The Cult of Peter Rabbit: A Barthesian Analysis

The cult of Peter Rabbit is firmly established: the four-legged oryctolagus cuniculus has appeared on everything from nursery wallpaper to tea cups, calendars to gameboards, bath seeds to slippers, in addition to fulfilling a lengthy assignment as the principal character of a host of book, film, and record adaptations. The prevalence of the Peter Rabbit image evokes what the French semiologist and critic, Roland Barthes, has defined as "myth": a coherent system of communication, or significations. However, it is not the recurring object per se, i.e., Peter Rabbit, that upholds this mythic status, but rather the way in which the image is portrayed. As Barthes maintains:

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.

(109)

What in nature, so to speak, takes a homely rabbit and places it on the pedestal of social adulation? Does the image of a rabbit in some way contain an a priori or eternal mythic quality? Of course not. According to Barthes, there are no eternal myths, though there may be ancient ones: "it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language" (110). Myth, then, as a type of speech or language, is an inevitable outcome of social interaction.

History has proven rabbits to be pervasive literary and cultural symbols, ranging from Brer Rabbit and Peter Cottontail to the more elusive and enigmatic Easter Bunny. In the case of Peter Rabbit, a search for the origination of this image is best begun with the author herself. Potter, although a descendant of a prominent London family, was attracted early to the rural environment, first, as a youth vacationing at regular intervals in the English or Scottish countryside, and later, as an adult residing permanently in England's famous Lake District. As Taylor, one of her biographers, points out, from a youthful age Potter had established a "lifelong interest in the natural order of things" (14).

Potter's early journals reflect her fascination with rabbits in particular. At age nine Potter drew "rabbit fantasies," i.e., rabbits ice-skating, driving carriages, sledging, and even riding horseback (14). This pastime continued well into her teens; by 1890 Potter had acquired her own pet rabbit which she christened Benjamin H. Bouncer. This rabbit accompanied Potter on most of her jaunts, even on her trips between England and Scotland. It was during these delightful years that Potter began to make more detailed and naturalistic observations of the natural world around her, and especially of her rabbit companion.

Potter's sketches and paintings of Benjamin "from every angle and in every pose" (20) served as the model for her first commercial art—greeting cards for the London publisher Hildesheimer & Faulkner. When Benjamin expired, Potter acquired a new rabbit, which was promptly christened Peter. Potter's journals and sketchbooks of this period are again filled with drawings of rabbits, showing both naturalistic studies and sensitive, though peculiar, rabbit fantasies (including a pen-and-ink drawing entitled "A Rabbit's Dream").

Peter, like Benjamin before him, became both Potter's constant companion and artistic model. Peter was the inspiration for many new greeting card designs, for a host of picture-letter stories to her former governess's children, and for her own imaginative illustrations to popular classic works of the time. It is no surprise then that by 1897 Potter had synthesized these extensive observations into the prototypical story "The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor's Garden."

After many tedious revisions, and some unsuccessful attempts to interest commercial publishers, Potter decided to publish the work herself, and did...