Beatrix Potter’s Contribution to Children’s Literature between Reality and Narrative Representation

From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi sulla Formazione

Chiara Lepri, Università di Roma Tre

The Woman and the Cultural Context

Alison Lurie, one of the best-known scholars of children’s literature on the interna-tional scene, writes that in the early Twentieth century “a woman escaped from prison with the help of a rabbit. It was not a modern prison, with facilities for education and rec-reation and a chance for parole, but a tall, dark, stuffy Victorian house; and the prisoner, who had been confined there for most of her thirty-six years, was under sentence for life”.

The reference is to today’s famous British illustrator and writer Beatrix Potter, whose life choices were distinguished in times when a woman who belonged to good English society was asked only to be a wife and mother or to quell her own artistic ambitions in the private sector and that, on the other hand, for a long time she firmly refused to adhere to this cliché to dedicate herself primarily to her passions; Peter is the rabbit, the light-hearted rodent in a jacket and shoes, an icon of the small anthropomorphic animal that still has so much attraction on children.

Lurie’s incipit is acute, because talking about Beatrix Potter as an author for children does not only require a critical and comparative work on her artistic and literary work, nowadays recognized as a classic of literature for children, but also an unavoidable mass exercise focused on the existence of a woman whose testimony of life and whose writings (both public and private) let emerge “the conflict between binding social expectations, full of prescriptive codes of conduct, and aspirations” which, to use the Carmela Covato’s words, “give voice to the contrast between feelings, emotions and rules, telling training stories not traceable in official treaties”.

Particularly in this case, therefore, the investigation of literary testimony requires a reflection that also considers the personal history of the author who becomes the model of an emancipatory path undertaken and conducted consistently throughout the course of her life, in the name of realization of a lifestyle, in a balance (precarious, not simple, not taken for granted: think of her poor health during childhood and youth and the conflicts with her parents) between instinctual instances, representations, social practices and desire for affirmation in a field closed to women.The result is a work that for these reasons also becomes an emblem of another culture, open to difference, custodian of a different, multiple and hybridized knowledge which finds its natural and happy expression in children’s literature.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/ssf-11232

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/sf/article/view/11232