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Jopi Nyman, who teaches at the University of Joensuu, Finland, takes us into the forbidden garden of Edwardian England, a place where ‘dangers lurk everywhere and any careless rabbit may end up in a pie...’

Beatrix Potter's animal tales are permanent bestsellers that have pervaded the market of children's literature and become one of Britain's major literary exports appealing to children and parents alike. Early editions of her tales are collectors' items and her house in the Lake District (now National Trust property) continues to attract a mass of literary tourists, who want to feel her England and become one with the rural landscape from which her literary imagination is thought to have drawn its inspiration. Yet such a romantic vision of Potter's idyllic narratives as symptomatic rural Englishness is only one half of the story.

In this article I want to suggest through a critical reading of Potter's Peter Rabbit tales that the England and English identities that today's readers find in Potter's narratives are produced in the context of imperialism and the related early twentieth-century redefinition of English national identity. In this task I am following such postcolonial critics as Edward Said, whose (1994) reading of the role of the colonies and Antiguan slavery in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park shows that English literature cannot be understood without appreciating the role played by the margins and Others in constructing an English national identity. In this process children's and juvenile fiction has had a significant role to play since the late Victorian period in particular. One may, for example, think about Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), who becomes a masterspy to serve the empire, or H. Rider Haggard's African adventures that propagate colonialist values and the supremacy of the English. As historically and culturally constructed narratives, children's books contribute to the ways in which ideas of nation, gender and race are constructed and reproduced. In order to show the pervasiveness of the colonial imagination, I want to identify some of the colonialist tropes used in the stories and to suggest that the stories construct an English identity that is based on colonial economy and colonial Others.

The stories show Potter's rural England contains its colonial Others and transplants colonial dilemmas into English soil. Given that, for Peter and his cousin, Benjamin, Mr. McGregor's garden is colonized and annexed land where colonial identities may be performed and lapine fantasies of lettuce fulfilled, it is no surprise that The Tale of Benjamin Bunny is a story of colonization structured as a quest narrative in which the two young males set out to explore a garden. The Other territory is both attracting and dangerous, dangers lurk everywhere and any careless rabbit may end up in a pie. The illustrations to the story are particularly interesting as they show two well-dressed young explorer rabbits passing through a jungle-like garden 'along a little walk on planks' (29) and carrying in a pocket-handkerchief some specimens of the natural resources of the garden (i.e. onions) to be taken to Peter's mother. And, indeed, not only are the two gazed at by the natives of the space, the four dark-brown mice engaged in their natural activities consisting of 'cracking cherry-stones'. These mice are native inhabitants of the colonial garden: their difference from the two intruders is made obvious as they are not shown to possess two particular features of culture: they do not have a language but merely 'wink' at the explorers, instead of speaking to them; nor do they possess clothing. Unlike the two rabbits, who enter the garden in order to retrieve Peter's clothing, the four mice appear naked and thus uncultured.

The four Peter Rabbit Tales are also a continuous story that constructs a version of the history of England as a deteriorating narrative in the Condition of England mode. Apart from the happy childhood spaces, Potter's England figures as a rather gloomy space. The change from the happy world of Peter's childhood to the everyday reality of the impoverished Bunny family who are content with Mr. McGregor's rotten vegetables and finally to the dark tale of the threatening Mr. Tod cannot but parallel changes in Britain's social structure and its diminishing role in world politics. The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies makes it clear that England has become a nation where food is scarce and both Peter and Benjamin are more labourers who worry over the source of daily income rather than the free-roaming gentlemen of earlier periods, another issue suggesting the impact of class-based gender ideals made explicit in the stories. This contributes to the stories' nostalgic vision of the land of childhood as being carefree.

The worries over England's future are explored further in the tales through tropes that are immersed in the rhetoric of nationhood. The stories define England through its mothers, connecting the tales with the period's redefinition of motherhood as a national project. Regardless of his actions and repeated disobedience, Peter appears a dutiful son of the hard-working, widowed Mrs. Rabbit whose main aim is to delight his mother either emotionally or economically. Economic motives and prosperity are repeatedly emphasized in this context where buying and selling are important. And when Peter returns with Benjamin, the issue is foregrounded since home and shop are the same space where rabbit-tobacco and onions have their place. And what Mrs. Rabbit offers her customers are products from colonized spaces as revealed in her sign showing that she trades in tea and tobacco, as well as herbs. Here again, the mother stands for a British economy based on prosperity derived from colonial trade; the young Peter, then, is fully immersed in colonial economy and lives for fulfilling the needs of his mother. As the later stories show, the disappearance of the mother and the related economy forces Peter into labour and shows a national crisis and the emergence of different perils that threaten the Arcadian existence. And, indeed, Britain's decline starts with the death of Peter's unnamed father: while the sons of the nation devote themselves to their nation-mother, whose name, Josephine,  has an imperial ring suggesting another regal name such as Victoria. Her disappearance from the later tales which are pervaded by an increasing darkness reveals the depth of the national crisis, the lack of a strong leader, and the beginnings of a post-imperial era.

The tales also construct an imperial race, an English ethnicity, through their portrayal of the lapine (that inhabits the national landscape of rural England) as a race threatened by the Others through the use of a particular trope of colonial discourse, cannibalism. As the animals of the tales are curiously translated into people ('I have made many books about well-behaved people. Now, for a change, I am going to make a story about two disagreeable people, called Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod' [491]), the rabbits are represented as humans. In the context of Victorian (anthropological and medical) discourses of race, this strategy encourages the racialization of the different species represented and leads to polarizations. What the three carnivorous mammals (badger, fox and Mr. McGregor) share is an enchantment with rabbit people's flesh, showing that the rabbits are threatened by Others, who consider them as pies. It is through the utilization of the discourse of cannibalism that the Other becomes a savage whose cultural practices breach the most basic of our taboos. Through this trope Potter's tales construct racial and ethnic difference between the distinct groups populating the landscape, a theme supported by showing the increasing presence of the Other. The nationalist allegory of The Tale of Mr. Tod shows that the Other may now invade your home: Tommy Brock kidnaps Benjamin Bunny's sleeping children by giving their grandfather an opiate-like cabbage leaf cigar that makes the old rabbit fall asleep. The representation of space also changes from a jungle-like garden to dangerous frontiers as a liminal space the ethnically English rabbits should not enter. There, on the hill, far away, lives Peter's sister Cottontail with her family. And this is because of explicitly racialized reasons narrated in the text as a parenthetical addition: '(Cottontail had married a black rabbit, and gone to live on the hill)' (55). And this space is that of the cannibal Other too: 'But there were preparations upon the kitchen table which made him [Benjamin] shudder. 'There was an immense empty pie-dish of a blue willow pattern, and a large carving knife and fork, and a chopper' (58). In the end the trope of cannibalism is evoked as a fear of being devoured by the Other, as a fear of losing one's control over one's body. While other solutions may be possible, in this context the fear of the Other devouring the nationed body of the English subject signifies fears concerned with the future of Englishness. By suggesting that the frontier (garden) that the English males have once been able to tread safely has now been transformed into a space of risk populated by not-altogether-trustworthy black rabbits and carnivorous badgers and foxes, Potter's history of England signifies loss and disappointment. What is now threatened and thus resisted in the tales is the body of the individual, a fear emphasised by representing the body most heavily at risk as that of the little bunny, the future of the nation.

Though Potter's tales seek to base English identities in an English landscape, they end up representing colonial fantasies. But as these fantasies are also a part of the national landscape, the strategy of representation shows how deeply the imperial crisis penetrates Englishness. While Potter's writing of English national identity as a tale of good rabbits and bad foxes in an imagined rural England is an attempt to construct Englishness, that identity cannot be achieved without the presence of the Others. Since national narratives, such as Potter's children's books, are embedded in networks of power, we critics, teachers and practitioners of British Studies should reflect on the construction of national (and other) identities in apparently simple narratives that yet have significant power both globally and locally. Children's fiction is only one of many cultural texts inviting reading and understanding, yet it is an extremely powerful one.

This is a summarized version made specially by the author for BSN of a paper given in June 1999 at Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: a conference in pursuit of the English held at the European Studies Research Institute of Salford University. It is published with thanks to the organisers, Liz Hedgecock (lhedgecock@hotmail.com) and jo Knowles (dknowles@liv.ac.uk) who plan to publish proceedings of the conference in the near future.

Suggested Reading

DAVIN, ANNA.'Imperialism and Motherhood' History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians 5 (1978): 9-65.

FERGUSON, MOIRA. 'Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class.' Women: A Cultural Review 5.1 (1994): 34-52.

HULME, PETER. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797.1986. London: Routledge, 1992.

KNOWLES, MURRAY and MALMKJAER, KIRSTEN.
Language and Control in Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.

POTTER, BEATRIX. The Complete Adventures of Peter Rabbit. 1982.
London: F. Warne & Co  Puffin Books, 1984.

SAID, EDWARD. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994.

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