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“To Half Believe and Wholly Play”: Dialectics of Reality in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice
- American Imago
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 71, Number 2, Summer 2014
- pp. 133-160
- 10.1353/aim.2014.0013
- Article
- Additional Information
The essay examines how the commandeered dollhouse of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice is both allegorical stage and symbolic container of the inner life of the child—in particular, the oscillatory play between the real and the fantastic. These dialectics are masterfully dramatized in the narrative and woven into the fabric of the prose. Enjoining them to “play” along, Potter reassures the young reader that in spite of their “bad” impulses, feelings and fantasies, they are not “so very very naughty after all.”