Scary ones, darling ones

Have you ever ex­per­i­enced the ir­ra­tional fear of a small an­imal or an in­sect? Well, I have. I have been afraid of mice and rats for as long as I could re­mem­ber, but I could never ex­plain my­self the reason why. Ac­cord­ing to the Cam­bridge Eng­lish Dic­tion­ary, this is called a pho­bia and it is defined as “an ex­treme fear or dis­like of a par­tic­u­lar thing or situ­ation, es­pe­cially one that is not reas­on­able”. We know that it is not reas­on­able to fear a tiny creature that can­not harm us, and yet, we run about like crazy people scream­ing and shak­ing from all our bones. This is what I have done whenever I ran into a mouse or a rat. I entered a room fear­ing that I might see one and I could not man­age to con­trol my­self un­der dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances whenever I knew that I might see one. As a per­son who lived most of her life with her grand­par­ents, life in the coun­tryside was a bur­den. I could not ima­gine go­ing to the at­tic or the base­ment be­cause I knew that they might be there: those un­ima­gin­ably scary creatures that caused my biggest fears. And I am not the only one. I am sure that each and every one of us fears some­thing. We are all grownups who might not be able to con­trol ourselves at the sight of what scares us and this is a re­ac­tion that any­body can have.

Why read books with rodents as main characters?

I star­ted think­ing of this situ­ation a couple of years ago when I star­ted study­ing an MA course which was en­titled An­imal Tales. I thought that I would only deal with dogs, cats, horses and pigs, but it was not like that. While hear­ing my teacher speak, I saw my biggest en­emy on the screen – a rat. My ini­tial re­ac­tion was to grab my jacket and run to the door which I did un­til I no­ticed how crazy I might seem to those around me. So I star­ted read­ing as many books as I could in which the main char­ac­ters were the ro­dents. You will prob­ably ask yourselves why tor­ment my­self with read­ing books in which the main char­ac­ters are the very creatures I do not like. I will tell you why. Be­cause lit­er­at­ure has the ma­gic fea­ture of trans­form­ing what we know as be­ing ugly into creatures that may be dear to the reader. Lit­er­at­ure man­ages to take us into the lives of these an­im­als and give them such fea­tures that make the read­ers fall in love with them. 

Where do mice stand in childrens’ literature?

In an art­icle called “Mice and rats in children’s lit­er­at­ure,” which was pos­ted on­line on the 20^th of Au­gust 2015, Lin­sey Stace, a self-de­clared afi­cion­ado of ro­dent-in­fes­ted lit­er­at­ure, ex­plains why au­thors seem to like to have these small creatures as prot­ag­on­ists. They have come to be a part of lit­er­at­ure only be­cause small help­less chil­dren can eas­ily identify them­selves with these an­im­als. A ma­jor dif­fer­ence between them would be that mice are por­trayed as harm­less and sym­path­etic whereas rats are seen as ruth­less and bru­tal. Stace thus men­tions that: 

Mice are small, secret, nu­mer­ous and usu­ally hid­den. They are beau­ti­ful and neat and, one must feel, cour­ageous to live with us so closely. Their fur-coated bod­ies make them en­dear­ing and stroke­able (Stace, “Mice and rats in children’s literature”). 

The art­icle re­com­mends titles of books about ro­dents that are worth read­ing, start­ing with early titles from the eight­eenth cen­tury, like The Life and Per­am­bu­la­tions of a Mouse writ­ten by Dorothy Kil­ner in 1784. Then, the au­thor spe­cifies that any reader of books for chil­dren must take into con­sid­er­a­tion the Be­at­rix Pot­ter series, or the ones writ­ten by E.B.White. He also men­tions the per­en­nial Mickey Mouse of the Dis­ney series, or some of the re­cent writ­ings like The Tale of Desper­eaux by Kate DiC­a­millo (2003). In­cid­ent­ally ro­dents also oc­cur in fic­tions like The Ad­ven­ture of the Sus­sex Vam­pire by Ar­thur Conan Doyle, La Peste by Al­bert Camus, and even Ninety Eighty-four by George Or­well. Even though some of these titles do not ac­tu­ally fall in the cat­egory of books for chil­dren, they all present the lives of dif­fer­ent ro­dents. Moreover from among the books writ­ten for chil­dren, a reader should also have know­ledge of titles like: Abel’s Is­land by Wil­liam Steig, The Cricket in Times Square by George Sel­don, An­gelina Baller­ina by Kath­er­ine Holabird and Helen Craig, and The Mouse and his Child by Rus­sell Hoban. All of these books are worth read­ing be­cause in them, one can dis­cover a mini­ature mir­ror world of hu­man be­ings, a world that un­folds near us, as these creatures live among us, the humans. 

Ideas of books to start with

Life & Perambulation of a Mouse

The Life and Per­am­bu­la­tion of a Mouse was writ­ten in 1784 by Dorothy Kil­ner, a fe­male writer who fo­cused on writ­ing stor­ies for young chil­dren, out of which the lat­ter can learn how to be­have in the so­ci­ety of the time.

The story starts with an In­tro­duc­tion in which the nar­rator ex­plains that be­cause of bad weather, she is con­fined in­doors in an area of Eng­land to­gether with some friends.  Suf­fer­ing from bore­dom, one of them gives the other the task of re­lat­ing the stor­ies of their own lives. Every­body agrees, but when the au­thor starts to think about what she could write, she real­izes that she is clue­less and does not know what to write about. It is then when she hears a voice telling her to write about “its story”. Con­fused at what she heard she comes to real­ize that in the room with her, there is a mouse who wants people to know his story. This story presents the lives of four mice broth­ers: Long­tail, Nimble (the nar­rator), Soft­down, and Brighteyes. Their names are clear phys­ical de­scrip­tions of how they look like. The main fea­ture of Long­tail is bravery; Soft­down , as his name sug­gests ‚is — both in char­ac­ter and phys­ical ap­pear­ance —quite soft, while Brighteyes, the weak­est of them all, is eas­ily scared and very slow. Nimble, the nar­rator, is a mouse that through­out its re­col­lec­tion of his life, keeps on high­light­ing its love for food, and that he loves nib­bling and gnaw­ing everything that it finds. The story starts with the mouse speak­ing about what is the first thing in his life he can re­mem­ber, and that was his mother’s words when she de­cided to al­low him and his broth­ers to start provid­ing for themselves.

‘I have, my chil­dren, with the greatest dif­fi­culty, and at the ut­most haz­ard of my life, provided for you all to the present mo­ment; but the period is ar­rived when I can no longer pur­sue that method: snares and traps are every­where set for me, nor shall I, without in­fin­ite danger, be able to pro­cure susten­ance to sup­port my own ex­ist­ence, much less can I find suf­fi­cient for you all; and, in­deed, with pleas­ure I be­hold it as no longer ne­ces­sary, since you are of age now to provide and shift for yourselves; and I doubt not but your agil­ity will en­able you to pro­cure a very com­fort­able live­li­hood. Only let me give you this one cau­tion —never (whatever the tempta­tion may be) ap­pear of­ten in the same place; if you do, how­ever you may flat­ter yourselves to the con­trary, you will cer­tainly at last be des­troyed.’ (Kil­ner, 265)

The Life and Per­am­bu­la­tion of a Mouse as a book writ­ten for chil­dren, could have been used in edu­cat­ing by scar­ing chil­dren in or­der to pre­vent them from do­ing bad deeds. Al­though meant for chil­dren, this book is dif­fi­cult to read and, at the same time, dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand by the nowadays young reader. How­ever, why not start with a book which presents other ways of liv­ing and which takes us back to the be­gin­ning of lit­er­at­ure with mice and rats.

Stuart Little

Stu­art Little  writ­ten by E.B. White in 1945 is an­other book meant for chil­dren in which the main char­ac­ter is a very un­usual one. It is a small little mouse. This mouse was the second son of Mr & Mrs. Fre­d­er­ick C. Little, and the brother of George, their eld­est son.

The truth of the mat­ter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers and the pleas­ant shy man­ner of a mouse (White, 2). 

What is more, even though nobody knows ex­actly how he ar­rived into the Stu­arts’ house (as this is nowhere ex­plained in the book), he is re­ceived with great joy and happi­ness. Moreover nobody felt that this was an ex­treme or ex­ag­ger­ated situ­ation be­cause, even if the fam­ily no­ticed Stuart’s sim­il­ar­it­ies to a mouse, they still ac­ted as if he had been just an­other fam­ily mem­ber. The first thing that the fam­ily did was to provide him with com­fort. They built him a bed out of clothes­pins and ci­gar­ette box, they tailored suit­able clothes for them; they gave him bath­room ob­jects made for his height and ar­ranged the house so that Stu­art could eas­ily walk through it, without en­coun­ter­ing any dif­fi­culties. They made Stu­art be an­other mem­ber who, just like any other little boy, gets into troubles and man­ages to be smart enough to solve them by himself. 

The Tale of Despereaux

In The Tale of Desper­eaux writ­ten by Kate DiC­a­millo in 2003, the reader dis­cov­ers the story of  a mouse called Desper­eaux who is not in­ter­ested in nor­mal mouse activ­it­ies. He prefers read­ing books (in­stead of gnaw­ing them), and does not like to hunt for food. Yet, the worst of his be­ha­vi­ors is that he al­lows a hu­man be­ing to see him. Thus, he falls in love with Prin­cess Pea to whom he swears love forever. After hav­ing com­mit­ted such a big mis­take, he is sent to the dun­geons to be eaten by rats. The book moves then to Roscuro, a rat who is dif­fer­ent from all rats, be­cause he does not take any joy in tor­ment­ing people and loves the light in­stead of fear­ing it.

One day, while ven­tur­ing through the castle, he is seen by people, falls in the queen’s bowl of soup, and sees the look of dis­gust that hu­mans have for him. And this ig­nites in him the need to take re­venge on them. After a plot which takes the reader into the dun­geons of rats, fol­lowed by the re­venge of Roscuro against the prin­cess and the bravery of Desper­eaux who saves her, the end of the book is a happy one. The prin­cess and the mouse re­main friends forever and the rat is al­lowed to ven­ture around the castle.

What of Roscuro? Did he live hap­pily ever after? Well… Prin­cess Pea gave him free ac­cess to the up­stairs of the castle. And he was al­lowed to go back and forth from the dark­ness of the dun­geon to the light of the up­stairs (DiC­amilo, 266)

And what of Desper­eaux? Did he live hap­pily ever after? Well he did not marry the prin­cess, if  is what you mean by hap­pily ever after. Even in a strange world as this one, a mouse and a prin­cess can­not marry. But reader, they can be friends. (DiC­a­millo, 267) 

Conclusion

In a nut­shell, there is a large vari­ety of books for chil­dren that have as prot­ag­on­ists an­imal spe­cies com­monly (and un­justly, I would say) called ver­min. Some of you might be re­pelled by such a sub­ject. If it is so, my ad­vice for you is not to judge a book by its cov­ers, but to read it closely, as you may never know who you’ll fall in love with. You will never know what sim­il­ar­it­ies you can find between your­self and the creatures that scare you. And, most im­port­antly, you will be conquered by the spe­cial world that these books take you to, a world in which an ugly creature will even­tu­ally turn out to be a beau­ti­ful one; a mean one be­comes a kind one; a not-so-smart one will prove to be in­tel­li­gent. These are books in which you will def­in­itely find new “friends” that will make you change your minds forever. 

References:

”Pho­bia.” Cam­bridge Dic­tion­ary .Avail­able on­line: https://​dic​tion​ary​.cam​bridge​.org/​d​i​c​t​i​o​n​a​r​y​/​e​n​g​l​i​s​h​/​phobia [13 Decem­ber 2019]

DiC­amilo, Kate. The Tale of Desper­eaux. Berry­ville USA: Can­dlewick Press, 2003.

Kil­ner, Dorothy. “The life and per­am­bu­la­tions of a mouse” in A Store­house of Stor­ies, ed­itor Char­lotte M. Yonge, Lon­don: Spot­tis­woode, 1872, pp. 262–334. [fac­sim­ile on Archive​.org]

Kil­ner, Dorothy. The Life and Per­am­bu­la­tion of a Mouse. vol. II. 1784, on The Hock­liffe Pro­ject,

Stace, Lin­ley. “Mice and rats in children’s Lit­er­at­ure”. 20 Au­gust 2015.web. Avail­able on­line: http: //www.slaphappylarry.com/mice-in-childrens-literature/ [24 June 2018]

White, E.B. Stu­art Little. New York: Har­per­Collins, 1999 [ori­ginal publ. 1945]

(writ­ten May 2018, ad­ap­ted Dec 2019)

Ioana Vălean