The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast

Abstract

The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast Michael Mendelson (bio) All readers or listeners know that there are really two stories in The Wind in the Willows: that of the madcap, adventurous Toad the Gaol-breaker; and that of friendship, home life, and the simple joys of "messing about in boats," the story of Mole, Rat, and Badger. The story of Toad-of-the-Highways is centrifugal, an outgoing, Odyssean song of the open road; the other is centripetal, a riverbank idyll of domestic, pastoral pleasure. And because the values of the dusty road and the riverbank seem so opposed, readers naturally tend to align themselves with one of these stories at the expense of the other. Roger Sale, for example, has a distinct predilection for the homely adventures of the River Bank; for him, the book as a whole is "'about' coziness," while Toad belongs "over to one side" (174, 185). William W. Robson also finds the finest insights in the friendship of Rat and Mole, with the Toad chapters playing "a scherzo in the symphony" of quiet domestic life (98). And Humphrey Carpenter, though he grants that Toad "has a certain energy," maintains that the idiom of adventure was not the author's forte and that Toad lies outside the "heart of Grahame's Arcadian dream" (Gardens 154, 161). Such priorities were not, of course, shared by the work's first audience, Alistair Grahame, who responded enthusiastically to his father's original stories in which "Toad played the principal part" (Carpenter and Prichard, Oxford Companion 573).1 Most other child readers remain devoted to the Toad, as we may deduce from adaptations of Grahame's story: A. A. Milne's unifocal dramatization of the story in "Toad of Toad Hall"; the 1949 Disney film, which claims that for children Toad is "the most fabulous character in English literature"; and more recently, the Nederlander Theater's production, promoted with buttons that read "I Toad You So."2 This split between child and adult sensibility, between what Geraldine Poss calls the mock-heroic and arcadian impulses within the text, has itself been the focus of considerable criticism.3 [End Page 127] Peter Green was perhaps the first to refer to the "double theme" of the book (Grahame 202), while Carpenter asserts that "there are really two separate books" (Gardens 229n). Peter Hunt has taken this position to its logical end, arguing that "if there are two texts in The Wind in the Willows," they are structurally autonomous: "Mole's serious story once resolved, we can go on to Toad's more farcical one" (116).4 Criticism, then, has tended to separate the two stories, as if the contrasting impulses that motivate the narrative action operated independently. I will argue, however, that the clash between two such natural instincts as domesticity and romantic enthusiasm generates the special richness of the text as a whole. Instead of separating the two stories and devaluing one, I examine how Grahame not only juxtaposes but interlaces his two different plots and values. The question of narrative structure becomes all the more provocative when we remember that the oscillation between the two stories resulted from careful engineering. Peter Green has argued plausibly that Grahame composed the Toad sequence first, the episodes of the River Bank and the Wild Wood second, and the two set pieces, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All," last (Beyond the Wild Wood, chap. 11). In the final 1908 copy, however, Grahame steadily alternated between the stories of the open road and those of the woodlands, an alternation that I will argue functions as a narrative dialectic between the "contrary states" of individualistic hedonism and communal affection.5 As the plot progresses, Grahame advances ever more subtle variations of this dialectical argument. It is my intention, then, to explore Grahame's dialectic by paying close attention to the plotting of the work (the narrative order in which the simple chronology of the two stories is rearranged) and especially to the relation between adjoining chapters and groups of chapters.6 This method should clarify embedded contrasts and parallels that require the reader to activate their meaning by...