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  • Between Me and the World:Clothes as Mediator between Self and Society in the Work of Beatrix Potter
  • Carole Scott (bio)

Beatrix Potter's wonderful illustrations most often show animals dressed in clothes, usually the slightly old-fashioned kind of attire she saw people wearing in the vicinity of Near Sawrey. While this is a natural extension of depicting animals as characters whose speech and actions reflect the people she knew, the clothes play a much larger part in her books than simply as decorative touches for the illustrations. While they play a significant role in several tales, they are a primary focus of three, serving to highlight the delicate interaction between animal nature and civilized behavior, and to direct our thoughts toward the relationship between the individual and the social world, particularly those aspects involving power, impotence, and disguise.

Potter's use of clothes reflects a deep understanding of the part they play in human awareness, for clothing marks the point at which the individual and the social world touch, and expresses in physical terms the subtle relationship between the inner personality and the social milieu, the interaction that defines the self. For children who are in the process of developing self-definition, clothes are a very personal and immediate experience of their relationship to the world around them. Clothes serve both to protect and to restrict. They also serve as a means of self-expression, communicating the "inner" self—the way we see ourselves—as well as our social roles and our relationships to others.

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents explores how much the individual must repress of him or herself in order to live in society; many psychologists who followed him preferred to view the social medium as one that nurtures the individual's self-realization. Potter's stance on this continuum is unsure; her books repeatedly express her ambivalence both to nature and to society. Because her characters are predominantly humanized animals, the dividing line between humankind's animal nature and social self is thrown into dramatic relief and the focus on their relationship intensified.

This fluctuating line between the human and the animal is well portrayed [End Page 192] in the apparel Potter chooses for her creatures. Much has been made of her youthful passion as an artist of nature and her realistic drawings of plants and animals. Clothing the animals preserves the integrity of her naturalistic observation while clearly revealing the humanness the stories depict. In Jemima Puddleduck, the fox's wily nature, which in real life enables him to raid henhouses and elude hunting dogs, is metamorphosed into the suave urbanity of "the ginger whiskered gentleman" whose clever talk and seductive persuasiveness lead to Jemima's initial trust and ultimate betrayal. His rather caddish sophistication is expressed not only in his first presentation—he is reading a newspaper—but in his dress, the plus-fours suit of a country gentleman, complete with scarlet waistcoat; he is, as Jemima perceives, "elegantly dressed," his costume contrasting with Jemima's country shawl and dated poke bonnet. The reader, though not Jemima, sees him a little later undisguised by his clothes, revealing his true nature as he greedily paws the eggs she has laid. While this tale does not focus upon clothes, it does display some of Potter's evocative uses of them. The dress reflects the power relationships of a class system where a "ginger whiskered gentleman" can inflict his will upon a simple farm girl whose lack of class and education makes her prey to his wiles. Especially brilliant in this allegorical tale of seduction is the fox's provision of a nesting place for Jemima, a "shed . . . almost quite full of feathers." Feathers, of course, are Jemima's natural clothing, but just as she is unable to see the fox within the gentleman's clothes, so, overwhelmed by her biological urge to raise a family, she fails to realize how the fox must have "undressed" his previous conquests.

Where Jemima's adventure leads to her being "escorted home in tears," Lucie, in her search for her lost "pinny" and "handkins" in Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, is led on a journey that not only enables...

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