A Wolf in Tiger's Clothing: Danger, Desire, and Pleasure in Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea

This essay analyses a 1968 picture-book by the German-born British author, Judith Kerr. Drawing on psychoanalysis and the study of fairy tale and on Bettelheim's work on the nexus of the two, and with a theoretical framework that includes Todorov's notion of the fantastic and Benjamin's analysis of Kafka, it sees in the Tiger the embodiment of different forms of desire and presents three possible readings of the functioning of desire in the text (patriarchal, feminist, and electral), the coexistence of which contributes to the its uncanny quality. To make these arguments, the essay pays particularly close attention to the story's illustrations.