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Dec.26/04 - Jan.2, 2005 |
The magic of Beatrix
Beloved characters featured at the Royal Ontario Museum
By Jennifer Febbraro
Originally Published: 2003-11-02
Beatrix Potter, born in July, 1866 never expected to become an icon. And yet, her iconoclastic stories of Peter Rabbit have sustained the minds and imaginations of children for over a century, as this month's exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, Peter Rabbit's Garden, testifies to.
As the rudimentary architectural shifts at the ROM begin to tear down its old facade, and as the plans to hoist a crystallized, post-modern shell onto the antiqued brick is staged, inside a more traditional celebration is happening, though fear not, Beatrice Potter has been modernized.
Potter probably could not have imagined the transformation of her simple, pastoral tales into over-sized digital mutations and models. Nor could she probably have imagined her sketches of Peter Rabbit and the accompanying text, circling the cereal bowls of thousands of children world-wide, including my own.
She didn't set out to make a mint selling china, and yet Potter's tales forged a consumerism that redefined our understandings of the "privileged" literary childhood. One wonders if Potter and Pottery Barn (for kids) could have been a collaboration. Of course, it's only speculation. But 150 million copies of her 23 storybooks later, Potter's words still speak to kids, at least they speak to the great nostalgia they evoke for their parents.
How could she have dreamt that a little sketch in a notebook, one inspired by a lonely childhood, of a rabbit she had befriended could have blown up to such a phenomenon? A four-foot-three-inch model of the mischievous rabbit meets visitors at the door of the exhibit.
Potter had little interaction with other children and was educated by a private governess in the Lake District, in England. Summer holidays took her to Scotland and other rural landscapes where she was said to "befriend" squirrels, rabbits, and gophers play out their schemes in the vegetable gardens her parents tended. Loneliness left much time for fantasy and she soon began to study their movements and make drawings, which soon became the prized characters Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin, and Jemima Puddle-duck.
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