Original painting by Iona Ellsworth
I never heard the book read aloud when I was a child; my mother didn’t favor books written for children since she believed we could all absorb adult literature at an early age and be the better for it—and I think she was probably right. Her list of recommended titles for certain ages included Mother Goose “for babies from 18 months,” Beatrix Potter’s animal stories “for 2 to 3,” Grimm’s fairy tales “from 4 on” and Shakespeare’s songs “from 4.” After that it was Dickens.
Recently a woman I admire used The Runaway Bunny as the thesis for her sermon, and that brought the book and its message to my mind.
The bunny son begins the story by telling his mother that he is running away. The rest of the story is composed of his attempts to escape—becoming a fish, a rock and so forth to elude her—and her plans to find him. Humor seems to obscure the hint of desperation in the bunny’s attempts to evade her; there is nowhere for him to go where she will not find him. At the end he concedes with a sigh that he might as well stay where he is, resigned to being his mother’s “little bunny” forever.
I long for an end date to his imprisonment but that is not in the story.
I wonder how many children over the years have listened to the story with a creeping sense of dread. Do we learn to define love as being something from which there is no escape?
Perhaps some children hearing the tale are impressed by the mother’s “heroic” persistence, and we are certainly capable of that. There is a new group of women on the Republican side who are called, or call themselves, “Mama Bears,” fiercely censoring books they feel are “inappropriate” for their children to read. As always, these are books dealing with matters of sex. Years ago this kind of group didn’t want their children to learn about masturbating (as though we needed a book to learn about that!) but now they have turned their attention to discussions of gender fluidity. There is always a new bull to gore, but the topic is always sex.
One of the problems we who attempt to “civilize” through sermons or love entrapments of other kinds face is that many children and certainly many adults will almost automatically resist our well-intentioned attempts because we dread being captured, subdued, taught—as Mark Twain describes Huckleberry Finn’s resistance: “The Widow Douglas took me for her son and allowed she would sivilize me (sc) but it was rough living in the house all the time” and learning manners and behavior and dress, all confining, until Huck knew he would have to go back to the lawless outdoor life he experienced with “Pappy.”
Will the bunny ever escape?
Maybe when he becomes like the little rabbit my son called Carrot (he was orange) who was so unruly as an adult he lived in a hole in the yard and eventually disappeared into the wild.
I’m hoping one day the bunny escapes further “sivilizing” and also escapes into the wild.
And I wonder to what degree my mother’s preposterous expectations moved her semi-educated offspring toward despair.
She lived on the cusp of a radical change in U.S. education, heralded, to her mind, by the switch to teaching reading by the “look-say” method rather than phonetically and by a heavy reliance in the early grades on primers like the deadly Dick and Jane series: See Jane Run, etc.
Her mother, my beloved Richmond grandmother, Munda, had no use for such trash and often electrified me with the poems she recited, their source unknown:
“Webspinner was a miser old
Who came of low degree…”
And many others I have forgotten. Later, reading her published short stories, I realized that she and my father had something in common neither of them recognized at the time: a delight in frightening children, with the totally unacceptable but perhaps practical consideration that children will more readily learn to read what frightens them.
Reading as a way to ward off the horrors…
Maybe AI is not as bad as you’ve suggested; anyway, the MSN Bing AI did give the source for the lines you cited—”The lines you mentioned are from a poem called ‘The Squire of Low Degree.’ It is an anonymous late Middle English or early Modern English verse romance.”
I was/am a Reading Specialist. Phonics will let you down 50% of the time with all the irregular words we have in English. I loved the Dick and Jane books for my children. The repetition of words provides the necessary 20 or so times you need to encounter a new word to learn it. I still recommend them to new Mothers.
PS. My husband and I were volunteers at Actors Theatre of Louisville for many years. We are so sad as we have lost our fabulous regional theater. There is no Intern Program, no Humana…not much of anything. Actors Associates, of which I was President, is nonexistent and in fact most of us are resigned to not support the theater in it present form. It would be wonderful if you could have some of your friends look into what is going on and return this leading institution to Louisville.
The rabbit book and Tom Sawyer are about teaching young readers to hate Mother, to despise being under her love and guidance, the old thing of scaring the young away from threats to the control which those ruling in a society are determined to maintain a grip on.
In my first grade the Dick and Jane readers were used. I did not like them, although, because I was only six, I could not have told you why. Or perhaps I could have, had I been asked, I don’t know. I do recall feeling bored with them, and irritated by what little actions happened in them. Was I perhaps recognizing the sex role training in the depictions of the two little main characters, but had no words to define misogyny back then, pre-feminist insights about such things?
I liked there being pictures and colors in books and, when I went into third grade, was angry that our school books suddenly had only a small, black and white picture here and there, and no colors at all.
As for the phonetic style, I’m all for it. Sound it out. A tool for independently figuring out language.