Retelling Aesop’s Fables: From Beatrix Potter to Jerry Pinkney

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Francis Barlow’s famous frontispiece of the hunchbacked slave Aesop surrounded by his characters for the 1687 London edition of Aesop’s Fables.

Some stories are so good  that they are reimagined every generation.  As a kind of twice-told tale, the fable can be quite difficult to make one’s own: the plot unfolds rapidly in very few words and realizing the action in more than one illustration is not always an option.  But writers and  illustrators have risen to the challenge of retelling Aesopian fables in strikingly different ways, sometimes changing quite radically the traditional themes and characterizations.

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Beatrix Potter as a young woman.

Beatrix Potter’s fable retellings are among the best in English literature, but due to complicated circumstances, only The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse (1917) was published during her lifetime.  In 1919 Potter proposed to her publisher Fruing Warne that she work up a series of  connected fables begun years before.  Fruing did not mince words about the draft of The Tale of the Birds and Mr. Tod :   “It is not Miss Potter, it is Aesop.”   The firm’s commercial travelers wanted something new by Potter, so naturally his concern was sales, not supporting an author who wanted to strike out in a new direction. Even if Potter had not been frustrated by Fruing’s lack of enthusiasm, her eyes were no longer sharp enough to draw all the illustrations.  No one’s heart was in it, so the volume was abandoned.  The drafts and preliminary illustrations were published posthumously by Leslie Linder in The History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (1971).

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Jemima earnestly conversing with the foxy gentleman. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck (1908).

Fruing did wish her retelling of ‘The Fox and the Crow” long enough to fill a little book.  Potter had brought back the foxy whiskered gentleman (aka Mr. Tod) who almost succeeded in making dinners of the foolish Jemima Puddleduck,  her nest of eggs, and the careless Flopsy Bunnies at different times.

Looking for his next meal, he spies Miss Jenny Crow perched in a tree, trying to manage the large chunk of cheese she stole from a farm boy’s dinner basket.   Seeing an easy opportunity for dinner, Mr. Tod appeals to Jenny’s  vanity, calling her an  “adorable smutty Venus,” “a beautiful black lady bird elegant as a newly tarred railing” whose grace outshines the black swans of Tasmania.   His extravagant compliments make Jenny so nervous that she sidles up and down the branch, but without loosening her grip on the cheese.  Of course the fox wears her down.   When he exclaims that her voice must be “as sweet as a nightingale’s,”  she croaks and he realizes she is weakening.  He calls out, “She sings, she sings, louder, sweet sky lark”  and Jenny drops her guard, opens her  bill to caw, and drops the cheese into the foxy gentleman’s mouth.   He laughs until he cries and takes “no further notice of poor silly Miss Crow.  He had got what he wanted.”

Perhaps Potter as a woman should have been less tolerant of Mr. Tod’s wiles…  But she is hardly the only female reteller of “The Fox and Crow” who won’t take the crow’s side.  Lisbeth Zwerger draws the picture from the crow’s point of view, but the fox’s mock-serious gesture down on the ground expresses more amusement than disapproval in his hypocrisy.  There is no doubt who is going to triumph.

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From “The Fox and the Crow,” Aesop’s Fables Selected and Illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger. (New York/London: NorthSouth Books, 2006), p. 21.

Barbara McClintock ‘s lady crow, on the other hand, wears a dainty blue gown, red shawl, poke bonnet, and slippers, which makes her look even more ridiculous when she throws a tantrum after losing out to the leering fox…  Maybe vanity rather than gender is the fable’s point–so why couldn’t the roles be reassigned so that a foxy lady outwits a preening lad?

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From “The Fox and the Crow.” Animal Fables from Aesop Adapted and Illustrated by Barbara McClintock (Boston: David Godine, 2012), p. 5.

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From “The Fox and the Crow.” Animal Fables Adapted and Illustrated by Barbara McClintock, p. 6.

Potter titled her version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” “Grasshopper Belle and Susan Emmet.”   As tough-minded as La Fontaine’s “Le cigale et la formi,” “Grasshopper Belle” is one of the most powerful stories Potter wrote.  The main character is the  industrious ant Susan in a rusty black gown and black net cap, a “notable good housekeeper” like Mrs. Tittlemouse with “cupboards of spotless linen” and fully furnished storerooms with sacks and bags floor to ceiling.

A miserly soul, Susan works incessantly through the sunny summer months and has to go back and forth by the merry grasshoppers.  Grasshopper Belle all “in green satin with pink sleeves and gauzy wings” has the lightest foot of all and dances to the gentlemen fiddling “Sing leader, needle, treadle, wheedle, wheadle, sudle, chirr, whirr, whirr, oh, who is so fine, in silver gossamer as Grasshopper Belle?”  Loaded down with a heavy sack, Susan hisses  at them, “Vanity of vanity, disgusting idleness,” but they invite her to dance a turn to their music anyway.  Not that she does.  Nor will she stop when Belle offers to lull her to sleep–no, Susan must get home before the rain, to which  Belle trills, “Home, my home is in the barley grass, no cellars for me, come upon the grass stalk and watch the sun slip behind a cloud.”

Susan does get home just as the thunderstorm breaks.  At dawn the driving rain begins, turning to sleet by evening.  Susan sits contentedly by the fire sewing, ignoring the rattling latch and cries of “Susan Emmet, Susan Emmet, let me in.”   When the voice begs, “Let me in, let me in, I am dying, Susan Emmett,” the ant decides it is nothing more than the bitter cold wind.  While the ant is eating dinner, the latch rattles yet again and the voice calls out weakly to her.  Susan clears the table, thinking to herself, “She has had her lesson, I suppose I must let her in; she can sleep on the door mat.”  When she opens the door and looks out into the dark, “Grasshopper Belle lay dead on the doorstep.”

Would many American parents would consider reading Potter’s dark, but heartbreaking retelling of “The Ant and the Grasshopper”  to their children?  Two recent picture book versions, in which the fable has been recast as a tribute to the power of music, is probably much more in tune with the today’s sensibilities (and in line with recommendations of educators and social psychologists).  The father-daughter team of Rebecca  and Ed Emberley imagine the ant anxiously pushing a slice of watermelon back to the nest on a hot, hot summer  day.

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Rebecca Emberley and Ed Emberley, The Ant and the Grasshopper (New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2012), p. 31.

The Emberleys not only allow the grasshopper to live, they erase the object lesson of the dangers of having no plan for tomorrow.  Instead the happy-go-lucky grasshopper teaches the weary, dispirited ant how music makes burdens lighter.

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Let the good times roll! Rebecca Emberley and Ed Emberley, The Ant and the Grasshopper, p. 28.

In Jerry Pinkney’s retelling of the same fable, the banjo-playing grasshopper is also a joyful character.  Below he tries to convince the ants that they ought to stop and enjoy the beauties of the summer season.

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Jerry Pinkney, The Grasshopper and the Ants (New York: Little Brown, 2015), p. 8.

When winter comes and the miserable grasshopper shows up on the ant colony’s doorstep, they can’t find it in their hearts to lock him out.  He is welcomed in and offered the best of everything.

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Jerry Pinkney, The Grasshopper and the Ants, p. 18.

The Queen Ant sits down to tea with the grasshopper, as if to say  the love of music and  of nature can bring us together, if we allow it to happen.  Both insects are right in their own way, but no one loses in the end.

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Jerry Pinkney, The Grasshopper and the Ants, p. 36.

Who can argue with messages like these in confusing, competitive, and cruel times?  But is it necessary to obscure the pragmatic worldview of the Aesopian fable in order to protect young readers?  Some children will  embrace the happy ending where the ants and grasshopper party, others will remember Susan Emmet peering out into the dark, with the beautiful grasshopper Belle lifeless at her feet.  The good news is that we don’t have to choose among them–any version can be worth a look. The open-endedness of the twice-told tale is, after all, is one of its enduring pleasures.

See more Beatrix Potter and  bugs at Cotsen’s virtual exhibitions page!

Strange Bedfellows? “King Lear” and “The Natural History of Ants”

Some strange things happen to King Lear in Shakespeare’s tragedy about the proud king of ancient Britain who gives away his crown, loses all — including his wits — and finds himself in tatters on a heath in a raging storm, accompanied only by his (perhaps witless) court fool and a truly noble, young nobleman pretending to be a madman (Edgar).  At one point, the three of them crowd together inside a hovel to seek nighttime protection from a raging storm — a mad king, a fool, and a nobleman feigning madness, all huddled together: strange bedfellows, indeed!

Title page: "The Junior Class-Book," by William Frederick Mylius (London: M.J. Godwin, 1813) Cotsen new accession.

Title page: “The Junior Class-Book,” by William Frederick Mylius (London: M.J. Godwin, 1813) Cotsen new accession.

But even this amazing juxtaposition might not seem stranger than finding a (greatly shortened) version of King Lear cheek-by-jowl with “The Natural History of Ants,” which outlines the behavior of ants and uses it to model virtuous conduct for children.  Yet, that’s just what I came across recently while cataloging a newly-acquired Cotsen Library book: The Junior Class-Book, or, Reading Lessons for Every Day of the Year, by William Frederick Mylius (London: M.J. Godwin, 1813).

How did such seemingly disparate items as Lear and ants  come to be yoked together?  Credit a literary miscellany for children, a genre featuring abbreviated excerpts (fiction, prose, poetry, religion) from a wide variety of authors on an intentionally wide variety of subjects and topics.  Like the once-popular literary miscellanies for adults, those for children were samplers of sorts, but they were also meant to subserve an underlying didactic purpose as well. The sheer variety in the selection of materials in children’s literary miscellanies was intended to make them both more engaging and more readily-digestible to young minds, as per Enlightenment thinking on education.  It was also meant to provide a wide array of information on all sorts of topics that educators of the time thought children should know about: morality, history, geography, natural science, and classical mythology, among them.

Religion, once the exclusive foundation of early childhood learning (“A is for Adam”) was no longer the sole basis for childhood reading by the time of this book’s 1813 publication.  In a Preface, Mylius, the book’s compiling editior, is quite explicit about the role he intends the miscellany to play and how this differs from prior practice:

It is now a maxim sufficiently established in schools that children of both sexes are to be practiced and perfected in the art of reading by a miscellaneous collection.  Fifty years ago, the Bible was the only book used for English reading… a miscellany has great advantage… a stepping stone and ladder to all knowledge…

The variety of a miscellany for children is thus the point, as well as one of its key means to achieving its pedagogical ends.  The unusual range of material in The Junior Class-Book certainly got my attention!

But to be accurate, I should also stress how stress that Mylius imposes considerable didactic order on his selections — this is definitely not free-form, study-what-you-will learning!  The eclectic overall work is carefully divided into weekly reading selections — to be commenced on the week “after the Christmas Holiday” — and each week’s reading is further subdivided into six passages, one for each day of the week.  (“Six days a week,” you ask?  Sunday, while a day of rest, was presumably not a day without reading and study in Mylius’s eyes, but one still revolving around the Bible, not assignments from his book.)

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First page of “Contents” for “The Junior Class-Book”: from Fenelon to French Cookery to Shakespeare.

The first “Contents” page listing of readings should, I hope, give you with some idea of the variety of the content and format, as well as how the clearly didactic orientation is leavened by literature and variety: “Industry & Idleness,” “On Lying,” and “The Folly of Ambition” (almost sermon-like in their moral titles) are accompanied by “Of Bird’s Nests.” (Yes indeed, this passage discusses how birds’ nests are actually made, but it also stresses what humans can learn from observing how birds themselves learn how to build nests: learning from others’ learning — quite a sophisticated, psychologically-oriented  approach, when you think about it.)

“Florizel and Perdita” provides a more distinctly “literary” reading selection for the opening weeks, although a title perhaps not as immediately familiar to a modern reader as it would have been at the time of the Junior Class-Book‘s publication.  A retelling of an episode from Shakespeare’s The Winters Tale, “Florizel and Perdita”  is abridged from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, first published in 1807 to huge critical acclaim and general popularity and never since out of print.  Intended as an introduction to the then utterly-canonical (more unquestionably so then than today, believe it or not) plays of Shakespeare, the Tales were abridged narrative versions of twenty plays, intended as “easy reading for young children,” as the Lambs wrote in their own Preface.  But the selections are also quite didactic in their import, as the Lambs made clear at the end of the Preface, where they refer to their Tales as:

strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honorable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity… examples teaching these virtues…

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Beginning of “Florizel & Perdita,” adapted from Lamb’s “Tales of Shakespeare.”

Encouraging virtue and providing lessons for both thought and conduct: classic goals of didactic literature.

Reading the Tales now, their didacticism is striking and unambiguous — as you might expect in a version of Shakespeare from this time aimed at “young children.”  And this is is even more explicit in Mylius’s abridgement of Lamb in his Junior Class-Book.  The innocent virtue of Perdita — described as a “poor deserted baby” — is explicitly rewarded with happiness, marriage, and celebration, all traditional hallmarks of comic dramatic structure.  King Leontes, her father, repents the jealousy and wrath that led him to banish his daughter (his actual intent being her death).  Yet Mylius manages to distill Lamb’s twelve-page rendition of Winter’s Tale into a four-page anecdote of climactic discovery and reconciliation that captures the essence of the longer version to a remarkable extent, at least in my opinion — and one that does reasonable justice to the original play too.

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Reading for the 18th Week: “King Lear” in 8 pages.

The complex psychological and moral story of King Lear is similarly pared down by Mylius into just eight pages — compared with about fifteen pages in Lamb’s retelling of Shakespeare; his version also endeavors to tell more of the original story of Lear, not just focus on the final episode, as his “Florizel and Perdita” did.  Mylius outlines the context of the original story — Lear compelling his three daughters to compete in extolling how much they each love him — although he refers to Cordelia’s “plainness of speech” in refusing to “flatter” Lear, rather than her “appearance of ingratitude,” as Lamb phrases it.  Similarly, Mylius describes Lear as “incensed,” “full of wrath,” and “so little guided by reason and so much by passion,” in lieu of Lamb’s “dotage to old age…clouded reason…[inability] to discern truth from flattery…[and] fury of resentment.”  Likewise, near the end of his narrative, Mylius (rightly) labels Goneril and Regan as “wicked women” but not “monsters of ingratitude,” as Lamb terms them.  In all three cases, Mylius seems to be deliberately simplifying not just the language, but also the emotions, psychology, and motivation of the characters to make them more self-evident and comprehensible to younger readers.  Ingratitude, dotage, and flattery’s deceptiveness are, after all, pretty complex ideas for a child to grasp — and hard to do justice to in eight pages, either!  (Sub-plots and some characters are also eliminated, including Edgar, in both retellings of Lear for children, I should add, changing the cast of Shakespeare’s “strange bedfellows” referred to above.)

Much of the horror of Shakespeare’s play is mitigated — or left out altogether — in the retellings of both Mylius and Lamb — but both include the death of Lear, an “unhappy and misguided old man,” as Mylius terms him, at the end of his “tragical and instructive narration.”  (Some eighteenth-century versions of the play for adults changed Shakespeare ending to create a happy reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia, more akin to comedy or romance than tragedy.)  Lear’s life thus provides a cautionary tale, his fate something to be avoided by avoiding such character flaws and behavior.

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Conclusion of “King Lear”: “By the help of sleep and medicine, [Cordelia] and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses” of Lear.

To an adult reader today, King Lear might not seem like the best source of a story for children: a father behaving badly and driven mad by old age and pitiless remorse; resentful, spiteful children who lie to him and plot revenge; and a certain level of violence ending in suffering and death.  But Shakespeare was seen as a “special” writer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (again, even more so than now), an unmatched user of language and a perfect portrayer of human nature and activity.  And children can better appreciate complex character and motivations — even evil — and some level of violence in a story better than many of us once thought.  Just look at the popularity of the Harry Potter stories with children, some quite young; seldom have child readers (or movie-goers) found them too frightening or too violent to be compelling. Or perhaps that’s actually  part of their appeal?  Some parts can verge on being too scary or too extreme, but there are lines that don’t get crossed.

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“Regulus,” as envisioned by painter J.M.W. Turner.

Mylius’s adaptation of King Lear is not unique among his selections in dealing with complex or potentially-disturbing stories either.  He also includes one titled “Regulus, the Roman Patriot” (adapted from Baldwin’s History of Rome) a history-based account of a Roman general captured by the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars, imprisoned for six long years, then sent back to Rome to urge peace terms favorable to the Carthaginians but not in Rome’s best interests.  Refusing to do so once back in Rome, Regulus returns to Carthage under the terms of his release, only to be subject to “excruciating torments” by the “cruel” Carthaginians for his refusal to place his own life before Rome’s interests.  This is hardly “kid stuff” and would probably not find its way into most books for children today.  But it is a compiling story — as anyone who has seen J.M.W. Turner’s stunning painting Regulus can attest — and it tells a story of stoical courage, patriotism, and “nobility” of character that was not so unusual in British children’s stories of the time, especially those for boys.

Readings for Weeks 18 to 20: From "King Lear," to the "Natural History of Ants," to "Robinson Crusoe"

Readings for Weeks 18 to 20: From “King Lear,” to the “Natural History of Ants,” to “Robinson Crusoe.”

As such, “Regulus” presents an important facet of the sort of reading material that educators thought children should read in 1813 — and which they no doubt did actually read. Turner must have gotten the original germ of an idea for his 1828 painting from somewhere and the dates are suggestive!

But what about the ants?  After all, I did mention them in the title of this blog posting.  And the “Natural History of Ants” does help us better understand Mylius’s overall miscellany, in particular because it’s the selection immediately preceding “Regulus”!  Reading for a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (“Regulus” is a two-day reading selection, as is “Florizel and Perdita” — “King Lear” is a unique five-day reading epic in The Junior Class-Book, a testament to both the complexity of the plot and its perceived importance as a piece of literature.)

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Beginning of the “Natural History of Ants”: “They are seen diligently going from the ant-hill in pursuit of food for themselves and their associates…”  (“Associates”?  Are they all part of a law firm?)

Worker ants are presented as models of cooperation and diligence; they work together and they work hard; they “work continually … not sharing in the pleasures of the other parts of their community” (i.e. their “idler” children, who get to remain snug in the ant-hill!).  Ants also plan and defend their mound in concert, again working in “community” and even caring for the wounded and dead, according to the passage.  This rendition of “natural history” may seem a little poetic and anthropomorphized to a reader today, and Mylius’s selection is based on a work originally authored by poet Oliver Goldsmith (who also displayed his interest in children’s educational materials in works published by John Newbery).  Nevertheless, Mylius presents ants as models of social virtue, general benevolence towards their ‘associates,” and even patriotic virtues.  And he includes some of Goldsmith’s points of distinction between English and other European ants to make even clearer another at least implied meaning of the passage.  Rule Britannia!

So, we’ve seen how Mylius shapes material taken from Shakespeare and about Roman history, bird’s nests, and ants into the larger didactic whole of his miscellany.  Personally, I’m convinced that he does a masterful job of this.  But his didactic motivation is not without a sense of humor.  He includes William Cowper’s playful poem, “Dispute Between Nose and Eyes,” in which Nose and Eyes contend for ownership of the spectacles, using Tongue to argue and Baron Ear to hear the case (get it?).

And the verdict?

… whenever Nose puts his spectacles on,
Either by daylight or candle-light, Eyes should be shut.

I’ll let you puzzle out the full import of that poem for yourself — some works defy literary exegesis!