ABSTRACT
Beatrix Potter’s Tales and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, like Kipling’s Mowgli stories, concern a separate animal ‘world’ in a special space. Their settings, however, are not the colonial space of the Jungle, or Seton’s frontier world, but the English countryside. Here they create an area that critics have called ‘Arcadian’ or ‘idyllic’, inhabited by small animals, without the emphasis on action and violence of Kipling and Seton’s wild nature. It is hard to imagine an effective Scout Patrol in which the participants are called Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger, or even Peter Rabbit and friends. Potter’s fox, Mr Tod, is as carnivorous as Kipling and Seton’s wolves, but he is definitely not to be admired. To some extent, Potter and Grahame represent a feminine and domestic take on the natural world, as opposed to the strenuous masculinism of Kipling. But, as we will see, the domestic is not without its dangers in Potter’s tales, and Grahame’s world has a misogynistic aspect. Both Potter and Grahame hark back to earlier literature. Potter has links with Trimmer, Barbauld and the papillonades; Grahame’s text is full of allusions to the Romantic poets, and deploys the romanticised view of nature that can be found in Kingsley and Gatty. Potter’s illustrations show the attention to natural historical detail of Gatty, and her texts blend the realism of Trimmer with the fantastic of the papillonades. Grahame has no scientific pretensions, though his work is grounded in the knowledge of a particular landscape. As in the papillonades, their animals engage in human activities, and sometimes wear clothes.
