"The Northern Suburbs Seem to be Quite Frequently Afflicted by Raging Elephants": Identity Fluidity in Beatrix Potter's Tales and Life

Abstract

Central to the effect of Beatrix Potter's tales is her talent at creating fluidity in the boundary between human and animal identities, manifested by her characters' clothing, behavior, and conflicts, as well as by her styles of drawing and writing. This talent flowed from Potter's developmental experience of several jolts to her own identity while her deep connection to animals remained a lifelong constant. The fluidity she depicts between human and non-human identities is consistent with what Loewald (1951, 1952) identified as Freud's implicit theory about the nature of reality—that ego and reality are one during the phase of primary narcissism and gradually separate from each other, entailing a primal relatedness.

The title quote from 18-year-old Beatrix Potter's journal captures in its amusingly civilized description of wild beasts something of her complex relationship with animals. Central to the effect of Potter's tales is her talent at creating fluidity in the boundary between human and animal identities, a talent that flowed from her developmental experience of several jolts to her own identity while her deep connection to animals remained a lifelong constant.

Previous writers have demonstrated that Potter experienced and expressed in her tales many painful conflicts (Grinstein, 1995; Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020; Tutter, 2014) These aspects of her life and art can be understood within what Loewald (1951, 1952) identified as Freud's primary theory of ego and reality: that as the ego matures, it begins to recognize the dangerous separate reality into which it has been born and from which it must protect itself. My focus in this paper will be to explore an underlying aspect of Potter and her writings that can express such conflicts but is not explained by them: a fluidity between human and animal identities that has been suppressed in modern Western society but has been basic to most of humanity and is still available to young children, even in the West. This fluidity between human and non-human identities is more readily explained by what Loewald (1951, 1952) identified as Freud's implicit theory about the nature of reality—that ego and reality are one during the phase of primary narcissism and gradually separate from each other, entailing a primal relatedness.

Ego modulation of rage can be readily recognized in the title quote by the way that Potter describes the pachyderms rampaging in the precise "Northern suburbs" and with the prim "quite frequently afflicted." But this phrasing also achieves something else, a drawing together of animal and human natures. This will become clearer by examining the entire journal entry from which the sentence was extracted. Potter kept a journal (written in code that was not deciphered until 1958, indicating her strong desire for privacy from her controlling parents) from 1881 to 1897, when she was aged 14 to 30. The entry in question dates from October 26, 1884. Importantly, this was the one-year anniversary of the death of her Grandfather Potter:

[The date has] Fallen on Sunday owing to leap year. If the next year takes away as many dear faces it will bring death very near home. How strange time is looking back! A great moving creeping something closing over one object after another like rising water.

Perhaps few epitaphs can be found to match one on a lady buried at Welwyn, though I have heard and seen some other ones. "She was very pure within—she hatched herself a cherubim." "Hatched into" would have been clearer.

The Northern suburbs seem to be quite frequently afflicted by raging elephants. The last escaped, jammed itself in a lane where the frightened inhabitants gave it an unlimited supply of buns to keep it from knocking down the houses.

When we came home from the station on Thursday through Marylebone, we were surprised to find policemen moving on and turning off the traffic, amongst great excitement. Supposed there was a riot, that being the ordinary cause of excitement now, but it seems a horrid human head and then some limbs had been found in a back street. We had the same driver and horses from Taylor's again.

(Linder, 1989, pp. 109–110)

Depressive affect, which has frequently been noted as prominent for Potter (Grinstein, 1995; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020; Tutter, 2014), is obvious in this entry, as is rage, not only in the elephants but in the gruesome murder. Potter appears to be in great pain over the death of her grandfather, and to be warding off the pain with humor and insouciance, as when she suggests better phrasing for the epitaph, and finishes with a calm comment about their driver and horses.

But these dynamic conflicts are built upon and do not themselves explain boundary fluidity. Humans can transform into pure cherubim, or into a murderer or the corpse whose boundaries were concretely violated by chopping it up. The defiled body becomes an abject that, if observed, threatens the feeling of a sound identity (Kristeva, 1982). And elephants aren't so different from humans: they afflict the Northern suburbs the way that human rioting has become normal, and in fact, by calming down while eating buns, they behave far more humanly than whoever defiled the corpse. This close identity of animals with humans is at the core of Potter's tales.

Are Those Animals or People in Beatrix Potter's Tales?

It is commonly understood in child therapy and children's literature that animals provide a comfortable repository for feelings and conflicts that would be frightening for a child to own consciously. Rather than continuing to rage and threaten to eat his mother for sending him to bed without dinner, Max puts his rage into the Wild Things, where he can safely triumph over it (Sendak, 2012). This mechanism is active in Potter's stories and has been explored by Grinstein (1995), Scheftel (2014), and Tutter (2014). However, Potter takes this primary process boundary-crossing further so that it creates the completely different effect of raising wonder as to what it is to be a person or an animal. In what follows, I will place psychodynamic patterns notable in Potter's tales within a wider context that reveals identity issues that are not accounted for by those patterns. These identity issues raise the questions: Are her characters animals that act like people? People who look like animals? Or both? (Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020).

A primary locale of the human–animal ambiguity in Potter's stories is the characters' relationships to clothes. In the real world, people wear clothes and animals don't (unless dressed by people), but in Potter's tales, this signifier is less clear.

In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Potter's (2012) first and most famous story, clothes on one level carry the dynamic meaning of maturity and human-like good behavior that masters one's exciting animal nature. Peter is dressed properly by his mother and remains clothed as he trespasses in Mr. MacGregor's garden and eats his vegetables, but his clothes hinder him as he tries to escape and are almost his undoing when his buttons become tangled in a net. He wriggles out of his clothes and, looking like a wild rabbit, is able to run away swiftly, but his childish naughtiness is emphasized by the observation that this is the second outfit he has lost in a fortnight. This dynamic interplay is embedded in a larger ambiguity, though, that suggests additional meaning. Peter's sisters, who were "good little bunnies" (p. 10), shed their clothes as they responsibly gather blackberries, and the first picture in the story shows the entire family, mother included, unclothed like wild rabbits; thus, the "good/mature/human" meaning of clothing is undone and a consistent pattern is not obvious. This ambiguity is reflected in Mr. MacGregor's confusion as well. He is completely unsurprised by Peter's being clothed and uses Peter's left-behind garments to dress a scarecrow. But in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, a sequel, Peter's cousin, Benjamin, is shod in clogs as he helps Peter recover his garments, and Mr. MacGregor is baffled by the tiny clog footprints. He seems not to know whether animals wear clothing or not.

In The Tale of Two Bad Mice, clothing similarly carries dynamic meaning embedded in a larger ambiguity. As Tutter (2014) pointed out, this story progresses from a mouse couple angrily trashing a dollhouse because they were deceived by the fake food, to the tranquil family home of the mice, and finally to the mice making up for their "bad" behavior by paying a sixpence and sweeping the dollhouse. Shifts in clothing partly symbolize the difference between "bad" animal behavior and "good" domestic behavior: the mice are unclothed as they attack the dollhouse, and the mother mouse is clothed in her home and when sweeping the dollhouse. Scheftel (2014) thinks that the unclothed mice are frightening and uncanny, the clothed mice comforting. But the father mouse is never clothed, whether behaving well or not, and both mice are unclothed as they tuck the sixpence into a doll's stocking.

In many of Potter's other stories the seemingly arbitrary shifting between clothed and unclothed status is even more noticeable. In The Tailor of Gloucester, mice finish sewing a garment when the tailor is too ill to continue; the tailor's cat first resents the tailor freeing the mice and so tries to undermine the work, but finally repents. The mice and cat are variously clothed and unclothed, without this status correlating with their moral or emotional positions. In The Tale of Tom Kitten, Tom and his sisters lose their clothes in frisky play, so clothes again symbolize control over childish wildness, but the comic heart of the story occurs when three silly puddle-ducks steal the clothes, waddle off in them, and then lose them in the pond. Lest this be taken to mean that clothes symbolize good sense and so don't fit on silly creatures, one of the ducks, Jemima, has her own Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck in which she is clothed most of the time despite being too silly to recognize that the foxy gentleman who befriends her is an actual fox who plans to eat her. The dogs in the story, who act as sensible, brave, effective, human-like adults in saving Jemima from the fox, are never clothed. In The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding, considered by many (Carpenter, 1989; Greene, 1933) to be Potter's masterpiece with her most fully realized villains, two rats, Samuel Whiskers and his wife Ana Maria, capture and plan to devour Tom Kitten. These most immoral (by human standards) and cannibalistic characters are always elegantly clothed.

The blended animal–human identity of Potter's characters is also manifested behaviorally. Throughout the stories, animals eat foods appropriate to their species, even when they are clad and behaving most like humans. Sometimes the comestibles are realistic—Peter Rabbit snacking on vegetables—but sometimes they are amusingly humanized: I already mentioned the well-dressed rats intending to eat Tom Kitten, but Mr. Samuel Whiskers wants him prepared as a roly-poly pudding. In The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher the eponymous pretentiously clad frog dines on roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce. In The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan a cat and dog try to have an elegant tea party, but the action grows out of the dog's aversion to mouse pie, which she correctly suspects the cat will bake for her. When sugar is offered for tea, the dog cannot resist balancing a cube on her nose. The doctor who is called in is a magpie who engages in the magpie behavior of putting nails into a bottle.

Animal–human ambiguity shows up as well in the attitude of human characters toward eating animals. The Tale of Pigling Bland is commonly thought to be the most personally autobiographical of Potter's stories: written when, at the age of 46, she was getting married, seven years after her first engagement had ended in the death of her fiancé, this story tells how Pigling Bland, on the way to market, is captured by a Mr. Piperson, who clearly intends to eat him. Pigling Bland frees a captive female pig and they escape to live together happily ever after. These two pigs may be considered "extra-human" as they represent Potter and her husband (and are fully clothed at all times), but nevertheless are available for human consumption like real pigs. This dual nature is emphasized even more by the story never making clear whether Pigling Bland was headed to market to make purchases, or to be purchased himself.

In The Tale of Little Pig Robinson we see the same theme of pigs related to as humans and, at the same time, available for human consumption. Little Pig Robinson's aunts, Misses Dorcas and Porcas, send him to market to shop because they are too fat to fit through the stiles en route. Both humans and animals interact amiably with Pig Robinson at the market town, and warn him to be careful. But naïve and full of excitement, he fails to recognize that a new human friend is the cook for the aptly named ship captain Barnabas Butcher, and Pig Robinson finds himself shanghaied. (He eventually escapes to a blissful existence on a desert island.) The dual human–animal status of "animals" is especially clear in a brief narrator's comment at the beginning, about the fully clothed aunts who walk on their hind legs: "They led prosperous uneventful lives and their end was bacon" (2012, p. 347).

Potter's foundational creation of animal–human ambiguity is also apparent in her commitment to realism in her drawings and paintings. Even when clothed and behaving most humanly, her characters carry conviction as animals because of the realism with which they and their settings are drawn. From innumerable possible examples, I will select from her most familiar tale: when Peter Rabbit "ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes" (2012, p. 13), he looks like a real rabbit eating those vegetables despite wearing shoes and a blue jacket, and the setting includes a realistically drawn robin. The robin is never mentioned in the text but is shown in three additional pictures, helping to create the effect of an underlying real natural world.

The realism of Potter's art was no accident. She developed her skill in naturalistic drawing prior to her publishing career and was quite conscious of its importance for her stories. She based many of her animal drawings on real-life models; for example, she owned and sketched or painted Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny many times before they entered her books. She went to great lengths to get the animals right, as when preparing The Tale of Pigling Bland: "I spent a very wet hour inside the pig sty drawing the pig. It tries to nibble my boots, which is interrupting" (Potter, 1989, p. 183, emphasis in original). Many of the settings of her stories she drew from actual locations, so much so that villagers where she lived would look in her books to find both themselves and familiar locales. Potter even commented directly on the importance of realism in drawings: when her publisher objected to the very long tail of a cat in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, she responded, "[the cat's] owner wants you to be assured that the real tail is even larger" (1989, p. 271). When her publisher sent her the work of a younger illustrator, she responded (in the context of mostly positive comments),

Tell her to study branches, the trees and bushes are a little weak … I did so many careful botanical studies in my youth, it became easy for me to draw twigs. And little details like that add to the reality of a picture.

(1989, p. 271)

Potter's tales further depicted ambiguity between human and animal identities by blending unconscious personal conflicts with animal realism. The theme of bodily injury is prominent both in Potter's tales and in observations she made in her journal and letters. In The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which begins with the line "This is a tale about a tail" (2012, p. 23), the title character teases an owl until the owl tries to kill it, but only succeeds in breaking off its tail. In The Fairy Caravan (1929), guinea pigs are divided into a superior race with long hair and an inferior one with short hair. Tuppeny, a member of the latter group, has such poor hair that he resorts to hair-growing elixir that causes constant hair growth; his wife tries to control it by endlessly shearing it and then by tearing it out. In early editions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter, while hiding from Mr. MacGregor, hears someone singing "Three Blind Mice" and worries that his own tail will be cut off; years later Potter illustrated this rhyme for her small collection called Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes. Grinstein (1995, p. 77) assembled a number of journal entries in which Potter describes bodily injuries to animals and people she knew. And in a letter to a child dated October 3, 1916, Potter (1989) wrote, "That awful big beast at the museum is like a bad dream; I once did dream about it; it was coming downstairs on crutches into the big hall of the museum, and I was unable to run away" (p. 228)

Although Grinstein (1995) was confident that such material represents castration anxiety and penis envy, we do not know enough about Potter's early development to rule out pre-Oedipal injuries to the self as equally or more important unconscious determinants; her conflicted later relationship with her mother (see below) is highly suggestive of early maternal relationship difficulties. Whatever the deeper determinants may be, it is clear that concern about bodily injury was prominent in Potter's tales and psyche. But bodily injury is also realistically very common in the lives of animals and in their interactions with humans. It is unsurprising that a person greatly interested in animals would remark in her journal about animals being injured. And if one is writing exciting stories for children in which animals have dangerous adventures, the threat or actuality of bodily injury is an almost unavoidable theme. This theme appearing in the tales is thus analogous to "dreams from above" (Freud, 1923), in which the prime motivators for the dream are thoughts and intentions of daily life, with repressed material only serving to reinforce the quotidian concerns. Therefore, this theme in Potter's work has the aesthetic effect of emphasizing the shared identities of humans and animals: animals realistically experience what humans unconsciously fear.

Potter had a striking writing style that also contributed to creating human–animal ambiguity. Many observers have noted that her writing frequently involved formal phrasing studded with words fancier than children typically encountered in stories written for them (Carpenter, 1989; Grinstein, 1995; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020). Carpenter thought this style reflected the Regency speech Potter would have heard as a child from her beloved grandmother, or even took on Old Testament cadences. As such, when applied to animal characters, it lends itself to ironic criticism of upper-class snobbery. For example, in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, the upper-class snobbery of the eponymous character is signified by the regular use of his title "Mr.," and likewise the snobbery of his friends, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Turtle. The frog speaks elegantly even in fraught moments, an elegance emphasized by the repeated use of his full name and title: "'I trust that is not a rat,' said Mr. Jeremy Fisher" (2012, p. 125), "'What a mercy that was not a pike!,' said Mr. Jeremy Fisher" (p. 128). The characters' class snobbery is further emphasized by elegant clothing. But after all, Mr. Jeremy Fisher is "just" a frog, and as the story progresses he is humiliated, laughed at, and nearly devoured by a trout. What is most important to recognize here is that, while ironically critiquing class, this language also "dials-up," so to speak, the human–animal blending: even the kind of humans who consider themselves least animalistic are at the same time animals, and even such "low" animals as amphibians and reptiles are at the same time quite human.

Potter used such language in all her stories, not only those that obviously puncture class snobbery, and Carpenter (1989) sees it as always having sarcastic or parodic effect. A good example he presents is the scene where Peter Rabbit barely escapes from Mr. MacGregor after his clothes have become tangled in a net: "Peter gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears; but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows, who flew to him in great excitement, and implored him to exert himself" (2012, p. 14, emphasis added). Carpenter sees this as a gentle parody of moralizing tracts that were common at the time. Whether or not this creates parody, such irony applied to animals does seem always to contribute to "dialing up" the human–animal ambiguity: the talking sparrows are drawn naturalistically, and following their elegant advice, Peter does exert himself; he squirms out of his clothes and escapes as a wild rabbit, so we see the use of fine speech integrated with animality.

My impression is that Potter's use of such language generally demonstrated something fine about being a person, which she enjoyed melding with animality. Several times in her letters we can see Potter insisting on the importance of special words: in correspondence with her publisher, she advocated for the word "scutter" in The Roly-Poly Pudding, which she had already used in "the immortal Peter Rabbit which is a classic!" (1989, p. 162). In reviewing editorial suggestions on The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, Potter insisted on the word "conversed" ("children like a fine word occasionally," 1989, p. 96), and stated "I would like the book to end with the word 'rabbit tobacco' it is rather a fine word" (p. 96). "Rabbit tobacco" is indeed a rather fine word to illustrate the softening of boundaries between human and animal: it is an archaic term for "lavender" that condenses animal and human.

Potter's Unsentimental Animism and Identity Flexibility

Potter's talent at creating characters that blended human and animal identities grew out of her experience of herself and her relationship with animals. Although little definite is known about Potter's early relationships, tentative reconstructions can be made. As was common in upper-class British families at the time, while an infant, most of her care was in the hands of a nurse (Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007). In her letters, Potter (1989) remembered the nurse as a "stern Calvinist" who read to her (p. 365), and most importantly, as "a Highland nurse girl, and a firm belief in witches, fairies and the creed of the terrible John Calvin (the creed rubbed off but the fairies remained)" (Potter, 1982, p. 207). This coexistence of stern Calvinism with fairies fits as a template for Potter's later attitude that can be called unsentimental animism. In a journal entry of October 12, 1892, she wrote:

I have an unconquerable aversion to listening to accounts in the first person of supposed supernatural visitations … But keep Miss Anderson from this twilight land and her views of earthly life and politics are both amusing and clever, and I have also heard her tell a good ghost story, not in the first person.

(Linder, 1989, p. 286)

In a letter of April 1, 1922, she wrote of an acquaintance, "she is a goose to take to spiritualism; it is sad stuff, and it works much mischief amongst unbalanced folk" (1989, p. 275). But the fairies remained:

I have thought the whole countryside belonged to the fairies, and that they come out of the woods by moonlight into the fields and on to the dewy grass beside the streams. There are not many hedgehogs, which are fairy beasts, but there are green sour ringlets whereon the ewe not bites, and how without the aid of the fairy-folk of fosterland could there be so little mildew in the corn?

(Linder, 1989, p. 357)

Potter (1989) reflected on her complexly integrated view of reality in a letter written at age 70:

I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside; that pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry, and the strength that comes from the hills. (emphasis added)

(pp. 422–423)

For her, realism and romance were complementary. Realism did not eliminate her animistic experience of the natural world as peopled, nor did animism contribute to a fantastical turning away from reality as in spiritualism.

This unsentimental animism became focused on animals due to the peculiar way that Potter's parents restricted her social life (Grinstein, 1995; Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020). Especially because of her mother's fear of bad influence and germs, Potter had almost no contact with other children until her brother was born when she was six years old; for the remainder of her youth, they were each other's only child company. Her parents were remarkably tolerant of animals in the house, however, so animals became the children's surrogate companions:

The third-floor nursery menagerie included, at various times, rabbits (Benjamin Bouncer and Peter), a green frog called Punch, several lizards, including Judy who was a special favourite, water newts, a tortoise, a frog, salamanders, many and different varieties of mice, a ring snake, several bats, a canary and a green budgerigar, a wild duck, a family of snails, several guinea pigs and later a hedgehog or two.

(Lear, 2007, p. 38)

Importantly, the animals were both loved—out of many possible examples, I mention Potter referring to the "revered Benjamin" (Linder, 1989, p. 266), and her mourning the deaths of many of her animals, including Judy the lizard and a family of snails—and treated with scientific unsentimentality, as when Potter and her brother would study their dead pets by skinning and boiling them and assembling their skeletons (Lear, 2007).

More is known about Potter's adolescence because she kept the journal that I referenced above. She wrote in it about many topics, including art exhibitions, politics and world events, animals, and outings with her father, often interspersed with dry humor. She made many observations about people's behavior, but because of parental restrictions, almost none about children except her brother. Some entries are darkly depressive. Viewed chronologically, the journal shows Potter experiencing a prolonged adolescence with identity diffusion, which she went through in such a way that she retained unusual flexibility to reorganize her identity.

Several commentators (Grinstein, 1995; Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020; Tutter, 2014) have recognized in a portion of Potter's journal entry from May 29, 1885, evidence of her adolescent depressive mood and low self-esteem, linked to the aftermath of an extended bout of rheumatic fever that led to the narcissistic injury of Potter losing much of her long tresses and cutting off the rest, as well as her fear of disappointing both parents and, in this instance, shame at disappointing her father in particular. Eighteen-year-old Potter wrote (Linder, 1989):

I always thought I was born to be a discredit to my parents, but it was exhibited in a marked manner today. Since my hair is cut my hats won't stick on, and today being gusty, it must needs blow into the large fountain at the Exhibition, and drifted off to the consternation of my father, and the immense amusement of the spectators. We had to wait some time till the gutta-percha man was fetched and waded in to his chin for it.

It was of course too wet to put on, but as it was fine I did not care, for it is one of the peculiarities of my nature that when there is anything to be shy about, I don't care in the least, and I caused a good deal of harmless amusement. If only I had not been with papa, he does not often take me out, and I doubt he will do it again for a time. The weather, which has been very cold, suddenly turned to hot summer.

(p. 149, emphasis in original)

In what follows I place this extract back into the complete journal entry, where it becomes apparent that Potter experienced her adolescent pain within a substrate of identity fluidity that shaped her pain and could both intensify and ameliorate it. Here is the complete entry interspersed with my comments:

Mr. Lucas's partner is having the leading pictures at the Academy, Orchardson's and Alma-Tadema's among them. It is rather surprising considering the prospect of the Suakin to Berber railway.

It is extraordinary how wealth is exaggerated, the cause being that the public thinks people may eat their cake and have it at the same time. Lord Dudley, said to be the richest man in England, has died and left about 15,000 pounds a year. Every one now professes to have known he never really was so rich, but his extravagance would consume a large income. Last year each of his six boys had a separate set of servants, and there were forty horses in the stables. He used to get very valuable jewels at Hancocks and elsewhere, but it seems he did not buy them. He paid a heavy interest on their cost, and now they go back to the jewellers.

It was the same with Sam Mendel. Uncle Thomas says he does not believe he ever had more than 120,000 pounds at any time. Agney did a great deal to keep up his appearance partly because it would be very awkward for him when the crash came. W. Agney lost 10,000 pounds to him but doubtless made much more. The case is decided against Agney, and poor Mrs. Mendel will have enough to live on at the expense of her husband's character.

(Linder, 1989, pp. 148–149)

Potter begins by mentioning an art exhibition, immediately putting into consideration the gaze and what is seen. This consideration is then applied to ironic social commentary about appearances being deceiving and people not being who they seem: although Lucas's partner can display the leading pictures at the Academy, the firm of Lucas and Aird had the contract to build the Suakin to Berber railway in the Sudan, a financial and military fiasco coming to an end even as Potter wrote ("Suakin-Berber Railway," 2021). Lord Dudley and Agney had much less wealth than people wanted to believe; and note the emphasis on appearance: "very valuable jewels" and "did a great deal to keep up his appearance." This portion ends with a comment touching on women's position in the patriarchy.

Next comes the portion I extracted above. Placed back in the context of the previous passage, we can again notice the theme of the gaze and what is seen as it becomes very personal and expresses the relationship between body and identity: with her long hair and her hat, Potter would look like a fine young woman, but losing her hat and with her hair cut short, she appears as the discredit to her parents that she always thought herself to be. Tuerk (2020) commented on the defensiveness of moving to comment on the weather in the final sentence of this section, but with its attention to heat and cold, this sentence also further develops the theme of the body surface, now not merely as appearance but as a sensorially experiencing organ.

Next, Potter writes:

Here lies old Jones—who all his life collected bones—till death that grim and bony spectre—that all amazing bone collector—bound old Jones so neat and tidy—so there he lies all bona fide.

A worthy missionary who had just returned from the South Seas was asked by a friend "how he liked babies?" "Boiled," replied the missionary.

Mr. Gladstone's books are said to be used chiefly as waste paper. Someone said to him, "I've just seen a good thing in your book." "What's that?" "A pound of butter!"

Mr. Fargus (Hugh Conway) is dead after a very short reign, also Mrs. Ewing and De Nauvile, the latter painted.

(Linder, 1989, p. 149)

In this section, Potter defensively makes an abrupt shift of topic and switches to humor, but what shines through is the depth of her abjection triggered by the shame-filled experience of losing her hat. In addition to the gloominess communicated by reference to death, bones, cannibalism, and waste, these have been identified by Kristeva (1982) as signifiers of aspects of the self that must be warded off to maintain a coherent and positively experienced identity, suggesting that Potter is exploring what the boundaries of her identity are. There is a near identification between Jones, who collected bones, and Death, who collects Jones's bones. Ethnographers (Conklin, 2001; Goldman, 1999; Sanday, 1986) understand a frequent meaning of cannibalism to be breaking the human–animal boundary so as to identify the dead as not a person at all, but a prey animal. "Waste paper" hints at anality and its fundamental concern as to whether excrement is included or excluded as part of the self. That Potter is exploring boundaries of her identity in this section is further emphasized by Jones, after his death, being "bound … so neat and tidy," and by the book being used as waste paper that wraps and encloses. Potter appears to be unconsciously representing the transition of her human identity into what she shares with all animals: bodily processes, mortality, and eventual disintegration as a subject. But it is key to understanding Potter's self-experience and art that in this section she clothes her abjection in wit and rhythm. She is able to keep rhetorical distance from her misery and so play with it rather than being overwhelmed by it.

In the last sentence of this excerpt, Potter returns from abject fantasy about death to a realistic observation of real deaths, one of a painter, thus segueing into the final section of this entry:

For some time there has been a discussion of two and three columns in The Times, started by a British Matron about nude pictures. Nearly all the letters take the same sensible view, but the pepper of discussion is not necessary to keep up such a savoury subject.

I do not see the slightest objection to nude pictures as a class, nor are they necessarily in the least more indecent than clothed ones. Indeed the ostentatious covering of certain parts only, merely showing that the painter considers there is something which should be concealed, is far worse than pure unabashed nudity. The shame of nakedness is for the naked not the observer, and the pictures cannot feel.

If there is a question, it is between the artist and his model. Some painters are much more unpleasant than others according to the realism of their art. The president is not more solid than a dream, but when Alma-Tadema paints a striking portrait of Mrs. Alma-Tadema which you could put your hand into, it may be getting near the line.

I do not understand any one being put out with Poynter's Diadumene, the original cause of this discussion, it is no more like flesh than this deal table.

(Linder, 1989, pp. 149–150)

Potter closes this journal entry by circling back to the art exhibition with which she began, thus creating a pleasing unity. The theme of boundaries, the body, and the gaze and what is seen continues, but rather than focusing upon personal feelings of abjection, Potter has sublimated these issues into a discussion of the aesthetics of the nude in painting. Shame is mentioned but disavowed in this section, since a painting (unlike Potter, when her hat blew away) cannot feel. Skin is one boundary, and clothing is another, that paradoxically may serve to emphasize the nudity that it covers. (This sensibility is relevant to Potter's play with animal clothing in her tales.) Boundary permeability is depicted by equating the president with a dream, and by the image of a portrait so real that you can put your hand into it. With that image, Potter seems to be disapproving of realism, since it almost crosses the line of what is appropriate in nude painting. But she undercuts this seeming disapproval with her final sentence, in which she critiques the flesh of a nude as being so unrealistic—like a piece of furniture that one could certainly not put a hand into—that it should arouse no concern. It is the unrealistically solidly painted nude that she considers a poor work of art.

There are obvious derivatives of sexually exhibitionistic–voyeuristic fantasies (as well as orality) in this journal entry's associations to looking and nudity. Grinstein (1995) attributed Potter's intense visual artistic orientation to her scopophilic instinct, and identified episodes of looking in her stories as derivatives of sexual curiosity. But the overall impression created by this journal entry is that although sexuality played a role, it was not the most important level of the material. When sexuality is most apparent, in the discussion of nudity, it is as an aspect of Potter's sublimatory recovery from fantasies of abjection. What runs throughout the entry, from the opening social commentary, through the shame-filled experience of losing her hat, through humorous abjection, and finally through the discussion of nudity in art, is an exploration of the permeability of boundaries and identity.

Lear (2007) stated, "The tone of Potter's journal changes markedly after December 1886. Thereafter she reports fewer bouts of depression, and less fear of the future; undoubtedly the result of her improving health" (p. 71). This is correct but overly precise; the change in Potter's journaling was more gradual. Prior to 1886, she had written frequently, sometimes going for a couple weeks without writing, but more often writing multiple entries per week. Entries drop off almost completely after April 1886: one in December of that year, two in 1887, two in 1888, one in 1899, three in 1890, one in 1891. In 1892 she wrote a very long entry covering the beginning of the year, and on July 26 resumed the pattern of frequent brief entries used before 1886.

Potter's early journaling documented bouts of depression, as Lear noted, but these entries must be understood developmentally. They ring with an adolescent's moody awareness of passing time and uncertainty about her place in the world. For example, "I, seventeen. I have heard it called 'sweet seventeen,' no indeed, what a time we are, have been having, and shall have" (July 26, 1883; Linder, 1989, p. 49). "It is a year today since I wrote I had got the dumps. How are my prospects compared with last year. I am not, not in high spirits tonight, something unpleasant having happened, so my opinion should be bended as regards height" (January 18, 1884; Linder, 1989, p. 63). When a beloved old friend of the family (Mr. Gaskell) died, she wrote, "Shall I really never see him again? … I have begun the dark journey of life. Will it go on as darkly as it has begun?" (June 14, 1892; Linder, 1989, p. 94). And when her family had a chance to return to Dalguise, Scotland, that she had loved as a child, she wrote:

Then as childhood was beginning to shake, we had to go, my first great sorrow. I do not wish to have to repeat it, it has been a terrible time since, and the future is dark and uncertain, let me keep the past. The old plum tree is fallen, the trees are felled, the black river is an open hollow, the elfin castle is no longer hidden in the dark glades.

(May 5, 1884; Linder, 1989, p. 85)

It is likely that Potter's adolescent uncertainty about her identity was particularly gloomy and prolonged because of the critical demands of both parents, and especially the restrictiveness and hostile dependency demands of her mother. Witness these among Potter's infrequent comments about her mother in her journal: "I was amused beyond expression to see mamma rapidly opening drawer after drawer of one [at the British Museum] to see if it was clean, suddenly come to one full of human bones, 'who's feared of boggarts'" (November 19, 1894; Linder, 1989, p. 117); and "Mother is sorry [that cousins are engaged] and enlarges on that subject to me so continually that I begin to think she desires particularly that I should be acquainted with her views on it; an unnecessary precaution at present" (October 13, 1885; Linder, 1989, p. 158). Even when Potter was 39 and then 46 years old, her mother tried to prevent her two engagements. In later life, after Mr. Potter had died and Potter's mother was very wealthy, she refused to help her daughter financially, although her daughter took primary responsibility to care for her mother until she died. It is striking how well these factors and biographers' (Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020) descriptions of Mrs. Potter fit Erikson's (1956) description of typical mothers of adolescents with identity diffusion: "a pronounced status awareness, of the climbing and pretentious, or of the 'holding on' variety … a penetrating omnipresence … they are highly jealous" (pp. 90–91).

The near hiatus in Potter's journaling from 1886 to 1892 was precipitated by severe illness. On March 28, 1885, Potter wrote that her hair fell out and was shorn due to illness. Then came the May 29 entry quoted above. In June 1887 she wrote that she had been very ill with rheumatic fever, but apparently had largely recovered.

Potter seems to have responded to this crisis by partially consolidating her identity in a new direction. Two of her entries in 1890 are addressed to "Esther," believed to be an imaginary person inspired by the sister of Fanny Burney. Grinstein (1995) explains Potter's affinity with Fanny Burney as due to the latter's prominence as a novelist. Although Grinstein does not use the term, this appears to be a fantasied selfobject relationship to strengthen Potter's sense of self. Importantly, one of these entries is a long description of Potter's first commercial success, the sale of drawings for greeting cards, a first glimmer of financial independence that was an extremely important step toward separation from her parents (Grinstein, 1995; Lane, 1946; Lear, 2007).

Potter's resumption of regular journaling in 1892 corresponded to her developing a firmer identity, as Lear (2007) noted, less depressive and less fearful of the future. She became a nature illustrator and researcher primarily focused on fungi, and had a new identification figure outside the family, an old Scottish naturalist and fungi expert named Charles MacIntosh with whom she exchanged specimens and drawings. This scientific orientation coexisted with animism:

I think one of my pleasantest memories … is … all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below, like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them.

(November 17, 1896; Linder, 1989, p. 435)

Potter's drawings were accurate enough that they have been used as illustrations in a modern field guide to fungi (Findlay, 1967), and if social conditions had been different, she might have settled into this identity. However, her development in this area was stifled by patriarchal restrictions on women's scientific aspirations (Lear, 2007; Tuerk, 2020). To further her research on fungi reproduction and lichens, she obtained access to the Royal Botanical Gardens, but the male researchers there never offered her full collegiality. With the sponsorship and help of her uncle, she prepared a paper on the reproduction of fungi that was presented at the Linnean Society on April 1, 1897. As a woman, Potter was not allowed to attend, so the paper was probably read by Mr. Massee, the most supportive of the Botanical Gardens researchers, but it was largely ignored. No copy is extant.

Potter responded to this crushing rebuff not with despair but by reorganizing her identity again. She permanently stopped journaling, and she turned to creative writing and illustrating, becoming the Beatrix Potter with whom we are most familiar. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in 1902 to immediate popular and commercial success, and Potter proved to be an adept marketer of her work, creating such products as Peter Rabbit wallpaper and stuffed animals. Her increasing separation from her parents was facilitated by the love that developed between her and her publisher, Norman Warne. Their correspondence is filled with excitement about her developing stories, especially as she wrote The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904). Potter wanted a doll house to use as a model for her pictures, and Norman constructed one; Grinstein (1995) aptly states that they were "playing house." Potter's mother refused to let her visit Norman to draw the house (Norman lived with his own mother, so the visit would have been arranged totally without scandal) because she objected to their growing closeness; Norman sent her photographs of the house instead. Despite Mrs. Potter's interference, Norman proposed in 1905. Potter's parents vehemently objected, ostensibly because, as a tradesman, Norman was beneath them, but 39-year-old Potter overcame her guilt and accepted. Then, exactly one month after he proposed, Norman died of leukemia.

This event, both tragic and ironic, precipitated a final, more gradual shift in Potter's identity. She continued to publish her tales regularly through 1913, but in the correspondence with her new publisher, Norman's brother Harold, they begin to sound more like work than fun. Potter had planned to buy a Lake District cottage with Norman, and went ahead with the purchase after he died, thus establishing her first residence apart from her parents, although she continued to reside with them often. Her interests shifted toward farming and land custodianship, and, with the assistance of a local attorney named William Heelis, she purchased increasing acreages. In June 1912 Heelis proposed to her and she accepted, although she knew that her parents would again violently object, despite her being 46 years old. She proudly asserted her new identity by insisting on being known as Beatrix Heelis thenceforth, although she still published under the name Potter. The 1913 Tale of Pigling Bland, as noted above, reflected her new status in the story of a male pig who saves himself and a female pig from being devoured by a human, and they live happily ever after.

Potter settled comfortably into her new identity. She published only two more Tales and two collections of nursery rhymes. Her new identity continued her close relationship with animals and the natural world in a new form. She raised many farm animals and became an expert breeder and preservationist of the local Herdwick sheep. And she amassed a great deal of land, which she donated in her will to the National Trust, creating most of the Lake District National Park.

Potter's resolution of her prolonged adolescent identity diffusion thus enabled her to retain flexibility so that, rather than being defeated by crises, she was able to reorganize her identity, from troubled adolescent, to scientist, to creative writer, to farmer and preservationist. What remained in all these identities was an unsentimental animism that appears to have helped her maintain a sense of sameness and stability. In shifting her own identities, Potter lived the flexibility that she depicted in her characters that have the identity of people at the same time that they are animals.

Potter's Special Awareness

Potter's creation of characters that are simultaneously humans and realistic animals is unusual in children's literature. To glance at a few classics: Max's Wild Things are completely unrealistic and clearly serve as his projections (Sendak, 2012). Little Bear (Minarik, 2003), Frog and Toad (Lobel, 2014), and Richard Scarry's (2015) animals are drawn somewhat more realistically, but behave primarily as humans and also appear to serve primarily as repositories of children's projections and displacements. Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne, 1996) and his friends are realistic stuffed animals, which is not the same thing as realistic animals, and behave like children. Mole, Water Rat, and Badger are recognizable human types, with animal characteristics mainly limited to their dwellings; Toad, in his mansion, relinquishes even that animal feature (Grahame, 2018).

Potter's tales also perform this important function of embodying children's wishes and fears (Grinstein, 1995; Tutter, 2014; Scheftel, 2014). But her creation of characters that can be seen equally as humans and as realistic animals adds something else: a fundamental experience of commonality between the two.

Freud (1913) identified animism as typical of children and "primitive" peoples but outgrown with the development of the reality principle. He considered obvious the identificatory process in animism ("Animism came to primitive man naturally and as a matter of course. He knew what things were like in the world, namely just as he felt himself to be," p. 91), but his emphasis was on how the identificatory process was enlisted in the service of dominance and control:

Our psycho-analytic approach to the subject, however, is from another side. It is not to be supposed that men were inspired to create their first system of the universe by pure speculative curiosity. The practical need for controlling the world around them must have played its part.

(p. 78)

In his awareness of primary identification but emphasis on dominance and control, we see manifest Freud's two views of ego and reality that Loewald (1951, 1952) identified: Freud's more prominent view of the relation between ego and reality is one in which the ego must contend with a hostile, separate world, but Freud's writings about primary narcissism contain the view that, because ego and reality were originally one, the capacity for close relatedness remains. Loewald stated that true maturity inheres in the ability to experience both bounded and unbounded states. Even in Totem and Taboo, Freud (1913) seems to have himself espoused this more connected view in a comment especially pertinent to the topic of this paper:

Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited in their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who well may be a puzzle to them.

(p. 127)

This concept of relatedness between ego and reality, especially as manifested between humans and animals, receives support from modern anthropology. Descola (2013) surveys ethnographies from around the world and develops the idea that most cultures do not draw the sharp distinction between human society and nature that is seen in the West. In particular, it is common for animals, and even plants and natural objects, to be recognized as people; humans and other organisms are clothed in different appearances but share a fundamental spirit. At times, animals shed their animal skins and live as humans in houses, and humans (usually in dreams) can take on the appearance of animals (note Potter's characters, sometimes in human clothes, sometimes in animal skins). An extreme version of this attitude is found in what Viveiros de Castro (2015) calls perspectivism, common in Amazonia, wherein not only are animals understood to be people, they are additionally understood to look at us and themselves as we look at them and ourselves. For example, jaguars see blood as manioc beer and see humans as peccaries to be hunted; vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish. (Think back to the dog and cat eating mouse pie in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan.)

This anthropological point of view does not rule out that such identifications between humans and animals will be used in the service of projections and defensive displacements, but it sees the identifications as having their own meaning prior to any such defensive maneuvers. This accords with the pattern I have elucidated in Potter's tales of human–animal identity fluidity sometimes performing other psychodynamic functions but being a more general theme. Recognizing the identificatory processes as a theme in and of themselves helps us recognize that they are part of the dynamism of balancing experiences of communion and separateness (Bach, 1998; Loewald, 1951, 1952, 1979), as we see in Potter both keeping Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny as pets, but also like Mr. MacGregor eating rabbit pie. Here it is worth harkening back to the pigs, Misses Dorcas and Porcas, from The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, whose lives were uneventful and prosperous but whose ends were bacon. This attitude has affinity to hunter-gatherer societies that see animals as people but also as prey, to be killed and eaten respectfully so as not to offend their societies.

Potter developed in her life and expressed in her art special awareness of this possibility, largely dormant in the West, of experiencing animals as being people at the same time that they are animals. This balance between communion and separateness in Potter's relationship with animals appears to have helped stabilize her as she significantly reorganized her inner world and identity three times in response to crises. Her unusual upbringing gave her an unsentimental animistic view of animals as well as a personal experience of identity fluidity, and she drew on this experience to create her tales about animals—or are they people?