dimming over time, eventually fading and then burning out. Memories are fragments because they are recollections, not occurring in real time. In this manner, as Loftus explained, our minds fill in the blanks, attaching various fragments together to make a solid narrative. General knowledge, current situations, and expectations also creep in to distort memory. After an emotional event, responses derived during public and private conversation will shape our future feelings and emphasize particular details of the event. Daniel Schacter clarifies that “a person’s subjective confidence in a flashbulb memory (is) not matched by its objective accuracy (4).” When recalling such an experience, a person will adjust the memory to satisfy present emotional needs. This is clearly demonstrated among memory in depressed patients. Already feeling pessimistic and sad, a depressed person will more easily recall a negative experience, emphasizing the displeasure. Psychologists call this mood-congruent retrieval (5). Bolles also notes our natural inclination to discern emotions that arouse us and then arrange our memories to satisfy this (6).
Traumatic events may also affect our memories of ordinary events. Often, people will not recall normal events that occurred near the time of the emotional event because they were highly distracted. This distraction can linger over long periods of time, even a lifetime. As one Holocaust survivor notes, “part of my present life is my remembrance, my memory of what happened then, and it casts a shadow over my life today (7).”
Inventive (Autobiographical) Memory Schacter refers to Elizabeth Loftus and her experiment with false memory in an attempt to divide psychologists’ theories into two groups: those that believe we never forget anything, and can recall all memories with proper techniques, and those that believe, over time, we lose memories which cannot be recovered. Freud belongs to the first group. Loftus fits into the second. 84% of psychologists fall in line with Freud. Yet, this may not be a case where the majority rules.
Freud (and others like him) has dominated the world of psychology and therefore his ideas infiltrate the general public’s views of memory. Since his time, it has been demonstrated that a psychologist’s techniques of memory retrieval may in fact enhance fabrication of the remembrance. Cues given to trigger a memory will shape the associations and emotions of the specific recollection. Loftus demonstrated this in her Lost In The Mall experiment, where the sibling would likely never have announced the remembrance of the event without family participation. Furthermore, contemporary research on memory suggests forgetting may be beneficial, rather then the stigma of age and mindlessness we associate with it. Forgetting is our brain’s response to the demanding, fast-paced environment in which we live. These neural changes that lead to simple memory loss are evident in research with invertebrates, the organisms that are the foundation of our biology (8).
Comfort regarding memory loss can be found in an analysis of memory hierarchy. There are three levels of accuracy in an autobiographical memory: lifetime, general event, and the details of that event. The broadest level, lifetime, is most accurate for the longest time period. But, when a memory surfaces and we retell the narrative, we blend all the levels to create the most complete picture. In this way, a memory may be inaccurate from when it happened in real time, but the personal meaning, and coupled emotion, is truthful. Schacter illustrates this point through the words of author Isabel Allende. In her autobiography she writes, “my life is created as I narrate and my memory grows stronger with writing (9).”
Meaning is true. Memory is not. 1 Lauren Slater, in her book Opening Skinners Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004) details the theories and experiments conducted by Loftus in the 1990’s. The story is rich in interview material and personal reflections. The following paragraphs on Loftus and her work are developed from Slater’s text. 2 Ibid., 192-93. 3 Bolles, Edmund Blair. Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Memory. New York: Walker and Company, 1988, 39. 4 Schacter, Daniel L. Searching for Memory. New York: Basic Books, 1996, 200. 5 Ibid., 211. 6 Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting, 37. While he does not speak directly of depression and mood- associated disorders, Bolles implies that, regardless of our mental health, we shape our memories to reflect our current feelings and environment. 7 Schacter, Searching for Memory, 203. Schacter refers to Lawrence Langer’s book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory for this survivor’s reflection. 8 Ibid., 78. 9 Ibid., 93. On Animals and Children
When I was a little girl, still young enough to spend a Saturday morning watching cartoons, I fell in love for the first time. He was small, but tough, an adventurer in the wilderness. Fearing nothing, he carried a sword and dared to see what lurked in dark corners. He was amicable, delightful, and wore a feather in his cap. He was also furry, an animated version of the gooey, gummy bear-shaped candy.
The bears of the 1980’s cartoon Gummi Bears looked nothing like their candy counterparts, a sugary treat without chocolate (that I therefore took no interest in). I don’t know if the weekly morning advertisement was successful for sales, but the littlest bear of the pack, Cubbi Gummi, captivated me. Perhaps this is why I nicknamed my high school sweetheart Bear and I am currently dating a man who oddly resembles the boy-cub cuddly.
It never struck me as unusual to be lusting after an animal. Though young, I had already developed an understanding of the animal as metaphor – a lesson learned in cartoons, books, and everyday clichés. But as an avid reader, I learned mostly through books. My childhood reading collection illustrated protagonists as frogs, rabbits, and other animals who live in a seemingly ordinary world. Any child, parent, or nostalgic adult can tell you that children’s literature is awash with humanity’s morals and lessons – though people often don’t tell their own stories.
Boria Sax pointedly notes, “we are fascinated by animals, in part because, while we are unable to lay aside our analytic frameworks, they are, by comparison, not greatly burdened by them (1).” While she mentions that animals are not distracted by such structure, Sax does not imply that animals are without one. Because there was a time when human communities were not so far removed from animal groups, our history of the wild kingdom is understood through a language that implies kinship (and in time, linked biology). Our ancestors’ connection to animals was complex; they relied on proximity that allowed killing prey for food while maintaining a safe distance from predators. Appeasing the spirits of the hunted and the feared became a full- time practice, permitting people to accept issues such as death and guilt. Evidence of such worship has been found among Neanderthals, who encircled cave bear skulls in shrines (2). Also, cave drawings in such places as France and Spain illustrate the strong agile forms of clever animals outwitting their hunters.
In the earlier centuries of human civilization, the world was highly unexplored and man could not directly observe animals, especially not within their natural habitats. As the human population grew, spreading around the globe, so did an oral tradition based on rumors and unfounded opinions, creating outrageous images of beasts and brutes (3). Oral tradition plays a critical role in nearly all societies. By leveling the playing field of humankind, oral tradition, as the beginning of folklore, creates a global discipline. Though variations are inevitable, folk tales and fables provide a cross-cultural examination of animal-human relationships. Furthermore, with the introduction of natural history (and the fields of science developed in its aftermath), we can compare the biological animal to its mythological counterpart and begin to understand how fantasy and reality interact(4).
Aesop and After The term fable is synonymous with Aesop. A slave in the sixth century BC, his intelligence and wit, contained within storytelling, earned him favor with King Croesus of Lydia. His tales are meant to teach; though there is often humor, morals and the evils of sin are at the heart of every one. Each animal possess’ the characteristics necessary to teach the lesson and nothing more (5). “The fable in those early times was not a child’s plaything. It was a nation’s primer (6).”
As ambassador for the king, Aesop was killed at Delphi. Some scholars say Aesop called the oracle a fraud. Others note he was caught stealing from the temple (7). Either way, Aesop was sentenced to death, thus ending his life, but not his folklorist reputation. Roughly three centuries after his death, Aesop’s fables were finally committed to paper. Authors such as Charles Perrault and James Thurber have followed his success within the allegorical tradition.
In the century following Aesop, Aristotle wrote the first textbook on animals. By the second century AD, the Greek Physiologus compiled the first animal encyclopedia, including mythological creatures (some being part human, part animal). This became the twelfth century prototype for medieval bestiaries (8). With these, the Middle Ages saw a resurgence of animal attention. Often, animals received parallel treatment to men. For example, in Autun, France, in the early sixteenth century, rats were formally accused of destroying the barley crop. Their defendant, Bartholomew Chassenee, argued that the rats had not been properly summoned (due to the wide berth of dwellings they inhabited) and that their journey to court would be too dangerous, considering the cats (9). Also, during this time in history, children were considered small adults and, as soon as he no longer needed his mother (given as age 7), he became a man. Maturation was a physical change, not a mental one. Thus, in a sense, childhood did not yet exist as a stage in one’s life. But now, “new sciences such as psychoanalysis, pediatrics, and psychology devote themselves to the problems of childhood, and their findings are transmitted to parents by way of popular literature. Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral, and sexual problems of childhood (10).”
The introduction of childhood came prominently in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expectantly, with it came a literature genre of fables and fairy tales. How this began, and the importance of animals within these stories, will be discussed after a brief look at Darwin and his anthropomorphic views of the wild kingdom.
Darwin and Anthropomorphic Language Modern zoology is considered to have begun in the sixteenth century with Konrad Gesner at the University of Zurich. His work, along with seventeenth century’s Edward Topsell, was completed by Georges Buffon in the eighteenth century. Until Buffon, the new field of zoology paralleled the kind of animal behavior described in fables. While Buffon separated fact from fiction, he did believe that animals where progressing toward a united civilization; then, mankind interfered. This frame of thought continued, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, natural history within the United States was “saturated with folklore (11).”
In 1859, S.G. Goodrich published his Natural History of the Animal Kingdom. In an attempt to popularize natural history, Goodrich (and others) strived to fulfill many preconceived notions of the general audience. Goodrich wanted his readers to regard the animal from the animal’s perspective. This type of thinking was deemed necessary because people and prey still lived closely (12). Predators were described as evil while pets and farm laborers were considered friends. He also encouraged the Christian creation myth, only discerning that animals were made over geological time rather than all in one week (13).
Two facts are important to note here. S.G. Goodrich, under the pseudonym Peter Paley, also wrote children’s books on a vast array of natural history subjects. Also, 1859 was the year Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species.
Darwin’s theory of evolution transferred the field of natural history from a popular culture pastime to a scientific specialization. The idea that humans and animals are related made the general public feel too close for comfort to the wildlife they feared, killed, and domesticated. Furthermore, his 1872 text, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (a study of animal and human behavior) generously employed anthropomorphic language that implied animals have thoughts and feelings. While many scientists felt a language used to describe human activity should not be applied to animals, Eileen Crist remarks that “the evolutionary perspective compelled (Darwin) to acknowledge continuity not only at the level of physiological and morphological traits, but with respect to behavioral and mental attributes as well (14).”
Extractions of Darwin’s text exemplify this. When discussing parrots he writes that they “become so deeply attached to each other when one dies the other for a long time pines.” On the delight of a well-fed bovine, he notes “the deep grunt of satisfaction uttered by a pig, when pleased with its food.” When explaining mammals such as dogs and monkeys, Darwin describes how they may become jealous and “this shews that animals not only love, but have the desire to be loved.” Later, in even stronger anthropomorphic language, he says that dogs “possess something very like a conscience.”
Darwin is not guessing about an animal’s thoughts while observing its behavior; he recognizes the mental state in its behavior. A clear example of this can be seen in the following: “Animals which live in society often call to each other when separated, and evidently feel much joy at meeting; as we see with a horse, on the return of his companion, for whom he has been neighing (15).” He is not presuming the intention of the horse’s neigh, but observing it in the horse’s body movement and voice.
Darwin’s anthropomorphic language is further emphasized by his use of anecdotes. While this is considered poor science (because a single observed moment of a certain animal is unreliable data, especially to be applied to theory), Darwin peppers his text with first-hand accounts. He intentionally illustrates individualism within a species, an idea that suggests nuances in animal personality and character. In this manner, anthropomorphism reiterates evolution. A theory widely accepted as fact, the idea that human and animals have a linked ancestry allows us to employ human traits to animal behavior – and opened the door for us to view humans as animals (16).
Little Girls Lost in Books My favorite books as a little girl where Frog and Toad are Friends and Frog and Toad Together, both by Arnold Lobel. There are likely other texts in the series, but I had only these two. Frog is tall and humbly wise in striped pants and jacket. He embodies the old hippy that remembers life hides necessary lessons, but has forgotten how to find them. Toad is short, pot-bellied, in a checked jacket and brown pants (the entire color scheme of the books are dark and light green and dark and light brown. The muddy flowers and constant fog likely appealed to my budding sadness). The books each contain five short stories whose plots resemble elementary Seinfeld sketches. I knew Frog and Toad were not amphibians, nor representative of their species. They were, to expand the current analogy, Jerry and George (respectively), managing to get through life with a little help from friends.
Frog and Toad (as with fables, fairy tales, and all around good children’s literature) express the duality of being human – in books that never illustrate, nor mention, people. That is, the stories help children find and maintain the balance between good and evil, the classic struggle that affects every generation. Though we look for the moral in every story, as is always clearly demonstrated in Aesop’s fables, morality is not the issue. Rather, children’s literature embodies the assurance that every one of us can succeed. The prose “is future- oriented and guides the child…to relinquish his infantile dependency wishes and achieve a more satisfying independent existence (17).” The bedtime story is our first baby step toward growing up.
In my second grade journal, besides Frog and Toad, I mention books about pigs and cats as my current favorite library picks. I also wrote school research essays and haikus on hummingbirds and raccoons. It seemed animals were more a part of my learning life than humans.
Curious to know if animals really do exist in abundance in children’s literature, if animals really are heroes and teachers, I examined my own small collection of children’s books. I choose thirty-six texts, books that were more picture than story. Of the thirty-six, eighteen books portrayed only animals. Thirty-one of the books had at least as many animals as people and twenty-five actually illustrated more animals than people. Only one book out of my entire collection had no animals at all: Tug McGraw’s 1981 book Lumpy, where a talking baseball is the main character. Among my collection, birds, mice, and rabbits are most popular, closely followed by cats and dogs. As a child, these prevalent and domesticated animals were already part of my daily life. Because of this, I never hesitated to see and read about them in my books. Since Darwin not only proved that we are not alone, but we are family, it would be understandable that human attention towards animals would slowly decline. Presently, we tend to view animals as underdeveloped humans, diminishing their mythology and mystery. For children, it seems animals are quietly being replaced by Hogwarts School of Magic (where if the animals act human, it’s because of a spell) and digitally animated creatures named Pokemon.
Wanting to decide for myself if animals have lost their value in children’s tales, I spent some time in the children’s section of my local Barnes and Noble. As a child who preferred animals to people, I knew it was possible that my literature collection was slanted toward furs and claws. Admittedly, I hoped to find that not all animals had gone the way of the dodo. Having been a little girl without video games or the Cartoon Network, I did not want to discover that my past was already obsolete, replaced by wizards, Japanese animation, and otherworldly superheroes.
Equipped with my notebook and a cappuccino, I focused my inquiry on the largest display of picture books. There were fifty-five total. Twenty of these books had animal names in their titles (including Hiccupotamus which everyone knows is really just a hippo). Besides the common animals such as mouse, kitten, and bear, the titles also included pigeon, seahorse, and aardvark. An overwhelming majority of the book covers illustrated animals, from an armadillo and ants to a whale and a worm. Pigs were the most popular, being in the title of two books and pictured five times, while cows, horses, chickens, and dogs were all a close second. In fact, if Barnes and Noble’s picture book stock is a fair representation of current marketed children’s literature, it appears that animals still do rule the roost.
Why Animals Still Rule the Roost When we look at animals in literature we know, even as children, to ask: how are they like us? Different? Do they portray a certain kind of person, a certain attitude? We know our job as the reader is to relate. Though Frog and Toad wear suits and ride bicycles, I never needed these accessories to understand their human-ness. I did not linger long on identifying the kind of person each portrayed, but focused on how that kind of person fit into the real world. As a shy child, I eagerly engaged in the mundane quiet of Frog and Toad’s lives, in the somber cyclic stories, and, most importantly, reveled in two tiny reptilian creatures, powerless and lowly, having their own stories to tell.
Children’s stories often employ animals as teachers because it is generally believed that children naturally understand animals. They are assumed to be intuitively sensitive to wildlife because, while human, children are mentally undeveloped. Therefore, they are closer to nature than the well-educated, socially civilized adult. A child is more likely to heed advice from someone that is similar to them in mental thought and priorities, be it another child, a lion, or an ant. This is why threats employed by adults to control a child’s behavior often involve animals (including being thrown to the lions and being kidnapped by wolves). The adult transfers the responsibility of punishing bad behavior onto an animal (or mythical creature), thereby presenting himself as a protector rather than a disciplinarian (18). Size, aggression, and physical strength of the animal are usually exaggerated, reaffirming already culturally associated hearsay with that animal. Usually the animal is wild, always geographically local to add a realistic fear of potential encounter, but one that is necessarily unlikely. This is why the wolf will always be the sharp-toothed, growling man-eater of the woods, devouring grandmothers and pigs alike, and any attempt at making him sweet-natured will illustrate a wolf that is more man’s best friend than nocturnal beast.
When discussing animal roles in children’s literature, they are often divided into two groups: those that talk and those that do not. Talking animals offer the potentiality of what they may actually say to one another in reality, if only we could understand. Hugh Lofting’s stories about Doctor Dolittle employ this idea as their central theme. Learning the languages of animals from his parrot, Polynesia, Doctor Dolittle switches from being a people doctor to an animal one. However, he is not a typical veterinarian, prescribing glasses for a horse and asking a dog to sweep the floors. The idea of talking animals is not far-fetched, particularly for an animal lover like myself. As I write, my cat Bo is sitting on the kitchen table, meowing and peering in at me sit- ting at the dining room table. To me, it sounds like crying and I do not know if Bo is excited by the wind rustling the leaves outside the window, is sad because of the quiet coldness of the day, or absolutely bored, wishing I would drop my pen and play. Whatever it may be, I know Bo, a housecat, is talking to me (19). He jumps down and runs upstairs, having given up on communicating with me. In literature, Bo’s meows and purrs (and occasional growls) would be integrated into his human vocabulary, giving a greater sense that the idea of a talking cat is plausibly real (20). Furthermore, he would be illustrated as a domestic feline, a black and white tabby with round yellow eyes – though he may walk on his hind legs, as do Frog and Toad. The child reader instinctively understands the allegorical seriousness of the talking, strolling animal.
Even animals that have no spoken lines, and are never spoken about or even acknowledged by other creatures, possess an important role. These animals are the observers, passing judgment on the main characters and giving visual progression of the narrative (21). These animals are often small common critters, such as birds, mice, and insects. Beatrix Potter uses a robin to oversee the adventures of Peter Rabbit; Mercer Mayer employs a spider, cricket, and mouse throughout her books, sometimes as observers from the corner of the page and other times right in the heat of the event. Because they are animals that are prevalent and present in our daily lives, they feel natural and integral watching the plot unfold. These animals provide an outside source, within the confines of the pages, for the child to turn to for assurance that his understanding of a situation is appropriate.
A Concluding Note on A.A. Milne “Animals, talking animals, animals that are children or specially allied with children, creatures that can recreate, flatter, and repudiate the human wish that we are not alone – that is the backbone of children’s literature as we know it (22).” Animals are still the foundation of fairy tales and fables. Primary evidence of this can be found among Pooh, Piglet and Tigger fanatics. If you spot a golden-furred bear with a round, full tummy, you can be sure it’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Any tiger is a Tigger and every 100 Acre Woods enthusiast knows that a mole whistles when he talks. Christopher Robin and his animal friends are a national obsession.
Though A.A. Milne was British, his Winnie-the-Pooh is an American icon. Edward Bear (Pooh’s formal name) was a teddy bear given to Milne’s son, Christopher, on his first birthday. On a trip to the London Zoo, Christopher fell in love with a black bear cub named Winnie and Edward Bear became Winnie-ther-Pooh. (“Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?” asks Christopher to his father in We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin. “ ‘Ah, yes, now I do,’ (he) said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get (23).”)
We Are Introduced is the first story in which Milne writes about his son’s adventures with his plush animal toys. Milne published four such books in the 1920’s. In them, bears and bovines are the best of friends, rabbits don’t like visitors, donkeys are depressed, and tigers can bounced as high as kangaroos. Milne’s animal characters, more human than beast, teach us life lessons as we watch them learn (often the hard way). In 1982 and 1992, Benjamin Hoff brought these lessons into an adult language in his books The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. Using Pooh and Piglet to explain complex philosophy, it is most amazing that Hoff does this with animals generally meant to teach children. There have been other texts as well, in which subjects such as psychology and the new millennium are explored in the 100 Acre Wood. In 1966, Walt Disney brought Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures to film and has been doing so ever since (including a cartoon series). In 1993, Disney stated that the loveable bear is only second in popularity to Mickey Mouse (24).
Today, if one Googles Winnie-the-Pooh, over four million websites are linked to the bear and his friends. On one website, I was able to discover the 100 Acre Wood animal that I am most like (25). After twelve multiple- choice questions, it was determined that I am 47% Kanga, the kangaroo mother of Roo and good friend of Rabbit. She is introduced to the forest as a “strange animal” that is “Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals” that the other animals wish would go away and never come back (26). I smartly remind myself that 47% is not a majority. At first I find myself disappointed not to be closely linked to one of Milne’s creatures, but I then realize this ambiguity is why the stories are so beloved. The characters are developed in such a way that we relate to every one of them, making each one dear to our hearts. There is some Kanga in me, but also Rabbit, Eeyore, Piglet, Pooh and even Tigger too.
“And by and by Christopher Robin came to the end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop (27).”
It hasn’t.
1 Sax, Boria. The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of Animals. New York: Pace University Press, 1990, 2. 2 Martin, Laura C. Wildlife Folklore. Old Saybrook: The Globe Pequot Press, 1994, 11. 3 Clark, Anne. Beasts and Bawdy. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1975, 13. 4 Sax, The Frog King, 14. 5 Ibid., 27. Sax notes in her discussion of Aesop that “apart from a touch of humor, the beasts are emptied of all qualities irrelevant to their pedagogic function.” 6 Aesop’s Fables. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Inc., 1947, 14. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Sax, The Frog King, 66. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978, 27. Sale refers to Philip Aries and his 1962 text, Centuries of Childhood in his discussion of the history of childhood. This quote is from his text. 11 Sax, The Frog King, 66-68. 12 As Sax notes in The Frog King, “anthropomorphism must have created constant emotional strains in a society where chicken came from the barnyard rather than from the supermarket,” 77. 13 Ibid., 75. 14 Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Because the chapter of this book entitled “Darwin’s Anthropomorphism” was published as an article, all of the following Darwin quotations are from her 1996 article “Darwin’s Anthropomorphism: An Argument for Animal-Human Continuity” in Advances in Human Ecology 5, 33-83. Her copy of Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals is published by the University of Chicago Press, 1965. 15 Ibid., 33. 16 Sax, in The Frog King, remarks that Darwin’s theory “made the boundary between humanity and animals even more fluid, thus making it easier to demote large groups from human status,” 83. 17 Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, 11. 18 Porter, J.R. and W.M.S. Russel, eds. Animals in Folklore. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978, 35. 19 A short while later, I headed upstairs. Bo had found his brother, Avery, on the bed. The two were wrestling. It seems Bo had been expressing boredom and was now, with a friend, feeling aggressively happy. 20 Sale, Fairy Tales and After, 93. 21 Ibid., 82. 22 Ibid., 98. 23 Milne, A.A. The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1994, 1-2. 24