Peter Rabbit Research Articles

Celebrate 40,000 Years of American Art

I chose rabbits as an art icon because there is a cultural universality to them throughout the world. Standing rabbits not only appear in petroglyphs in the Americas, (these are from the Peterborough Site in Toronto, Canada), but in petrogylphs around the world as well. Japanese wood block prints, children's books (including those about Peter Rabbit), literature (for example, Richard Adam's novel, Watership Down, New York: Avon, 1972), the Easter Bunny, movies, pop culture images, and contemporary art such as Jeff Koons's stainless steel balloon rabbit and Barry Flannagan's bronze standing rabbits all give significance to my choice of art iconography. In educational institutions in this country, reference is often made to the age of America as being two hundred years or five hundred years, but because we still live under the aegis of colonial thinking, its never taken into consideration that some of the world's greatest cultures and cities were here in the Americas for thousands of years—and are still here. This etching is my succinct comment on colonial thinking. [End Page 154]

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

"Why is a Raven like a Writing-Desk?": The Play of Letters in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books

"Why is a Raven like a Writing-Desk?":The Play of Letters in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books Jan Susina (bio) "I think, I should understand that better," Alice said very politely, "if I had it written down: but I can'n't quite follow it as you say it." (Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 81) Although, strictly speaking, neither Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) nor Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is an epistolary novel, letters and references to letter writing appear frequently in both. Like Beatrix Potter's famous illustrated letter to Noel Moore that eventually became The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1863)—the handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript that he presented to Alice Liddell on November 26, 1864, and later revised to become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)—is nothing more than an elaborately illustrated letter. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was created by a man obsessed with the letters of the alphabet and the process of letter writing. Carroll once wrote in a letter to Marion Terry that "Life seems to go in letter writing, and I'm beginning to think that the proper definition of 'Man' is 'an animal who writes letters'" (Letters II, 663). As a successful writer of children's books, Carroll was ultimately able to resign his mathematical lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1881 to become, literally, a man of letters. It is worth recalling that "Lewis Carroll" is really just a literary construct, a clever reordering of his proper name, "Charles Lutwidge Dodgson." Carroll created this pseudonym by Latinizing his first and middle names and reversing their order. In 1853, he provided Edmund Yates, the editor of The Train, with two other possible pseudonyms based on anagrams of the letters in "Charles Lutwidge": "Edgar Cuthwellis" and "Edgar U.C. Westhill." Just as Carroll's letters and "Register of Letters" were the basis for the composition of his Diaries, Carroll's letters and his letter writing, I submit, influenced the composition of the Alice books. I will then argue in the second half of this essay that a possible solution to the famous riddle posed by the Mad Hatter can be found both in Carroll's playful rearrangement of letters and in his profound interest in letters and letter writing. Click for larger view View full resolution A rebus letter to Georgina Watson Carroll the Letter Writer Carroll was a systematic record-keeper. As a young man, he devised a "Register of Letters," which included a short summary of each letter along with its date and an entry number. He began his "Register" in 1861 and maintained it for the following thirty-seven years, ultimately recording that he'd written 98,721 letters (Collingwood 266). Although his complete "Register of Letters" has not survived, Carroll's nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood—whose biography of his uncle is appropriately titled The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898)—claims that it consisted of several volumes. While the "Register" has vanished, many of Carroll's letters have survived. Early editions of Carroll's letters include Collingwood's Life and Letters (1898), which reproduces 117 letters, and Evelyn M. Hatch's A Selection from the Letters [End Page 15] of Lewis Carroll to His Child-friends (1933) with 170 letters. Morton Cohen's more recent two-volume edition of The Letters of Lewis Carroll (1978), now the standard edition of Carroll's letters, is nearly 1200 pages and contains only a selection of 1350 letters from the 4000 that Cohen located. Cohen argues that Carroll was "one of the world's most prolific letter-writers" and estimates that Carroll wrote at least two thousand letters a year, around six a day (xvi). In a letter to Christina Rossetti, Carroll mentions that it was the thirteenth letter he has written that day and apologizes for its brevity (Letters I, 465). One of his diary entries mentions "having done a huge quantity of letter writing, and worked off some arrears that have been standing over some years" (Diaries II, 395). Elsewhere in his diary, he writes, "Wrote letters all morning. Other writing is falling into the...

The Psychological Uses of Ruthlessness in a Children's Fantasy Tale: Beatrix Potter and The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is one of the top best-selling children's books of all time. In an attempt to account for its staggering success, this paper examines the dynamic processes through which meaning shapes itself out of fictional constructs. A study of Potter's tale presents insights into the psychic logic of the author's intentions and her uses of narrative to give order through form to desire. Drawing on the work of Freud, Brooks and Winnicott, concepts such as transference, masterplot and wish fulfilment are considered as ways of illuminating the symptomatic uses of Peter for Potter. Arguably, the little hero's enactments of ruthlessness, 'mouth love' and defiance function as symbolic containing devices through which the author expresses her capacity for self-knowledge. The story's symbolization of greed serves not only as a displacement of the psychic reality of hunger felt by a gifted, rigidly controlled Victorian female author, but equally important, as a transitional space for child readers through time to imagine the capacity to go to extreme limits in terms of satisfying psychic spaces left empty and angry by want.

The heterogeneity of discourse genres: Implications for development

In contrast to traditional views of genre as relatively homogeneous and rule‐ordered forms, situated theories of communication conceptualize discourse genres as powerful and durable resources that are fully situated in the complexities of communicative interactions. From this perspective, discourse genres must be understood within complex and dynamic cultural practices. In this article we focus on such generic practices by tracing the pervasive heterogeneity and the distributed nature of discourse genres‐in‐use. We explore three examples from our research: a father and his two daughters playing Cindy Magic—a family‐created, verbal game; a family's engagement with their two‐year‐old's creative retellings of the tale of Peter Rabbit; and a woman with aphasia playing a barrier game in a research setting with her teenage son. These analyses point to ways that histories of generic practices are sedimented in and distributed across diverse resources, and to the ways that participants weave these traces into specific patterns. It is the pervasive heterogeneity of situated interactions, we argue, that is the ground of the ongoing development of this distributed communicative competence—the development of persons, resources, and practices.

Inside picture books

Mention a name from a beloved childhood picture book--Madeline, Corduroy, Peter Rabbit, Max and his wild things--and most adults can recollect a bright image, fragments of a story, the timbre of a certain voice, the sensation of being held, and best of all being together with someone and enveloped in fantasy. Why do picture book images shown to us as young children linger in our minds? How do picture books shape our lives early on and even later into adulthood? This book takes up such questions. It explores the profound impact of the experience of to children. Ellen Handler Spitz reveals how classic picture books transmit psychological wisdom, convey moral lessons, shape tastes, and implant subtle prejudices. Each chapter of the book discusses well-known children's books--Goodnight Moon, Babar, Little Black Sambo, to name a few--that deal with a theme of importance to young children. These include bedtime, separation, loss, and death; curiosity, disobedience, and punishment; and identity and self-acceptance. Focusing on the relationship between a child and an adult reader, Spitz explains the notion of conversational reading and emphasizes the mutual benefits of dialogue and intimacy. This book not only gives parents, grandparents, teachers, therapists, and scholars a new understanding of the meaning of picture books, it also empowers adults to interpret and choose future cultural experiences for their children.

Bamboozled by Botany, Beatrix Bypasses Bigoted Biology, Begins Babying Bountiful Bunnies: OR Beatrix Potter [1866-1943] as a Mycologist: The Period before Peter Rabbit and Friends

Bamboozled by Botany, Beatrix Bypasses Bigoted Biology, Begins Babying Bountiful Bunnies: OR Beatrix Potter [1866-1943] as a Mycologist: The Period before Peter Rabbit and Friends

Undifferentiated Bunnies: Setting Psychic Boundaries in the Animal Stories of Beatrix Potter, Jack London, and Ernest Seton

UNDIFFERENTIATED BUNNIES: SETTING PSYCHIC BOUNDARIES IN THE ANIMAL STORIES OF BEATRIX POTTER, JACK LONDON, AND ERNEST SETON W.C. HARRIS The Johns Hopkins University In his foreword to Famous Animal Stories (1932), Ernest Thompson Seton enumerates the "four well-marked types of Animal Story": the myth, the fable, the animal fairy tale, and the "literally true" animal story (v). But when Seton defines these "types," he threatens die very distinctions he has made. What, for instance, is die difference between a fable, in which animals are "human beings going around in Animal forms," and an animal fairy tale, in which an animal has "me mind of a human being"? How can one distinguish between animals who "think and talk like human beings, but live tiieir lives somewhat like Animals" and animals who "perceive, reason, and suffer as a man would do, although otherwise living the life of an Animal"? In both cases there seems to be no substantive and thus no categorical difference. What makes Seton's categories so fragile is die problematic notion of distinction, or (as Seton puts it) the "well-marked." The problem is not just setting boundaries tiiat cannot be crossed and re-drawn, but drawing such lines in die first place. The instability of Seton's categorical distinctions leads one to question the mechanics of differentiation, if not the very feasibility of making such distinctions. The problem of the "well-marked" is especially prominent in one of Seton's own animal stories, "Wully, the Story of a Yaller Dog" (1898). As the story of a tame animal gone wild, "Wully" problematizes one obvious distinction: the "well-marked" line tiiat differentiates man and beast, savage and civilized. But more is at stake than Seton's Darwinist platitude that "we and die beasts are kin" (Famous 11). The force of Seton's identifying with "the beasts" rests upon a distinction's having been made in the first place: the discrimination of himself as not a beast. Victorian Review 23.1 (Summer 1997) W.C.HARRIS63 Before one can identify with anyone or anything, he must first differentiate himself. Otherwise there is no "I" to do the identifying. Even if we can agree that identification presupposes the drawing of some distinction, itis far from clear, in the following animal stories, how one arrives at the first step of differentiating the self from everything else, how one distinguishes any 'T' at all. If Seton does not explicitly state that animal stories are about psychic differentiation, such a statement is implicit in his own efforts both to differentiate between animal story subgenres and to explain the psychological value of some of those stories. Seton praises the "literally true" animal story because it "aims to convey an accurate idea of the Animal's life and behavior, its mental processes, its trials and its methods of meeting each successive stress, in the great struggle that all take part in . . ." (Famous v). "Literally true" animal stories like Seton's own "Wully" compensate for what he views as the deficiency of the animal fairy tale — that is, its having "little relation to life, and no value whatsoever*as psychology" (v). Animal stories that are of "value" have a "relation to life," which for Seton is synonymous with being "of use as psychology." The phrase "relation to life" does not seem to refer simply to human life — in the obvious sense that animal stories, like works of art in general, are held to be about, or say something about, their creators. The "literally true" animal story has a "relation to life" for the same reason it is "of use as psychology": the animal's struggle is not the struggle of the human species but of the psyche (which is imagined as interspecies). "Wully" is not alone in its concern with the mechanics of self-differentiation. Both Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) depict boundary-marking as a means of differentiating, not man and beast, not species, but selves. A comparison of these three texts suggests that animal stories are psychological because they are·about psychic differentiation, about telling "out there" from "in...

A Wilderness Inside: Domestic Space in the Work of Beatrix Potter

A Wildness Inside: Domestic Space in the Work of Beatrix Potter M. Daphne Kutzer (bio) The so-called “little books” of Beatrix Potter are ironic on any number of counts. First, although they are physically small, their moral dimensions are quite large. Far from being simple tales of runaway bunnies and kittens, they are miniature novels of emotional weight and depth. Their miniature size (most were published in the familiar 10 x 14 cm size) is deceptive. The small size suggests small readers, but complexities of vocabulary and syntax suggest a more adult audience was intended to be part of the readership as well. And although the small size may seem appropriate to a child reader, any small child knows that larger formats are easier for less-coordinated hands to manipulate. The miniature size appeals more to the adult idea of what a child’s book should look like, rather than the child’s own ideas. The illustrations themselves provide further ironies: not only do they often make ironic comments on the text itself, but the very fact that quiet pastels illustrate stories of greed and near-death is ironic. But perhaps the greatest irony in the books can be found in Potter’s use of domestic space. In book after book there is at the very least an ambiguous tension regarding the pleasures of home, and at times home itself becomes as perilous as the wilderness. Wildness and wilderness threaten to invade and take over (as in the tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse), or they threaten to burst out of seemingly safe domestic spaces (as in Peter Rabbit). In some ways we ought not be surprised by Potter’s ambiguous feelings regarding domestic spaces. Even as sympathetic a biographer as Lane finds herself using such phrases as “unnaturally lonely” (18) to describe the young Potter and “silence and blankness” (37) to describe Potter’s early adulthood. Potter’s life was constrained by daughterly duty to an extent extreme even by late Victorian standards, and some of Potter’s [End Page 204] letters suggest that she herself was not unaware of—and was unhappy with—the nature of her family life. In a letter to Norman Warne, apologizing for her inability to visit both him and his mother, she writes, “I hardly ever go out, and my mother is so exacting I had not enough spirit to say anything about it. I have felt vexed with myself since, but I did not know what to do. It does wear a person out” (qtd. in Linder 151). She was thirty-six at the time. Her books, however, gave her not only the physical means of escape—royalties being used to purchase Hill Top and some nominal freedom from family pressures—but also as a means of expressing, as much as she was able to express, her own rebellious feelings. Her imaginative working-out of this rebelliousness generally took the form of the portrayal of domestic space as dangerous and threatening, as can be seen in a number of her works. Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908), for example, for all its delightful humor of bonneted and shawled ducks, is a rather dour look at the difficulties of motherhood and domestic life. Jemima is a barnyard duck, kept for her ability to lay eggs. But the farmer’s wife does not permit her to sit on and hatch her own eggs, for she is not to be trusted to brood them correctly, as even her sister-in-law acknowledges. Jemima has enough motherly instinct and enough wild duck left in her, however, to want to find her own secret spot and raise her ducklings herself. The conflict between her wild and her domestic sides leads to nothing but grief for Jemima, and her search for a safe domestic space leads only to death. In this book, the illustrations are the source of most of the ironic commentary, although the text itself is a small masterpiece of understated irony. In an early illustration in the farmyard, we see that Jemima has attempted to hide her eggs under some rhubarb leaves, but that the farmer’s son has found and collected them while his mother looks on...

Beatrix Potter: An annotated bibliography

Beatrix Potter is best remembered as the creator of the notoriously naughty bunny, Peter Rabbit. Peter and his circle of friends grace the pages of the little books, so called because they measure less than six inches tall. These children's classics have been delighting readers since The Tale of Peter Rabbit was first published in 1901. During Potter's lifetime the little books were read in the United Kingdom, America, and Canada. Foreign language translations of her work introduced her characters to children of other nations. Note the 1987 publishing event, the “new editions from the original watercolors,” which Warne used to great advantage! A flurry of books accompanied this event, by biographer Judy Taylor plus reprints (e.g., Linden). Today sales of the little books show no sign of abating. An industry of Peter Rabbit spinoff products has existed for almost as long as Peter has. Toys, games, videos, and collectibles of the Potter characters can be found on store shelves worldwide.

An introduction to children's literature

Children's literature is a remarkable area of writing and a growing area of study. Its characters - Pooh Bear, the Wizard of Oz, the Famous Five, Peter Rabbit - are part of most people's psyche and have strong links to basic myth and archetypes. They arouse strong feelings, as demonstrated by recent debates over political correctness. An Introduction to Children's Literature combines a history of writing for children with an assessment of its literary, sociological, and pedagogical roles. Fundamentally a history of British children's literature, Hunt identifies fantasy, nostalgia, nature images, a sense of place of territory, testing and incitation, and warmth and security as all key characteristics of children's literature.

Peter rabbit hops into the twenty-first century

Adults have tried to identify and to seek complex explanations for Potter's success. She explained it simply: “It is much more satisfactory to address a real live child. I often think that was the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit; it was written to a child—not made to order” (Lane, 1976, p. 183). She felt the more spontaneous the pleasure, the better the result.

Early childhood mathematics

Early childhood mathematics

Emotional Tone in Peter Rabbit before and after Simplification

A revised version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in 1987 by Ladybird press with simplified text and alteration of the illustrations of the 1902 original. Revisions of two other of the Beatrix Potter stories were subsequently published. By applying a computer system that detects words with connotative meaning scores and applying mathematical models to the stories it was possible to make an objective comparison of the emotional tone patterns in the original and the revised versions. As would be expected, the initial editions of the three stories were quite different from each other. The emotional tone pattern of Peter Rabbit and one of the other stories was shown to have been altered considerably by the simplification of text, which lends objective support to the outcry in the popular press against these changes.

The Adventures of Peter Rabbit Three Ring Circus: Imagination in Action

The Adventures of Peter Rabbit Three Ring Circus: Imagination in Action

Updike's Scarlet Letter Trilogy: Recasting an American Myth

UPDIKE'S SCARLET LETTER TRILOGY: RECASTING AN AMERICAN MYTH James A. Schiff University of Cincinnati Though many readers are aware of how John Updike has chronicled America of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in his Rabbit tetralogy, few have paid close attention to his other multivolume work concerning America (and a canonical American text), namely The Scarlet Letter trilogy. In 1975 Updike published A Month of Sundays , a novel in diary form in which a spiritually tormented and adulterous minister from Massachusetts is ordered to an Arizona motel for ministers-gone-astray; there he is urged to wrestle with his perverse soul and rub out his "stain."1 Updike later referred to that novel as "Dimmesdale's version" of The Scarlet Letter.2 In 1986 Updike published Roger's Version, an unreliable first-person narrative in which a Harvard professor, a crusty old doctor of divinity named Roger, manipulates and feeds upon the life of a youthful, pious computer science graduate student named Dale. Most recently, in 1988, Updike published the epistolary S., in which an angry North Shore housewife , with a strong predilection for Vitamin A, rebels against her Puritan heritage and patriarchal society by traveling to a desert ashram in Arizona. In these three novels, each told from the perspective of one of Hawthorne's three protagonists, Updike has expanded, updated , satirized, and rewritten Hawthorne's text. That such a bold and intriguing project should go largely unrecognized by the critical community is surprising.3 Though these novels, with the notable exception of Roger's Version, are lighter fare and less substantial than the best of Updike (the Rabbit books, The Centaur, The Coup), the project is significant. Any reconsideration of a canonical text by a major literary figure should warrant attention , particularly in light of the contemporary interest in intertextuality . In addition, the project is significant in that it reveals a more experimental and postmodern Updike, one who shares Nabokov's sense of word play and games. Two questions persist in regard to Updike's project: Why should a prominent novelist explicitly rewrite a story which has already been told so successfully? And why Hawthorne? In answer to the former, Updike has long relied upon the successful work of previous writers.4 His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1958), was a futuristic retelling of the story of St. Stephen. Rabbit, Run (1960) sprang from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Arthurian grail legend, and Peter Rabbit. 18James A. Schiff The Centaur (1963) updated and interlaced a variety of Greek myths, so many in fact that Updike compiled a mythological index as an appendix. The mythic mode, in which a writer appropriates and retells an earlier story or tale which has achieved mythic dimensions, has long been salient in Updike's fiction, though critics have failed to recognize its importance except in The Centaur. And according to Updike, the mythic mode is attractive not only because it offers "a counterpoint of ideality to the drab real level" and provides "an excuse for a number of jokes," but because it demonstrates the "sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or longings in our minds."5 In answer to the latter question—why Hawthorne?—one discovers in Hawthorne many of the same themes and conflicts inherent in Updike's own writing: the conflict between matter and spirit; a fascination with community and communal experiments; the anxiety and fear of moral damnation; the relationship between sex and religion ; an interest in what Tony Tanner calls the "unstable triangularity of adultery" and its effect upon a community; and the use of ambivalent symbolism.6 The link between the two writers is strengthened by the fact that both have lived most of their lives on the same approximate patch of ground near Boston: Hawthorne in Salem and Concord, and Updike in Ipswich, Georgetown, and Beverly Farms. Hawthorne has become more than just a literary antecedent for Updike; he is a figure embedded in the history and myth of Updike's chosen community, a writer whose town Updike must pass every time he goes to and from Boston.7 Yet in appropriating Hawthorne's text, Updike...

The Cult of Peter Rabbit: A Barthesian Analysis

The Cult of Peter Rabbit: A Barthesian Analysis

“But They're Good for You!”...The World of Horticulture as Brought to You by Popeye, Peter Rabbit, and Your Mother

“But They're Good for You!”...The World of Horticulture as Brought to You by Popeye, Peter Rabbit, and Your Mother

Adult Agoraphobia and Childhood Separation Anxiety: Using Children’s Literature to Understand the Link

Separation-anxiety stories are frequent in children's literature and have eight characteristic elements. Peter Rabbit is used as an early and very simple example. A case study follows which illustrates the fear of separating from the family in an adult agoraphobic. The Wizard of Oz is presented as a more expanded version of a separation-anxiety story. A case study follows which illustrates a woman's difficulty with maturity and separation. A review of the literature is made in which studies are cited which indicate a history of childhood-separation problems in adult agoraphobics. Studies also show that panic disorder in these patients is often precipitated by losses and separations. Studies also show that agoraphobics may have poor problem-solving skills. Children's stories may serve as a guide to children toward mastery of separation fear. A case study follows of a man who developed a panic disorder while watching E.T. E.T. is presented as a separation-anxiety story for the late 1900s. The paper concludes with a brief review of children's separation-anxiety stories and how they reflect broad cultural changes.

A Different Kind of Turf Battle

Disconcerting news of a bizarre new turf battle has come in from the United Kingdom. American physical therapists are no strangers to turf battles over professional prerogatives, but I have never heard of a case like this one. At the University of East Anglia, plans for new facilities for physiotherapy and occupational therapy are being jeopardized by previous claims to the building site, an abandoned golf course. Apparently, a group of squatters have had long-term residency on the site. To make matters worse, there is documented evidence that the squatters are capable of fierce and savage behavior; in fact, they spend most of their time fighting and killing each other. Although it may be hard to believe, it appears that in the land of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit, there is a bunny equivalent to the Manson family. Ensconced on the old golf course is a vast rabbit warren.…