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Animals As Book Characters - "But Animals Can't Talk"
by Virginia Lowe
Why do authors for children so often tell stories with animals as the characters? After all, all stories are about human desires or intentions or deceptions, whether the characters are people or anthropomorphised (human-like) animals.
It is partly because they are a delight to draw. Beatrix Potter kept numerous pets, and did actually dress up her rabbits in little jackets as models for Peter and the rest of them. But she was certainly aware of the irony of what she was doing. Several of her stories depend on the actual clothes the animals wear, including Tom Kitten in which she notes, despite their mother dressing them in "elegant uncomfortable clothes" that "they had dear little fur coats of their own". Anthony Browne talks about the pleasure of drawing gorilla faces -- they can have the same expressions as human ones, but are much more fun to draw, with creases and bumps.
Many of the traditional tales told to both children and adults, before universal literacy, feature animals. Think of Aesop's fables, Grimm's story collections ("The Bremen Town Musicians" for instance) or "Little Red Riding Hood" (Perrault). Then there are the English ones like "Puss in Boots". It is almost a staple of traditional stories that animals can think and talk they often wear clothes as well. So anthropomorphism has a long history, and remains a staple of the picture book diet today.
And children enjoy animal stories. They even enjoy the level of irony in the human-ness, once it occurs to them. On the other hand, adults often bring their own level of humour to children's books. Recently I have read a critic on Richard Scarry's work, saying that children are amused at the incongruity of a large animal like a hippo riding a bike. Here I disagree. Children do find Scarry very funny, but it is the characters' numerous accidents that amuse. After all, a hippo riding a bike is really no more incongruous than a cat doing so -- both are completely unlikely. Occasionally at two, my son would query his favourite Scarry book "Why is a dog playing the guitar?" or "Turkeys cant drive!" But he was considerably older (three and three months) when he suddenly realised, first to a tape of an animal song -- "it's really people. Because they can't talk, can they? Animals can't talk."
It seems that children who live with pets are slower to articulate this fact. In most households, pets are addressed as if they could understand, and answers often made for them too. It must seem a small step to children used to this behaviour, and not at all surprising, when animals in books can talk and reason.
This realisation often happens through a contrast. My daughter was three and a half when she first encountered Miffy at the Zoo (Dick Bruna). At the first reading, where the zoo animals address the rabbit Miffy, Rebecca laughed with delight -- "Animals don't talk!" -- and found the whole story hilarious every time she heard it, from then on. This aspect is foregrounded by the contrast between Miffy (who always behaves exactly like a person), and the zoo animals which are not clothed, and should not have been able to talk.
There are various levels of anthropomorphism. The characters may look exactly like animals, but be able to think as humans, and even speak (the bears in McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal). Or they may wear some clothes while still looking like the actual animals (Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten). Or they can be dressed and behave in every way like people, living in houses, going to school (Miffy, Browne's Willie the Wimp and Russel Hoban's Frances series are like this).
By making the characters animals, the story and its message are distanced, so don't apply directly to the child. Sometimes this can act to the child's advantage. At four my daughter had been squabbling with her friend Justin, and when he was to visit again, I referred to Best Friends for Frances - a favourite book at the time. "Frances' best friend is a boy". She responded scathingly "It's different for animals".
Mainly it is the delight that children feel when they encounter animals behaving as they themselves might. Anthropomorphised animal characters will be with us for a long time to come.
About the Author
My book, Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell (Routledge) is based on a reading journal kept intensively from birth until about age ten, then sporadically until the children left home at 18, dealing with both children, their reactions to books, and their interactions with each other. My son is the only male child who has been studied in this way -- the other four parent-observer studies have all been of girls. The book has a section on their responses to anthropomorphism, as it examines their understanding of the reality status of stories and pictures. Details of the book and an order form on my website createakidsbook.alphalink.com.au
Dr Virginia Lowe runs a manuscript assessment agency, e-course on writing and illustrating, and workshops. The webpage has a "Successes" page listing the children's books which have been published after our assessments -- Create a Kids' Book.
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