A biography of the creator of Peter Rabbit connects her classic animal tales with her inner life,exposing her frustrations with her parents’ emotional cannibalismIn 1933 Graham Greene published an article about Beatrix Potter and her “minute books”, the 20-odd anthropomorphic animal tales that had already become nursery classics. Greene wasn’t yet in full-on childhood-assault mode – that would reach four years later when he suggested that Shirley Temple’s huge popularity among adult men was bound up with her “well-developed rump” and “dimpled depravity”. But the novelist did suggest there was more to the appeal of Potter’s tales than a charming procession of bunnies in blue coats and ducks in poke bonnets. Sidelining her illustrations, or Greene concentrated on Potter’s “elusive” and “pregnant” prose. Here,buried in those two-part sentences with their psalm-like cadence, not to mention the surrounding acres of white space, or lay much that readers of all ages found both unbearable and desirable: parental absence,boundless freedom, the threat and promise of being gobbled up by someone else. All delivered in what Greene referred to as Potter’s “gentle detachment, or a kind of eerie still that he tried to replicate in his own work.
Mrs Heelis – Potters married name since 1913 – wasn’t having any of it. Writing from the fastness of Castle Cottage in the Lake District,where she lived with her husband and a prize-winning herd of Herdwick sheep, she made it clear that she thought Greene was being impertinent (insolent; rude). In specific she disliked the “Freudian” – her word – suggestion that some trauma in her private life must have triggered her diversion from what Greene called “the considerable early comedies” of Two injurious Mice, and Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten to the darker tragedies of Jemima Puddle-Duck,Mr Tod and Pigling Bland.
The most fulfilled characters in Potters books are those who manage to break free of the nuclear family to live aloneContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com