Bunny Art
11 MARGHANITA LASKI
WHAT the subject really needs, of course, is field-workers and a research grant and something promised on the Third Programme. All sorts of fascinating correlations, I am convinced, exist, but I dare do no more than hint at them without evidence which, even if inconclusive, must at least be better than anyone else has bothered to get. Or may it be that no one else has bothered to get any at all ?
I've got a pink pot bunny with gilded ears and bottom. All really distinctive rabbit features—whiskers, a nose that looks as if it could twitch, a tail that might thump the ground—are blended into mean- ingless rotundity. I took my bunny to a lecture I was giving on design, and expounded on it fervently as a fine example of the magnificently bad. It couldn't, in fact, have been worsc. After- wards a woman came up to me and said that she agreed ; my pink pot bunny really was rather frightful ; but, she added confidingly, "I've seen some awfully sweet green ones."
The green bunny is, indeed, now recognised as ornamental art of a high social order. His lack of distinctive features shows that misunderstanding of impressionism has now percolated a pretty long way ; his matt china surface is well in tune with what Osbert Lancaster has very properly called New-Statesman-Weekend decor ; and his colour, by some quirk I can't yet analyse, is accepted as representational. He is the contemporary apogee of Bunny Art.
What I am concerned to discover is just why the bunny holds this special position in the English heart. He has held it for a long time. You find bunnies on fourteenth-century choir-stalls ; there's a fine example in the Victoria and Albert dated 1755, a china soup-tureen that is all bunny save for the cabbage he is chewing and the snail that glides droopingly over it. There are bunnies on the Peter Pan statue and bunnies at the back of the pottery " Wedding Group" that Arnold Machin designed for Wedgwood. Bunnies arc inevitable decoration in every Christopher- Robin nursery and in every Little-Elsie-and-the-Elusive-Elves children's fairybook. Stonewear bunnies brood couchant and rampant in many an English garden.
And as with the plastic arts, so with Eng. Lit.—Benjamin Bunny, Peter Rabbit, that irascible old gentleman the White Rabbit from Alice. Even Virginia Woolf wrote a bunny-tale in her short story King Lappin. But why rabbits ?
Agriculturally rabbits are a pest, shot on sight, quite good to eat, a moderately salable pelt. But foxes are pests and so are squirrels, and neither holds anything like the same place in English folk art. This leaves good-to-eat. Is there a clue here ? No. (First job for field-workers: Has bunny-art the same importance in rural as in urban districts ? It doesn't do to have preconceived ideas in this kind of research, but I'd bet any money that density of bunny- art and houses-per-acre have a correlated ratio.) The English are a sea-faring race. Can we go any further on this tack ? No. " Each man kills the thing he loves." There may be something here. An enduring feature of English life is to breed rabbits, name them, encourage the children to love them, kill them (the rabbits) and then eat them. Other nations fulfil this cycle but with one significant difference. They do not name their rabbits. Have we here a hitherto ignored facet of that Spartan training that results in God's Englishman ? But we kill and eat our domestic geese, chickens, pigeons. Only the rabbits arc named. So we come back to the initial question, "Why rabbits ? "
Rabbits used to be widely employed in female magic. Various (here) unprintable rites were performed by women with rabbit-blood. (Second job for field-workers: Do men (a) buy (b) coo over model bunnies ?) I think magic is relevant. Magic and the colour green usually go together. Those strange boys and girls who used to appear out of—yes—out of rabbit-holes into English villages in the Middle Ages were always green-pelted. Green china bunnies are, in fact, a very nice example of folk-memory. The rabbit is magical ; therefore he must be green. But why is he magical ?
" Gone to get a rabbit-skin, To wrap the Baby Bunting in." Why " Bunting ? " (No, no, this is not a philological article. Education consists in asking the right questions, and this is the wrong one. Eliminate it.) Why a rabbit-skin ? If you really insist we can get the field-workers on to it, but even without them I dare assert that no normal baby could be wrapped in any normal rabbit-skin. The poem is emphatic that one rabbit-skin only was sought. Must one then look for an abnormal baby and/or rabbit ? One must not. Significant symbolism is what one seeks.
We are on the right lines. Rabbits are connected with magic. Rabbits are connected with babies. Rabbits are philoprogcnitive. Now we've really got something for the field-workers to do. Enquiries throng thick and fast. Has bunny-art increased as the birth-rate dropped ? Can we find an inverse ratio between (a) bunnies from the factories and babies from the wombs and (b) bunnies on the individual mantelpiece and babies in the individual nursery ? Since no one can gainsay me, I state firmly that such a ratio exists. Bunnies are baby magic. No wonder, then, that in my pink bunny the distinctive whiskers, nose and tail are lost in a mess of pottery. They are irrelevant. All that matters is the unconscious recognition of the rabbit as a teeming womb.
Looked at in this light, the position of the rabbit in English folk- an is not only likely but inevitable. The green children out of the rabbit-house, Baby Bunting in his rabbit-skin, all fall into place. In the unconscious mind rabbits and babies are interchangeable, and the social outlook at any given time determines which is preferred. When the birth-rate rises rapidly, the rabbit loses his hold ; his (no, her) advantages of swift parturition and easy birth-pangs are felt to be irrelevant. But when the birth-rate is falling, when the females in the community are secretly obsessed with a sense of guilt at their failure to perform their proper female function, the rabbit comes into his own. In the garden, round the dado, on the mantel- piece, he substitutes for the babies who will never be born.
I wonder if this applies only to England. In Sweden, for instance, the birth-rate is also falling, but there the prevalent motif is not rabbits but Scottie-dogs. I wonder why Scottie-dogs. Forward, field-workers !
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