Aesop in the shadows, Peter Hollindale
Leslie Linder decoded Potter’s works or journals, which changed the way critics and
readers think about her and her works. This reminds us that Potter was a professional in
hiding her true ideas and opinions, she's a person who isn't willing to show her hand.
Literary critics love writers who show them challenges of codes (who write coded works,
which makes the critics' job more challenging). The focus of this essay is the coded
presence of Potter, the naturalist, in the work of Potter, the artist and storyteller.
Alison Laurie valued Potter's talents as a painter and a naturalist and said that she'd be
very famous if she had been born at this time or if she had been born a man. As a
biologist, Professor Roy Watling thinks that Potter's work is inconsistent or conflicting.
He believes that one can’t treat animal so scientifically then make them into stories like
this. In fact, what Watling regards as inconsistent is actually the centre of Potter’s
originality and the source of her huge influence on the modern animal story.
Decoding the combination of study and fantasy in Potter’s works requires considering
that Potter was an accurate student of natural history and natural science. The interest
in natural history expressed itself in two important ways. On the one hand, there is the
fondness for real, individualized animals, for animals as a kind of people with names and
characters. And on the other hand, the scientific, separated observation, the autopsies,
the judicial skill, the practical farming. In the story, there's a double perspective toward
characters as animals and as persons.
Potter belongs to an artistic and intellectual tradition. She moves easily between the
biological reality of the animal and the social behavior of the human. By considering her
as both a naturalist and a satirist, and reading the books as conversations through
fantasy, we can appreciate the originality of her achievements.
It's easier to see Potter as a moralist, a fabulist like Aesop. While I think she's more of a
post-fabulist artist of the modern age. post-fabulist is a helpful term. She recognizes
Aesop, but he's really in the shadows, while she's an imaginative artist in a scientific
age.
Susan Hill considers Potter as a realist and also a moralist because Peter was punished
for his naughtiness in comparison to his sisters. Alison Lurie believes that there's a
hidden morality in Potter’s books. She says that an important feature of Potter’s books
was that they broke completely with the traditional pattern of the animal tale, which
had always been used to point a moral. Usually, the unconventional message is hidden
behind a screen of conventional morality. For Laurie, the concealed morality is the idea
that disobedience and exploration are more fun than good behavior. Of course, Potter is
morally aware, but she's also rebellious.
Natural history governs both moralism and revolution in Potter’s stories. In her books,
morals are more of facts of life, which is expected from a scientific naturalist,
pathologist and field observer. It is natural for young animals to explore their
surroundings, to leave the nest and their mother’s protection, to play away from home.
There is not a common moral pattern in these stories, only a common pattern of natural
animal and child behavior, with the unexpected consequences that life itself provides. In
Potter’s work, we find both the artist and the natural scientist, the double self that
draws on storytelling traditions but used the skills of a biological observer to remake
them in the image of a new century.
Composed by: Mennah Alshafey.
mennahalshafey@gmail.com