To begin at the beginning, the best place to start reading a story is its title. When we read the title The Tale of Peter Rabbit, we might assume it means nothing much more than The Story of Peter Rabbit. If so, the curious among us might wonder why Beatrix Potter did not simply use that as her title. But take a moment to say the title aloud. What do you notice? Concentrate on the sounds. What you should hear (allowing for slight discrepancies depending on what kind of accent you have) is this: The teil of Peter Rabbit. The word pronounced as teil (as transcribed into phonetic script) can be written in two different ways, with two different meanings: a tale is a story, while a tail is what a rabbit has on the end of its body. This tale then is not just a story, it is a homonym: a word that has the same sound as another, but a different meaning. When a homonym is used for humorous effect, we call it a pun. As anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with British humour will know, puns are a form of wordplay we Brits very much enjoy. Potter gave her story the title she did for a good reason: it contains a pun on the words tail and tale. If the title had been The Story of Peter Rabbit, it would not have been so interesting. This exact same use of a pun on tale/tail can be found in the title of chapter three of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale. Alice, the Mouse and various other animals are soaking wet after getting out of the pool of tears. To help everyone dry off, the Mouse volunteers to tell a very dry (i.e. academic and boring) tale (= story).
Having dwelt on the title quite long enough for one thesis, let us move on. What this rather drawn-out analysis of Potter's title should alert us to is her intention to insert a dry sense of humour into the story. The next point that needs to be made is that Potter clearly wants us to read the words on the page in conjunction with the illustrations that go with them. The pictures are not there as decoration, to prettify the story, but are to be read as an integral part of the tale. They complement the words, giving the reader visual clues as to the real meaning behind the words printed on the page. Let us look at an example.
The first picture we see is of a family of rabbits. The mother rabbit is sitting with her tail towards the reader. Her children are hiding under the roots of a tree; three of them are poking their faces out. They are all obediently lined up behind their mother, out of harm's way. However, one small rabbit has stuck his head under the tree, leaving his rear end to face the reader, with his tail (the rabbit's, not the reader's!) up in the air. This is clearly the tail of Peter Rabbit. Here we have the visual representation of the pun in the story's title. Potter is quite literally pushing the pun into our faces. The visual joke of Peter showing us his tail also serves as a clue to his character. Potter is telling us not only what kind of character he is, but also indirectly what sort of story he will get himself involved in. Peter is naughty (no good little rabbit would dare stick its bottom in the air in quite so provocative a way!); he is disobedient (he is not following the family line); he is gormless (he has buried his head in the sand, leaving himself vulnerable to attack). And sure enough, the story that unfolds will bear out all these points. Peter is told by his mother not to go into Mr. McGregor's because it is dangerous; he ignores her advice, and through his wanton disobedience puts his life in danger.
Before moving on, let us return to the tree the rabbits are sheltering under. Now, given Potter's dry sense of humour, what sort of tree do you think the rabbits will be living under? As we saw in the title, Potter has a predilection for puns. Think of all the many kinds of tree you might find in a British wood: oak, beech, elm, horse chestnut, and fir. As before, read the words aloud. Listen carefully for any possible puns. If the story were about a tree near the sea, it might well have been a beech (beach) that Potter chose. But this is a story about rabbits, and so really there is only one possible choice: a fir tree. Why? What do rabbits have to keep them warm? Fur, of course! Naturally, the tree they seek to protect them will be a fir (fur) tree. Interestingly, the house of the March Hare (who might be thought of as a literary cousin, or perhaps uncle, of Peter's) is described as having a roof of fur (see the end of chapter 6 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
At last we come to the text itself, the words on the page: "Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree."2 At the risk of overstating my case, and perhaps even boring my readers, I would like to draw attention in passing to some further similarities between Peter's tale and Alice's. At the start and the end of her story Alice is on a bank (while Peter is in one). Alice is with her sister, and she is bored. Peter is with his sisters, and he is bored, too (why else would he be sticking his bottom in the air?). And of course there are rabbit-holes in both. The first sentence of any story must draw the reader in. It must arouse our curiosity. If it does not succeed in this, we will stop reading and find something more interesting to do. The two main ways of maintaining readers' interest are mystery and suspense (as David Lodge explains in his book The Art of Fiction3). What mystery and suspense can we find in this innocuous-sounding opening? While it might appear to some a laboured point, I would argue the very names of the four little rabbits are a mystery of sorts: why do three of them have the sort of silly names we usually reserve for our pets, while one has a very normal (even Biblical) name?
Peter is a boy's name, and Potter uses the male third person singular pronoun 'he' in the line "He ate some lettuces" so we are in no doubt as to Peter's gender. His three siblings however are apparently asexual. Their names are neither clearly male nor female, (though we can guess they are more likely to be the latter). Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail appear only twice in the story, and on both occasions they are together as a group. In the two sentences in which they make an appearance, Potter does not use personal pronouns to refer to them individually, and simply repeats their names ("Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail, who were good little bunnies, went down the lane" and "Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper").
This discrepancy between Peter and the other three is intriguing. He is clearly a boy and is even more clearly the star of the show. His name appears 23 times in the story, and the narrative point of view is always Peter's. Wherever he goes, the story follows. His siblings are in fact female, but this is something we only find out later in other Peter Rabbit stories. In "The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies" we learn that Benjamin Bunny has married Flopsy and they have a large family; in "The Tale of Mr. Tod" we learn that Cottontail has lost her hyphen, married a black rabbit, and gone to live on the hill. Mopsy remains a bit of an enigma even at the very end.
To return to the question of suspense and mystery: why does Potter invest so much energy in Peter but virtually ignore his sisters? Why this sexual discrimination? Is it reading too much to see a resemblance between the author's name and the hero's? Potter, Peter; Peter, Potter? Peter is Potter's hero in perhaps more ways than one. An alter ego? It is dangerous to try and read too much into any story, but it is tempting, nonetheless!
What we can say without fear of getting carried away is this: Peter has a human name, while his sisters have the sort of names we give our pets (i.e. animal names). Peter is clearly delineated, while his sisters have little more than a walk-on part. Their only function in the plot is to act as a contrast to their brother: while he is naughty, disobedient and acts on his own in a reckless way, his sisters are well behaved, obedient and act as a group. The sexual stereotyping is there for all to see, and it is carried over into the illustrations: Peter, the boy, wears blue, while the girls wear pink. Peter's mother, a widow, is forced to adopt the traditional male role of breadwinner (she goes off to the baker's!), and so she too wears blue.
While we are on the subject of names, it might be worth considering the names of Peter's sisters and what connotations these names conjure up in our minds. Flopsy contains the word 'flop', which means (1) to sway about heavily (2) to move in an ungainly way (3) to sit, kneel, lie, or fall awkwardly or suddenly (4) to fail, collapse (5) to sleep (6) to make a dull sound as of a soft body landing. None of these meanings inspires quite the same confidence in us that the Biblical Peter does (Peter being the rock of Jesus). Mopsy is hardly any better. A mop is a bundle of cotton fastened to the end of a stick, used for cleaning floors. If we were to read too much into their names, we might mistakenly assume that while Peter is as hard as a rock, dependable and resolute, his two sisters are heavy, clumsy, awkward, ponderous, and dull, only good for cleaning. This is another example of Potter's dry sense of humour. The names she gives her rabbits are meant ironically: Peter is a big girl's blouse; far from being a rock his mother and sisters can depend on, he is a scatterbrain whose stupidity is only matched by his readiness to dissolve into tears. Indeed it is Peter who does the only flopping to be found in the story, ("he flopped down on the nice soft sand on the floor of the rabbit-hole"). Before leaving the subject, let us finally look at the name of the antagonist, the Scottish Mr. McGregor. What is the significance (if any) of giving him a Scottish name? Assuming Peter is an English rabbit, it would make sense to have his nemesis as a Scot. Perhaps it is significant that Peter makes inroads into a Scotsman's garden (= Scottish territory) before being driven back. In the later Peter Rabbit stories, in particular The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, further incursions are made by the English into Scottish land, and treasures stolen. This being a children's story, the treasures are l ettuces, and not North Sea oil. This nationalistic element of the story finds an echo in Peter's eating some French beans. Given the bad feeling that has existed between our two countries for centuries, it should come as no surprise that the French beans make Peter feel rather sick!
The need to read the illustrations in conjunction with the text has been mentioned already. It is particularly pertinent to remember this when we consider the characterization of the rabbits. The first picture we have of the family shows them in a wood sitting beneath a fir-tree, with nothing but their fur to keep them warm. They are shown in their natural environment, with the background painted in. The next picture shows Mrs. Rabbit telling her children to take care not to go into Mr. McGregor's garden. The rabbits are painted against a white background, cut off from their natural environment. From being normal rabbits living in the wild, they have suddenly become anthropomorphic rabbits, standing on their hind legs, wearing clothes, and speaking English. But although they have suddenly assumed human characteristics, they have not lost their 'rabbitness' entirely; presumably they still taste of rabbit otherwise it is unlikely Mrs. McGregor would even contemplate putting one of their family in a pie. The anthropomorphic rabbit is still evidently a rabbit, something to be chased and killed by the humans it comes into contact with (see The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies). One of the ironies of Peter Rabbit is that it is precisely his aping of human behaviour that so nearly spells his doom. When he is being chased by Mr. McGregor, he cannot run as fast as he might because he has adopted the human upright pose of running on two feet instead of four. In addition, he is wearing shoes which further slow him down. It is only once he has lost his shoes and his coat that he can return to his natural four-legged state. Unhindered by his clothes, he is able to outrun the elderly white-bearded McGregor. In their initial encounter there is a further irony in that the four-legged rabbit Peter is on his hind legs, while the two-legged McGregor is on all fours, as he plants some young cabbages on his hands and knees. They have unwittingly adopted the other's natural pose!
The human behaviour Peter adopts is shared by his mother, and indeed taken a step further. Not only does she dress like a human, she even has a job. Dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood, she walks through the wood. But instead of being eaten by the big bad wolf, her journey is much more prosaic: she shops for food. She is herself a shopkeeper, selling tea and tobacco (as we learn in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny where we also discover her name to be Josephine Bunny). Quite why Potter tells us all this is unclear. The fact she runs a shop seems neither here nor there, and has no great effect on the plot. Her status as a shopkeeper might be interpreted in many ways, but let me give just one possible reading.
The Rabbit family is lower middle class. They have a nice clean home and they dress smartly. They can afford the loss of two sets of Peter's clothes in a fortnight. The paterfamilias is dead, and his widow works hard to bring her children up to be good little bunnies. The Rabbit family live not far from the McGregors. The McGregors have a large garden they zealously guard with high walls, locked doors and not one, but two cats (the white cat in c and the dark one in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny). The McGregors are landowners. They try to keep all the fruits of the earth for themselves, which is what the rich always do. They kill any intruders on their land. The Rabbits have to learn that the lettuces are not for them. But Peter is young and reckless. He doesn't want bread (or cake), he wants lettuces. So, a-poaching he will go. He escapes the landowner's grasp by a whisker, but loses his clothes in the process. His clothes are hung out on a cross as a warning. Peter, dispossessed, returns home with his tail between his legs. Then in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny we find him sitting by himself, poorly and poor, wrapped in of all things a red handkerchief! What symbolism! Peter as revolutionary wrapping himself in the red flag of revolt! Together with his cousin and comrade-in-arms Benjamin, Peter returns to the garden (while the McGregors are out in their gig) to take back his clothing, and to regain his dignity (in the shape of a few choice onions). Viva la revolucion!
In his enlightening and entertaining book Beginning Theory Peter Barry writes, "Aristotle (. . .) insists that literature is about character, and that character is revealed through action."4 Now whether Aristotle had something along the lines of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in mind when he formulated his ideas about literature, character and action remains a moot point; nonetheless Potter's tale fits the bill admirably. The character of Peter Rabbit dominates the story from start to finish, and it is precisely through his actions that Peter's character is revealed to us. Thus the simplest way to observe his character is to look at the actions he performs, and to do this, we need look no further than the verbs used when Peter is the subject of the sentence. The most frequently used verb is 'run' which together with its near cousins 'rush' and 'jump' occurs ten times in the text. This pervasive sense of Peter continually running about like the proverbial headless chicken is reinforced by the five verbs 'squeezed', 'wriggled', 'slipped', 'flopped', and 'scuttered'. The repetition of verbs of rushing paints a picture of a flibbertigibbet who is constantly flapping about, always on the move, but to no general purpose. Indeed this constant running hither and thither takes up so much of Peter's time, he rarely has a spare moment to catch his breath and think about what he is doing. His youth and immaturity manifest themselves in his reckless rushing about, getting himself into scrapes and pickles that only providence saves him from.
Ironically it is precisely because of Peter's scatterbrained character that the tale works so well. No matter how cynical a reader might be, it is virtually impossible not to like Peter. He is an anti-hero but with none of the emotional baggag e of a Holden Caulfield or a James Dean. He is comical but without meaning to be. He is a fat little rabbit who stumbles about getting into trouble, who is quick to take fright and even quicker to shed tears. Wherever he goes, he causes mayhem, getting caught in nets, losing his clothes, upsetting flower pots. And when he does finally escape, the first thing he does is rush home to mother. What an endearing if unprepossessing hero for a story! We the readers cannot help but warm to him.
Peter's lack of sang froid is only matched by his love of lettuces. The first thing he does after squeezing under the gate into Mr. McGregor's garden is to start eating. After eating lettuces, he helps himself to some French beans and some radishes . All three kinds of food are considered today as extremely healthy sources of nutrition and fibre, and yet in spite of this vegetarian diet Peter is fat. The irony is Peter (a rabbit) eats what non-vegetarians sometimes disparagingly refer to as 'rabbit food', the sort of non-fattening food that humans eat to help them lose weight - and yet he is fat! Meanwhile his sisters who eat such fattening items as bread and milk are never described by Potter as being overweight. Considering all the nervous energy Peter expends rushing about and getting into trouble, you could be forgiven for imagining him to be as thin as a post. This reversal of what we might expect is one of the story's great joys, and is to be found again and again in Potter's work.
An early example of reversal (by which I mean the device whereby a writer surprises the reader by introducing a discovery that runs counter to what we expect) is the scene early in the tale when Peter's mother tells her children she is going to the baker's. The pastoral scene of rabbits frolicking about in the wood lulls us into thinking this story is going to be benignly bucolic. If Mrs. Rabbit is happy to let her children go into the fields or down the lane, we think to ourselves, then that must mean they are living in a world free from predators. So, no foxes then to worry about . . . Having lulled us into this false sense of security Potter then jolts us out of our complacency by means of a reversal. There may be no foxes to trouble the rabbits, but instead there is something much worse: the McGregors! Suddenly our image of a happy family of rabbits living a sweet life of bucolic pleasures, free from danger, is stood on its head and shown to be untrue. The sweet cuddly rabbits may be anthropomorphic, with their human-like clothes, but they can still be caught and eaten! The way Potter presents this reversal is a delight; Mrs. Rabbit euphemistically says, "Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor." To spare her children's feelings she makes it sound as if Mr. Rabbit simply underwent a change of living environment, and that instead of living in a rabbit-hole, he now lives in a pie. The use of the word 'accident' is highly ironic: it was only an accident as seen from the rabbits' point of view. For Mrs. McGregor of course there was nothing accidental about it. Mrs. Rabbit tries to spare her children's feelings by using ambiguous language, but in doing so she inadvertently puts them in danger. Peter is too stupid to understand the real meaning of his mother's words, and thus remains ignorant of the danger he faces when he ventures into the McGregors' garden. The irony is that Mrs. Rabbit's concern for her children's feelings in fact contributes to their being placed in danger. Similarly, her dressing Peter up in coat and shoes indirectly almost gets him killed: the coat buttons get caught in the gooseberry net, and his shoes slow him down when he runs.
To return briefly to Peter's father and his accident with the pie: earlier I mentioned how important suspense and mystery are to any story. One thing that still mystifies me about this tale is how on earth Peter's father got caught? Even the bumbling Peter manages (admittedly with a little help from his friends the sparrows) to escape from the McGregors. Although we never get to see Mrs. McGregor, we can assume she is not much younger than her husband, who wears glasses, has a long white beard, and is hardly the world's fastest runner. For Mr. Rabbit to have been caught by such elderly slowcoaches, he must have either been very unlucky or very foolish. Is it possible that Mr. Rabbit was even more of a nincompoop than his son? If so, why would someone as sensible and stolid as Mrs. Rabbit ever marry him?
As for suspense in the story, it is to be found in the chase as Mr. McGregor runs after Peter. First he threatens to bash him over the head with a rake. Then Peter gets caught in the gooseberry net and it seems as if he surely must die. But he is saved in the nick of time by the arrival of the sparrows, who like the cavalry in a Western appear out of nowhere like a deus ex machina. Then Peter in his usual inimitable fashion jumps from the frying pan into the fire; he hides in a watering can full of water inside a tool-shed (the equivalent of all those blind alleys the good guys always inadvertently run down in the movies). The suspense is hardly of Hitchcockian intensity, but nevertheless Potter has us wondering how the hapless Peter can get himself out of a fix this time. Then, a sneeze gives his whereabouts away and Peter has to move smartly to avoid a grisly end in a rabbit pie. He breaks out through a small window, and for the time being, we can sit back and relax. Phew! Peter's got away!
There follows an interlude for us and for Peter to catch breath before the climax of the great escape itself. Peter c arefully avoids the white cat, climbs onto a wheelbarrow to survey the lay of the land, sees his chance and seizes it. He runs full pelt to the gate with Mr. McGregor in hot pursuit. But as in most Hollywood films containing a car chase and multiple crashes, we are never in any real doubt; we know that the goody (Peter) must thwart the baddy (Mr. McGregor) and escape for the story to have a happy end. The genre of book to which The Tale of Peter Rabbit belongs demands a happy ending. And where better a place to end this paper on Peter than with a happy end!