Images of the Female on Campus: Beatrix Potter

 

 

A Hundred Years of Hip Hop Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit and Friends

Location: Perry Castañeda Library First Floor

            Helen Beatrix Potter is the world renowned author of the series The Tales of Beatrix Potter, which included such famous characters as Benjamin Bunny and Peter Cotton Tail.

            Beatrix Potter is a product of Victorian parents, and reportedly not what a Victorian mother's dream. According to the website bpotter.com Helen was quite a strange girl. She fancied art and animals, although she was "unsentimental about her pets," and had more animal friends than human ones. She did however have a talent with the paintbrush, which can be enjoyed in any one of her stories. According to our class and what constitutes a Victorian, or Victorianism, does include Helen. She loved nature, had a bit of a "grotesque" side when it came to ill animals (by grotesque I mean she was unable to bear a drawn out death and would offer the animal a quick and painless end, should it be necessary), and was as fanciful as Lewis Carroll.

            "I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense..." – Beatrix Potter’s Journal, 17 November 1896, from the National Trust collection. This quote represents the style of writing Potter's children's novels have. Everyone knows that rabbits and animals do not talk or walk upright and live as humans do, but the balance she finds in the stories with her characters makes them pleasant and not too far fetched for the reader to enjoy.

They aren’t as fantastical as Alice in Wonderland but they aren’t quite the norm.

            With the huge success of this wonderful children’s writer, the journey to writing great children’s literature is to learn from predecessors such as Beatrix Potter. She even has strong female actresses playing her in movies. Renée Zellweger plays the lovely Potter in the film Miss Potter which was released in 2006. How else could Miss Potter not be a role model for future women writers?