Abstract

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.”

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