Bodies and Pleasures in The Wind in the Willows

Although Kenneth Grahame originally objected to The Wind in the Willows being illustrated (Green 285), the text has since proved a site of much visual activity. From the coy early sketches of Ernest H. Shepard to Arthur Rackham's fantastic watercolors, illustrators have gloried in the imaginative possibilities of Grahame's text. Yet as Elaine Showalter notes of the numerous illustrations of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet, a visual tradition growing alongside a literary text can signal an absence in the text itself. Ophelia, lacking agency and development within the play, inspires attempts to complete her character, to fill in Shakespeare's bare sketch (Showalter 78). So, too, with The Wind in the Willows. I think illustrators are inspired not simply by the local charm of small animals in the English countryside but by a particular lacuna—an absence of consistent, direct reference to their physical characteristics.

For those who are not visual artists, other forms of accommodation may be necessary. Grahame's purpose was to trace a world of innocent delights and thereby to encourage children's identification with animals whose small bodies and large egos match their own. Yet today we have to wonder how innocent this prepubescent vision of the physical self is, particularly given Grahame's note to his publisher that the work was "clear of the clash of sex" (Ellmann xvii; Kuznets 175).¹ How effective can such a clearing be, and what are its costs? Here I will explore the relation between Grahame's evasion of mimetic fixity and the ideological marking in the text with regard to gender. I am concerned with both the poetics and the morality of representation—the access that it affords to readerly pleasure and the violence that it does to the represented object. After considering some purposes and effects of the absence of bodies from The Wind in the Willows, I will turn to the way in which the repressed—the clash of sex—returns, specifically in Grahame's portrayal of Toad in the guise of the washerwoman. Finally I will suggest how, by treating gender as a role rather than a stable reality, The Wind in the Willows unsettles some of its own misogynistic violence.

Although this essay focuses closely on Grahame's text, the argument that I pursue has implications for the study of children's fantasy literature in general. I will suggest limitations in the model of feminist interpretation—empiricist, liberal feminism—that has recently dominated in the field. Such a model, while useful in identifying overt forms of sexism, assumes a rigorous gender opposition that does not regularly appear in imaginative literature for children. In the final section of this essay I will suggest how a poststructural form of feminism, one that resists the notion of (two) fixed genders, is more appropriate and helpful in analyzing works like The Wind in the Willows. A delight of classic children's fantasy is the creation of a realm where possibilities are multiple rather than exclusive. Kenneth Grahame strives for such freedom in his images of gendered behavior, hence his work imagines a world of multigendered possibility, even though it remains historically connected to a misogynistic society.

Pleasures Without Bodies

The world represented in The Wind in the Willows is one of multitudinous pleasures. From the early moments of Mole's glad animal pleasure in spring sunlight and a first glimpse of the river, Kenneth Grahame's text continually evokes the delights of the flesh—the simple, creaturely satisfactions of good food, welcome rest, comfortable shelter. Bodily as these experiences are, however, they are curiously detached from any sustained representation of the physical bodies of the central characters. Originally written for the author's young son, who was nearly blind from birth, The Wind in the Willows offers an unusual and compelling example of a children's text that does not privilege the visual senses.² Grahame relies on other sensory media, more fluid and less prone to iconolatry, to establish the experiences of his characters. The occasional reference to a forepaw or to Rat's swimming abilities or to Mole's...