SOURCE: McGillis, Roderick. “Utopian Hopes: Criticism Beyond Itself.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 9, no. 4 (winter 1984-1985): 184-86.

[In the following essay, McGillis offers conservative, radical, and visionary perspectives on The Wind in the Willows.]

“Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”

—Northrop Frye

You will remember in the “sort of fore-court” outside Mole's front door in The Wind in the Willows there are a number of brackets carrying “plaster statuary.” Kenneth Grahame identifies three of the plaster statues as Garibaldi, the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria. None of these three were literary critics, but had they been, each of their critical perspectives would have been quite different from the others'. I feel somewhat in the position of the infant Samuel, if for a moment we can imagine him as a critic called by the voice of theory. The voice called Samuel three times, but three times he was unable to respond because he did not know his subject; the fourth time the call came, Samuel responded, but being young and inexperienced he feared to repeat what he had heard. The voice of theory must call each of us, but like Samuel I am not sure I understand what it says. Unlike the voice Samuel heard, the voice of theory is not single and revelatory, but multitudinous and bewildering.

The topic addresses this multitudinous and bewildering voice: critical perspectives on children's literature. Perhaps the topic is actually the problem, since we have no lack of critical perspectives and most, if not all, of them have the frustrating tendency of coming between the reader and his experience. We are so quick to theorize, to classify, to articulate structural principles, to moralize, or to defend a point of view that the experience of literature, the experience of what Georges Puolet calls “interiority,” the mutual possession of reader and text, is lost. I suspect that much of what is wrong with the teaching of literature to the young stems from the belief that something called “literary competence” is to be achieved through the early and systematic study of what we now refer to as the “grammar” of literature, or from the opposite notion that since all knowledge is subjective we ought to encourage the student to emote, to say whatever comes into her head when we ask her to comment on a text. If we must situate ourselves somewhere between these two extremes, I presently lean to the subjective approach, because it offers a means of circumventing criticism in order to return the reader to the text. Of course, there is no way to circumvent criticism; either we remain in innocence or we enter the land unknown and look for its secrets.

Many students I have known look, like Thel, with hesitant, timorous, and decidedly reluctant gaze, on the critical landscape; a few others become good little clods of clay. But surely criticism need not become, as it has for so many academic readers, more important than the literature it takes for its raw material. I fear descending into cliché, but the “experience of literature itself” should be our goal, and this experience is available to all readers. If criticism is to help us share our experience of literature, it must do so by pointing beyond itself, and to point beyond itself criticism, as Northrop Frye suggests, “needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself” (77).

The land unknown that I referred to with allegoric briskness in the last paragraph is that formidable structure of words that criticism attempts to make sense of: literature. An example of the secrets literature has is the plaster statuary I mentioned when I began. In a book about a group of amiable animals who live near an English river, who rarely travel beyond the sound of the current's ripple, and who have an allegiance to the great god Pan, why do we have statues of a biblical prophet in his infancy, the Queen of England, and one of the most famous mid-century radicals? I have for a long time considered these statues as the keys to the book's meaning, but for my purpose here I will suggest that they may also present us with three ways of reading The Wind in the Willows, and by implication of reading any book. At the risk of being shamefully reductive, I will call these ways of reading the conservative, the radical, and the visionary. All three have as an ultimate aim the furtherance of utopian hopes, but my contention is that only the last, refusing as it does the quest for power and the voice of authority, preserves the integrity of these hopes.

A conservative approach to The Wind in the Willows might well look on the book with nostalgia, and find the emphasis on the sweetness of home, on the simplicity of life, and on the order of society convincing and attractive. The “inner myth” of the book, as Peter Green calls it, suggests a middle-class view of the world. A critic approaching the book from what I am calling a conservative perspective would allow himself to indulge in affective assertions. For example, he might write, as Roger Sale has in fact written, that the pleasure of The Wind in the Willows “is the pleasure of enclosed space, of entering a charmed circle, of living in a timeless snugness” (168). If the critic's concern is with children, he might argue that the child reader can identify with the characters and that the value structure of the book, built as it is on such attractive ideas as “home,” “friendship,” “experience,” and “nature,” offers security and reinforcement for the young reader. We are warmed, Rebecca Lukens notes, “by discovering among other things that one loves one's home where one's belongings are, and that even the most contented finds faraway places alluring” (50).

The emphasis on “home” is especially important. Here is Fred Inglis on Grahame's evocation of home:

Badger's kitchen unselfconsciously embodies continuity: the magic reverberance of the word ‘home’ and all its rich cognates tingle in the plenitude of the ceiling hung with ‘bundles of dried herbs’ and ‘nets of onions’ … All that home means in Kenneth Grahame has since undergone a sharp attenuation under the minute, relentless bombardment of the doctrines of mobility, obsolescence, and acquisitiveness.

(122)

The values of the River Bank society are dear to this critic, who concentrates his reading of the book on the first five chapters. When he does allude to the politics of social inequality, he does so to slight this aspect of the book. He writes: “It is not a trivial point that they are insurgent working-class weasels and stoats who are thrown out of Toad Hall at the end but the point does not touch the heart of Grahame's matter; the recovery of home is as important there as it is when Mole finds Mole End again one snow-threatening Christmas Eve. … Quite simply, Grahame creates a Utopia … and its outline is visible today” (122-123). For Inglis, Grahame offers the reader “an image of happiness perfectly combined with innocence, and all of us would wish our children to feel the strength of such an image” (119-120). I hope it is apparent that readings of this kind function on the belief that literature can sustain us, warm us, reassure us, make us better people, perhaps even quieten us.

It is worth noting that such impressionistic and affective commentary has its formal complement. The same critic who states that The Wind in the Willows warms us, also uses the book as an example of a work with an “episodic plot.” This kind of plot differs from the “progressive plot” in that the pattern of action does not lead through the “rising action to the central climax,” but rather it proceeds through discrete episodes (Lukens, 57). This is the approach I experienced when I was in elementary school years ago. Memorize the structures of literature and you will have acquired essential knowledge for living. I hated it. To be chocked full of literary competence was to transform you into an educated, cultured individual prepared to assume your station in society. Besides knowing that The Wind in the Willows has an episodic plot (even here it is perhaps truer to say that the book uses both episodic and progressive plots), you might also know that it has a pastoral vision and that it contains a parody of the heroic quest. This last point, understated or not, will be important to the conservative critic because the hero as adventurer threatens society; the critic will wish to see Toad as a converted toad fixed firmly within the society he had once threatened through his irresponsible individualism. In this book, the group, the community itself is heroic.

Such a view of The Wind in the Willows will leave some readers uneasy. From the formal and emotional perspective is not Grahame's vision, as winsome and warm as it is, regressive? Do we not miss much of the point if we ignore the tensions in the book, tensions that derive from the historical moment? Is it not misleading to find values of permanent relevance in the pastoralism of The Wind in the Willows? Instead of the “Thames-side Shangri-La of simple pleasures” that Peter Green sees in the book's pastoralism (xvii), might a better account read something like this:

[Pastoral] offers a political interpretation of both past and present. It is a propagandist reconstruction of history. … An audience is lulled into a false sense of empirical security by being told relatively unimportant things that are demonstrably true. Topographical details work well like this. Then the ‘great lie’ is smuggled in among such a collection of platitudes. The ‘great lie’ in pastoral concerns its presentation of change. Economic change in rural society is invariably presented as an external agency, despite the fact that rural society carried the seeds of its own destruction within itself. Capitalism was really quite at home in both the long and the short grass of rural England … pastoral endorsed the essentially aristocratic codes of conspicuous consumption, idle ease and languid leisure. Oaten reeds merely disguised aristocratic deeds. … Before you become too nostalgic about the merry old days of rural England, it is worth thinking about which groups have a vested interest in such nostalgia.

(17-18)

Such a view of pastoral is historical and overtly political, and although the writer—Roger Sales—concerns himself with the period 1780-1830, we can easily relate his account of Romantic pastoral to The Wind in the Willows. Whereas the conservative critic will find the first five chapters of Grahame's book the most satisfying, a radical critic would most likely concentrate on the rebellious stoats and weasels and their storming of Toad Hall, that symbol of conspicuous consumption, idle ease, and languid leisure. I say “most likely” because, to the best of my knowledge, we do not have a radical reading of The Wind in the Willows. Were we to have one, it would conform to Terry Eagleton's dictum that a radical commentary “will contribute to the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of ‘better people’ through the socialist transformation of society” (211). The return of Toad Hall to its aristocratic owner, the vision of society neatly and securely ordered in a class system, and the assertion that Toad is indeed “altered” will seem retrograde. Grahame's anxiety over social and technological change will seem escapist and anything but utopian. Grahame's Arcadian vision cannot compete with the vision of Utopia as a city which reflects man's ascendancy over, rather than his harmony with, nature. Instead of looking backward, the utopia looks forward to the proper end of social progress. The defeat of the stoats and weasels, the dismissal of the motor car, are signs of a mole-like retreat from social reality. The difficulty I have with this approach is that the call to action of a radical theory merely inverts the encouragement to inaction of a conservative theory. The literary imagination, as Frye remarks, “is less concerned with achieving ends than with visualizing possibilities” (The Stubborn Structure, 116).

And so how do we read The Wind in the Willows: We might begin with the reminder that the “primary function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society” (The Stubborn Structure, 5). It seems to me that The Wind in the Willows is educative in just this way: it removes easy certainties and directs our attention to a society that is not ordinary, not actual. The Wind in the Willows can teach us that society, that reality, exist in our imaginations. Let me take one example from the book: the home. All commentaries I know take the Dulce Domum of chapter 5 literally: the home is sweet, safe, stable; in short, it is felicitous space, to use Lois Kuznets' term. A less sympathetic reader might focus on Toad Hall as a house that represents social inequality. In either case, the home is both a place and a value that we might wish to realize in our lives or that we might wish to overturn. Both reactions are, from an imaginative point of view, misguided. The home in The Wind in the Willows is both an anchor and a trap, both an escape and a prison. On the first page Mole “bolts” out of his house and then scrapes, scratches, scrabbles, and scrooges his way to the sunlight. Space is less than felicitous when it has to be dusted, swept, and whitewashed.

But the test case is chapter 5: Dulce Domum. The vision of Mole's “our little home,” his “anchorage,” beckoning, welcoming, and warming him and his guests on a cold Christmas eve is compelling. It is also incomplete. The clue is perhaps at the beginning of the chapter, when Mole and Ratty plod home through the cold and the snow. They come to a village and spend a moment observing and contemplating the interiors of the cottages, most of whose “low latticed windows were innocent of blinds.” On the one hand, the contract between interior and exterior signifies the goodness of these home in which the people

gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture. … Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

This vision of the comforts of home appears sweetness itself. But note the cat. The home fires might well be something to yearn for, but there is a price for such cosiness as we see in these homes. The next paragraph moves to “one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night.” Clearly visible behind the white blind is a bird cage with a sleeping bird. As Ratty and Mole watch, “the sleepy little fellow” wakes, raises his head and yawns “in a bored sort of way.” Surely we have here a reminder that an animal's freedom is lost when domestication comes its way. And yet, domestication has its allurements.

Allurements are exactly what the home offers. Critics are fond of noting that The Wind in the Willows is, as Grahame wished, free of the “clash of sex,” but they are wrong. Those “mysterious fairy calls” that reach Mole in the darkness as he and Ratty proceed on their way are a vamp's temptation. Here is the passage: “Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.” The sexual metaphor has its complement in a metaphor of capture: “And now [his old home] was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in.” The language suggests the paradox of a home that both satisfies and dissatisfies. By the end of the chapter, Ratty has successfully brought Mole to the “frame of mind” in which he sees clearly how plain, simple, and narrow his home is; he does not wish to “creep home and stay there.” Yet his home is of “special value;” his “anchorage” is more idea than place. Home has become an imaginative possibility, something not left behind but forever there ready for recreation. This vision of imaginative fulfillment, its possibility yet its ever receding movement, is everywhere in the book suggesting that neither travel nor home, neither energy nor indolence can finally fulfill. The only true home is an imaginative one built, like Badger's, on the foundation of history, and serving as shelter for heroes or harvesters. Its fires should play over everything “without distinction.”

Just as the homes in The Winds in the Willows are vulnerable to change, so is the society itself. Despite the quiet ending, we know that the taming of the Wild Wood continues because of fear. We also know that the motor car and the steam train will not go away: the pre-industrial Arcadia of the River Bank will pass into history, although as an imaginative possibility, as the English Tourist Board realizes, it endures. As long as it does endure we must strive to recreate it, and our striving is a reflection of our freedom. We remain free only so long as we remain maladjusted to ordinary society. Criticism offers us a power to fend off the loud world; this power is both personal and communal. I said earlier that a visionary criticism refuses the quest for power and the voice of authority. What I meant by this is that the true critical voice seeks not control, not possession, but detachment. It seeks not the limitation of meaning, nor does it seek to abandon intellect. As teachers we must, and again I echo William Blake, stain the waters clear. The true act of teaching, like the true voice of criticism, is to detach our students from us, to liberate their imaginations and we can only do this if we touch them with ours.

So how do we teach our students that The Wind in the Willows is a visionary book, a book that tells us we can travel much farther in our imaginations that we can on foot or by train or boat? Well, we do not. What we try to do, I hope, is to strengthen the student's own response by directing him or her to the book's poetry, to that aspect of writing students most often learn to pass by. I am speaking, of course, about language and metaphor, those things we ignore when we rush to introduce young students to plot structures and character types. These things they will learn anyway, but their spontaneous love of language, of poetry, of rhythm and the activities of the singing school too easily are lost. Before we begin to systematize we must have, as Shelley says, the strength to imagine that which we know, and we know the energy of poetry sings in all young hearts. I am calling for an impossibility, but without the belief in a community of readers, each singing in his own voice and yet in harmony, utopian hopes will descend into the arena of the actual. We must continue to believe in that nowhere our language in its imaginative capacity creates and recreates.

The dignity of our enterprise should be to liberate our students from the stock response, and for those who work with children this should be a joy, since the younger the child the freer she is from stock responses. For those students who are older, who want us to provide the certainty of meaning, who tell us, as Mole tells Ratty, “You hear better than I. … I cannot catch the words,” we can do no better than leave them in Mole's position at the end of “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”: understanding the silence.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Bassil Blackwell, 1983.

Frye, Northrop. The Stubborn Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1970.

Green, Peter. “Introduction,” Wind in the willows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Inglis, Fred. The Promise of Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Kuznets, Lois R. “Toad Hall Revisited,” Children's Literature 7 (1978):115-128.

Lukens, Rebecca J. A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1976.

Poulet, Georges. “Criticism and the Experience of interiority,” The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1972. 56-72.

Sale, Roger, Fairy Tales and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Sales, Roger. 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics. London: Hutchinson, 1983.