Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code (review)

Beatrix Potter's life and work have been explored from many different perspectives. The story of Potter's escape from the strictures of her repressive Victorian home and the social limitations on an unmarried woman's life, to a successful life as a groundbreaking children's author, as well as an independent landowner and farmer, is well known. Critical approaches to her array of small, exquisite books for little children are also numerous and take many different stances.

In this book, however, Daphne Kutzer does something relatively new. She investigates the entire set of books through the lens of Potter's biography and her views on social and political issues of the day. By placing the small books in a social and political context, and by paying careful attention to both large thematic questions and small details of presentation, she offers a new way of looking at the entire oeuvre.

The book makes a cogent case that just because the books are small, often pastel, created with a delicate precision of word and image, addressed to little children, and feature talking animals as protagonists is no reason to ignore the broader significance of what they tell us about the author and about her times. Kutzer refers to many of the little books as novels and makes a convincing argument that we gain greater insight by treating them in this way.

Many adult readers of Potter experience the books through a veil of nostalgia for their own childhoods and do not always see the complexities and ironies the tales present. The books may be miniature and populated by anthropomorphic animals, but the words are as full of irony and wit as a Jane Austen novel, and the plots are often small masterpieces of social comedy. . . . All of Potter's works, however, from the simplest to the most complex, are informed by the context of Potter's life and her place in Victorian and Edwardian England. Examined in this biographical and critical context the books take on subtleties and complexities that have often been missed by critics.

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Given the vast range of critical literature devoted to Potter's stories, Kutzer is making a large claim to suggest that such a large issue has been overlooked. However, in the course of the book, she backs up her claim that she has something new to offer in convincing detail. The comparison to Austen is not new; what is effective in this book is how Kutzer treats the whole set of Potter's books with equally careful attention, and how she draws on the entire fabric of the books—words, pictures, and layouts—as evidence for her analysis. By respecting the true complexity of the books in this way, and by not fearing to connect these small stories to the large issues of the day, she makes it possible to explore the foreground and background, the counterpoint and harmony of Potter's books in complicated and interesting ways.

Many critics have noted Potter's ambiguous attitude towards the delights and perils of domesticity. To say that this ambivalence is a major component of many stories is not to make any kind of new observation. However, Kutzer pursues this idea systematically through the entire set of books, noting the ebb and flow of Potter's own domestic circumstances, the evidence of her letters, and the social and political developments of the time. Drawing on this range of sources, she provides a substantial exploration of questions of domesticity, rebellion, fairness, and compromise.

For example, Kutzer's reading of the ongoing theme of rebellion is subtle and convincing. Writing of The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Roly-Poly Pudding, she says,

Potter is on the side of rebellion in these two books about the cats, as she usually is, but her allegiance is a complicated one. It appears that one must know when to rebel, not only how to rebel, in order to be successful, and if you mistime your rebellion you may never be able to leave the confines of...