Month: March 2015

The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child

The Gruffalo, Front CoverWe have read this wonderful pair of books by Julia Donaldson countless times. What’s not to love about a tiny mouse who preys upon the fears of his predators with a bit of imagination and consistently catchy couplets? When it turns out that there is such a thing as a Gruffalo, the mouse has to think fast! In the sequel, the “Big Bad Mouse” is the bogeyman conjured up to keep the Gruffalo’s daughter away from the “deep dark Wood.” When the Gruffalo’s Child sneaks out to see for herself, the mouse has to think fast … again! Axel Scheffler’s illustrations offer additional details that my young readers love (cavewall drawings of Snake, Owl, Fox, and Mouse, for example). For the adult reader, the exquisite politeness of Mouse, Fox, Owl, Snake, and Gruffalo point to familiar social menaces and solutions more than to “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson 57.15). What grown-up hasn’t wanted to conjure up a gruffalo of an excuse to escape an unwanted lunch invitation at least once in her or his life?

But I keep coming back to Donaldson for her note-perfect poetic meter, which is an integral part of the storytelling. Good poetry lays down a beat and then varies it in meaningful ways. The Gruffalo is mainly iambic and dactylic, invoking patterns children know well. (An iamb is one unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat: da DA. A dactyl is a stressed beat followed by two unstressed beats: DA da da.) Say these two dialogic couplets out loud to hear the dactyls tripping along decorously:

[Fox] Where are you going to, little brown mouse?
Come and have lunch in my underground house.
[Mouse] It’s terribly kind of you Fox, but no —
I’m going to have lunch with a gruffalo.

All very polite and light, until the mouse brings up his imaginary pre-arranged lunch date. The mouse forces Fox off the social script.

[Fox] A gruf–fa–lo? What’s a gruf-fa-lo?

With the two interrogatives (the first one a non-sequitur or non-sentence), the meter abruptly shifts to spondees (two stressed syllables), which I’ve marked in bold. There are many ways to read this line (and I’ve tried them all over the course of reading this book aloud several hundred times), but the words seem to come out best as querulous spondees. To me, the change of meter signals an irruption into the normal flow of social dialogue. The mouse inserts a surprising piece of information. The Fox can’t help but ask — just as Owl and Snake will do in the subsequent pages.

The mouse is in control of the social dialogue from this point on. First, he gets to complete Fox’s incomplete half-line:

A gruffalo! Why, didn’t you know?

In studies of Shakespeare’s verse by theatre practitioners, there’s general consensus that shared half-lines indicate haste, with the second speaker jumping in to finish the line (Rokison). In this case, the mouse feigns exclamatory surprise (“A gruffalo!”) and shames his interlocutor with the implication that Fox is outside a knowledge community (“Why, didn’t you know?”). Without much time to think, the mouse resorts to a repeated adjective rather than specifics of the gruffalo’s appearance:

He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws,
And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws.

The mouse will elaborate these details in his next encounters (with Owl and Snake), when he’s had more time to conjure up the vision of the Gruffalo. But this moment, when the mouse is only beginning to imagine his Gruffalo, always makes me laugh. “Terrible” is the best he can do — four times! Technically, the repetition of “terrible” is an instance of “diacope.” Silva Rhetoricae defines diacope as “Repetition of a word with one or more between, usually to express deep feeling.” The mouse is certainly feeling something deep: fear of being eaten by Fox! And so he is both in control of the exchange and not entirely in control of the image … yet. When he does fully master the idea of a gruffalo, the Gruffalo (now with an uppercase G) materializes in front of him, a new terror to be managed.

The mouse’s bravado and quick thinking are deeply pleasurable precisely because they come from a place of vulnerability. He is vulnerable to things bigger than he is, to veiled threats that seem like kindness (“tea,” “lunch,” “a feast”), and, finally, to his own imagination. To a child trying to parse a world full of bigger people, mysterious requests, and nameless fears, the mouse is an achievable heroic model.

This exchange in The Gruffalo should remind you of another question-and-answer nursery rhyme, also in alternating dactylic lines:

Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

I like to think of The Gruffalo as the mouse’s revenge. Ultimately, The Gruffalo is an instance of the “world turned upside down” motif, where normal hierarchies are inverted.

Image from the British Library © The British Library Board.
Image from the British Library © The British Library Board.

In the lower left-hand corner, you can see a crudely drawn mouse or rat chasing a cat — part of a series of inversions (fish swimming in the air, a man’s hands where his feet should be, a horse pushing a cart). Such images, popular in Renaissance Europe long before their appearance on this 1646 title page, often include children instructing their teachers or blessing their parents. The mouse’s triumph over Fox, Owl, Snake, and, ultimately, the most terrible thing he can imagine, is the triumph of the child. And it all plays out in mutually supporting ways at the level of narrative, image, and verse.

References

Burton, Gideon. Silva Rhetoricae. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.

Donaldson, Julia. The Gruffalo. Ill. Axel Scheffler. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 1999. ISBN 978-0333710937.

Donaldson, Julia. The Gruffalo’s Child. Ill. Axel Scheffler. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 2005. ISBN 978-1405020466.

J., T. The World Turn’d upside down: or, A briefe description of the ridiculous Fashions of these distracted Times. London, 1646.

Rokison, Abigail. “Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse Line.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry. Ed. Jonathan Post. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 285-305. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199607747.013.0024. See section 16.2, “Shared Lines.”

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII. 1850. Text from Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson and annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson. London: Macmillan, 1908. Available in digital diplomatic transcription at Representative Poetry Online. Ed. Ian Lancashire. Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 1998.

New Scholars Roundtable — Treasures and Tea @UVicLib

The UVic Special Collections “Treasures and Tea” series gave me the opportunity to convene a “New Scholars Roundtable.” Today, I had the privilege of moderating a session highlighting the work of emerging scholars with material from Special Collections. The speakers were: Michelle Spelay on Thomas Heywood’s Gynaikaeion, Emily Hector on The Wrongs of Woman, Alyssa Currie on William Blake prints, Nadia Timperio on the Pocket Books phenomenon, and Elyse Mitchell on the fortunes of Sono Nis Press. I reproduce below the text of my introduction to the event and my introductions of each presenter. We’ll be posting their work to the new Special Collections blog in due course.

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I’m very pleased to be showcasing the work of new scholars today, all of whom took English 500 in Fall 2014. English 500, or “Textual Studies and Methods of Research,” is the only course in our graduate program that all students must take. The challenge of the course is to turn obligation into opportunity. Holding the class meetings right here, in this room, means that we are surrounded by the wonderful opportunities afforded by our Special Collections and University Archives.

My colleague, Dr. Erin Kelly, says that she feels like a matchmaker when she teaches English 500. She does a wonderful speed-dating exercise where students get to spend a few minutes meeting a series of rare books and materials from our literary archives. Students rank their books and arrange a second date if they wish. This year, with the fortuitous appointment of Heather Dean as Associate Director of SCUA, I felt that we could be more ambitious. To extend the metaphor, we hoped to spark a love affair between books and graduate students that would lead to a long-term relationship with the material forms of literary transmission.

Setting aside the potential jokes about getting into bed with a book – which is one of the many things not allowed in SCUA – we did have two additional objectives. The first was to provide students with opportunities to make new discoveries that might lead to original research projects. The second was to learn more about our collections. And so Heather and I matched each one of the 26 students with manuscripts, rare books, prints, archival holdings, and other SCUA materials that spoke directly to their research interests. Each student had a unique assignment, which the student and I co-created in the SCUA Reading Room with the materials in front of us. The one requirement common to all the assignments was that the student contribute something back to the library – in the form of a finding aid, an update to the catalogue metadata, a complete signature collation, a blog post, a conservation proposal, or an acquisition proposal.

The results were wonderful … and this work is now filtering into the Library system. For several students, the bibliographic love affair is bearing fruit in the form of the Master’s Essay. For others, it will be a valuable line on their CVs. For the library and future users, we now have several more invaluable finding aids, including a list of poems and stories in an important journal in the Transgender Archive, which makes visible a hitherto hidden collection.

So why these five new scholars today? Certainly, their presentations in December were excellent. To be fair to the other members of the class, I must say that there were many excellent presentations – which tends to be the outcome when students get excited about a project. But these particular five presentations, taken together, will give us a good sense both of the range of materials in SCUA and of the kinds of questions that new scholars can ask – and answer – within the limited time frame of English 500. As you’ll hear and see, our speakers today have done first-rate scholarly work. They truly are “scholars.”

Speakers

Michelle Spelay

Michelle recently graduated from the English Honours program at UVic where she pursued research interests in early English drama and book history. This led her to the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia where she is working towards a dual degree in both library and archival studies. At UBC, Michelle is combining her interests in rare books and digital librarianship by working at the UBC Library’s Digitization Centre. Her current project is digitizing the Uno Langmann BC Historical Photograph Collection that features photographs dating back to the 1850s. Michelle’s discussion today will focus on Thomas Heywood’s Gynaikeion, a 17th century encyclopedia of women.-

Emily Hector

Emily Hector is a first-year Masters student in UVic’s English department. She graduated with a BA Honours in English from the University of Manitoba and is a 2014 SSHRC recipient. Emily’s research interests lie in Victorian literature, with special focus on working-class women, literacy, and Christianity. Today, she will be presenting on Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, a Victorian Evangelical who wrote to improve safety conditions for factory workers.
 

Alyssa Currie

Alyssa completed her undergraduate degree from the University of Northern British Columbia with a joint English and History Major. She is currently completing her Masters of English, studying the works of William Blake and other Romantic Era artists. Alyssa serves on the board of the English Graduate Student Society and recently presented at University of Victoria Ideafest. Today, she will be discussing how things are not always what they seem in Special Collections.

Nadia Timperio

Nadia Timperio is a Masters student in the English department at the University of Victoria. She completed a Bachelor of Arts and Science in English and Biology in 2014 at the University of Windsor. There, she co-authored the piece, “Narrative and Numbers: Tony Judt, Edward Bellamy, and the Problem of Inequality,” which was presented at the Canadian Association for American Studies annual conference and is currently under review. Her research interests lie in American drama and the construction of identity through social and cultural spaces. Today, her presentation looks at an early publication of American playwright Edward Albee’s most notable work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Elyse Mitchell

Elyse attended UVic for her undergrad, where her research interests led her to focus on modernist poetry and contemporary Canadian gothic fiction. After spending several years as a high school English teacher in Vancouver, she has returned to academia, where she is focusing on the changing face of Canadian publishing and how Canadian literature reflects and constructs Canadian identity. Her Masters essay examines Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and considers the limits of Gothic narrative tropes for critical examinations of literature from a postcolonial perspective. Her discussion today focuses on the changing face of publication in Canada.