Rebirth in the Life and Works of Beatrix Potter by Richard Tuerk (review)

While the life and works of Beatrix Potter have served as ripe sources for extensive scholarship over the years, Richard Tuerk—author of Central Still: Circle and Sphere in Thoreau's Prose and Oz in Perspective: Magic and Myth in the L. Frank Baum Books—enters into this corner of the literary world with Rebirth in the Life and Works of Beatrix Potter in order to establish a connection between Potter's own desires for freedom and transformation and those of her characters. Arguing that Potter's works regularly depict "protagonists [who] go through a series of events that roughly correspond to processes of initiation in which a kind of rebirth appears," Tuerk also notes that "a good case can be made for seeing a sense of depression and anxiety" within her stories (7, 22). According to Tuerk, Potter's "attempts to grow up, her attempts to become an adult rather than just her parents' child, find voice in book after book that she created" (183). Such desires for transformation and rebirth thus become present within her work, creating stories that blend realism and fantasy in unique ways while eschewing the category of moral tales to instead serve as more complex works of art (41).

Tuerk's book can be divided into two distinct sections: the first introduces readers to Potter's life and style of writing while the second contains in-depth analyses of each of Potter's major works. In this first section, Tuerk treats Potter's realism as a defining feature of her style, noting that she "hardly ever writes about [the animals in her books] sentimentally; she hardly ever glosses over the dangers in their lives" (37). Such realism, then, requires that the rebirth experienced by her characters also occurs in a realistic way; Tuerk notes both that "[t] he changes [Potter's] animals undergo are incremental rather than total," and that the effects of these changes on each animal are not always the same (42, 7).

It is within this first section that Tuerk begins setting up a secondary argument about Potter's work, positing that her tales "fit under the rubric of 'wonder tale' or 'fairy tale'" (43). Using J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" as a rubric for this discussion, Tuerk contends that Tolkien's dismissal of The Tale of Peter Rabbit as a "beast fable" rather than an actual fairy tale is incorrect as well as inconsistent with Tolkien's own definition of the fairy tale. While the chapter "Fairies, Fairytales and Beatrix Potter" is a fascinating and persuasive argument as to the classification of Potter's stories, it mentions little of the rebirth concept Tuerk has discussed thus far. This is a missed opportunity as Tolkien's essay points out that it is typical of fairy stories to use danger and tragedy as vehicles for growth and change, meaning that the pervasive pattern of rebirth seen throughout Potter's works is yet another way in which these stories meet his idea of the fairy tale.

In the second section of the book, Tuerk includes individual chapters each analyzing as few as one and as many as three of Potter's works at a time. Tuerk treats twenty-one of Potter's twenty-three major tales (Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes and Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes are the only two not included) as well as The Fairy Caravan, Sister Anne, and three of Potter's posthumous works. It is clear from his writing that Tuerk is passionate about Potter's stories and excited about the ideas he posits. In his examination of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tuerk takes the argument of symbolic rebirth in Potter's work to a more literal level. Noting that Peter's entanglement in the gooseberry net leads to an illustration in which he "is in the usual position of a human fetus getting ready to exit … the birth canal," Tuerk follows this imagery throughout Potter's story to argue...