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If you grew up in an English-speaking country, like I did, there's a good chance
that you read <I>The Velveteen Rabbit</I> when you were a kid, or had it read to
you. I bought a copy recently, and carried it around showing it to people. Most
of them said "Oh, the Velveteen Rabbit!" or "Oooh, the Velveteen Rabbit." Only a
few seemed to share my reaction, the set of feelings I associate with the name
of this children's book: despair, anxiety, a nameless dread.
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It's a simple, classic story. A little boy, and his <A HREF="quote1.htm"
TARGET="rigtrabb">favorite plush rabbit</A>; a <A HREF="quote2.htm"
TARGET="rigtrabb">minor tragedy</A> involving humans and a <A
HREF="quote3.htm" TARGET="rigtrabb">major one</A> involving stuffed toys.
It was the second tragedy that caught my mind -- I must have been four or
five the first time I read the book -- and which made me sob with fear and
a sense of creeping doom.
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It's not <B>supposed</B> to be a sad story. Children's tales traditionally have
happy endings. Since the reign of Queen Victoria, at least, and this one was no
exception. But somehow the cheerful ending left no impression on my mind; no
matter how many times I read it, I would always set it down with tears welling
at the bottoms of my eyes.
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The official ending of the Velveteen Rabbit has a <A HREF="quote4.htm"
TARGET="rigtrabb">syrup and saccharine taste</A>. The <A HREF="quote6.htm"
TARGET="rigtrabb">"nursery magic Fairy"</A> pops into the tale like a
mechanical hand of God and rescues the forlorn rabbit; I think I must have
filed this cliched little sprite away with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus,
and God, none of whom I can ever recall believing in. The <A
HREF="quote5.htm" TARGET="rigtrabb">tragic anticlimax</A> of the story
struck me much more deeply, and so for me it was the real ending. Until I
picked the book up again last week, the fairy had vanished from my memory;
I had no idea of the happy ending.
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I had my own fantasy worlds to inhabit. When I was very small I began to
accumulate a small community of stuffed animals, much like the rabbit of the
book. They all had names, voices, personalities, hobbies, and birthdays; some of
them got along with each other, but others were of more surly dispositions and
got into arguments or fights. For years, I slept with them all piled around and
on top of me. It was an idea I must have gotten at some forgotten point from
Winnie the Pooh; I was their Christopher Robin, of course, settling disputes and
telling them stories.
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For a long time I felt like I cried upon every reading of The Velveteen Rabbit
because I feared something similar would happen to my stuffed companions... they
would be thrown out and consumed by flames, cloth and plush blackening and
charring. I recall going to the city dump with my father and breaking down,
imagining my stuffed skunk, Christopher, falling into one of the huge pits of
waste and being lost forever among trash and refuse, crushed into a cube, buried
in the earth.
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But now my childhood friends all sit safely in my closet at my father's home,
most of them tattered, worn, and missing quite a bit of stuffing but still
intact. Now I think that perhaps I wasn't crying for fear of their fates as much
as I was for my own. Although some marketing copywriter tells me on the flyleaf
of my copy that the Velveteen Rabbit is about "love's power to breathe life into
a toy," I know, as I have known since I first read it, that that trite phrase is
only the backdrop for a story about disillusionment, despair, and death.
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As the story is seen through the eyes of the rabbit, a reader naturally
comes to identify with the rabbit in his quest to become <A
HREF="quote7.htm" TARGET="rigtrabb">"Real."</A> The rabbit, like many
people, struggles to lead an authentic life, and he seems to succeed, given
meaning through his bond to a young boy; but just when things look up, his
illusion of happiness is shattered, and he is thrown out on a pile of junk,
forgotten almost immediately and waiting to be burned.
<P>
Such were the thoughts that rose up unknowingly in my small head when I was
young. Many authors have written about the moment in their childhood when they
realized the final nature of death, but I recall no such moment; it may be that
awareness of death came slowly. (Later on, my voice did not break either, but
gradually deepened instead. I never even noticed.) In any case, some part of me
felt as if I would someday be cast out, that I would lie broken and unwanted in
the midst of filth and decay, looking back mournfully at lost memories while
waiting for my final destruction.
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I am not and never have been a Christian, so I have no hope of a good fairy
appearing to whisk me away to eternally sunlit lands; nor am I imbued with
enough of the serenity of Eastern thought to enable an escape from creeping
Western alienation. There may be <A HREF="quote8.htm"
TARGET="rigtrabb">other types of people</A> in the world, but I am by my
birth year a Rabbit. We may try to live authentic lives, and succeed
without the help of fairies, but in the end we all lie wrecked and
nostalgic on the trash heap, waiting for the flames.
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