In light of Gloriavale’s reluctant acceptance of Winnie-the-Pooh, Claire Mabey argues in favour of the wider canon of anthropomorphic animal literature.
There is nothing more bleak than the banning of books and the curtailment of reading. Control what people read and you control what they think, and how they behave. In that way, it came as zero surprise when RNZ reported last week that Gloriavale has a lengthy list of books their members aren’t allowed to explore, and a devastatingly narrow band of acceptable ones.
The RNZ report included quotes from Servant Peter Righteous’s email to the Gloriavale community. The messages are dependably depressing: there’s to be no feminism, or fairytales, or science fiction, or fantasy, or supernatural themes, or myths and legends “presented as truth”. There is more, but you get the idea.
But where Righteous comes morally unstuck is on the subject of books with animals in clothes, RNZ reported. Winnie-the-Pooh is where the floodgates begin to crack: “We had a push to allow Winnie-the-Pooh because he was so kind to his friends. God bless him,” Righteous wrote. “At least the animals in Winnie-the-Pooh are toys – that’s a realm of fantasy for children that’s pretty safe. But I think some of the other stuff is ridiculous and we can do better. There is so much good material available that we don’t need to go near the grey areas. What benefit do we gain from it?”
Indeed. What benefit do we gain from grey areas? And fantasy? And what benefit from animals in clothes? Well, as Righteous says, “What goes into a mind comes out in a life.” Here is a list of fantasy books featuring animals in clothes and what they give to a mind, and a life.
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Animals: bear, owl, kangaroo and her joey, tigger, piglet, rabbit and donkey
Clothes: actually fewer in the original books than in the Disney versions
I’ve been re-reading these books and one important thing to note is that Pooh (who is Christopher Robin’s toy, as Righteous correctly points out. A toy that talks and walks and saves his friends from drowning, and eats honey) doesn’t wear any clothes in the original illustrations. The now-iconic, too-short red T-shirt is a Disney modification. Piglet, though, has always worn a little green vest. But the clothing is beside the point. What Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends and the Hundred Acre Wood give us is a microcosm of the childhood experience. Pooh is nice to his friends. But the stories aren’t always nice, in that they’re not-uncomplicated portrayals of what it’s like to be a child and to read the world differently compared to the adults around you.
There is a refrain in the Pooh stories relating to Pooh’s intelligence: “Pooh hasn’t much brain,” says Piglet in ‘Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water’. Pooh is a character driven by his body, unclothed as it is, and his appetites. But this constant reminder from his own friends that he doesn’t have a brain plays on his mind (ironically). He sings a song to himself to debate the matter, and write over it: “Well, Pooh was a Bear of Enormous Brain”. Pooh is clever, but he is often without knowledge. In the absence of facts Pooh makes them up, fills the spaces with his own, unique and charming language. Some may read him as kind, while others might read him as the open-hearted, roomy companion that a child might need while the rest of the world is competitive, and haughty, or severe and depressing: like Eeyore (morose), Owl (pompous), Tigger (competitive), Kanga (at times awfully severe, like the time she puts Roo in a cold bath to harden him up and not be “small and weak like piglet”).
Christopher Robin is the real boy at the heart of the menagerie and his walking, talking toys can be seen as symbolic of the facets of human society that Christopher is having to navigate as a young boy between the wars (the Pooh books were published in the 1920s and 30s). Pooh is the friend who is determinedly creative in the face of difficulty and in the face of absence. How else could he figure out how to save Piglet from drowning by using an upturned umbrella, and all the while composing a song to aid the rescue? Pooh is an artist. This will be dangerous for some, inspiring for others.
Book: Pokko and the Drum by Matthew Forsyth
Animals: frogs, and a whole array of forest-dwellers
Clothes: many. Also knitting and living in a house
This is one of the greatest picture books ever created. It is about being loud and proud and different: it’s about defying silence and fear. It’s very funny, beautiful and has that essential quality of the best picture books: it can be read again, and again and it won’t lose its potency.
Pokko is an only child (and a frog) who has tried out lots of different gifts from her parents to entertain her: a slingshot, a llama, and now, a drum. Only the drum is loud and Pokko’s parents are busy with reading and housework and keeping their froggy heads under the radar. So Pokko is sent outside where her bold little personality takes on the forest. She drums and turns into a band leader, with animals spooling out from behind trees to join her with their own instruments. The band grows and swells until it’s a hīkoi of individuality, daring to tell the world they’re there and alive and they’re weird and wonderful.
This is a story for any person who has an itch to scratch, a bone to chew, a drum to beat. I hope that Gloriavale members push for Pokko: she’s a little froggy light, an inspiration.
The collected works of Beatrix Potter
Animals: the full gamut of farm animals (though not so much sheep or cows)
Clothes: lots
Surely the most extraordinary series of books with animals in clothes there ever was. The more you read these slim tales of frogs going fishing and losing their galoshes and nearly being eaten, and squirrels going nut-hunting and nearly being eaten, and cats being rolled up in dough by rats and nearly being eaten, and pigs being sent to market only to be kidnapped by a ship’s cook and nearly being eaten, the more alarming and wonderful the mind of Potter becomes.
When I was a very small child my favourite of the Potter books was apparently Little Pig Robinson. Which I find very strange. It’s the longest of the books – far too long to read in one sitting which means my parents most definitely skipped large chunks of it. It’s an increasingly anxious story about a young pig (Robinson) who must leave his idyllic farm and go to market on behalf of his Aunties who are now too large to squeeze through the stiles on the footpath over the fields that lead to town. The further Pig Robinson goes from the farm the more his animal life starts to mingle with the world of humans. Like Peter Rabbit in which the farmer Mr McGregor is a murderous villain, humans in Pig Robinson are harbingers of death.
At the beginning of the book, Pig Robinson is in a lovely suit of duck-egg blue. But as the story unfolds he sheds his clothes which no longer fit after the cook on the boat he’s stolen onto feeds him up. His nakedness is a symbol of his vulnerability as much as his growing awareness of the trouble he’s in, and what he truly means to the humans around him: the potential of pork. In the end, of course, Pig Robinson evades the dangers of the wild world and travels so far that he reaches the magical parts of it.
In The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck (my favourite these days) Jemima wears a bonnet and a shawl which slip off as her plan to try and hatch her eggs away from the farm fails. The clothes are symbolic of her frail guile: she dresses herself as if in costume when she embarks on her stealth mission to hatch her eggs (heartbreaking, now, to realise they were always taken from her by the farmer’s wife) but the journey takes her clothing from her, strips her down to her animal self, a duck duped by a fox.
All of Potter’s books are worth fighting for: they’re dark little stories about what it’s like to have to struggle for what you need to survive in a world where other animals, and humans, will try and stop you, even eat you.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Animals: a toad, a rat, an otter, a mole and a badger (and a bunch of Wild-Wooders, weasels, ferrets and stoats)
Clothes: beautiful high-fashion posh country clothes, plenty of tweed and vests
Kenneth Graham’s pastoral classic is a love letter to the countryside: to its animals, its trees, its wildflowers and its hidden habits. But it’s also a tribute to the anti-hero and the power of wise friends. Toad is one of the most compelling cads in all of fiction. And the best-dressed. He is capricious, jovial, spoiled squire of a Toad Hall, and he has a sumptuous wardrobe to reflect his status and his hankering for nice things.
My favourite item of clothing, though, belongs to Mole who wears a black velvet smoking jacket. I have always wanted a black velvet smoking jacket and enjoy clothes that are created specifically to go with an activity, especially when it seems as relaxing and as dapper as black velvet.
While there is a marked absence of developed female characters in this story about charming animal gents (which may not bother Servant Peter Righteous) the Wind in the Willows offers the mind a study of unchecked desires, and good friends, and days on the river in a boat contemplating the why of life and the how of people.
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Animals: rabbits, a seagull
Clothes: none – but this isn’t about the clothes, it’s about the fantasy
Watership Down is one of the most moving reading experiences you’ll ever have. It’s a fantasy: meaning it imagines a world in which rabbits speak and have all the capacities of human thought and feeling (and so fits with the above books which are also all fantasies and thus join the no-go, grey area of Righteous’ banned books list).
Adams’ story makes rabbit society complicated and by proxy it makes all society complicated. This is a book about rabbits, and destruction and renewal, freedom and escape. The rabbits don’t wear clothes but Hazel, and Fiver and Cowslip, and Bigwig and Blackberry and the rest reflect back to readers the human way of the mind: fear, vision, strategy, desire, hope. There is death, and injury and pain, but there is survival and love and the attainment of peace and freedom. There is nothing more important for a human to vicariously endure: these epic, complex, emotional books prepare us for the real life version.
My hope, always, is that members of Gloriavale keep pushing for their right to read and read anything they want. If there was a push for Winnie-the-Pooh, maybe there could be a push for Pokko and Peter Rabbit and Toad and Hazel’s stories. And all the other animals who wear clothes and convey the truths of humanity and what we are able to attempt with these short lives of ours.
Righteous is absolutely right about the power of books, but he’s so wrong about everything else. It’s criminal to stop people from accessing books and making people fear what stories might do to them. The mind is a robust place: ideas seeded there need the mirror of literature to be lured into bloom. Some stories will change minds, even stir new actions, others will confirm what it already knows. That pigs can be brainy, toads can be ridiculous, ducks can be desperate and rabbits can see the future and change their lives.