The Velveteen Rabbit: A Kleinian Perspective

A popular, even "classic" children's story, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco is in some ways troubling nonetheless. At least two commentators have recently expressed reservations about the story. In a 1983 review of the five new editions published promptly once its copyright had expired, Gerald Weales grudgingly acknowledges that "there are thousands of readers out there who see 'The Velveteen Rabbit' as a story about the power of love and who turned it into a children's classic." It is clear that he does not number himself among these thousands; he precedes this observation by demurring to their judgment. "The second step," he writes, "has always baffled me. . . . The problem for me is that the final transformation [of the Rabbit] is brought about not by love but by self-pity." A few months earlier, Faith McNulty included The Velveteen Rabbit in a report on her rereading of three books she remembered fondly from childhood. Black Beauty and The Wizard of Oz continue to delight and to merit McNulty's recommendation, but The Velveteen Rabbit fares less well:

Rereading this blatant tearjerker, I am not surprised that it once filled me with terrible feelings, too complicated to name. . . . It plucks at a child's deepest fears and longings. That is not necessarily wrong. The sin I can't forgive is its sad, sleazy message, as false as a three-dollar bill. The book gives no hint that there is any way to meet the tragedy of lost love and betrayal other than letting the heart break. I am a little angry that I was once subjected to this cruel book. . . .

[179-80]

There is indeed something "complicated" about the anxieties this simple story provokes, but the nature of those complications is barely suggested in the comments I have quoted. Psychoanalysis—in particular Melanie Klein's theories of early childhood development —can, by confronting the question at the heart of the story, help give a name to the "terrible feelings" McNulty refers to. "Of what use was it," the Velveteen Rabbit asks at a crucial moment, "to be loved and lose one's beauty and become Real if it all ended like this" (37)? This question, bearing upon the inevitability and pain of separation and upon the child's ambivalence toward separation, burdens not only this story but also Bianco's other books for children.¹

Though Klein is arguably the most important and innovative of the second generation of Freudians and the first generation of post-Freudians, her ideas are less well known in this country than in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. Yet Kleinian concepts, such as splitting of the object, persecutory anxiety (also identified as paranoid or paranoid-schizoid anxiety), and depressive anxiety, speak directly to the problems raised in this story.² It is important to recognize at the outset, however, that "depressive and persecutory anxieties are never entirely overcome" ("Our Adult World" 256); they are "reactivated," for example, even in the most "normal mourning" ("Mourning" 353). Successive reactivations in childhood and adulthood complicate one another and undermine simple conceptions of chronological development. Narratives involving straightforward chronology may, on the other hand, harbor within them traces of early anxieties and reactivations of seemingly superseded developmental positions. (Klein prefers to speak of "positions," which may be reoccupied, rather than "stages.") A story like The Velveteen Rabbit—fantasy reconstructed quasi-realistically—is a nice analogue to the reactivation in adulthood of the inner life of the infant or child.

The Velveteen Rabbit, subtitled How Toys Become Real, tells of a Velveteen Rabbit that becomes real in two stages. First the Rabbit becomes real for the Boy who receives it as a Christmas gift; then, through the agency of a Fairy, it is brought to life and allowed to join the real rabbits who had earlier rejected it. The passage from one stage to the next requires separation from the Boy and is managed through the narrative strategy of an illness of the Boy's and a medical judgment that his playthings must be destroyed. It is evidently of concern to the storyteller that...