The Velveteen Rabbit at 100

By Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Contributions by Kelly Blewett, Claudia Camicia, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Elisabeth Graves, Karlie Herndon, KaaVonia Hinton, Holly Blackford Humes, Melanie Hurley, Kara K. Keeling, Maleeha Malik, Claudia Mills, Elena Paruolo, Scott T. Pollard, Jiwon Rim, Paige Sammartino, Adrianna Zabrzewska, and Wenduo Zhang

First published in 1922 to immediate popularity, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams has never been out of print. The story has been adapted for film, television, and theater across a range of mediums including animation, claymation, live action, musical, and dance. Frequently, the story inspires a sentimental, nostalgic response—as well as a corresponding dismissive response from critics. It is surprising that, despite its longevity and popularity, The Velveteen Rabbit has inspired a relatively thin dossier of serious literary scholarship, a gap that this volume seeks to correct.

While each essay can stand alone, the chapters in "The Velveteen Rabbit" at 100 flow in a coherent sequence from beginning to end, showing connections between readings from a wide array of critical approaches. Philosophical and cultural studies lead us to consider the meaning of love and reality in ways both timeless and temporal. The Velveteen Rabbit is an Anthropocene Rabbit. He is also disabled. Here a traditional exegetical reading sits alongside queering the text. Collectively, these essays more than double the amount of serious scholarship on The Velveteen Rabbit. Combining hindsight with evolving sensibilities about representation, the contributors offer thirteen ways of looking at this Rabbit that Margery Williams gave us—ways that we can also use to look at other classic storybooks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496846013

Book preview

Introduction

The Velveteen Rabbit at 100

—Lisa Rowe Fraustino

The rabbit finds the idea melancholy: he wants the prize of life without the decline that goes with it. But, like all of us, there is nothing that he can do.

—Margaret Blount, Animal Land (189)

In the midst of my editing this volume during the novel coronavirus pandemic, Jared Misner contributed an essay to the Modern Love section of the New York Times titled My Best Friend Is Gone, and Nothing Feels Right with the subtitle If Grief Is the Price of Love, I Am Unable to Pay. Misner’s heartfelt requiem to his best friend, Alison, who died of COVID-19 at age twenty-nine, ends with an allusion to a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) that Alison had read at his wedding two years earlier:

The rabbit asks if becoming real hurts. The skin horse tells him yes, sometimes, it does. Sometimes your eyes will get rubbed off in the process and you’ll lose some of your shine. But that’s how you know you’re real. Nothing real can remain untouched.

The whole time they’re talking about love, of course.

Misner leaves us with these words: Alison made me real. Alison ruined me. And I am better because of it.

Across disciplines with vastly different methods, purposes, and audiences, The Velveteen Rabbit after one hundred years in print continues to enrich popular, critical, and creative discourse around its famous question, What is REAL? (Williams 3, emphasis original). First published in 1922 and immediately popular, this classic by Margery Williams has never been out of print.¹ Besides the multiple editions and international translations issued with different illustrators—increasingly since 1983, after the text came out of copyright, The Velveteen Rabbit has been adapted for film, television, and theater, in a range of mediums, including animation, Claymation, live action, musical, and dance. Countless fans of The Velveteen Rabbit use its famous quotable lines not only in nursery wall décor but also in epigraphs and extended metaphors for philosophical life lessons in their writings. The well-known story has also engendered contemporary self-help books, such as The Velveteen Principles: A Guide to Becoming Real. Hidden Wisdom from a Children’s Classic (Raiten-D’Antonio) and The Velveteen Woman: Becoming Real through God’s Transforming Love (Waggone). In 1971, The Velveteen Rabbit won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award that the University of Wisconsin used to give books it deemed worthy of sitting next to Alice, and in 2007, a poll of the National Education Association ranked it in the Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children. Not surprisingly, research on The Velveteen Rabbit turns up numerous pedagogical approaches and not just in reading and language arts as the story’s central themes have been applied to urban school reform, autism and literacy, and the teaching of history.

Literary scholars have most commonly read the rabbit-turned-Real as a parable of child development or metaphoric myth, often through philosophical, psychoanalytic, and sociological lenses. Meanwhile, multidisciplinary thinkers have used the story to explore metaphysics, questions of attachment and separation, the meaning and dignity of becoming older, death and renewal, love and personal relationships, and even such esoteric topics as developing professionalism among pharmacy students or understanding the swimming reflex. Clearly, a century after the debut of what its acquiring editor, Sidney Powell, at Heinemann believed would be a classic (Moore 8), The Velveteen Rabbit is still relevant—and perhaps, judging from the results of a recent web search, even more relevant than ever to nostalgic adult readers if not to a young audience. Frequently, the book inspires the kind of sentimental, often nostalgic response stirred up by The Giving Tree (1964), Love You Forever (1986), or The Rainbow Fish (1992)—and, it must be said, a corresponding dismissive response from many in the literati.

Given that the story starts with the Rabbit as a stocking-stuffer gift, it makes sense that Faith McNulty includes it in her 1982 New Yorker roundup column Children’s Books for Christmas. However, her message is more of the what-not-to-give variety. Her review includes a colorful description of The Velveteen Rabbit as a blatant tearjerker by a sly author who manipulates her naïve readers (McNulty 179) and plucks at a child’s deepest fears and longings (80). This might be acceptable to McNulty if not for the unforgivable sin of its sad, sleazy message; that is, The book gives no hint that there is any way to meet the tragedy of lost love and betrayal other than letting the heart break (180). This betrayal comes from the Boy who, despite making the toy Real through love, doesn’t give further thought to the old Rabbit, or even to the splendid new replacement toy rabbit, because he’s so eager to go to the seaside after his recovery from scarlet fever. Magical transformation into a happily-ever-after rabbit with legs doesn’t mend the toy’s heartbreak for McNulty.

Similarly, Meaghan Russell claims in a 2012 mini-essay for the Minnesota Review: Too often, animals have been mere devices, slaughtered for the sake of pathos.… Novelists keep this cheap trick under their hats. And when they need a reliable show stopper to really affect us, out comes the rabbit. The Velveteen Rabbit. I’ll just stop there (43). Brynn Downing, in a 2017 creative nonfiction essay, Rabbitdom, published in the Prairie Schooner, lyrically expresses a similar concern: "The crux of The Velveteen Rabbit is a creature’s wish to be more than stuffing and velvet nose—to be made Real by love. He is told by the Skin Horse it will hurt. The story always disturbed me, how quickly the rabbit is cast off, how easily he changes form (57). Of course, the old Rabbit has been cast off on doctor’s orders because what he sees is not a Real sentient being but an easily replaced object, a mass of scarlet fever germs that must be burnt along with the old picture-books that the Boy looked at during his illness (Williams 14). Given that scarlet fever was a leading cause of death in children in the early twentieth century, it may be unfair to view the discard as a betrayal by the Boy even if all he can think of is going to the seaside rather than pining over the loss of a beloved toy. This, after all, is the way of children, so innocent and heartless," to quote J. M. Barrie’s last words in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy (226).

The Sly Author

Margery Williams was born in London on July 22, 1881, and died September 4, 1944, in New York City. Though she published twenty-seven books, including five translations of works from French and Norwegian, and though she won the John Newbery Honor Medal for her novel Winterbound (1936) in 1937, she is primarily known today as the author of The Velveteen Rabbit.

While biographers make no mention of her mother that I have been able to find, it is frequently noted that Williams’s father, Robert Williams, was a warm and encouraging influence. A fellow of the classics at Oxford as well as a barrister and an opinion writer for periodicals, he held liberal views of education, prescient of today’s unschooling movement. Williams was taught to read early and then allowed to explore her interests freely, without instruction and largely alone because her only sister was six years older. Anne Carroll Moore, who knew Williams well, quotes her as saying, "My favorite book in my father’s library was Wood’s Natural History in three big green volumes, and I knew every reptile, bird and beast in those volumes before I knew the multiplication table" (13). Her father’s death, when Williams was seven years old, was a deeply saddening formative experience that would shape her artistic vision.

Williams spent the rest of her childhood back and forth between the United States and England. After two happy years at the Convent School in rural Pennsylvania, ending at age seventeen, she knew she wanted to become an author. At nineteen, she returned to London hoping to publish. That she did and more. Peggy Whalen-Levitt sums up Williams’s next few years: "By 1906, when she was twenty-five, she had published four adult novels;² married Francesco Bianco, a dealer in rare books; and given birth to two children" (63). Williams’s attentions turned away from writing to care for Cecco (born August 15, 1905) and Pamela (born December 31, 1906). They lived in Paris and then Turin while Captain Bianco served in the Italian Army during World War I and returned to London before the family permanently relocated to the United States.

They moved in 1921 to support the artistic development of Pamela, a child prodigy in drawing and painting. After the twelve-year-old’s 1919 solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, Gertrude Vanderbilt took Pamela under her patronage and arranged an exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York. Upon viewing Pamela’s artistic works, which were inspired by the works of Walter de la Mare—a well-known poet whose writing for children Williams greatly admired, de la Mare himself was inspired to write an ekphrastic collection of poems. Heinemann published their recursive collaboration in a 1919 volume, Flora: A Book of Drawings with Illustrative Poems. According to the prefatory note about Pamela Bianco, Her remarkable talent for decorative invention, and her poetic imagery drew crowds to the exhibition, and obtained the enthusiastic praise of the entire press (Bianco and de la Mare). Today, it may surprise most children’s literature scholars to learn that, during their lifetimes, Pamela Bianco was actually far more famous than her mother.³

Inspired by de la Mare, with her children now in adolescence, Williams resumed writing, turning her hand to stories she had told them [her children] when they were small, stories about their toys (Bechtel 148) as well as those she herself had loved as a child (Whalen-Levitt 63). The first of these was based on her almost forgotten Tubby who was the rabbit, and old Dobbin the Skin Horse (Williams qtd. in Moore 15) and published by Harper’s Bazaar in 1921 as a vehicle for original illustrations by Pamela (Chu). We now know this story, The Velveteen Rabbit, as her first children’s book. In it, Harry E. Eiss writes, Williams discovered the wonder and sense of the miraculous invoked by the works of de la Mare and expressed it through a simplicity and directness matching a child’s worldview (47). Moore first encountered The Velveteen Rabbit when its American publisher, George H. Doran Co.,⁴ sent her the prepublication pages and asked her opinion on how the book would sell. She found the themes stunningly poignant because she had recently spent time in France and England where she had formed vivid first-hand impressions of children whose toys and pets and books had been destroyed (Moore 8). A century later, readers may not be aware of this postwar context for young readers who had suffered deprivation and loss.

A number of successful children’s books followed The Velveteen Rabbit in rapid succession, now under the name Margery Williams Bianco.⁵ Two were illustrated by Pamela Bianco, including The Little Wooden Doll (1925) and The Skin Horse (1927), the latter a subject of brief discussion by Scott T. Pollard and Kara K. Keeling in this volume. In A Tribute to Margery Bianco, Williams’s contemporary and friend of the family Louise Seaman Bechtel describes the reason for the author’s success: This kind of imagination, playing not upon fairies but upon the real things a child knows, his toys and his pets, struck a note … to which children will always answer (148). She singles out Williams’s touch of the true artist that keeps the most important thing predominant in a dramatic simplification. The Velveteen Rabbit belongs to a Boy—we do not know his name, or what his home looked like, or exactly how many people were in his family, because it doesn’t matter to the rabbit’s story (Bechtel 148). Williams shared her philosophy of Writing Books for Boys and Girls in a speech to the National Council of Teachers of English in 1936, the year her Newbery Honor Book Winterbound was published. In writing a real life story I think it should be real life, as far as one can present it, she said (Bianco 163). Things shouldn’t be made any easier than they actually are because it’s unfair to readers when each difficulty is promptly surmounted and something always turns up in time to save a situation. She believed: Children know much better. They know that things don’t happen just that way, and that if you really want to accomplish anything at all—no matter how small—you generally have to work pretty darn hard over it, and go through a lot of misgivings and discouragement along the way (Bianco 163). This philosophy, from someone who drew on her own and her children’s real-life toy stories and who had also lost her father at an early age, perhaps explains the Rabbit’s suffering and that tear of despair from which the nursery magic fairy springs. Williams would likely have appreciated Misner’s words I quoted earlier: Alison made me real. Alison ruined me. And I am better because of it.

Margaret Blount quips, in Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction, The path of every toy is always downwards because while we give them human attributes, breakable and disposable toys they remain (189). She asks, When such creatures are given thoughts and emotions, how can they be other than tragic? Blount answers her question with The Velveteen Rabbit:

The only way out of the difficulty is to turn toys into cheerful ageless beings such as Larry the Lamb or Winnie the Pooh, neither of whom lives in the real world at all, but in some place where a small boy and his bear will always be playing. But the fairy-tale satisfaction of this short, perfect allegory would not be valid if the rabbit were not part of the child’s real life. The allegory is about human love and human childhood. (189)⁶

While the magical ending isn’t realism, it’s realistic in its aims: to show the spiritual rewards of loving through a lot of misgivings and discouragement. Williams aimed to create what she called imaginative literature as an interpretation (Moore 11), something she admired in Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s writing about his mother, the extraordinary gentle wisdom with which she used legend and stories to interpret the spiritual problems of life (Moore 12).

Many early shapers of children’s literature in the United States found Williams to be not only a talented writer but also an insightful critic whose ideas influenced the direction of the field. Bertha Mahony Miller found her a rarely able critic (vi) and valued her advice on manuscripts submitted for publication in The Horn Book (xi). Moore also lauded Williams’s rare quality of criticism (3). After the author’s death in 1944, Moore and Miller collaborated to edit Writing and Criticism: A Book for Margery Bianco (Horn Book, 1951), in which they recount why they were impressed with the quality and variety of Mrs. Bianco’s interests, her skill as a writer and translator, the reliability and richness of her background, and, above all, by the wisdom, the humor, the spiritual integrity she brought to the field of children’s books after World War I (Moore 3). Intended to make something of Margery Williams Bianco’s life and work known to later generations (Moore 3), this book, ironically and unfortunately, is now rare and found primarily in special collections. Despite the efforts of her contemporaries who themselves have become legends, most of Williams’s contributions to the field of children’s literature are in danger of being lost to history. Perhaps this has happened because, in the words of Eiss, Her writing is a product of a time when children’s literature presented an ethos that many children and critics find unrealistic today, an ethos combining love, beauty, health, nature, God, family, truth, and the natural goodness of the child’s worldview (49). Perhaps a pandemic ethos during a time of global climate change and alternative facts, dovetailed with the hundredth anniversary of The Velveteen Rabbit, will ignite renewed interest in the author’s life and collective works.

The Scholarship

Academic scholars have, like bloggers and the literati, also weighed in on the pathos of The Velveteen Rabbit, some finding it troubling and others, touching. According to Eiss in a brief article in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The story’s poignancy, and its fairy tale quality, often compared to work by Hans Christian Andersen, keep The Velveteen Rabbit from becoming overly sentimental" (47). In a 1988 Children’s Literature in Education article about the toy as child, Geraldine DeLuca admits that the maudlin nature of The Velveteen Rabbit always disturbed me (211) because of a confusing message: "What happens, I can’t help wondering, to the toys in the nursery in The Velveteen Rabbit that don’t get to sleep next to the little boy, that don’t get loved? Do they go to heaven or do they stay in some nursery limbo, like unbaptized souls? (212). In her early years as a scholar, Ellen Handler Spitz was so dismayed" by The Velveteen Rabbit that she avoided it when selecting books to read aloud to [her] own children at bedtime (585). The passivity and abject submission of the protagonist left her aghast (Spitz 587). It seemed a betrayal of heroic virtues—enterprise, ambition, self-assertion, and perseverance (Spitz 588). Then, in 2009, after attending a dramatic adaptation of the story performed by the Enchantment Theatre of Philadelphia, she reconsidered. The producers had imagined and staged the playtime between the Boy and Rabbit, giving the passive toy heroic agency. In this interpolated moment of play, writes Spitz, "Enchantment Theatre confers upon its protagonist the active role that is never explicitly vouchsafed him/it in the original text. We are made to see that the love between the Rabbit and the boy [sic] is, at least temporarily, mutual" (588). Spitz ends her essay about The Velveteen Rabbit not one whit less harrowed by its unacknowledged grief and by its tragic loss of love, but less cautious about reading it aloud to children, less wary of its manifest submissiveness, more open to its latent substance (590). Perhaps when reading the words on the page, Spitz had never before thought to imagine all the splendid games together, in whispers that the Boy and Rabbit have together in the nursery (Williams 6).

Marina Warner does clearly understand the mutuality of their relationship when, writing in the same year as Spitz’s reconsideration, she calls The Velveteen Rabbit that most tender and thoughtful of children’s stories and theorizes on the soul of toys: The question of the real haunts the psychology of play and through play, the theory of fantasy: Is the state of animation that the power of thought can conjure sufficient to make reality present? (5). Regarding the famous lines of the Skin Horse about becoming real, Warner states: The inner journey of a playing child takes shape in relation to the things that her games animate, and sensory qualities of every kind—appealing to smell, touch, hearing, even taste, as well as sight—enhance the potential of becoming Real like the Skin Horse (6). It seems that dismay over the story arises from cynical adult literalism while delight stems from remembering the young child’s real experience of make-believe.

The early advocate of children’s literature as a scholarly discipline Francelia Butler did include The Velveteen Rabbit in her 1977 anthology Sharing Literature with Children, acknowledging that the sentimentality of this book is distasteful to many adults and redirecting the reader’s attention to the child’s simple, creative play-world of stuffed animals and blocks (23). For children, beloved toys do come to life, and Butler viewed The Velveteen Rabbit as a gentle and sensitive rendering of this theme (23). Butler was not alone in defending the classic among those who discussed what books to celebrate and recommend in the early days of the Children’s Literature Association. In a 1980 Readers’ Choice survey that Perry Nodelman conducted for the ChLA Quarterly, The Velveteen Rabbit made it to the rankings of storybooks for younger children most admired (3) in a ten-way tie for fourth place (along with The Tale of Peter Rabbit [1902]—and missing from the Readers’ Choice list was that other classic story about a bunny in a nursery, Goodnight Moon [1947]) (Pereira 169). While the methodology and accuracy of Nodelman’s survey was contested, the result did show that The Velveteen Rabbit was widely admired.

It is surprising, then, despite its longevity and its 2,450,000 hits on a Google search in January of 2022, that The Velveteen Rabbit has inspired a relatively thin dossier of serious literary scholarship and scant engagement in extended dialogue between existing arguments—a gap that this volume seeks to correct. The first to apply a psychoanalytic reading of the text was Steven V. Daniels in the 1990 issue of Children’s Literature. His essay, "The Velveteen Rabbit: A Kleinian Perspective," applies Melanie Klein’s post-Freudian ideas about splitting parental figures into good and bad as a way to cope with the ambivalence of separation in early childhood development, thus explaining the anxieties represented in and triggered by The Velveteen Rabbit. Daniels concludes that the story regresses to persecutory fears and the solace available only through idealization, which explains both the oddities and suppressions in the text (26) and the responses of critics like McNulty.

In his 1993 essay "Death and Renewal in The Velveteen Rabbit: A Sociological Reading, Allan Kellehear stands up for the story in debate with Daniels, arguing: Although the Rabbit was discarded by the Boy’s guardians and not, it should be well noted, by the Boy himself, the love between them continues on in both their subsequent lives and memories. Therefore the story’s theme is not about the ‘ambivalence of separation’ (Daniels, 1990) but rather the robust ability of love to transcend separation, even in death (46). Of the scholarly literature published before the current volume, Kellehear’s sociological reading of the near-death imagery and the imaginative support for the story’s final message, that real love continues even when the beloved is taken away" (47) perhaps does the most to help us understand why quotations from The Velveteen Rabbit so often appear in sermons, eulogies, and titles of essays about far-flung topics one hundred years after its original publication.

Lois Rostow Kuznets likely had not seen Kellehear’s article before her 1994 monograph When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development went into production, as she does not engage his ideas in her brief discussion of The Velveteen Rabbit. Given the story’s continuing popularity and prominence in toy literature, I find it surprising that Kuznets gives the text only three pages of attention, especially given a dominant motif identified in her introduction: Toys, when they are shown as inanimate objects developing into live beings, embody human anxiety about what it means to be ‘real’—an independent subject or self rather than an object or other submitting to the gaze of more powerfully real and potentially rejecting live beings (2). One might expect to see an endnote crediting Williams.

Kuznets does recap central arguments in Daniels, including the failure of the fairy-magic ending to repair separation anxieties. She wittily concludes, Although Daniels does not say so, I speculate that Rabbit himself needs a transitional object to carry out such a reparation (Kuznets 62). This is a line that Mitzi Myers quotes in her review of the monograph, also commenting on The Velveteen Rabbit as the work that an amazing number of my students wax lyrical over, rather to my puzzlement (184). Kuznets’s own critique is that the Rabbit’s acquisition of an immortal natural body—the ability to live ‘for ever and ever’ in the midst of mortal rabbits—is a violation of the mythic metamorphic tradition (61). Of course, those who read through a Christian worldview have no problem with this biological materialist contradiction. Metaphorically, if the Rabbit is a stand-in for a human child, Rabbit-land becomes the afterlife for someone born again. This is pointed out quite clearly in "Love and Immortality in The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid," a chapter in Vigen Guroian’s 1998 book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination.⁷ Guroian might have helped Myers better understand her students’ lyrical waxing as he reports that in his religion classes they have not hesitated to conclude that Williams has written an allegory not only of love but of immortality (69). Though he refers to Jack Zipes in his discussion of The Little Mermaid, Guroian cites no literary critics of The Velveteen Rabbit, only the child psychologist Robert Coles and philosopher Martin Buber.

Mary Galbraith, in the 1999 ChLA Quarterly article ‘Goodnight Nobody’ Revisited: Using an Attachment Perspective to Study Picture Books about Bedtime, briefly positions The Velveteen Rabbit with Where the Wild Things Are as a bedtime story of the hostile type: The child is depicted in solitary confinement in his child-space, enduring the abandonment or rejection of other humans by fantasizing attachments with toys or dream-figures (174). She mentions Kuznets in a note discussing transitional objects but, strangely, not Daniels. Susan Honeyman also quotes Kuznets—in fact, referring to the same primary motif I included above—in her 2006 ChLA Quarterly essay Manufactured Agency and the Playthings Who Dream It for Us. In her discussion of The Velveteen Rabbit, Honeyman agrees with Daniels that the rabbit wants to be really Real, not just loved but also alive—which is a lose-lose situation given that living always leads to dying (118). But what Honeyman finds disturbing is that in all this sentimentalizing on the value of love, the audience (targeted, at least, as children) is encouraged to embrace an object position—not to love better but to better please those by whom they wish to be loved (119). This reading strains the conceptual metaphor of anthropomorphism by presupposing that child readers identify with the plush rabbit as a mirror of their human selves rather than as a literal toy that they love and make Real only in fantasy. The child, being human, has to face the mortality—like the Boy ill with deadly scarlet fever—that the real (not real Real) toy never will.⁸

In her 2007 essay PC Pinocchios: Parents, Children, and the Metamorphosis Tradition in Science Fiction, Holly Blackford [Humes] also waves to Kuznets and includes The Velveteen Rabbit as an example of narrative elements [that] are common to folk-based stories of child development in which toys are simultaneously child characters and more than children. They stand for children when they embark on journeys to understand their relationship to their creators and develop their own sense of consciousness and agency; characters undergo metamorphosis when they have explored and mastered what it means to be human (76). Blackford Humes sees the Rabbit as representing developmental concerns for both children and parents as a quest for human value, and she finds the deus ex machina ending true to the folk tradition. (And I am delighted that Blackford Humes has expanded her insightful reading of The Velveteen Rabbit for inclusion in the current volume.)

Most recently, Kirsten Jacobson added a philosopher’s voice to the slowly growing critical dossier with "Heidegger, Winnicott, and The Velveteen Rabbit: Anxiety, Toys, and the Drama of Metaphysics," the first chapter in Peter R. Costello’s edited volume Philosophy in Children’s Literature (2011). Jacobson does not include a literature survey of previous scholarship on her primary text but rather reads the depiction of reality in The Velveteen Rabbit through insights from Aristotle, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and other philosophers as well as psychologists such as Eva-Maria Simms, J. H. van den Berg, and D. W. Winnicott. She looks at the Boy and his toy as being both a subject and an object of views and values (Jacobson 16) in ways that could resolve what prior critics see as inconsistencies, violations, or disturbing oddities.

When doing research for my proposal to edit this volume, I was both disappointed and excited to find the lack of abundance in previous scholarship. Obviously, we learn and grow in our understanding when we can build from the foundations established by other thinkers over time. At the same time, the gaps leave us plenty of spaces to explore and burrow into the meanings that have kept The Velveteen Rabbit alive and Real in the imaginations of readers for a century.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rabbit

While each essay in this volume can stand alone, and all could be read in any order a reader might wish, I have placed the chapters in a sequence designed to flow with coherence from beginning to end, showing connections between readings from a wide array of critical approaches. Along the way, readers will find useful examples of how we might look at other classic storybooks, not just The Velveteen Rabbit, in new ways that combine hindsight with evolving sensibilities about representation.

The volume opens with a chapter by Blackford Humes that places The Velveteen Rabbit in a wide context of nonhuman characters who become sentient and experience the virtual game of testing the boundaries of reality. Using theory of puppetry, animation, simulacrum, and virtual reality, Blackford Humes traverses the unstable boundaries of the real—and who defines it. By applying the simulacra theory of Jean Baudrillard, who tracks the ascendency of the model or simulation of the real throughout the twentieth century, particularly with shifting media and media theory, the chapter seeks to understand how the intertwined concepts of modernity and simulacra are deeply at issue throughout the story. The confusion of meaning in The Velveteen Rabbit is a tragic mirror of the century’s breakdown in distinctions between representations and referents, as the century transformed its experience by grasping for the real through images, models, and simulations of reality. By analyzing the rabbit’s inability to sort and separate models and originals, which are dependent on one another for recognition in a culture of commodities, media, and images, Blackford Humes argues that Rabbit’s status as simulacrum moves him from puppet to avatar, contingent upon virtual communities. Rather than interpreting The Velveteen Rabbit as a failure or deus ex machina, she points out that it is precisely the irresolvable nature of the existential dilemma that we appreciate most.

In chapter 2, Kelly Blewett and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre focus on the role of illustrations in The Velveteen Rabbit. They begin by taking a close look at the illustrations of William Nicholson, arguing that the artist’s framing and coloration of the original 1922 illustrations, though likely constrained by financial considerations, underscore the text’s deeper psychological themes in ways that later adaptations resist and reinterpret. Of the book’s seven original illustrations, five feature portrait-style presentations of the Rabbit and none feature human actors (the Boy, Nana, or the doctor). Stylistic elements of the illustrations reflect the state of mind of the Rabbit as he negotiates two transformations (new toy to loved toy; loved toy to real rabbit). Nicholson’s attention to the psychology of the Rabbit reflects the then-current Freudian focus on the psyche and anticipates later criticism. A significant resurgence of interest in the 1980s through the present has resulted in illustrated editions that tend to displace the Rabbit as the central figure in favor of emphasizing the Boy, as the 1980s focus on childhood, child-psychology, and resistance to gender stereotypes now held sway. In all, this chapter provides a case study of how illustrators across time have used rich visual language to support competing interpretations of a classic children’s story. Ultimately, Blewett and Clapp-Itnyre suggest that the illustrations, with their flexibility to reflect current trends, have helped the story to endure.