a gallimaufry

on Beatrix Potter and Brer Rabbit

Perhaps you missed the slight kerfuffle about Beatrix Potter recently? I certainly did; it wasn’t until I was chatting on the phone on Sunday with M that it came to my attention. M had read about it in The Times; Beatrix Potter was being accused of cultural appropriation by some crazed academic because Peter Rabbit was a talking rabbit like Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit stories were originally told by enslaved Africans. We both thought this seemed a bit silly.

Curious, I found the article in The Conversation by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall. It is a really interesting article! I am so glad to have read it. If you are a Potter fan, I urge you to do the same. And if you are a fan of Enid Blyton, for once she comes out of it well!

(Beatrix Potter, illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne, London, 1902; found here)

Zobel Marshall makes a compelling case that Potter knew and loved the Brer Rabbit stories of ‘Uncle Remus’ and drew on them for the plots of some of her stories as well as some of the language. Fearful of plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism, Potter herself never publicly acknowledged the link; since then very few academics have acknowledged the link either.

Finally, Zobel Marshall sites this refusal to discuss Potter’s use of Brer Rabbit as part of a wider appropriation of Black culture, in which Black culture is used by predominantly white culture and not acknowledged.

I mean, can any of this actually be disputed? The article is measured and well argued. I do disagree with her claim that the plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, of the trickster stealing food, being the ‘plot [that] is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales’. The plots of most of her books are quite different. Still, I was curious about M’s interpretation of the article, based as it must have been on what they read in The Times. And a cursory Google brought up a list of furious headlines in the right-wing press.

I couldn’t read The Times article because it is behind a paywall. I think it must be this one. I note the use of the word ‘stole’; not a word that Zobel Marshall used once in her article, as far as I could see. However, inflammatory headlines in the Daily Express (‘Beatrix Potter Accused of ‘Copying’ African Slaves’ Stories for Peter Rabbit) and the so-called news site GB News (‘Now Peter Rabbit is Under Threat by Woke Mob as Beatrix Potter Attacked’) were followed by reasonable summaries of Zobel Marshall’s article so perhaps the Times article is also better balanced.

Not so Libby Purves’s reaction in the Daily Mail: ‘Academic Accusing Beatrix Potter of Stealing Peter Rabbit Needs a Lie Down.’ To be honest, I never have high hopes of the Mail and this is an opinion piece, but I do respect Purves and was therefore very disappointed by what I read. Purves admits that what Zobel Marshall writes is ‘fairly convincing’ but the problem is her tone: ‘her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, I suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt’. Purves then goes on to explain that cultures have always borrowed from and influenced each other, which is not Zobel Marshall’s point, and to complain about the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

(A.B. Frost, illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris, published by D. Appleton and Co., 1911; found here)

Purves uses Zobel Marshall’s article to make a wider point, and I intend to do the same with hers. I find her reaction absolutely typical of those people who lose their wigs when the National Trust dares to include information in their properties that a family enriched itself through slavery or who immediately tell you, when the topic of slavery comes up, that Black Africans profited from slave trading too. Why are they so frightened about accepting historical fact? Why can’t we say that some British families profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade? Why are we only supposed to feel pride in our past and not shame as well? Why can’t we acknowledge it if we draw on another cultural tradition for our own creative work?

Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated wonderful books that we still enjoy today, and she drew on the stories of Brer Rabbit to do so. See – it’s not difficult to make a start, is it?

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story is a novel that has hovered on the periphery of my reading attention for about a thousand years. It’s only the fact that it is being reissued in a very pretty edition by Michael Walmer books that I finally got round to reading it. Not knowing much about it before I started, I read it in a genuine state of suspense: however, I want to include spoilers in my discussion of it, so if you would like a similar experience to me, click away now!

Zuleika (pronounced, so I read after I’d finished it, Zu-LEE-ka) is an orphan, abandoned by her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford, because he disapproved of her parents’ marriage. She has to earn her living as a governess, a post she is unfit for, being herself ignorant of what she is supposed to teach and – perhaps more importantly – being devastatingly attractive. Having been shunted from school-room to school-room, she learns some fairly basic magic tricks and sets herself up as a ‘prestidigitator’. To stupendous success. While her abilities are mediocre, her beauty and allure catapult her to fame and wealth. Belatedly, her grandfather invites her to stay with him in Oxford, where she exerts her femme fatale charms with – well – fatal results.

Zuleika’s great problem is that in a world where all young men fall in love with her, she can only love a man who remains impervious to her. This man is the Duke of Dorset, a man perfect in every ability but who, like Zuleika, has never been in love.

The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls. [...] That he should be confronted with one of them – with such an one of them! – in Oxford, seemed to be sheer violation of sanctuary.

Zuleika is thrilled – but unfortunately the Duke has fallen for her after all. She rejects him, and so he vows to kill himself. This inspires all the other undergraduates in Oxford, similarly smitten, to swear they will die for Zuleika too. But will they?

(Illustration by George Him for the 1960 Heritage edition of Zuleika Dobson, found here; if you click on the link you can see more!)

What makes this novel so unsettling is its blend of light social comedy and really dark themes. And it is funny and well observed. Oxford is mockingly but affectionately portrayed in its traditions and eccentrics. The fellows of Judas College are happiest when all the undergraduates have gone, and they can jeer at Pedby’s bungled reading of the Latin grace for years without end. The Duke belongs to a club so exclusive that during his second year he is the only member. Realising that this is unsustainable for a club he, ‘not without reluctance, but unanimously’, elects a few new members. When Zuleika complains that the Second Division boats row before the First, the Duke tells her that ‘Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.’

But into this charming comedy are woven strands of delusion and cruelty. Everyone falls in love and often out of love again very easily. In the case of the mass of students, it is a form of hysteria – most of them have barely glimpsed the woman for whom they pledge to die. What then is the value of love? Is it just a trick, like Zuleika’s sleights of hand?

Zuleika and the Duke are powerful and careless of their power. Zuleika enjoys the tribute of men falling in love with her and doesn’t care what becomes of them. The Duke is so self-regarding and narcissistic he takes it as his due that the other students revere him. When he decides to kill himself, they emulate him. The deaths are not directly the fault of Zuleika or the Duke, because the undergraduates have after all freely chosen to give them their power and influence. Indeed, once the die is cast, the Duke attempts to prevent the tragedy. Zuleika, however, comes to desire it and revels in it; truly disturbing.

Zuleika Dobson was first published in 1911 and it is hard now to look back at the futile deaths of a large number of young men without the shadow of the First World War looming into mind, especially when Beerbohm describes the stormy moment before the Duke’s plunge thus:

A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky. Then there was consonance to split the drums of the world’s ears, followed by a horrific rattling as of actual artillery – tens of thousands of gun-carriages simultaneously at the gallop, colliding, crashing, heeling over in the blackness.
Then, and yet more awful, silence; the little earth cowering voiceless under the heavens’ menace.

I don’t think it is a stretch to link the Oxford students’ mindless romanticism, faux chivalry and death wish with an attitude that romanticised war and honour and brought its sons to the trenches. Furthermore, the Duke’s ridiculous notion of honour traps him into going ahead with his stupid suicide. The poisonous destructiveness of this veneration of honour and death is most clearly and horribly shown in the scene of Noaks’s death. Noaks has been too cowardly to drown himself with the other young men; he is goaded to fling himself to his death by Zuleika and the Batch family in a scene which switches rapidly from comedy to horror and is surely echoed by the later practice of women sending white feathers to men who did not want to fight.

(Max Beerbohm by himself; found here)

The Duke seems to die for love of Zuleika; actually, he hates her. Seeming and being are all too often distinct in this novel. For fun and also to reinforce this idea of delusion, Beerbohm frames his novel with classical motifs. There is a comic chorus, of sorts: the ‘high grim busts’ of the Roman emperors which decorate the Sheldonian theatre and watch over the drama that plays out. On seeing Zuleika when she arrives in Oxford:

sweat started from the brows of the Emperors. They at least saw the peril that was overhanging Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. [...] Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles.

The novel’s narrator claims to be ‘Clio’s servant’ – the servant of the Muse of history (although he fears that to be so is to be ‘not quite a gentleman’). Thus he pretends that his fiction is ‘true’. He pre-empts the reader’s disbelief in his ability to record all these conversations and even thoughts accurately, by spinning a tale of being given special powers by Zeus to travel invisibly and enter minds. It is typical of the novel that he lays claim to truthfulness with an outrageous explanation, and that he plays further with the difference between seeming and being that threads through this story of delusion.

It is a book quite unlike any other that I’ve read. It is delightful and cruel by turn, both frivolous and tragic. It ends with a surprising twist on the exhortation that you be true to yourself – given by the Warden to Zuleika. Apparently, a spoof sequel was written in which Zuleika goes to Cambridge. I can’t help wondering what that might be like...

(I was sent a copy of this book to review: you can order a copy from Michael Walmer books.)

 

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Over at Shiny New Books my review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s splendid biography of T.H. White is now up!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my love for STW’s writing. I had always wanted to read this biography but the prices of second-hand copies were too high (added now to the extra costs from Brexit of importing books to the EU gripe gripe).

Now Handheld Press has republished the book in a lovely new edition with an introduction by Gill Davies. I couldn’t crowbar much about the introduction into the review (which is already too long really, I can never stop myself), but it makes this edition far, far more valuable than the original. Davies discusses how STW researched and wrote the biography, how her talent for fiction inflected her writing, how she dealt with THW’s very dark side.

Thus it frames book very nicely and reminds us that it is a written and created artefact, the product of years of work and thought. It also, interestingly, centres STW rather than THW; I think it’s true to say that many if not most people who read the book now will read it because of their interest in her work rather than his, an unusual shift.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner at Frome Vauchurch, undated; from the Sylvia Townsend Warner website here)