"Making a Break for the Real England": The River-Bankers Revisited
1984; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.0648
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
Resumo"Making a Break for the Real England":The River-Bankers Revisited Tony Watkins (bio) On January 1st, 1983, The Wind in the Willows came out of copyright. A month or two later, the English Tourist Board ran a series of double-spread magazine advertisements featuring The Wind in the Willows prints by Nicholas Price. The advertisements, which depicted Toad, Mole or Rat riding in a vintage car or consulting a map on their way to a castle, bore the slogan: "The Real England: Make a Break for it." The ads invited us to explore a "real England" of ancient monuments and of small villages virtually untouched by social and economic change: an England that is timeless, mysterious and yet, simultaneously, small, rural, comfortable and domestic; made up of communities with pastoral and comic-pastoral names like: "Sheepwash," "Badger's Mount," "Butterwick" and "Buttocks Booth." They promise, "Hidden just beyond the noise of the motorway you'll find secret places that have barely changed for hundreds of years:" the real England, the nation's real home. This series of advertisements sent me back to re-read The Wind in the Willows and to think about the relationship between such established works of children's literatue and history: both the history from which the text emerged and the history into which it is received by us as readers. What accounts for the extraordinary popularity of this novel, seventy-five years after its publication? As commentators have pointed out, The Wind in the Willows consists of three narratives welded (some would say "pasted") together: the adventures of Toad, derived from bedtime stories and letters from Grahame to his son Alistair, the tale of the friendship of Rat and Mole, and the two lyrical celebrations of nature mysticism, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All." What holds these disparate narratives together? Part of the answer is supplied by two articles, one by Geraldine Poss and the other by Lois Kuznets, that appeared in issues of the Association's annual, Children's Literature. Geraldine Poss's exploration of recurrent pastoral images in the novel and the parallels between Toad's adventures and The Odyssey leads her to describe The Wind in the Willows as "the sweet epic in Arcadia." Lois Kuznets' article is even more important: she uncovers the significant structural pattern of oppositions in the novel that cluster around "wanderlust" at one pole and "homesickness" at the other. Using Gaston Bachelard's concept of "topophilia," Loi s Kuznets argues that a sense of felicitous space appears in Grahame's leisurely, almost languid descriptions of the general landscape of The Wind in the Willows and in the attention he pays to particular habitats of his main characters. A search for felicitous space . . . permeates the structure of The Wind in the Willows. There is no doubt about the crucial importance in the novel of the tension between a longing for travel and "nostalgia" (homesickness). The latter is the predominant feeling, experienced as loss combined with either an intense longing for home as a place to be regained (Mole End and, to some extent, Toad Hall), or a strong feeling of home as a place to celebrate for its welcome and reassuring continuity (in particular, Badger's kitchen). As Lois Kuznets suggests, such images and feelings certainly relate to both Grahame's own psychology and the appeal the book has had for children and adults. But images of home and the "topophilic" landscape can be related not only at the individual level to the author's or reader's biography, but also at the social and cultural level to the nonconscious structures of the period within which the text was produced or within which it is received. As the geographers D.W. Meinig argues, a landscape can acquire a symbolic status as "an image derived from our national experience, which has been simplified, beautified and widely advertised so as to become a commonly understood symbol." Further, such landscapes can be "most influential at the national level" as symbols of idealized communities. The shape of what Raymond Williams calls the "structure of feeling" within which The Wind in the Willows was written is a...
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