A. A. Milne 1882-1956

(Full name Alan Alexander Milne) English novelist, playwright, essayist, critic, autobiographer, and author of children's poetry and juvenile fiction.

The following entry presents an overview of Milne's career through 1995. For further information on his life and works, see CLR, Volumes 1 and 26.

INTRODUCTION

Though he wrote in a variety of genres for adult readers, Milne is remembered almost exclusively for his four notable children's books. Ostensibly written for his young son Christopher Robin Milne, the verse volumes When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927) each consist of short, lighthearted poems for children, of which "Vespers" is perhaps the most famous. The latter mentions Christopher Robin by name, and several of the poems allude to the boy's prized toy bear. This stuffed animal—who has become one of the best known characters in Western literature—appears as the protagonist of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), which depicts the adventures of Pooh and his animal friends in an idyllic forest known as the Hundred-Acre Wood. Christopher Robin, Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and the other residents of the Wood reappeared in 1928's The House at Pooh Corner. Though his creations were judged on a level with Lewis Carroll's, and his children's works were often ranked above those of such noted contemporaries as J. M. Barrie and Kenneth Grahame, Milne aspired to be remembered as an author of "serious" novels, essays, and plays for adults. Nonetheless, thanks to the legacy of Pooh, a silly and self-centered yet oddly generous bear, ruled as much by his heart as by his stomach, Milne's writing for children holds an exalted place in world literature.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born in London on January 18, 1882, Milne was the youngest of schoolmaster John Vine Milne's three sons. As a child, he attended Henley House, the preparatory school at which his father was headmaster. One of his tutors at Henley was H. G. Wells, who would later go on to his own literary fame with such science-fiction classics as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Wells and Milne would remain lifelong friends, with Wells offering his young protégé advice throughout his career. At age eleven, Milne was awarded a scholarship to attend the elite Westminster School in the fall of 1893. At Westminster, Milne excelled at mathematics, later earning his B.A. with honors in the subject from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1903. During his tenure at Cambridge, Milne edited the school magazine, Granta, and his work so impressed R. C. Lehmann of the noted humorist publication Punch that Lehmann asked Milne to begin submitting sketches to the magazine. In 1906 he was hired as an assistant editor at Punch and soon began writing a weekly column. Milne first established himself as a writer of humorous essays, and out of this reputation, he was able to publish his first book, a series of fictional sketches titled Lovers inLondon (1905). In 1913 Milne married Dorothy Daphne De Selincourt and, seven years later, she gave birth to Christopher Robin, their only child. During World War I, Milne served as a signal officer for the British Army and composed his first play, Wurzel-Flummery, which was produced in 1917. The success of his 1919 play Mr. Pim Passes By ushered in the most fruitful decade of Milne's career, a period in which he wrote his four major children's books as well as his novel The Red House Mystery (1922) and several other notable publications. During this time, Milne enjoyed great fame, which continued thereafter, but almost exclusively on the merits of his Pooh books. In his latter years, he became increasingly bitter over his lack of success with literature for adults. A committed political Liberal, Milne campaigned ardently for an end to war. However, after the rise of Adolf Hitler, Milne revised one of his antiwar tracts, Peace with Honour (1934), to take account of the fact that there remained forms of tyranny that required armed opposition. Unfortunately, his literary successes were balanced by a growing distance between Milne and his son. Christopher, always leery of his place in the Pooh pantheon, had begun to resent his family, believing he had been taken advantage of by his father. In 1948 Christopher married his cousin Lesley de Selincourt, which enormously disappointed his parents, who both disapproved of the match and saw their hopes that he might marry his childhood friend Anne Darlington (who appeared in as a character in Milne's two books of poetry) dashed. In 1952 Milne suffered a debilitating stroke that completely incapacitated him. Nonetheless, he clung to life for another three years until he finally succumbed to his illness on January 31, 1956. In 1961 Daphne Milne sold the film rights to the Pooh property to the Walt Disney Company, who redesigned illustrator E. H. Shepard's original images of the characters. As a result, the two incarnations of the Pooh animals are designated as either "Classic Pooh" or "Disney Pooh." For his part, Christopher Milne was able to finally come to terms with his role in the creation of the Pooh stories late in life and even contributed two valuable reflections about his father and his own Pooh legacy: The Enchanted Places (1974) and The Path through the Trees (1979).

MAJOR WORKS

Milne's first forays into writing for children began as an extension of his long-time passion for verse, the result of which was the spontaneously written poem "Vespers"—possibly Milne's most anthologized poem to date. A short poem drawn directly from Milne's observances of watching his son say his evening prayers, "Vespers" seems overly sentimental at first glance. But, in reality, the poem evinces some decidedly adult sensibilities in that the boy's poetic recitations are filled with asides that demonstrate that the child is saying his prayers only out of a sense of obligation because he knows his parents expect it of him. Lines like "God bless Mummy. I know that's right" and "Oh, God bless Daddy—I quite forgot" show a stubborn resistance to evening prayers that belie the seemingly overt saccharine qualities of the verse. Regardless, the poems in Milne's When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six retain much of their tender disposition, demonstrating Milne's fond embrace of the child-like institutions of limitless excitement and the unimpeded enjoyment of life. These books also established another recurring theme for Milne: his insistence that his stories were not based exclusively on his son Christopher Robin. As he repeatedly told his readers, the characters in his verse collections and the Pooh books were based on a combination of elements from his own childhood, his imagination, and certain characteristics drawn from his only son. In such poems as "Halfway Down" and "Disobedience" Milne skillfully portrays—in economical and seemingly effortless verse—the varied world of childhood, in which the child focuses solely on the self and grown-ups act as meddlesome, if generally benign, outsiders.

This atmosphere pervades Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, two works that depict an ideal world in which Pooh and his friends—Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Tigger, Owl, Kanga, and Roo—enjoy the freedoms of adulthood while maintaining the carefree qualities of childhood. The story of Christopher Robin's toys coming to life in the Hundred-Acre Wood, Winnie-the-Pooh attempts to create a comforting place for young readers where imagination and family are unifying concepts. Pooh and his animal compatriots act as a family even as they engage in such gentle adventures as trying to reach the North Pole, helping Eeyore find his lost tail, and assisting Pooh in outsmarting the bees so that he might illicitly dip into their honey. Despite the fact that the stories were named after their titular protagonist Pooh Bear, Christopher Robin is very much the central figure of the narratives. Father, protector, and the undeniable leader of his animal friends, Christopher Robin serves as the core of their merry band and the one that the others inevitably turn to for guidance and safety. However, Christopher Robin is still portrayed as a young boy and, most importantly, a growing boy—a poignant fact that emerges as a constant undercurrent to the Pooh stories. In Winnie-the-Pooh, he is seen primarily as a little boy free to escape into the forest to adventure and scheme with his friends. Taking a more prominent role in The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin is now clearly on the verge of adolescence and his responsibilities have shifted, threatening to take him away from his childhood toys. Straddling both his role as little boy and father figure to Pooh and his brethren, Christopher is uncertain as to how his friends will fare without him and whether he should communicate his concerns. Towards the end of The House at Pooh Corner, as he loses his ability to do "Nothing", Christopher Robin asks his best friend, "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?" Pooh has no idea what Christopher is talking about. "So they went off together," Milne concludes. "But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."

CRITICAL RECEPTION

A romantic in the age of realism, Milne's essays and plays suggested literary sentimentalism and jaunty humor and, as a result, often struggled critically in the crosshairs of a burgeoning investment in the realist movement. Nonetheless, Milne was a popular writer, and his throwback style of gauzy sentimentalism and high fantasy were seen as perfectly suited for younger readers. Even so, as contemporary critics Catherine Kurkjian and Nancy Livingston have asserted, "Milne did not write these stories for children; rather he intended them for the child within us all because of the wonderfully innocent view of the world they present. The stories allow us to remember what is truly important—friendship and love". Despite the largely positive reviews of Milne's children's poetry and the Pooh books, there was some backlash, most notably by Dorothy Parker, whom famously skewered Milne's overtly maudlin aspirations and juvenile language in The New Yorker. Milne responded to her criticisms, remarking that "no writer of children's books says gaily to his publisher, 'Don't bother about the children, Mrs. Parker will love it.'" In the nearly eighty years since the first publication of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne's "Silly old Bear" has become something of a cultural phenomenon, finding a second life in movies, songs, books, and a variety of other consumer goods. Originally, the Pooh stories received only limited critical analysis due to most scholars dismissing them as simple diversions for children. However, the 1963 publication of the essay collection The Pooh Perplex, edited by Frederick C. Crews, opened a new wave of popular analysis of Milne's juvenile stories. A low-key series of essays targeting college students, The Pooh Perplex examines the Pooh books from a variety of critical and scholarly perspectives. In the years since, Milne's Pooh stories have inspired several new avenues of literary scholarship which explore, among other themes, the familial relationships of the animal characters, aspects of the father-son relationship between Christopher Robin, Pooh, and Milne himself, Milne's reflections on his own childhood, religious iconography in the Pooh books, and the fading childhood of Christopher Robin and his fear of outgrowing his toy friends.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Children's Works

Once on a Time [illustrations by H. M. Brock] (juvenile fiction) 1917

When We Were Very Young [illustrations by E. H. Shepard] (children's poetry) 1924

Winnie-the-Pooh [illustrations by E. H. Shepard] (juvenile fiction) 1926

Now We Are Six [illustrations by E. H. Shepard] (children's poetry) 1927

The House at Pooh Corner [illustrations by E. H. Shepard] (juvenile fiction) 1928

Toad of Toad Hall [adaptor; from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame] (play) 1929

Prince Rabbit and the Princess Who Could Not Laugh [illustrations by Mary Shepard] (juvenile fiction) 1966

Other Works

Lovers in London (novel) 1905

The Day's Play (essays and criticism) 1910

Mr. Pim Passes By (play) 1919

The Red House Mystery (novel) 1922

By Way of Introduction (essays and criticism) 1929

Four Days' Wonder (play) 1933

Peace with Honour (essays and criticism) 1934

It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (autobiography) 1939; published in United States as Autobiography, 1939

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Kenneth Sterck (essay date summer 1980)

SOURCE: Sterck, Kenneth. "The Real Christopher Robin: An Appreciation of A. A. Milne's Children's Verse." Children's Literature in Education 11, no. 2 (summer 1980): 52-61.

[In the following essay, Sterck discusses Milne's poetic verse in When We Were Very Young and The House at Pooh Corner, noting how both volumes evince the "balance between punctiliousness and sympathy which gives A. A. Milne's fantasy its individual signature."]

I suppose it had never occurred to me that there was any problem of identity; after all, you only have to turn over the pages of When We Were Very Young and E. H. Shepard has the answer: Christopher Robin in coat and gaiters, in wellingtons, in sun hat and jersey, barefoot on the beach with his father, never was there a more authentically documented reality. And there the matter rested until the B.B.C. broadcasted last summer a series of readings from The Enchanted Places, a memoir by Christopher Milne. This made it clear that Christopher Robin was a more complex creation than usually supposed. It soon appeared that the search for Christopher Robin begins with his creator. The road leads from The Enchanted Places to It's Too Late Now and would have to go still further back for a full appreciation of A. A. Milne's talent. This piece is limited to his two books of verse for children.

Echoes are strong over the years in the Milne family, especially in the attachments between father and son based on the strong affection of the father and the hero-worship of the child. Both autobiographies contain anecdotes in which relief from domestic tensions is sought in the solvent of a sympathetic humour. One tells about the prosperous time when A. A. Milne's father is the headmaster and owner of a successful preparatory school. His wife is in charge of the domestic arrangements and carves the meat.

The matron stands beside her, helping vegetables in an obviously inferior manner. She has just sent one of the boys upstairs to fetch something for her. The boy comes into the dining-room.

"Henry," says my father, "you're late again."

"Yes, sir. Please, sir, it wasn't my fault—"

"No excuses, Henry. You must put your chair away and stand."

So Henry eats his first course standing.

"All right, Henry, you may take your chair now."

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Please, sir. Matron sent me upstairs for her spectacles just as I was coming in."

Awed silence. "Sucks for J. V.," The boys are thinking, "he'll have to apologise." The younger assistant-masters look up anxiously. Do schoolmasters ever apologize? Isn't it bad for discipline?

"Then in that case," says my father, wishing to get it quite clear, "it wasn't your fault you were late?"

"Please, sir, no, sir."

"Oh" (Everybody is waiting) "Oh, well, then, you'd better take two chairs."

And everybody laughs and is happy.(p. 17)¹

Nothing could be more simply told, though the preference for dialogue over description is characteristic, but the whole incident is warmed by the admiration of the teller for his subject. The other refers to a time when A. A. Milne is a father, and his own son has taken a new-found interest in birdlife.

I had been given a bird book for Easter (Easter 1934: I have the book still) and with its help I had made my first discovery. "There's a black-bird's nest in the hole under the tiles just outside the drawingroom window," I announced proudly. "I've just seen the blackbird fly in." "I think it's probably really a starling," said my father. "No, it's a blackbird," I said firmly, hating to be wrong, hating being corrected. "Well," said my father, realizing how I felt but at the same time unable to allow an inaccuracy to get away with it, "Perhaps it's a blackbird visiting a starling …" He could never bear to be dogmatic, never bring himself to say (in effect): This is so because I say it is, and I am older than you and must know better. How much easier, how much nicer to escape into the world of fantasy in which he felt himself so happily at home.(p. 121)²

With this guidance, one can make a tentative answer to the question A. A. Milne puts in "Just Before We Begin" (the preface to When We Were Very Young ): "Then there is another thing. You may wonder sometimes who is supposed to be saying the verses."

When the story, however slightly sketched, could have a miserable ending, the King unhappy because there is no butter for his bread, Sir Brian Botany terrorising the villagers, a sad bear contemplating his stoutness, or the once-happy dormouse persecuted by his know-all doctor, and when all is resolved by the lightest of humorous touches,

The cow said
"There, there!
I didn't really mean it;
Here's milk for his porringer
And butter for his bread."3

I am Sir Brian? Oh, no!
I am Sir Brian? Who's he?
I haven't got any title, I'm Botany—
Plain Mr. Botany (B)4

But do you think it worries him
To know that he is far from slim?
No just the other way about
He's proud of being short and stout.5

or, if coming across a dormouse in a chrysanthemum bed,

You will find (so Aunt Emily says) that he lies
Fast asleep on his front with his paws to his eyes.6

then the teller is A. A. Milne, adult, and with his years of writing light verse for The Granta and Punch behind him. "The Three Foxes" and "The Four Friends" also belong to this group of poems where a small incident hovers on the brink of narrative and evokes the typical self-effacing humour,

James gave the huffle of a snail in danger
and nobody heard him at all.7

Also A. A. Milne is clearly the teller of the small group of seven poems which share a nature/fantasy setting ("Water-Lilies," "Twinkletoes," "Brownie," "Shoes and Stockings," "Knights and Ladies," "The Mirror," and "The Invaders" ). They are marked by the commonplace observation of the city dweller at a loose end in the countryside, but the best achieve a fresh lyrical movement.

Where the water-lilies go
To and fro,
Rocking in the ripples of the water,
Lazy on a leaf lies the Lake King's daughter,
And the faint winds shake her.
Who will come and take her?
I will! I will!
Keep still! Keep still!
Sleeping on a leaf lies the Lake King's daughter …8

However, the great bulk of the poems, some thirty out of the forty-four, invoke Christopher Robin directly or indirectly, and for help with these we must look again to the autobiographies. Whatever the emotional genesis of the poems, initially they were quite definitely unplanned. A. A. Milne describes how in January or February of 1923 he had wasted a morning from the serious business of playwriting in order to write "Vespers." A few months later, he was asked by Rose Fyleman to contribute to a collection of children's verses she was editing. After an initial refusal, he relented and produced "The Dormouse and the Doctor," so that two of the most popular poems in the collection, which exhibits a wide range of content, were in fact written before there was any idea of a volume.

That August was wet and the family were sharing a house in North Wales with friends. The proofs of "The Dormouse" arrived with the suggestion that a book of similar poems would be a good idea. Whether or not this was so, it afforded a good excuse to withdraw from the damp proximity of family and friends into the summerhouse. He says in It's Too Late Now : "I had eleven wet days in that summer-house and wrote eleven sets of verses." By the end of the year he had forty-four poems, and was at the beginning of a richly creative period. By the time of the publication of The House at Pooh Corner in 1928, the child for whom the books had in part been written was eight years old and still in the nursery, where his nanny was the exclusive focus of his affection. It may come as a surprise that A. A. Milne's success as a children's writer was so unsought and, by himself, so unregarded; and whatever it was founded upon it was not, at that time, founded on close contact with his son.

There are two sorts of writer. There is the writer who is basically a reporter and there is the creative writer. The one draws on his experience, the other on his dreams. My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead. (p. 36)⁹

Thus, one of the roles of Christopher Robin at this time is manifested in a personal fantasy of A. A. Milne, which the reader may miss because his eye has been taken by an E. H. Shepard illustration, taken from the life of the actual child. For example, in the poem "The Island" disregard the picture of the boy on the cliff top in favour of a dream child with whom A. A. Milne may escape present realities:

If I had a ship
I'd sail my ship
I'd sail my ship
Through Eastern seas;

Down to a beach where the slow waves thunder—
The green curls over and the white falls under.10

Explaining the personal pronoun in the titles of the two books of poems, Christopher Milne suggests that the verses were written to celebrate a double childhood. "My father, who had derived such happiness from his childhood, found in me that companion with whom he could return there" (p. 159). So that as well as the fantasy child, there is the projection of Christopher Robin as a surrogate for his own remembered infancy. These distinctions can be seen when they operate singly, though there is nothing to prevent their overlapping, consciously or otherwise. "At the Zoo" describes a familiar Londoner's outing to Regent's Park:

There are lions and roaring tigers, and enormous camels and things,
There are biffalo-buffalo-bisons, and a great big bear with wings,
There's a sort of a tiny potamus, and a tiny nosserus too—
But I gave buns to the elephant when I went down to the zoo!11

It is an equally clear attempt to put the outing in terms of a young child's experience and expression, even if the latter is now treated with suspicion. In the middle, as it were, are poems of a more generalised childhood experience applicable to father, son, and children everywhere.

Whenever I walk in a London street,
I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street,
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, "Bears,
Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"12

Some, however, apply to father only and a good example is "The Engineer" in Now We Are Six.

Let it rain!
Who cares?
I've a train
Upstairs,
With a brake
Which I make
From a string
Sort of thing,
Which works
In jerks,
'Cos it drops
In the spring,
Which stops
With the string,13

A. A. Milne's clumsiness was a family joke; "give him a pear and he became moist up to the elbows, and a honey sandwich called for a bath" (p. 115). On the other hand, Christopher Robin from an early age became a repair man about the house and reports, no doubt with justice, that if he had made a brake it would have worked. So, when it comes to trying to form a just estimate of particular poems, it is as well to remember the chameleon quality of Christopher Robin to change his nature with the circumstance. This may be tested in the case of "Vespers," allowing for the following facts: (1) This is A. A. Milne's first published poem for children. (2) At the time of its composition, Christopher Robin was 2½ years old. (3) His order of affection was: Nanny, Mother, Father. (4) Although A. A. Milne was brought up in a strictly religious family, he was himself an equally firm agnostic.

Therefore, the poet's rather naughty little child cannot be based on his own child, who at 2½ years, although he could certainly repeat a prayer by rote, would not be able to provide it with a commentary, however artless.

God bless Mummy. I know that's right.
Wasn't it fun in the bath tonight?
The cold's so cold, and the hot's so hot
Oh! God bless Daddy—I quite forgot.

Likewise, it cannot be a memory from A. A. Milne's own childhood. In fact, Christopher Robin is remarkably elusive in this poem. At one moment, he is the angelic child; at the next, he carries a formidable weight of adult cynicism.

But even so one must tell the truth about the matter. Not "God bless Mummy, because I love her so" but "God bless Mummy, I know that's right"; not "God bless Daddy, because he buys me food and clothes" but "God bless Daddy I quite forgot." (p. 223)¹⁴

Children recognise the deplorable truth of this, but it is the very truth which A. A. Milne resented. It was unfortunate that the first poem should have been so universally misunderstood, but a writer's words once freed sometimes go in unintended directions. It is this imprecision which gives the effect of sentimentality to what was intended as a serious comment on childhood and which now appears as little more than an echo of the widespread cynicism of the 1920s. If When We Were Very Young is the less effective of the two books, it is in part because three-quarters of the poems occupy the doubtful territory of shared childhoods, while the best of them occupy the neutral ground of "Lines and Squares," "At the Zoo," and"Market Square." By the time A. A. Milne was writing Now We Are Six, Christopher Robin was old enough to enjoy a wider subject matter, and the central figure of the poems comes into his own at the expense of the dream figure. Not that the old ambiguities can be banished entirely; "The Engineer" has already been mentioned, and another example is "In the Dark."

There was one great difference between my father and myself when we were children. He had an older brother; I had not. So he was never alone in the dark. Lying in bed with the lights out, he could so easily be "talking to a dragon" and feeling brave, knowing that if the dragon suddenly turned fierce he had only to reach out a hand and there would be Ken in the next bed. But I could take no such risks. I had to keep reminding myself that the dragon was only a bedtime story one, not a real one." (p. 25)¹⁵

I've had my supper,
And had my supper,
And HAD my supper and all;
I've heard of the story
Of Cinderella,
And how she went to the ball;
I've cleaned my teeth,
And I've said my prayers,
And I've cleaned and said them right;
And they've all of them been
And kissed me lots,
They've all of them said "Good-night."16

This poem shows that the dream child's influence was frequently anything but baleful, and it serves to support Christopher Milne's contention that for his father, the balance between creativity and reportage tilted towards the former. It has a lively movement and an ingeniously worked out metrical pattern which reflect the hard work put into shaping it. Whereas a straightforward reportage poem like "Buttercup Days," to which E. H. Shepard has added two real portraits and a real Cotchford Farm, becomes an occasion for vague adult day-dreaming and a tripping, featureless rhythm.

Where is Anne?
Head above the buttercups,
Walking by the stream,
Down among the buttercups.
Where is Anne?
Walking with her man,
Lost in a dream,
Lost among the buttercups.17

This serves to emphasise that the disparate elements in a poem only make it more tricky to manage; it is the degree of control over them which the writer has for the moment managed to achieve which determines our response to "Vespers" or "In the Dark."

The main difference between the two books, however, is that the gift for mock-heroic narrative directed to a domestic setting, suggested in "The King's Breakfast" is here given wider scope; poems of this kind are "King John's Christmas," "King Hilary and the Beggarman," and "The Knight Whose Armour Didn't Squeak." A further happy development is to apply the same formula to Christopher Robin's childish illnesses and the doctors who attended him.

They expounded the reazles For sneezles
And wheezles,
The manner of measles
When new.
They said "If he freezles
In draughts and in breezles,
Then PHTHEEZLES
May even ensue."18

and to the occasional pets which caused upsets to the more tender natures of the household when accidentally freed,

She said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did,
She said she wanted matches and she just took off the lid,
She said that she was sorry, but it's difficult to catch
An excited sort of beetle you've mistaken for a match.19

The verbal dexterity is much better employed here than in the easier imitations of childish diction for comic effect. In these poems, the fictional and the actual Christopher Robin meet on equal terms in an open-hearted celebration of the domestic moment. They are a more satisfactory achievement than "Vespers" or "Disobedience," in which the central character is apt to wander off into uncharted areas of adult experience and nostalgia. They maintain most surely the balance between punctiliousness and sympathy which gives A. A. Milne's fantasy its individual signature.

We went to all the places which a beetle might be near,
And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear,
And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout:
"A beetle house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"
It was Alexander Beetle I'm as certain as can be
And he had a sort of look as if he thought it must be Me.20

Notes

1. A. A. Milne, It's Too Late Now.
2. Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places.
3. "The King's Breakfast."
4. "Bad Sir Brian Botany."
5. "Teddy Bear."
6. "The Dormouse and the Doctor."
7. "The Four Friends."
8. "Water-lilies."
9. Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places.
10. "The Island."
11. "At the Zoo."
12. "Lines and Squares."
13. "The Engineer."
14. A. A. Milne, It's Too Late Now.
15. Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places.
16. "In the Dark."
17. Buttercup Days.
18. "Sneezles."
19. "Forgiven."
20. "Forgiven."

References

Milne, A. A. When We Were Very Young, London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1924.

Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh, London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1926.

Milne, A. A. Now We Are Six, London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1927.

Milne, A. A. The House At Pooh Corner, London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1928.

Milne, A. A. It's Too Late Now, London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1939.

Milne, Christopher The Enchanted Places, London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; New York: Dutton, 1975.

Anita Wilson (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Wilson, Anita. "Milne's Pooh Books: The Benevolent Forest." In Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Volume One, edited by Perry Nodelman, pp. 163-72. West Lafayette, Ind.: ChLA Publishers, 1985.

[In the following essay, Wilson examines how Milne utilizes strong character patterns in his Winnie-the-Pooh books to create a nurturing utopian world for young readers, arguing that Pooh's Forest represents "liberation from the constraints of school and work … and freedom from danger and anxiety."]

For over half a century, Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin have been an inseparable literary pair. Ironically, Alan Alexander Milne had never intended to make his mark as a writer of children's literature, and was somewhat frustrated to find himself permanently typed as the author of poems and stories about a small boy and a Forest of personified animal-toys. When he began writing the verses for When We Were Very Young (1924), Milne had already achieved considerable success and popularity as a dramatist and novelist, although his humorous fantasy Once on a Time (1917) had not been very successful with either an adult or juvenile audience. But his previous accomplishments were eclipsed by the immediate and extraordinary success of When We Were Very Young ; inspired by Milne's three-year-old son, this deft and amusing collection of light verse went through fifty-two editions in its first year of publication and has never been out of print since. The stage was set for Pooh's equally sweeping appearance two years later in Winnie-the-Pooh, followed by a second book of poems featuring a slightly older Christopher Robin, Now We Are Six (1927). The House at Pooh Corner (1928) was Milne's last children's book, although he adapted Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows as a play for children, Toad of Toad Hall, in 1929.

Milne's quartet of juvenile best-sellers developed from his role as the real Christopher Robin's father, and from Christopher's devotion to his teddy bear, originally known as Edward. As the introduction to When We Were Very Young explains, Christopher had named the swan whom he visited each day Pooh, "because, if you call him and he doesn't come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying 'Pooh!' to show how little you wanted him" (ix). When Edward Bear wanted a more exciting name, he became Winnie, after a bear in the London Zoo, and Pooh, since the swan didn't want the name anymore. The characters of Edward/Pooh and his companions developed from Christopher's toys. Milne said in his autobiography that he "described rather than invented them"; his wife and son had created their personalities and voices. (286). Only Owl and Rabbit were his own invention. Pooh, Eeyore, and Piglet were present in the nursery during Christopher's earliest years, while Kanga and Tigger came later, toys for Christopher but also chosen with an eye to their literary roles. In his autobiography, The Enchanted Places, Christopher Milne recalls that his everyday play with the nursery toys became entwined with his father's stories about them, until his bear was inseparable from A. A. Milne's literary sensation: "The Pooh in my arms, the Pooh sitting opposite me at the breakfast table, was a Pooh who had climbed trees in search of honey, who had got stuck in a rabbit hole, who was 'a bear of no brain at all'" (77).

And it is this interplay between the real Christopher and Pooh, and their imaginary roles, which forms the framework of the Pooh books. In the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, "We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin." "We" incorporates Christopher Robin as part of the audience, and his appearance as Pooh's friend and rescuer establishes both his dual role as listener and character, and the nature of his place within these stories. He is important, but never the protagonist, and is less individualized than the animal characters. In a number of episodes, he makes a cameo appearance as the reassuring authority figure who functions as a deus ex machina. Christopher could be almost any small child, but Pooh is unique; while he shares the stage with the other inhabitants of the Forest, he is indisputably the star and the favorite.

From the Three Bears to the Berenstain Bears, ursine characters are abundant in children's literature, but few have achieved Pooh's enduring popularity. Pooh, nevertheless, has encountered his share of opposition, most notably from Dorothy Parker's review of The House at Pooh Corner in the New Yorker, where she declared that by page five, "Tonstant Weader fwowed up." Milne unflappably replied that "No writer of children's books says gaily to his publisher, 'Don't bother about the children, Mrs. Parker will love it'" (Autobiography 282).

And the Pooh books, now regarded as modern classics, have stood the test of time, remaining popular through several generations of children. Winnie-the-Pooh outstripped even the phenomenal success of When We Were Very Young, and became Milne's best-selling (and probably best-loved) children's book. Widely translated, it has the additional distinction of a Latin version, Winnie Ille Pu, and inspired Frederick Crews' satire of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex. Pooh himself entered the mass media in the nineteen-sixties as a character in a Disney film and as the logo for Sears Roebuck's children's wear. Pooh toys, calendars, cookbooks, records, and so on are ubiquitous. In short, Pooh is not only a beloved literary character, but a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Nevertheless, such popular acclaim neither diminishes nor enhances the books themselves, which continue to stand on their own merits.

Much of the uniqueness and enduring appeal of the Pooh books rests upon Milne's succinct and skillful characterization; each animal is a distinct individual with his own personality, speech pattern, and appearance. Each is also an easily recognizable type: Rabbit is the organizer and busybody, efficient and officious; Eeyore the eternal pessimist, morosely self-satisfied in his gloomy view of the world; Owl is the pompous know-it-all whose wisdom is more appearance than substance, and so forth. Pooh's character is a bit more complex and less easily pigeon-holed; he is a "bear of little brain" who cheerfully accepts his own limitations, a loyal friend, an enthusiastic poet, albeit undistinguished and unappreciated, who celebrates the simple pleasures of food, companionship, and the outdoors. He possesses some typical bearlike characteristics—a growly voice, love of honey, clumsiness—but is more an animated Teddy than a personified wild animal. As Thomas B. Swann observes in his critical study of Milne, Pooh "represents the ultimate taming of a wild animal into a children's toy" (89). Pooh has none of the powerful or menacing traits of a bear, and his devotion to home, friends, and frequent meals gives him a cozy domestic character. The other characters likewise have a few traits borrowed from nature—Piglet likes "haycorns," Eeyore prefers thistles, Rabbit lives underground while Owl nests in a big tree—but they are distinguished by their personalities rather than their animal characteristics. Christopher Milne's comment that Rabbit "became less rabbity and more Rabbity" (77) as the stories developed applies to the other characters also. Milne's creatures offer more insight into human than animal nature.

Milne achieves a perfect unity of character and action in the Pooh stories; as Margaret Blount observes in Animal Land, "The appearance of each animal—as in all toys—gives its character, and in contrast to the human world, things are always what they seem" (178). Piglet, pink and small, appears timid and is so; Eeyore's grey coloring, natural for a donkey, matches his glum personality, while his thistle patch, "rather boggy and sad," epitomizes his place in the Forest society. E. H. Shepard's illustrations help to establish each character as a unique individual, and are integral to, and inseparable from, the stories; one could not imagine Pooh and his companions in any other guise. Although simple in technique, the illustrations capture the essence of character in such details as Eeyore's drooping ears and Rabbit's whiskers. Christopher Milne notes that Pooh's entire character is evident in the placement of his eye, which expresses "his particularly Poohish look" well known to generations of Pooh fans (78). A. A. Milne had not always held Shepard's work in high esteem, having once asked the art editor of Punch, "What on earth do you see in this man? He's perfectly hopeless." (By Way of Introduction 34). But Shepard's pictures are the ideal complement to Milne's stories; Swann notes that "their simplicity is that of Milne's writing, the simplicity of genius, of capturing essentials in a few unerring strokes …" (90).

Milne's characters are generally consistent and static, and rarely surprise readers, or each other, with unexpected actions or behavior. Pooh does become somewhat more capable as the stories progress; Stephen Canham sees a pattern of maturation as "the bear of very little brain gradually moves toward an incredulous but proud recognition of his own capacities …" (26). Pooh sails in Christopher Robin's umbrella to rescue Piglet from a flood, and is subsequently honored with a party in the last chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh ; in The House at Pooh Corner, he gets Eeyore out of the river by throwing a large stone to "hoosh" him over to the bank. Nevertheless, Pooh remains essentially the same: well-intentioned, frequently befuddled, and endearingly dim.

For a young child, Milne's stable and consistent characters are comprehensible and reassuring; one knows what to expect from them, and they are never disappointing. For adult readers, one of the special pleasures of the Pooh books is their light-hearted yet astute portrayal of attitudes and personalities drawn from life. The animals are not merely disguises for human traits, but through their individual characters, they represent a spectrum of emotions, outlooks, and approaches to life. Eeyore wallows in self-pity and takes a perverse satisfaction in his own misery; Rabbit seeks orderly and practical solutions to every problem, listing and organizing; Kanga centers her life around a domestic maternal role, obsessed with baths and coughs and Strengthening Medicine. A note of exaggeration in the portraits of these one-dimensional characters permits a touch of satire, but this never overwhelms the individuality of each animal or undermines Milne's affectionate approach to his characters. An interchange between Pooh and Rabbit in The House at Pooh Corner conveys the essence of each in an amusing but incisive way, and contrasts their fundamentally different perspectives: "'We've come to wish you a Very Happy Thursday,' said Pooh … and Rabbit, whose life was made up of Important Things, said, "Oh, I thought you'd really come about something'" (270). Afterwards, Pooh and Piglet ponder Rabbit's character:

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything." (270-271)

Here, and throughout the Pooh stories, Milne implies that the bumbling bear is wiser than he himself realizes, and that there are qualities more valuable than "Brain." Pooh is no hero in the usual sense of the word; his enterprises, whether to trap a Heffalump or to get honey by impersonating a little black cloud, rarely turn out as planned—the occasional success stands out as an exception. The juvenile reader/listener can frequently relish the satisfaction of being smarter than Pooh; John Rowe Townsend notes that the Woozle story, for example, "generates superior giggles in children, as the two silly animals go round and round the spinney discovering at each circuit that the Woozle has been joined by more companions" (172).

Yet Pooh does not emerge as a fool or a failure; in a sense, he always wins because he can never be unhappy or defeated for any length of time. After receiving bee stings instead of honey in the first episode of Winnie-the-Pooh, he concludes that these are the wrong sort of bees, who would therefore make the wrong sort of honey, so there is no great loss. In the next chapter, "Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place," finding himself wedged in Rabbit's front door after over-indulging in refreshments. The predicament clearly results from Pooh's insatiable appetite, but this is not a moral tale; after a week of fasting Pooh is freed, and "with a nod of thanks to his friends, he went on with his walk through the forest, humming proudly to himself" (35) and continuing to eat as much as ever.

Pooh's sanguine disregard for the lessons of experience and his never-failing eagerness to try yet another scheme or adventure contribute to an intriguing aspect of his character—its blending of a child's and an adult's role. In his cheerful if sometimes baffled view of the world, his mingled egoism and generosity, not to mention his love of food, Pooh exhibits traits which are not unique to children, but are commonly associated with childhood. But he is not simply a child in the form of a bear; as a carefree bachelor, he lives alone, comes and goes as he pleases, and has the independence and prerogatives of adulthood with none of the responsibilities. In short, he enjoys the best of both worlds, and so represents a form of wish-fulfillment both for adults and for children. Similarly, Christopher Robin is a small boy playing in an imaginary world with his stuffed animals; as the stories make this world real, they preserve the freedom of child's play while transforming Christopher into a parent-figure who functions as the Forest's benevolent and supreme authority. Loving, protective, and all-knowing, he is always at hand in a crisis ("It's Christopher Robin!" said Piglet. ' He'll know what to do,") and periodically boosts Pooh's self-esteem with such assurances as "You're the Best Bear in All the World."

Pooh's other best friend, Piglet, is also a child-adult, although more timid and dependent; even the misanthropic Eeyore, whose sardonic comments are those of a disillusioned adult, takes a childlike pleasure in his birthday presents. Tigger and Roo are the only characters who function entirely as children, and who live with a parent who cares for them. There is no suggestion that they will ever grow up; like all of the animals, they are characterized within a static role. Rabbit and Owl, the grownups of the group, often seem more foolish than Pooh; eager to maintain their high opinions of themselves, they can never admit mistakes or ignorance—a common attitude of adults toward children.

As Pooh refuses to be defeated by circumstances, he displays a similar childlike tenacity and resilience in his use of language. Like Humpty-Dumpty, Pooh is the "master" of his words, insisting that his pronunciation ("mastershalums" or "jagular") or his definition is correct, despite any evidence to the contrary. On the North Pole expedition in Winnie-the-Pooh, he sticks to his idea that an ambush is like a gorse bush, frustrating Owl's pedantic attempt at correction:

"An Ambush," said Owl, "is a sort of Surprise."
"So is a gorse-bush sometimes," said Pooh.
…
"We are not talking about gorse-bushes," said
Owl a little crossly.
"I am," said Pooh. (111-112)

Pooh's literal translation of an unfamiliar concept into a known object is typical of a young child's reasoning; in a similar vein, Christopher Robin defines an expedition as "a long line of everybody," and declares that the pole Pooh used to fish Roo out of the river is, in fact, the North Pole. Pooh also uses language as a means of comprehending the world around him, often verbalizing his thought process as he tries, like a child, to figure things out. He says to himself that buzzing noises mean bees and bees mean honey, and ends this laborious chain of cause and effect with the egocentric assumption that the world centers around him: "And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it" (Winnie-the-Pooh 10). Words can exert power over dangers or threats, like magical spells in folk tales; "Ho-ho, " said just the right way, will disarm a Heffalump, and Rabbit assures Pooh in Winnie-the-Pooh that "Aha!" will tell Kanga, "We'll tell you where Baby Roo is, if you promise to go away from the Forest and never come back" (89). The written word holds a special fascination. Owl and Rabbit, who can write, consider themselves a cut above the other animals; as Rabbit says to Owl in The House at Pooh Corner, "… you and I have brains. The others have fluff" (223). And Pooh, whose spelling is "wobbly," is much impressed by Owl's lengthy Happy Birthday message to Eeyore—the longer, the better, and since Pooh can't read, Owl's reputation for literacy is quite safe.

Much of the humor in the Pooh books arises from Milne's ingenious play with language; from the first chapter, when Pooh literally lives "under the name of Sanders" written over his door in gold letters, the stories are filled with puns and word play. Searching for Eeyore's lost tail, Pooh informs Owl that someone else is interested in his new bell-rope; Eeyore was not only fond of it, but "attached to it." At times the characters coin new words which seem more apt than the originals, such as Roo's "spudge" for Owl's none too clean sponge. Pooh turns Owl's pompous discussion of customary procedure into something good to eat—"Crustimoney Proseedcake." Spelling and capitalization also contribute to Milne's inventive use of language; the multiplication tables take on a new guise as "Twys-times," which Pooh says don't work, and a Bear of Very Little Brain, a Useful Pot to Keep Things In, or a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water would not be the same without capitals. On a more complex level, Milne plays on our usual expectations of how language functions; in this respect, his style has some resemblance to Lewis Carroll's. Pooh's clock, stopped at just the time for an eleven-o'clock snack, is reminiscent of the perpetual Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. A typical dialogue also has echoes of Wonderland in carrying a strictly literal "logic" to the point of absurdity; Pooh, returning home after finding Piglet out, is surprised to see Piglet sitting in his own armchair:

"Hallo, Piglet," he said. "I thought you were out."
"No," said Piglet, "It's you who were out, Pooh."
"So it was," said Pooh. "I knew one of us was." (Winnie-the-Pooh   158)

Pooh's world, however, is a peaceful haven compared to Carroll's exhilarating and sometimes nightmarish Wonderland. Milne's Forest is a benevolent world, an Eden free from corruption and death where life consists of a pleasant round of visits, meals, small adventures, and general enjoyment. No one has any desire to leave this paradise, or to explore the outside world; Christopher Robin will eventually leave because he has to, not because he wants to. The wanderlust seen in Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is entirely absent among Milne's characters. In this snug and friendly setting, even the occasional moments of anxiety are amusing rather than fearful, since no genuine dangers or threats exist; there is no Wild Wood or Mr. McGregor in Milne's forest, and every adventure ends happily. As Canham observes, reassurance "is one of the key values of this world" (24). Situations which may appear frightening, at least to the characters involved, are not only harmless but funny; the "Horrible Heffalump" is only Pooh with a honey jar over his head, and a seaworthy umbrella rescues Piglet from a flood. Common motifs of adventure stories—expeditions, kidnapping, a message in a bottle—become parodies in this secure environment where everyone goes home to supper after a satisfying day of adventures.

The animals do not mimic the everyday aspects of human life such as working and spending money; their existence is emancipated from such requirements and most of their activities are inseparable from play—the all-absorbing play of the young child. Providing liberation from the constraints of school and work (school is the beginning of the end of Christopher Robin's carefree existence) and freedom from danger and anxiety, the Forest represents an ideal world for both children and adults. It is not, however, a lawless world based solely upon self-gratification. "Nature red in tooth and claw" is entirely absent from Milne's Forest; the animals are cooperative and kind toward one another, and appear to be so by nature, without coercion. The stories are not didactic in any contrived or obvious sense, but present a friendly world in which an assortment of different characters like and respect one another, and coexist harmoniously. Rabbit and Owl may show off, but their conceit and bossiness are more amusing than annoying, and the Forest would be less enjoyable without them. There is plenty of laughter, but no malice or cruelty. Friends are always loyal and always there when needed; when Christopher Robin is worried about Pooh in the flood, Owl breaks off his pompous discourse on unfavorable atmospheric conditions and flies over to Pooh's house. Newcomers like Kanga and Tigger must be accepted as members of the community, and turn out to be quite likable once one gets to know them: "Tigger is all right really, " as Piglet says in The House at Pooh Corner (250). In these respects, the Pooh books do convey a moral perspective—idealized, certainly, but nonetheless attractive.

The outside world, of course, is more demanding and less accommodating, and it is inevitable that Christopher Robin must eventually enter this world. In The House at Pooh Corner, the Forest has become a refuge and escape from the encroachments of school, the "Bisy Backson": "Christopher Robin came down from the Forest to the bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit, as it didn't on such a happy afternoon …" (247). The "Contradiction" at the beginning of this book is so called because it is a farewell to the Forest; bedtime stories about Pooh have been displaced by arithmetic problems, and Christopher's father, formerly the storyteller, is now the schoolmaster. The adventures come now only in dreams, and the stories are "all that we shall remember now."

Christopher must exchange the benevolent Forest, with its spontaneous adventures and happy endings, for the more restrictive environment of school. As he tells Pooh in the last chapter, in the Forest one can do Nothing, "just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering" (307). But he knows that "they," meaning grownups, don't let you do nothing in the practical outside world which they control. Christopher's recital of what he is learning in school gives a rather satirical view of his education, and begs the question of whether he would be better off remaining in the Forest; "something called Factors" and "what comes from Brazil" are jumbled together with "how you make a Suction Pump (if you want to)" (310). But Milne was too honest to pretend that childhood can, or should, last forever. As the Pooh books ended when the real Christopher Robin became a schoolboy, so the fictional Christopher must leave his Forest and animals behind. A little boy and his bear will be forever playing in the timeless world of the Forest, but Christopher will go away to school and, inevitably, grow away from the Forest and all that it represents. The conclusion of The House at Pooh Corner thus preserves the Forest itself as an incorruptible dream world, untouched by time and change, but recognizes the inevitability of change for Christopher Robin. It is not an absolute departure, however, for Pooh intends to go on being faithful, even if he can't understand Kings and Factors, and Christopher Robin knows that whatever happens, Pooh will always understand. As Milne says in the introduction to The House at Pooh Corner, "the Forest will always be there … and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it" (154).

References

Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction. New York: Avon, 1977.

Canham, Stephen. "Reassuring Readers: Winnie-the-Pooh. " Children's Literature Association Quarterly 5, 3 (Fall 1980): 24-27.

Crews, Frederick. The Pooh Perplex. New York: Dutton 1963.

Lurie, Alison. "Back to Pooh Corner." Children's Literature (1973): 11-17.

——. "Now We Are Fifty." New York Times Book Review 14 November 1978: 27.

Milne, A. A. When We Were Very Young. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1924.

——. Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1926; rpr. The World of Pooh, New York: Dutton, 1957.

——. Now We Are Six. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1927.

——. The House at Pooh Corner. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1928. rpr. The World of Pooh.

——. "Introducing Shepard." By Way of Introduction. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1929, 33-37.

——. "The End of a Chapter." In By Way of Introduction, 195-202.

——. Autobiography. New York: Dutton, 1939. American edition of It's Too Late Now. London: Methuen; 1939.

Milne, Christopher. The Enchanted Places. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; New York: Dutton, 1975.

Moynihan, Ruth B. "Ideologies in Children's Literature: Some Preliminary Notes." Children's Literature (1973): 166-172.

Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Swann, Thomas Burnett. A. A. Milne. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children, Rev. Ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975.

Tremper, Ellen. "Instigoratng Winnie-the-Pooh. " The Lion and the Unicorn 1 (1977): 33-46.

Anita Wilson (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Wilson, Anita. "A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six: A Small World of Everyday Pleasures." In Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Volume Two: Fairy Tales, Fables, Myths, Legends, and Poetry, edited by Perry Nodelman, pp. 173-82. West Lafayette, Ind.: ChLA Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essay, Wilson analyzes the narrative, perspective, and familial relationships portrayed throughout When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.]

Like Robert Louis Stevenson, A. A. Milne began his first book for children as a diversion during a dismally wet summer holiday. He had already written "Vespers," and Rose Fyleman had encouraged him to write a book of verses after he sent her "The Dormouse and the Doctor." Working in a summerhouse in Wales, Milne began what was to become a perennial best-seller of children's literature as he reflected upon childhood—his own, and his son's: "… there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years … and here within me were unforgettable memories of my own childhood" (Autobiography 280). Although Milne dedicated When We Were Very Young to Christopher Robin, the child in the poems is sometimes Christopher Robin, sometimes A. A. Milne as a child, and sometimes "the child," or any child. In fact, Christopher Robin appears by name in only four of the forty-four poems in When We Were Very Young, which owes as much to Milne's imagination and memories as it does to his son's childhood:

As a child I kept a mouse; probably it escaped—they generally do. Christopher Robin has kept almost everything except a mouse. As a child I played lines-and-squares in a casual sort of way. Christopher Robin never did until he read what I had written about it, and not very enthusiastically then. But he did go to Buckingham Palace a good deal (which I didn't) though not with Alice.…(By Way of Introduction 196)

As for who is speaking the verses, Milne says in the Preface to When We Were Very Young that if you are not sure, it is probably "Hoo,"—"one of those curious children who look four on Monday, and eight on Tuesday, and are really twenty-eight on Saturday.…"The blending of Milne's voice and memories with Christopher Robin's experiences continues in Now We Are Six, which features a slightly more mature Christopher Robin and gives Pooh a more prominent role in the poems.

Nor were Milne's poems based upon a close relationship between father and child. While nannies figure in a number of the poems and parents in general are mentioned occasionally, only one poem out of both books portrays Christopher Robin and his father. In "Sand-between-the-Toes," they take a walk on the beach together, more like two children, each with sixpence from Nurse, than parent and child: "We clambered over the humping sand—And Christopher held my hand" When We Were Very Young (75). Ordinarily there would be nothing unusual in this closeness between parent and child, but the emphasis given the final line of this verse creates a rather wistful tone and suggests that Christopher and his father had few such moments. In his autobiography, Christopher Milne indicates that during his nursery years, his father remained in the background; a close and rewarding father-son relationship developed later, when Christopher was a schoolboy and well beyond the Winnie-the-Pooh stage. Ironically, it was this distance between Milne and his son which stimulated him to write poetry for children; the poems were a substitute for, rather than a reflection of, an intimate bond between father and child: "My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead" (36).

Not all of Milne's poems are about children, but most are, in some respect, about childhood. Milne transforms kings and knights into humorous figures in whom the child can see himself; King John is "not a good man," but Father Christmas provides his heart's desire, "a big, red, india-rubber ball," anyway. Kings can exercise power as children would like to; another royal figure in one of Milne's most popular poems, "The King's Breakfast," won't settle for marmalade instead of butter just to make things easier for everyone else. King Hilary looks forward to sugar-plums in his Christmas stocking and dismisses his snobbish Chancellor. These characters do as they please, acting out the fantasies of the child who says, in "If I Were King," "I often wish I were a King / And then I could do anything" (When We Were Very Young 100). "Bad Sir Brian Botany," on the other hand, is a grownup bully who meets with poetic justice. "The Knight Whose Armour Didn't Squeak" is wise by a child's standards; he can write letters and multiply up to four. The grownups in these poems combine a child's perceptions with an adult's prerogatives. Other verses not featuring children include a few nature poems, mostly in When We Were Very Young. On the whole, these are not among Milne's best, for they lack his characteristic verve and humor. He seems most natural and at ease in depicting rather homely and ordinary scenes, as in "Summer Afternoon," where "Six brown cows walk down to drink" (When We Were Very Young 67), or "The Invaders," where the cows make another appearance as they tramp through the woods in early morning.

Milne's antecedents in the area of children's poetry include Christina Rosetti's Sing-Song (1872) and Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). He surpasses both in wit and verbal ingenuity, although he never achieves the depth of feeling found in a lyric such as Rossetti's "Sea Sand and Sorrow." A few of Milne's poems reflect well-known works by his predecessors; "Wind on the Hill" resembles Rossetti's classic "Who Has Seen the Wind?" and "Daffodowndilly" borrows her name for the daffodil, while Milne's "Swing Song" is reminiscent of Stevenson's "The Swing." Like Rossetti and, particularly, Stevenson, Milne focuses his poetry around cheerful images of a young child's everyday experiences. His poems are not derivative, however; in their deft humor and irresistible rhythms, they are inimitably his own. Milne's work is distinguished above all by his disciplined and inventive light verse, which at its best gives an impression of effortless humor and grace. He did not toss off trifles for the nursery; as he observed in his Autobiography,

Whatever else they lack, the verses are technically good.… When We Were Very Young is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously even though he is taking it into the nursery. (282)

The same philosophy that children deserve the best is evident in Now We Are Six also.

Indeed, Milne's craftsmanship is impeccable, and his ingenious use of rhyme, meter, and typography is a trademark of his verses. Sound and sense are perfectly matched in the rollicking rhythm of "James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree" or the refrain from "Busy," the "threeish" poem in Now We Are Six :

Round about
And round about
And round about I go—
All around the table,
The table in the nursery—(9)

or in the quieter, more contemplative mood of "Halfway Down," where, as Zena Sutherland notes, the pattern of the verses mimics Christopher Robin's stopping firmly on the middle step:

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite Like
It. (When We Were Very Young   83)

Finding ingenious ways to keep the strict rhyme and meter essential to light verse was a challenge which Milne clearly relished; in "The Christening," for example, a rhyme creates a pun in the first verse:

What shall I call
My dear little dormouse?
His eyes are small,
But his tail is e-nor-mouse. (When We Were Very Young   7)

A common speech pattern of small children, doubling plurals, is carried to comic extremes in "The Three Foxes" : "They went to a Fair, and they all won prizes— / Three plum-puddingses and three mince-pieses" (When We Were Very Young 42). The appearance of the poem on the page is also often important; Christopher Robin, in "Politeness," says that he always answers grownups' questions,

If they ask me
Politely.…
BUT SOMETIMES

I wish

That they wouldn't. (When We Were Very Young   43)

The small print of the last line suggests Christopher whispering his rebellious thoughts, too softly to be heard. The repeated refrain and varied typeface in the closing lines of "The Little Black Hen" highlight the child's egocentric delight at being more important than the adults:

Berryman and Baxter,
Prettiboy and Penn,
And Old Farmer Middleton
Are five big men.
All of them are wanting
An egg for their tea,

But the Little Black Hen is much too busy,
The Little Black Hen is much too busy,
The Little Black Hen is MUCH too busy …
She's laying my egg for me!(Now We Are Six   66)

The child in Milne's verses is in many respects a typical child with universal qualities that have not changed in half a century. He (or she) is curious, egocentric, imaginative, sometimes perplexed by the seemingly pointless demands and questions of adults. Less typically, perhaps, he is a rather solitary figure. Only two poems out of both volumes are about children playing together; in Now We Are Six, "Buttercup Days" and "The Morning Walk" portray Christopher and his closest childhood friend, Anne Darlington, to whom Now We Are Six was dedicated. Other than his nurse, the child's usual companions are animals, real or stuffed. The child in When We Were Very Young christens his dormouse, revels in the rabbits which he finds on the common, and romps in the hills with a puppy, who "got talking" when they met—like most small children, Christopher is quite able to believe that animals can speak. The bear Pooh of Milne's classic novels plays only a minor role in this volume, but comes into his own in Now We Are Six, where he is Christopher's best friend. The poems about friendship, "The Friend," and "Us Two," feature Christopher and Pooh, not Christopher and another child:

So wherever I am, there's always Pooh,
There's always Pooh and Me.
"What would I do?" I said to Pooh,
"If it wasn't for you," and Pooh said: "True,
It isn't much fun for One, but Two
Can stick together," says Pooh, says he.
"That's how it is," says Pooh. ("Us Two," Now We Are Six   37)

Although Christopher's solitude eliminates a slice of life from these verses—there are no poems about school, or other activities involving groups of children—it allows Milne to concentrate upon the child's inner world, particularly as expressed in imaginative play. Role-playing is portrayed as a way of experimenting with one's identity, which is fluid and offers infinite possibilities. In "Nursery Chairs," after impersonating a hunter, lion, and sailor, Christopher Robin plays at being a three-year-old in his own chair; in play, this identity is no more "real" than the various roles which he slips in and out of. "Busy" presents a similar game of role-playing: "Perhaps I am a Postman. No, I think I am a Tram. / I'm feeling rather funny and I don't know what I am—" (Now We Are Six 9). By age six, Christopher has a firmer sense of self as he ponders the differences between himself and a younger child: "If I were John and John were Me, / Then he'd be six and I'd be three" ("A Thought," Now We Are Six 71). He still has an active imagination, however, as he slays dragons in his suit of armor and creates Binker as an alter-ego and imaginary companion in a sometimes frustrating world:

Well, I'm very fond of Daddy, but he hasn't time to play.
And I'm very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away,
And I'm often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my hair …
But Binker's always Binker, and is certain to be there. (Now We Are Six   20)

Like all young children, Christopher Robin lives in a world largely controlled by adults, whose values and requirements often make little sense to him. He pities the tradespeople in "Market Square" who do not have a rabbit, which is far more important to him than the saucepans and mackerel for sale. In a number of poems, Milne blends humor with a sensitive awareness of the child's point of view. Adults sometimes emerge as a collective, anonymous "they" who, as Christopher says in "Independence," "don't understand." They ask foolish questions, burden him with precautions ("Not up there, dear!") and dismiss his attempts to share his discoveries. "Come Out with Me" contrasts the child's excitement about what he has seen with the grownups' disappointing lack of interest:

There's wind on the river and wind on the hill …
You can hear the sea if you stand quite still!
There's eight new puppies at Roundabout Farm—
And I saw an old sailor with only one arm!
But every one says, "Run along!"
(Run along, run along!)
All of them say, "Run along! I'm busy as can be."
Every one says, "Run along,
There's a little darling!"
If I'm a little darling, why don't they run with me? (Now We Are Six   59)

Here sentimental clichés enable adults to diminish the child's importance under a veneer of affection. Elizabeth Ann, one of the occasional female children in Now We Are Six, receives similar responses when she asks how God began—admittedly a tough question: "Now then darling, it's time for bed," and "Well, what put that in your quaint little head?" ("Explained" 80, 82) Even Alice, who watches the changing of the guard with Christopher, listens without genuine interest and stifles his question cheerfully but decisively: "Do you think the King knows all about me ?" "Sure to, dear, but it's time for tea" (When We Were Very Young 5). Adults focus on their own priorities rather than the child's. They find no purpose in climbing a hill when "There's nothing to see," and they want to know the child's plans for a beguiling spring morning when, like Pooh, he plans only to enjoy whatever the day may bring:

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow—
Anywhere, anywhere, I don't know. ("Spring Morning," When We Were Very Young   37)

The children in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six can be more than a match for the adults, however. One of Milne's attractive qualities is his lack of didacticism; his poetical children are not taught lessons about good behavior, and the grownups are far from infallible. Jane, "The Good Little Girl," in Now We Are Six, is a far cry from Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Good Boy," who goes to bed with a clear conscience because he's been obedient all day—since she has no intention of incriminating herself, she wonders why her parents bother to ask if she's been good:

Well, what did they think that I went there to do?
And why should I want to be bad at the Zoo?
And should I be likely to say if I had ?
So that's why it's funny of Mummy and Dad,
This asking and asking, in case I was bad,
"Well?
Have you been a good girl, Jane?" (70)

Ernest Shepherd's illustrations, which show Jane standing on a lawn with a "Keep Off the Grass" sign and feeding an animal next to another sign forbidding the same, make clear that her parents don't know as much as they think they do. Similarly, Mary Jane's well-intentioned nurse tries to placate her with presents and can't see what is obvious even to the youngest reader: " And it's lovely rice pudding for dinner again !— / What is the matter with Mary Jane?" ("Rice Pudding," When We Were Very Young 53) The notion of parental authority and control is turned completely upside-down in "Disobedience," where James James leads his errant mother home on a leash and reprimands her in a delightfully dictatorial fashion: "You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me" (When We Were Very Young 34)

Although the children in Milne's poems may be occasionally vexed or baffled by the inscrutable ways of grownups, these are a source of annoyance, not anguish. Milne chose to emphasize the joyous aspects of childhood; disappointments and frustrations are handled with a light touch which makes them humorous rather than devastating. As in the novels about Pooh, nothing bad ever happens to anybody; losing Alexander Beetle is the closest Christopher Robin comes to a crisis. The poems do not deal with the darker side of childhood—such emotions as fear, anger, or jealousy are entirely absent. Christopher never has nightmares, but enjoys being alone in the dark, where he can imagine anything he likes. The bears waiting to eat him at the street corner hold no terrors; he complacently defeats them by stepping over the pavement squares. He never loses his temper, breaks a toy, or has a fight and, despite his occasional impatience with adults, Christopher never causes trouble for them. He emerges as a remarkably happy and well-behaved child, inhabiting a sedate and benevolent world.

While Milne undoubtedly gives a one-sided picture of childhood, he excels at cheerful and spirited evocations of everyday joys:

I've got a nice new pair of braces,
I've got shoes with new brown laces,
I know wonderful paddly places.
Who's coming out with me? ("Growing Up," When We Were Very Young   99)

An adult, or an older child than three-year-old Christopher, may smile at his ecstasy over these small symbols of growing up, but Christopher is not made fun of; throughout Milne's poems, the laughter is affectionate, not sardonic, and the child's perspective is respected. Christopher's struggles with "Dates and Pounds-and-ounces and the names of funny Kings" are amusing, but his worries reflect every child's anxiety over schoolwork: "And I know they'll think me silly if I get the answer wrong" ("The Friend," Now We Are Six 67). And readers of any age can identify with the egocentric dream-world of "The Island" : "There's nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me" (When We Were Very Young 39). Milne's attitude is not one of amused condescension; he respects the child. As he said in his Autobiography regarding When We Were Very Young, "It seems that the nursery, more than any other room in the house, likes to be approached seriously" (282).

Milne can lapse into sentimentality, however, when he tries to render children charming to adults, rather than portraying them naturally and with a touch of humor. The baby-talk which appears in some of the poems is one of their less attractive characteristics; even at three, Christopher Robin seems too old for "nuffin" and "nosserus" and "portant"—happily, there is less of this in Now We Are Six. In "Buttercup Days," however, Christopher and his friend Anne appear as miniature lovers, innocently acting out adult roles. Anne is twice described as "little," a description Milne rarely applies to children in his poems, and her attachment to "her man," as Christopher is called, is depicted in a coy fashion which reduces both children to adorable figures for the sentimental pleasure of adults. "The Brownie," in When We Were Very Young, also seems excessively sweet; brownies "wriggle off at once because they're all so tickly / (Nanny says they're tickly too)" (16). The accompanying illustration reinforces this contrived tone, showing Christopher Robin peeking behind the curtain in his dainty smock and girlish coiffure. The facing page provides a refreshing contrast with "Independence," where Christopher gleefully swings on a tree branch, his curls in disarray, while complaining that grownups always spoil the fun with "Now take care, dear!" or "Hold-my-hand" (17).

Probably the most notorious of Milne's poems is "Vespers" : "Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." Although this is the last poem in When We Were Very Young, it was one of the first that Milne wrote. He gave it to his wife, "telling her that if she liked to get it published anywhere she could stick to the money" (279). As Milne wryly observed some years later, it turned out to be an expensive present. In his autobiography, Christopher Milne acknowledged that "Vespers" brought him "more toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment" than any of his father's poems (28). Yet Milne did not intend the poem to be sentimental; in fact, he saw it as a humorously realistic description of a child whose dutiful prayers mean little to him:

Not "God bless mummy, because I love her so,"
but "God bless Mummy, I know that's right"…
not even the egotism of "God bless Me, because

I'm the most important person in the house," but
the super-egotism of feeling so impregnable that
the blessing of this mysterious god for Oneself is
the very last thing for which it would seem necessary to ask. (285)

Egotism and heartlessness were qualities which Milne perceived as natural to children, if not necessarily attractive. He considered "Buckingham Palace" another example of the former, and "Disobedience" a portrait of the latter; when James James Morrison's mother disappears, his only reaction is to tell his other relatives "Not to go blaming him. " This seems a rather solemn reading of a poem which comically inverts the roles of parent and child, but it shows that Milne was not oblivious to the less endearing characteristics of young children.

The enduring appeal of Milne's poems rests neither upon sentimentality nor uncompromising realism, but upon his light-hearted yet sympathetic portrayal of a child's everyday world. Milne made no exaggerated claims for his verses, even after the overwhelming success of When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. His intention was to entertain, with wit and grace, and his poems are one-dimensional, straightforward, and cheerful. They are clever and amusing, not intense or profound, and they unapologetically reflect the snug and sometimes smug atmosphere of a middle-class English household in the 1920s; the uniformed nannies, the orderly nursery life, the decorous trips to the park and the zoo now have an old-fashioned flavor, and the attitude of "all's right with the world" which permeates the poems may now seem complacent, particularly to adults. Milne's limitations become strengths, however, as he creates un-pretentious but memorable images of childhood, simultaneously humorous and affectionate. As in the Pooh stories, he does not attempt to offer a comprehensive vision of life or of childhood, preferring to depict a small world of everyday pleasures where good humor and happy endings are the rule. He rejoices in ordinary happenings and, wisely, does not strive for the extraordinary. Thomas Burnett Swann quotes a review of Milne's last book, four years before his death, that epitomizes Milne's achievement as a writer of children's literature: "He has perfect vision out of a small window …" (148).

References

Milne, A. A. When We Were Very Young. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1924.

——. Now We Are Six. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1927.

——. "Introducing Shepard." By Way of Introduction. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1929. 33-37.

——. "The End of a Chapter." By Way of Introduction. 195-202.

——. Autobiography. New York: Dutton, 1939. American edition of It's Too Late Now, London: Methuen, 1939.

Milne, Christopher. The Enchanted Places. London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; New York: Dutton, 1975.

Sterck, Kenneth. "The Real Christopher Robin: An Appreciation of A. A. Milne's Children's Verse." Children's Literature in Education 11, 2 (Summer, 1980): 52-61.

Sutherland, Zena, Dianne L. Monson, and May Hill Arbuthnot. Children and Books. 6th Ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1981. 286-287.

Swann, Thomas Burnett. A. A. Milne. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Rev. of Year In, Year Out, by A. A. Milne. The New York Herald-Tribune Book Review, 29 (November 16, 1952): 5.

Paula T. Connolly (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Connolly, Paula T. "Characters, Friends, and Toys." In "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner": Recovering Arcadia, pp. 71-95. New York, N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

[In the following essay, Connolly assesses how the personalities and roles of the characters in Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books work together to create a unifying sense of magic.]

Christopher Robin

In 1933 Parents' Magazine announced that Christopher Robin was one of the "six most famous children in the world" (see Thwaite, 399, 218), and the following year Frank Swinnerton would write that "the name of Christopher Robin Milne has long been as familiar to thousands of readers as Little Lord Fauntleroy" (Swinnerton, 120). The problem, of course, is that there were several different Christopher Robins: a character variously seen in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six as well as Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, not to mention the character's namesake, the very real Christopher Robin Milne.

A. A. Milne asserted that the character of Christopher Robin was a fictional composite and never meant to be a faithful rendering of his son. In an attempt to clarify the confusion, he described the character who first appeared in When We Were Very Young :

Now there is something about this book which I must explain; namely, that the adventures of a child as therein put down came from three sources.

1. My memories of my own childhood.

2. My imaginings of childhood in general.

3. My observations of the particular childhood with which I was now in contact.…

Now who was this Christopher Robin … soon to be the hero of Winnie-the-Pooh and other books? To me he was, and remained, the child of my imagination.¹

To the public, as Milne soon discovered, such a separation between character and real boy was not as easily made. Indeed, Milne even cited that as one of the reasons he stopped writing children's stories and verse:

The distinction [between character and child], if clear to me, is not so clear to others; and to them, anyhow,…the dividing line between the imaginary and the legal Christopher Robin becomes fainter with each book.… I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him. Moreover, since he is growing up, he will soon feel that he has had more publicity than he wants for himself. ("End of a Chapter," 205)

In this last prediction, Milne proved unerringly accurate. Although he was protected from much of the negative impact of such publicity while he was a child, once Christopher Milne left for school and certainly in later life he suffered from the notoriety he received because of his father's fictional creation.

As Christopher Milne shows in The Enchanted Places, the fictional character Milne created would at times relentlessly pursue the "real" Christopher. An incident he recounts there demonstrates the problems he faced. Christopher had made a recording of "Vespers" when he was a young child, but that recording would come to haunt him when he later went to school: "How intensely painful it was to me to sit in my study at Stowe while my neighbors played the famous—and now cursed—gramophone record remorselessly over and over again. Eventually, the joke, if not the record, worn out, they handed it to me, and I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field" (C. Milne, 178).² Although Christopher never used the name "Christopher Robin," he was dogged by his namesake character throughout his life, and although his childhood proved to be a generally happy one, in later years he and his father drifted apart, with Christopher suffering not only from relentless attention owing to his name but also from feelings of being exploited by his father.³

If there are important differences between the character and the boy—not the least of which was the father's drawing on his own childhood to create a world and vision of the character—there are also different Christopher Robins within the stories. In the narrative frame of Winnie-the-Pooh Christopher Robin, who asks to be told stories and wants his father to come watch him bathe, overtly asks for both entertainment and attention, in each case demonstrating his need for the father's assurance. It is the father, not he, who is creator and controller of the stories. The clearly dependent Christopher Robin not only requests more tales, but also asks specifically about his role in those stories, wanting to be included and relying on the father-narrator to validate his sense of self. "I didn't hurt him when I shot him, did I?" (WP [Winnie-the-Pooh ], 21), asks Christopher Robin about Pooh's return from the skies, and "'Didn't I give him anything?' asked Christopher Robin sadly" (WP, 89), about the story of Eeyore's birthday. In the fantasy world of the Forest, Christopher Robin is magnanimous and never in any conscious rivalry with his companions, but the child in the normative scene betrays his insecurities and desire for center stage when he asks his father a bit anxiously, "Was Pooh's pencil case any better than mine?" (WP, 161). In the narrative frame Christopher Robin seems a bit like the impressionable Piglet wishing for glory:

("Was that me?" said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.

"That was you."

Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.)(WP, 10)

Such overt insecurity and impressionability is absent in the Christopher Robin of the fantasy tales, for there he is transformed from a timid, dependent child to a wish-fulfilling image of loving paternal authority. To the inhabitants of the Forest, Christopher Robin is their protector and the ultimate representation of authority and wisdom. It is he who is described as "the only one in the forest who could spell" (WP, 48) and who writes the notices for Owl's door, he who is the omniscient figure sitting in the tree above the wandering Pooh and Piglet and who knows long before they do what the "Woozle" tracks signify. It is he who had once told Piglet a story that suggests to the small animal the means of his rescue from his flooded home. Moreover, it is clearly he to whom all the characters turn in their times of need: Rabbit believes Christopher Robin will find a way to extricate Pooh from his home; Piglet races to Christopher Robin's house, knowing only he can save him from "a Hellible Horralump … a Hoffable Hellerump!" (WP, 70); Kanga is not frightened when she discovers Roo has been kidnapped, "for she felt quite sure that Christopher Robin would never let any harm happen to Roo" (WP, 103).

Indeed, Piglet seems to speak for all the others when, on the trip to the North Pole, he tells Pooh, "If Christopher Robin is coming I don't mind anything" (WP, 115). Christopher Robin serves as a loving and reassuring leader. Although he believes Pooh can more easily be pushed back inside Rabbit's home, he respects Rabbit's wishes and agrees not to try that route. At times he calls Pooh a "Silly old Bear," but he does so fondly, and when Pooh asserts "I am a Bear of No Brain at All," Christopher Robin assures him, "You're the Best Bear in All the World" (WP, 43).

No matter what foibles Pooh displays, Christopher Robin is always loving, forgiving, assuring, and never chastising. He has become, in this world, all that he is not in the normative world of the narrative frame. Yet this depiction of Christopher Robin as adult caretaker is undercut throughout the story, so that the childlike ego of the Christopher Robin hearing these tales is soothed but, true to the power of the narrator-father, never really allowed control. Christopher Robin's knowledge is, in large part, only a facade. His spelling, after all—"PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID" (WP, 48)—leaves something to be desired; he is unable to put his boots on without help; he does not really know what the North Pole is or how to find it; and his pronouncement that "there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them" (WP, 135) is only one of the many rationalizations he makes to disguise his lack of knowledge. Although in some ways probably echoing the responses of adults in the normative world who evade children's questions, it is clear that Christopher Robin's "careless" comments are frequent disguises of his lack of knowledge. This facade, which is never broken by the animals, provides a gentle satire that allows the reader to puncture the pretense of the character Christopher Robin but leaves him, within the narrative context of the story, unscathed.

In The House at Pooh Corner Christopher Robin comes more into his own. His role in Winnie-the-Pooh is largely peripheral. There, he is not involved in many of the adventures, and he often appears at the end of chapters as a type of deus ex machina. His presence, which is frequently more felt than seen, allows the characters to have a sense of safety, the Forest a mood of benevolence. In The House at Pooh Corner, though, the focus is frequently on Christopher Robin—where he is, what he is doing, and how his growing up is affecting the Forest. Christopher Robin is still loving, but here we find an older boy, one who faces the challenges of the world beyond the Forest. This Christopher Robin no longer fakes knowledge, as he had during his expedition to the North Pole, nor does he say things as "carelessly" as he had in Winnie-the-Pooh. Like the older Christopher Robin in Now We Are Six, this child often recognizes his limitations and reveals his anxieties.

Christopher Robin leaves the Forest, both for play and work. The first time we see him in this book, Eeyore has knocked at his door, and we are told that "Christopher Robin had spent the morning indoors going to Africa and back, and he had just got off the boat and was wondering what it was like outside" (HPC [The House at Pooh Corner ], 11). There is no narrative frame in this story, and the power of Christopher Robin's ability to create worlds on his own is demonstrated in his interior fantastic journey to far-off lands. Now conscious of the world outside the Forest, he has brought some of that knowledge into his imaginings to redefine his landscape of play, and while he is still interested in the Forest, he has now found other fantasy worlds.

Christopher Robin's exposure to the outside world and his inculcation of it is evident in the successive notes he leaves on his door when he goes to school in the mornings. "Gon out. Backson" (HPC, 81) is followed by the more self-important and urgent "GON OUT / BACKSON / BISY / BACKSON" (HPC, 78), and finally the more lucid "GONE OUT / BACK SOON" (HPC, 91) reveals the change and development of the young child. School has entered the Forest, at least through the experiences of Christopher Robin, and this change is evident in his interactions with the other characters. Christopher Robin is still seen as the protector of the Forest. He finds Pooh and Piglet in their Heffalump trap and helps them out; he comes up with the idea of how to get Tigger and Roo out of the tree; and Piglet seeks him out to rescue Pooh and Owl from Owl's house.

This is also, however, a Christopher Robin who shows intentional indirection, in a much more sophisticated way than his earlier attempts to evade questions of which he was unsure. Such indirection is evident, for example, when he asks, "What would you do, if your house was blown down?" (HPC, 161), in a tacit attempt to ask Piglet's approval for Eeyore's appropriation of his house. This is also a young boy who feels anxieties. When he comes upon Pooh and Piglet who had been lost in the Forest, he remarks, "'Oh, there you are,'… trying to pretend that he hadn't been Anxious" (125). Here, for the first time, the facade of Christopher Robin's control of the Forest is directly punctured by the narrator, and we see a child who is fallible and even fearful. Anxiety marks his entrance to the world beyond the Forest, and, in response, the Forest has become for him a place to escape such fears and pressures. Rather than the animals seeking out Christopher Robin for comfort, he now seeks the Forest as a place of respite and is especially pleased with their company when they come for visits. He goes to the Forest "just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit … and he thought that if he … watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known" (HPC, 105).

The Forest has been the place of childhood play where one can do "Nothing," but as Christopher Robin tells Pooh, "I'm not going to do Nothing any more.… They don't let you" (HPC, 178). After he tells Pooh of the things of the world beyond the Forest that he has learned at school, his sadness and fear of losing his toy friends is palpable. His earnest vow to return to the Forest—"Yes, Pooh, I will be [here] really. I promise I will be, Pooh" (HPC, 179)—speaks more of his anxiety than his certainty. As they sit at Galleon's Lap, Christopher Robin is clearly in two worlds. With his eyes on the world and his hand on Pooh's paw, he cannot express the fears he feels so keenly—"'Pooh,' said Christopher Robin earnestly, 'if I—if I'm not quite—' he stopped and tried again—'Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?'" (HPC, 179). Like the child characters in Now We Are Six, Christopher Robin has left the egocentric childhood where his dreams of power were once fulfilled by his worlds of fantasy. Still longing for the reassurance of his childhood world, this Christopher Robin no longer believes in his own omnipotence, nor even in the power of the father-narrator to create a safe world for him. This child recognizes his vulnerability and realizes that he cannot stop time and that he must enter other worlds that will never offer him the power, assurance, and comfort of the Forest he had enjoyed in Winnie-the-Pooh.

The Toys

Just as Christopher Robin's character was quickly identified with the "real" Christopher Milne, readers have been fascinated by the "real" toys that served as models for Christopher Robin's Forest companions. It seems somehow fitting that it was Pooh Bear that started it all: for Christopher's first birthday he received the stuffed bear that he later described as "my inseparable companion" (C. Milne, 90). Several months later he received a stuffed donkey as a Christmas present, and a stuffed Piglet was later given to him by a neighbor. It was from these toys, and Christopher's games with them in the nursery, that the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner began.

By this time the importance of the toys was not lost on his father, and when a stuffed kangaroo and tiger were given to the young boy, the toys were chosen "not just for the delight they might give to their new owner, but also for their literary possibilities" (C. Milne, 91).⁴ To suggest that the toys all came complete with their personalities would serve to diminish Milne's creative process to mere transcribing. Indeed, some toys—such as the donkey Eeyore, whose neck had collapsed a bit and "this had given him his gloomy disposition" (C. Milne, 90)—did suggest the personalities they would have in the stories. Owl and Rabbit, however, were inventions of Milne, with no like toys owned by his son. And although Milne had said, "Making it all sound very simple, you only had to look at them to see at once that Eeyore was gloomy, Piglet squeaky, Tigger bouncy and so on," as Christopher Milne asserts, "of course there was much more to it than that" (C. Milne, 91).

The character toys are typified by distinct personalities, yet they should not be simply dismissed as one-dimensional. To be satisfied with rote associations—defining Pooh, for example, only as a "Bear of Very Little Brain" or Piglet as simply fearful—is to ignore some of the ways these characters are developed throughout these stories. As critic Peter Hunt has argued, "The characters in the Pooh books are remarkably, subtle, given the few words that Milne has available to him.… To say that … Piglet is timid, Rabbit bossy, Eeyore gloomy, Tigger bouncy, and Kanga motherly is to underestimate them" (Hunt 1988, 403).⁵ Of all of the characters in Milne's children's stories, it is perhaps Winnie-the-Pooh himself, the self-described "Bear of Very Little Brain," who is the most frequently underestimated.

Sir Pooh de Bear

In many ways Winnie-the-Pooh is, as Christopher Robin fondly calls him, a "Silly old Bear." He thinks he can trick bees into believing he is only a rain-cloud; he gets stuck in Rabbit's door because of his overactive appetite; he circles a tree following only his own pawprints, believing somehow he is on the trail of elusive Woozles; he is impressed by Owl's writing ability; he does not know his left from his right; and he never quite understands Eeyore's sarcasm. Although these incidents are comic, at the end of The House at Pooh Corner the bear's fear of being left behind because of his lack of brain is poignant:

Then he began to think of all the things Christopher Robin would want to tell him when he came back from wherever he was going to, and how muddling it would be for a Bear of Very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. "So, perhaps," he said sadly to himself, "Christopher Robin won't tell me any more," and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant that you just went on being faithful without being told things. (HPC, 178)

In his lack of intellectual ability and his frequent and humble acknowledgment of his limitations, Pooh serves as Christopher Robin's alter ego. As in the poem "The Friend" in Now We Are Six, the child who worries about the pressures of education and growing up finds solace in being able to experience an intellectually superior role over a toy companion who will never grasp rudimentary lessons. Pooh becomes a perfect companion for this young child. Always friendly and willing to please, lovable precisely because he is often so silly, and certainly someone never to feel intimidated by, Pooh comforts Christopher Robin and reifies the boy's sense of self.

The bear becomes an alter ego to Christopher Robin in a new way in The House at Pooh Corner. Still a bit bumbling and never able to understand what Christopher Robin learns at school, this constant companion is also the childhood that the boy must ultimately leave behind. In the first storybook Pooh is a would-be Woozle-tracker and Heffalump-catcher, enjoying the prospect of adventure. In The House at Pooh Corner, however, although he does build a house for Eeyore, much more of his time is spent visiting with friends and hence unifying the inhabitants of the Forest, and more often than that, just resting. When a search is organized for Small, one of Rabbit's "friends-and-relations," Pooh is disheartened because it "look[s] like a bothering sort of day" (HPC, 42). What Pooh much prefers doing is watching the river, enjoying a sunny day, letting a rhyme come to him, sitting by the side of a stream, and meeting Piglet at a "Thoughtful Spot" (HPC, 128) where they sit and frequently do nothing else at all. Pooh, the eternal inhabitant of the Forest, has the option of such leisure activity, unlike his friend Christopher Robin, who is no longer allowed to do "Nothing." Pooh's restfulness in this second book provides a counterpoint to the activities of Christopher Robin—activities apparently mandated by others and ones that take him from the Forest world.

Whether Pooh is active or resting, it would be a mistake to define him as simply foolish and leave it at that. Despite the general assumption by most of the characters in the stories, as well as many readers, that Pooh is a "Bear of Very Little Brain," it is he, not Christopher Robin, who is the main character of the stories (hence the titles Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner ). Although Christopher Robin is the ostensible protector of the Forest, he is frequently isolated from his toy companions. Instead, it is Pooh who visits characters, tries to assure their happiness, journeys to different parts of the Forest, learns of and resolves problems; it is he who is the link between characters and the active participant in most of the adventures. Ironically, it is precisely Pooh's sense of intellectual inadequacy that leads him to succeed so frequently. When Eeyore has lost his tail, "Pooh felt that he ought to say something helpful about it, but didn't quite know what. So he decided to do something helpful instead" (WP, 47). Similarly, when Roo is being washed downstream, Eeyore puts his tail in the water, turning his back to the scene; all the others, including Christopher Robin, give directions to one another, "But Pooh was getting something" (WP, 125). Not talking, or even giving much thought to the matter, Pooh is the one who acts quickly and thus effects Roo's rescue.

Other characters are certain they are much smarter than Pooh, but those assumptions are not always proved true. It is, after all, Pooh who discovers that the donkey's tail is missing, and he who learns that Owl has mistaken it for a bell-pull. Although Christopher Robin, sitting in the tree overhead, is ready to tell Pooh that he has been following his own paw-prints, the bear prefers to figure out the puzzle himself, which he does by sitting down and placing his own paws in the tracks. Most frequently, it is Pooh and not Christopher Robin who resolves issues in the Forest. It is he who saves Roo from the water and he who discovers the North Pole; it is he who thinks through the situation and realizes that a jar will float on the rising flood and take him to Christopher Robin's house, and, once there, it is Pooh, not Christopher Robin, who suggests they rescue Piglet by using the boy's umbrella—to be renamed by Christopher Robin The Brain of Pooh. To the young boy, this idea is "something so clever that Christopher Robin could only look at [Pooh] … with mouth open and eyes staring, wondering if this was really the Bear of Very Little Brain whom he had known and loved so long" (WP, 144). Like a young child, Pooh is frequently underestimated, even by his closest companions.

Even Pooh's silliest plans show a creative thought process. When Pooh attempts to trick the bees into believing he is a storm cloud, he reveals not merely his constant appetite and his egocentric view of the world, but also his powers of imagination. In this scene he directs Christopher Robin and attempts an imaginative re-creation of scene, complete with props and songs. Admittedly, Pooh's singing heightens the bees' curiosity about him, and Pooh is never quite convincing as a storm cloud, yet his directing of the scene shows an ability of imaginative play. Similarly, his creativity is clear in his constant singing, humming, and poetry writing. He is the chronicler of the Forest, for his songs tell of such myriad experiences as their journey to the North Pole, Piglet's escape from Owl's house, and Tigger's search for food.

Just as defining Pooh as simple-minded underestimates him, seeing him as greedy only pays superficial attention to the character. Pooh is clearly driven by his appetite—an urge that gets him into several tight places—but his concern with food is not simple greed. He associates it with social activity. He is willing to share his breakfast honey with the newcomer Tigger, although he is admittedly relieved to discover that Tiggers do not like honey. When Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he likes doing best in the world, honey is only part of the answer: "What I like best in the whole world [he says] is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying 'What about a little something?' and Me saying, 'Well, I shouldn't mind a little something, should you, Piglet,' and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing" (HPC, 172).

Pooh's concern for food, an internally directed desire to satisfy self, is thus balanced with his outward sociability and his continued and active concern for others' happiness. This concern extends to all others in the Forest, and especially to Eeyore, who seems most in need of cheering up. When Eeyore's tail is missing, Pooh immediately sets out to find it. When he discovers it is Eeyore's birthday, he sets out to alert the others and organize an impromptu birthday party. And while Christopher Robin does not even know that Eeyore has been without a home, Pooh has already decided to build him one.

Pooh is the one who does most of the visiting, linking the community together. Such a binding together of community is evident, for example, in his conversations with the more exclusive Rabbit. When Rabbit complains to Pooh and Piglet about the sudden intrusion of Kanga and Roo, he acknowledges only those present. Pooh, in his awkward way, shows an inclusive view, reminding Rabbit of those not there, but still part of the Forest world:

"What I don't like about it is this," said Rabbit. "Here we are—you, Pooh, and you, Piglet, and Me—and suddenly—"

"And Eeyore," said Pooh.

"And Eeyore—and then suddenly—"

"And Owl," said Pooh.

"And Owl—and then all of a sudden—"

"Oh, and Eeyore," said Pooh, "I was forgetting him. " (WP, 90-92)

For all of his failings, Pooh becomes the hero or, perhaps more accurately, the mock-hero of the Forest. He is a more fully rounded character than any of the others, with his varied traits balancing one another. Having an unremitting naïveté and optimism as well as a blend of egotism and humility, greed and concern for others, Pooh is both active and creative. He resolves many of the dilemmas of other characters and initiates a few of his own. The only character other than Christopher Robin to have a proper name, he certainly surpasses his child friend in the number and description of appellations awarded him. First, Edward Bear, the stuffed and lifeless teddy bear dragged down the stairs by Christopher Robin, in the fantasy world he is renamed Winnie (after a polar bear Christopher Robin had met at the zoo) -the-Pooh (once the name of a swan Christopher Robin had known and now given to the bear, perhaps because of his adventure-with the bees).⁶

Intermittently termed "Silly old Bear" and a "Bear of Very Little Brain," at the end of each book he becomes a hero figure and is awarded additional titles in recognition of his varied roles. In Winnie-the-Pooh he is "this Bear, Pooh Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, F.O.P. (Friend of Piglet's), R.C. (Rabbit's Companion), P.D. (Pole Discoverer), E.C. and T.F. (Eeyore's Comforter and Tail-finder) (WP, 144), and at the final party in his honor, he sits opposite Christopher Robin at the head of the table and is proclaimed the "best bear in all the world" (WP, 158). At the close of The House at Pooh Corner only Pooh remains with Christopher Robin, and the boy knights him "Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights" (HPC, 177), simultaneously parodying the humble bear's daydreams of grandeur and acknowledging both Pooh's importance to his friend and their imminent parting. In the end it is Pooh, not Christopher Robin, who is the cornerstone of the Forest. This is a place, the author assures us in the "Contradiction," that "will always be there … and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it." This place will remain, even after Christopher Robin has left it, and it is the bear—Winnie-the-Pooh—who brings it essential life and whose presence underlies the community found there.

Friends-and-Relations

For the most part, the other characters in these stories have fewer personality traits than Pooh, and their distinguishing characteristics—Eeyore's moroseness and Tigger's energy, for example—are often highlighted through contrast. Nonetheless, these characters' traits are evinced with varying implications in their interactions with others. They are not, in short, mere static designations.

Owl, flying above the others and living high in a tree, is the pretentious intellectual of the Forest. Always ready with advice that never proves to be very helpful, he is the bombastic storyteller who truly defines circumlocution: "Owl went on and on, using longer and longer words, until at last he came back to where he started" (WP, 51). Although he ostensibly tells stories because of their relevance to the situation at hand, it is clear that he is more interested in the storyteller than the listener. His verbosity nearly causes the weary Piglet to fall from his tree into the water below, and in his self-absorption Owl ignores Pooh's requests for food—requests that even the contentious Rabbit had fulfilled.

Despite his pretensions and his apparent insensitivity, Owl is at times keenly aware of his fallibilities and anxious to maintain the illusion of his wisdom, which he believes defines his place in the Forest and predicates his relationship to the others. Ironically, he demonstrates acumen more in his varied attempts to mask his inadequacy than in his pompous assertions of knowledge. Owl does, after all, have intelligence of a sort. Although he can only spell his name "WOL," he knows how to maintain his intellectual facade. He writes a happy birthday message only after ascertaining that Pooh will not be able to read it. He translates the message Christopher Robin has left—"BISY BACKSON"—as a reference to a creature, "the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson" (HPC, 81), and manages, again, to evade the admission that he cannot read by getting Rabbit to tell him what the message says.

Owl is, in essence, smart enough to manipulate situations so that his failings are hardly ever exposed. There are times when the characters become exasperated by Owl's verbosity, as during the flood when Christopher Robin chastises, "Oh, don't talk, Owl, go on quick!" (WP, 143), and a time when Piglet unwittingly acknowledges that "Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things" (WP, 131). Yet Owl's facade is never really destroyed by the characters. Typical of the acceptance offered by those in the Forest, Owl's stories may be ponderous and his veneer often broken with the reader, but the characters seem ready to accept him just as he presents himself.

Rabbit aligns himself with Owl, saying to him, "you and I have brains. The others have fluff. If there is any thinking to be done in this Forest … you and I must do it" (HPC, 78), yet it is not wisdom as much as authority that Rabbit seeks. He is a "Captainish" (HPC, 74), self-important character: "As soon as … [Rabbit] woke up he felt important, as if everything depended upon him. It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought About It" (HPC, 74). While Owl blusters, telling stories no one really listens to, Rabbit is a master at organization, making lists, plots, and plans. Through such demonstrations, he maintains his authority, evident when he announces to Pooh that "I promised Christopher Robin I'd Organize a Search for … [Small], so come on" (HPC, 40). When Rabbit attempts to persuade Pooh and Piglet to join him in his plan to humble Tigger, he even assumes Christopher Robin's authority. Rabbit tells them that the boy would not only agree with the plan, but would say, "I would have done it myself, only I happened to be doing something else" (HPC, 113).

To maintain such orderliness and authority, Rabbit sets up a clear hierarchy, by aligning himself with important characters, speaking for Christopher Robin, and distancing himself from others. He is at times bitingly anti-social: he tries to evade Pooh's visit by pretending to be someone else, and in response to a later greeting by Pooh, "Hallo, Rabbit … is that you?," he responds, "Let's pretend it isn't … and see what happens" (WP 114). Rabbit does not, however, really want solitude. Other characters are important to him because he can order them about or assume an air of superiority with them. He repeatedly uses others for his own purposes, officiously dispensing with them when they do not serve his needs; he says hello "in the voice of one who would be saying 'Good-bye' in about two more minutes" (HPC, 89); and although he becomes a good friend of Roo, that friendship is based not so much on a transformation of a newly repentant Rabbit as on the fact that "Roo … said 'Yes, Rabbit' and 'No, Rabbit' almost better than anybody else in the Forest" (HPC, 75).

While it may seem ironic that Rabbit is the only character with so many "friends-and-relations" he spends little time with them, and they chiefly serve to stroke his ego: "[Rabbit] came to the place where his friends-and-relations lived.… [H]aving nodded to a hedgehog or two, with whom he was too busy to shake hands, and having said, 'Good morning, good morning,' importantly to some of the others, and 'Ah, there you are,' kindly to the smaller ones, he waved a paw at them over his shoulder, and was gone; leaving such an air of excitement and I-don't-know-what behind him" (HPC, 76).

It is Rabbit, though, the one who prizes orderliness, who first notices that Christopher Robin has not been at home during the mornings, and he who sets about trying to discover where he is. In his desire for order and its inherent stability, it is important for Rabbit to clarify the whereabouts of other characters, so as to maintain the structure of the Forest community. Indeed, regarding the search for his friend-and-relation Small, Rabbit explains to Pooh, "I don't want him.…But it's always useful to know where a friend-and-relation is, whether you want him or whether you don't" (HPC, 39). His quest for such stability is one of the reasons that he is so threatened by the appearance of Kanga, Roo, and later Tigger. Believing he can order his world, his vision of the community is disrupted by Kanga, a "Strange Animal.…Ananimal of whom we have never even heard before!" (WP, 92).

Tigger becomes even more of a threat to Rabbit. His sheer lack of orderliness is a bother to Rabbit, but more than that, Tigger does not recognize and even undermines Rabbit's authority by "bouncing" him from time to time. Rabbit is dismayed because "Bouncy Tigger … was the sort of Tigger who was always in front when you were showing him the way anywhere, and was generally out of sight when at last you came to the place and said proudly 'Here we are!'" (HPC, 75). Rabbit's officiousness—his desire to impress his will on others and to be busy with "Important Things" (HPC, 130)—is very different from the ways of Pooh. While Pooh enjoys just sitting or visiting Piglet, Rabbit clearly discourages any visitors, and when he seeks out others he does so with a purpose. Unlike Pooh, who believes the secret to good rhymes is letting them come to you, Rabbit "never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them" (HPC, 83).

Unlike Owl, Kanga's concerns are practical ones, and unlike Rabbit, she is intensely devoted to family. The only female in the Forest, her role as mother defines her interactions with others. She chastises Owl for his messy house and dispenses the only intentional punishment in the stories. Her version of this "joke" on the hapless Roo is to give him a cold bath, caution him about not growing up to be "small and weak like Piglet" (WP, 107), wash his mouth out with soap, and give him a dose of bad-tasting medicine. They are motherly activities turned wrong, and to some extent they support Christopher Robin's contention that "a Kanga was Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals," and, as Piglet rightly foretells, "if One of the Fiercer Animals is Deprived of Its Young, it becomes as fierce as Two of the Fiercer Animals" (WP, 94).

The serious edge of Kanga's maternalism is allayed by her readiness to adopt the newcomer Tigger. Not intimidated by size or impressed by other's knowledge, Kanga instinctively "knew at once that, however big Tigger seemed to be, he wanted as much kindness as Roo" (HPC, 35). It is Roo, of course, who receives her single-minded attention. The only two animals of the same species in the Forest, the image of the two as family is heightened by the fact that they share parts of a single name, hence parts of the same being. It seems fitting, too, that she is a kangaroo with a pocket for her young, for Kanga wants her child protected from his surroundings and close to her at all times.

Kanga's attention may seem restrictive, her treatment of Roo overprotective; however, considering her child's exploits she does well to guard him. The baby kangaroo explodes with energy whenever possible: jumping, climbing in and out of mouse holes, scaling trees with Tigger, asking Tigger to bounce him. Oblivious to danger and anxious to be the center of attention, Roo keeps calling to the others, "Look at me swimming!" (WP, 124) as they frantically try to rescue him from being washed downstream. Roo is naive, too, in the complete and implicit faith he has in friends. When stuck in a tree with Tigger, Roo calls down to Pooh and Piglet with no sense of irony, "we've got to stay here for ever and ever—unless we go higher. What did you say, Tigger? Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan't be able to see Piglet's house so well, so we're going to stop here" (HPC, 68).

Typical of many children, his naïveté with his friends is countered by his rebellion against the restrictions placed on him by his mother. When he is playing on Poohsticks Bridge he falls into the water "on purpose, because he suddenly saw Kanga coming from the Forest, and he knew he'd have to go to bed anyhow" (HPC, 108). In addition to such evasions, Roo even criticizes his mother's authority by deconstructing adult language to point out its inaccuracies, as when Kanga refuses to allow Roo to journey into the Forest with the other animals:

"I think not today, dear. Another day."

"Tomorrow?" said Roo hopefully.

"We'll see," said Kanga.

"You're always seeing, and nothing ever happens," said Roo sadly.(HPC, 116)

Tigger's bouncing makes him a perfect companion for kangaroos, and his energy, naïveté, and playfulness make him a good friend to, although not necessarily a good influence on, the energetic Roo. Tigger, like Roo, is a complete child in the Forest. As a child figure, he finds his home with the only mother and family in the Forest, and he there finds the food he likes best of all is that of the other child, Roo's "Strengthening Medicine." Never as fierce as a tiger, Tigger is a blend of childlike energy—bouncing Pooh's shadow, attacking a tablecloth, racing ahead, then asking if he is going the right way. Unlike Owl's pretensions of being able to read, when Tigger announces what he likes to eat or do, many of his assertions are not such a mask. He sincerely does not know his limitations until he has overextended himself. His claims often reflect his childlike egocentrism, as when he defines his experience as representative of all tiggers. And the assumptions he makes of his ability reflect a child's attempt to find his place in the world. Sitting marooned in a tree, for example, he imagines himself as a swimmer, certain that he is good at something, although he is not sure what.

Eeyore, far from the boisterous, impulsive, and sociable Tigger, lives a sedate and often isolated life in the Gloomy Place. Of all the characters, he is the one who always expects the worst to happen, often predicting bad weather, especially when it would ruin social events. Even when things are going well, Eeyore is certain that "Being fine today doesn't Mean Anything" (HPC, 69). Although his complaints often provide their own comic comment on such exaggerated pessimism, Eeyore does introduce a negativism to this Arcadia, a suggestion of the possibility of harm and death that is otherwise absent even during such accidents as Roo's falling in the water and the destruction of Owl's house. Such is the case when the characters are trying to decide how to help Tigger and Roo out of a tree. When Piglet suggests they form a ladder, each standing on the other with Eeyore on the bottom, Eeyore responds, "And if Eeyore's back snapped suddenly, then we could all laugh. Ha ha! Amusing in a quiet way,… but not really helpful" (HPC, 70).

Eeyore, the only character to refer to himself in the third person and the only one to speak overtly of death, is certain that the world is conspiring against him, as when he learns of his missing tail and assumes, not that it has been lost by accident, but that "Somebody must have taken it.…How Like Them" (WP, 47). Such cynicism at times becomes an excuse for inertia. The slow-plodding donkey blames overwhelming and anonymous forces for his problems and does not even look for his own tail. Indeed, what appears to be simple self-pity or pessimism on Eeyore's part often serves as an effective means of manipulating others. In the hopes of alleviating his gloominess, characters frequently help Eeyore so that the donkey need not act himself. This is true, for example, when Pooh goes off to find the donkey's missing tail.

In fact, Eeyore maintains a good deal of control, particularly through his use of language. While Rabbit overtly attempts to manage events and characters, Eeyore's complaints and sarcastic comments allow him to manipulate others in a much more subtle but often more effective way. His incessant sarcasm reveals a penetrating insight into events and a keen agility with language. Sarcasm is, after all, expression based on the juxtaposition of what is said with an underlying intent that is often left unstated. Such sarcasm is evident when Pooh visits Eeyore on his birthday and the donkey motions to the empty space before him, complaining wryly, "Look at all the presents I have had.… Look at the birthday cake. Candles and pink sugar." When the literal Pooh tells him there are no presents, Eeyore agrees, "'Joke,' he explained. 'Ha ha!'" (WP, 76). This "joke" motivates Pooh to celebrate Eeyore's birthday and hence the donkey's self-pitying sarcasm encourages others to compensate for the differences between Eeyore's portrait and reality.

Eeyore's sarcasm takes several different forms. When Piglet exclaims how wet Eeyore is, Eeyore derides the obvious and "asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time" (HPC, 101). More than any of the others, he is aware of and makes explicit the intentions of characters, ready to break their facades while all others maintain them. He deconstructs pretensions and thus functions as a type of social satirist, as when Rabbit says he had visited Eeyore, and the donkey clarifies, "Not conversing.…Not first one and then the other. You said 'Hallo' and Flashed Past. I saw your tail in the distance as I was meditating my reply. I had thought of saying 'What?'—but, of course, it was then too late.…No Exchange of Thought: ' Hallo—What '—I mean, it gets you nowhere, particularly if the other person's tail is only just in sight for the second half of the conversation" (HPC, 150).

Eeyore, too, is a character of some contradictions. He is the glum philosopher who gazes at his own reflection in the stream and wonders such unanswerable questions as "'Why?'… 'Wherefore?' and sometimes … 'Inasmuch as which?'" (WP, 45), yet he does not even notice that his own tail is missing. And despite his incessant complaints, it would be a mistake to assume that he does not want a place within the community. Indeed, Eeyore frequently wants to be the center of attention. Although at the end of each book Pooh is recognized as the hero of the stories, it is Eeyore who wants center role in each event.

In Winnie-the-Pooh he assumes the party is for him, and he even begins an acceptance speech to the others; in The House at Pooh Corner he writes the poem for Christopher Robin's good-bye. After he has read it for the others he tells them, "If anybody wants to clap … now is the time to do it" (166), and, in response to Pooh's praise that it is better than his own writing, Eeyore, clearly aware of his own desires for attention, explains, "It was meant to be" (167).

Readers often associate Eeyore with unremitting gloominess, but there are a number of times when he is quite happy. When his tail is returned to him, for example, "Eeyore frisked about the forest, waving his tail … happily" (WP, 54). In this scene the donkey's joy is reinforced by Shepard's illustrations of him smiling and doing somersaults. Later, when Eeyore receives birthday presents from Pooh and Piglet he does not complain about what is left of his gifts but instead finds a use for the empty pot and burst balloon, and as the others go on their way he "was taking the balloon out, and putting it back again, as happy as could be" (WP, 89). In this scene, too, we learn that Eeyore is not simply self-involved. When he learns that Piglet had fallen with the balloon, his first question is not about the condition of his present but of his friend: "You didn't hurt yourself, Little Piglet?" (WP, 86).

Indeed, Eeyore who complains that "nobody minds. Nobody cares" (WP, 72) does care about others. True to his character, the aid he offers is accompanied by his cynicism and constant complaints, and in each incident his self-described "pathetic" (WP, 72) state is typically reinforced. Yet when Tigger needs breakfast, Small needs finding, or Tigger and Roo need helping down from a tree, Eeyore is willing to lend assistance. The scene in which Roo is swept away in the stream and everyone attempts to rescue him is an apt one for depicting Eeyore's interactions with others. As all the others follow Roo, "Eeyore had turned around and hung his tail over the first pool into which Roo fell, and with his back to the accident was grumbling quietly to himself, and saying, 'All this washing; but catch on to my tail, little Roo, and you'll be all right'" (WP, 124). Here Eeyore is immediately ready to help and even to offer Roo assurance, but he nonetheless complains, "So much for washing " (WP, 124). Despite Eeyore's good intentions, his back is turned away from the scene, suggesting his separation from the others as well as his general inertia, and he is left behind, sitting with his tail in the water even after Roo has been rescued.

Living apart from the others in the Gloomy Place and often psychologically separated from them as the Forest doomsayer, Eeyore is nonetheless intensely aware of how others interact with him, keeping track, for example, of the intervals between his meetings with other characters. When Eeyore is told about the destruction of Owl's house, he complains to Rabbit that "Nobody keeps me Informed. I make it seventeen days come Friday since anybody spoke to me" (HPC, 150). Rabbit refuses to succumb to Eeyore's ploy for pity and instead chides his passivity: "It's your fault, Eeyore. You've never been to see any of us. You just stay here in this one corner of the Forest waiting for the others to come to you. Why don't you go to them sometimes?" (HPC, 150).

Eeyore, who has been particularly adept at recognizing the underlying intentions of others, is no less aware of his own, and must agree with Rabbit: "There may be something in what you say.… I must move about more. I must come and go" (HPC, 150-51). Eeyore resolves to be more sociable, and by the end of The House at Pooh Corner he has become more a part of the Forest community. Because of his new determination, it is he who finds a new house for Owl. Admittedly, because of his past parochialism, he does not realize that it is Piglet's house, but nonetheless he is here concerned enough about another's comfort that he does not simply turn his back and hope to help but instead strikes out on his own quest to find a solution.

Indeed, the alienated Eeyore becomes not only the one to find Owl a home but also the spokesman for the community. His good-bye poem is signed by all the characters and as they present it to Christopher Robin "they stood around, and waited for somebody else to speak, and they nudged each other, and said 'Go on,' and gradually Eeyore was nudged to the front, and the others crowded behind him" (HPC, 169). Although he complains about the crowding and leaves after the presentation, his leaving seems to come more from their awkwardness at a good-bye than a distaste for community. In the end, Eeyore, the cynical outsider, becomes the one to speak for the others and "send / Our love" (HPC, 166), "a comforting sort of thing to have" (HPC, 169), as Christopher Robin points out.

Piglet, like Eeyore, is a character often seen as having a single personality trait. Yet, also like the donkey, his character is not quite so flat, and he also develops by the end of The House at Pooh Corner, redeeming himself by overcoming his timidity and rewarded with recognition by the others and a surer sense of community. Although Piglet wants to be useful and included in adventures, his sense of himself as "a Very Small Animal" leaves him fraught with self-conscious timidity. Piglet does, after all, agree to accompany Pooh in case the tracks he is following turn out to be those of "Hostile Animals" (WP, 38). Once those tracks multiply, though, Piglet's fears overwhelm him. Despite the assurance he gives Pooh that he will "be quite safe" now that Christopher Robin is there, the presence of the boy protector is not sufficient for Piglet, and "he trotted off home as quickly as he could, very glad to be Out of All Danger again" (WP, 42). Although Piglet is afraid of both imaginary and real animals, he is a creature with a kind heart. He ultimately agrees with Rabbit's plan to humble Tigger, but in their discussion it is Piglet who evinces momentary sympathy, even for an animal of which he is afraid: "'I should hate him to go on being Sad,' said Piglet doubtfully" (HPC, 113).

Ultimately, Piglet's size becomes his asset. Although everyone believes Owl is the one in the Forest who can read and write, it is Piglet, small enough to fit into Christopher Robin's pocket, who accompanies him to school and thus learns to write well. When he is "a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water," he writes a message, "HELP! / PIGLET (ME)" and "IT'S ME PIGLET, HELP HELP" (WP, 133), which eventually leads to his rescue. When Owl's house topples, it is Piglet's size that again serves him well. Pooh devises a plan to lift Piglet up to Owl's letter-box, where the small animal will be able to climb through and bring others to rescue them. Piglet is fearful, but here as he faces not mere monsters of the imagination but friends who need his help: "it did seem the only thing to do. So with one last look back … Piglet nodded bravely at Pooh and said that it was a Very Clever pup-pup-pup … Plan" (HPC, 142-43). His newfound confidence is clear as he exits the letter-box and calls back to the others, "'I can climb down quite easily, I mean it's dangerous but I can do it all right, and Christopher Robin and I will be back in about half-an-hour. Good-bye, Pooh!' And without waiting to hear Pooh's answering 'Goodbye, and thank you, Piglet,' he was off" (HPC, 145).

Piglet is often painfully self-conscious. Concerned about appearing cowardly, he often tries to mask his fear, as when he jumps in fright near the Woozle tracks and then, "to show that he hadn't been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice in an exercising sort of way" (WP, 39). Ashamed of what others may think of him, Piglet often departs a scene once he believes he has revealed his fears. After mistaking Christopher Robin for a Heffalump, for example, Piglet "felt so Foolish and Uncomfortable that he had almost decided to run away to Sea and be a Sailor" (HPC, 54).

Once he has overcome his fear and effected the rescue at Owl's house, Piglet comes more to terms with himself. When Pooh writes a poem for " O gallant Piglet … !" (HPC, 149), the small hero can now admit to Pooh that he did "blinch a little.…And [the poem] says, 'Did he blinch no no'" (HPC, 153). No longer ashamed of himself and now ready to acknowledge and face his fears, Piglet is rewarded for his honesty when Pooh explains, "You only blinched inside … and that's the bravest way for a Very Small Animal not to blinch that there is" (HPC, 153).

Just as Eeyore is able to get some of the attention he seeks in The House at Pooh Corner, many of Piglet's dreams also come true. The "Very Small Animal" who had fantasized of "the day when he answered a Heffalump back as bravely as if the Heffalump wasn't there" (HPC, 47) faces real, not imaginary, dangers as he rescues Pooh and Owl. His vision of himself changes as he "sighed with happiness, and began to think about himself. He was BRAVE" (HPC, 153). No longer ashamed or insecure, Piglet can now accept himself and admit his failings. Whatever they had been, they had always been tempered by his kindness to others, and that kindness is eminently apparent at the close of the book. There Piglet shows true nobility when he avoids embarrassing Eeyore and gives up his house to Owl. Once a "Very Small Animal" who had dreamt of having a companion so that he would not be alone in times of need, Piglet finally gets his wish.

Throughout both books, Pooh and Piglet are the closest of friends, and although there is some competition between them—as when Piglet races ahead to give Eeyore his present first—that is only based on their insecurities and never undermines their deep loyalty to each other. They spend time together visiting, going for walks, talking, and simply sitting silently. They share the same sense of leisure and restfulness and offer each other encouragement and support. Their relationship becomes a model of friendship, and it is reified in the conclusion of The House at Pooh Corner when Pooh invites Piglet to live at his house and Piglet accepts.

In this Forest, then, there is room for a range of characters, each of whom is accepted for who he or she is. And although marked by distinguishing traits, the way the characters evince those traits in their interactions with each other and their visions of themselves and their world shows that their personalities are not simply one-dimensional. Nor are these characters static. After all, this is a place where dreams can be fulfilled—where a small boy gains the respect and adulation of his friends, a "Bear of Very Little Brain" resolves problems, a gloomy donkey writes a poem of love, and a timid piglet becomes a brave and noble hero.

Notes

1. "The End of a Chapter," in By Way of Introduction, 202-204; hereafter cited in text. Milne notes that he used the name when it was appropriate for poetic considerations, and was surprised how the public responded to Christopher Robin, especially since only three of the 44 poems featured him.
2. Christopher Milne recalls that once he left for school, "Christopher Robin was beginning to be what he was later to become: a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up" (178).
3. Christopher Milne recalls how in "pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had flinched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son" (179). See The Enchanted Places (31-32) for a discussion of Christopher's names. See also Thwaite, who recounts how the friction between father and son led to their separation in later life.
4. Christopher Milne recounts how through first his games, then his mother joining him in play, the toys became more character like, and it was then that his father "could take over" (91). See Christopher Milne (90-93) for a discussion and description of the toys. Roo was lost near Cotchford Farm, but the other toys were sent to the United States, where they first housed at Dutton, then given to the New York Public Library in 1987. Milne stipulated that the toys could not be cleaned up but "look as if a child had just finished playing with them" (Thwaite, 475). Indeed, Piglet, who had been chewed by a dog, suffers a bit from wear. For photographs of the toys, see "Winnie-the-Pooh Tours U.S.," Life, 19 February 1951, 75-76, 79. Several attempts have been made to identify the "human"models for the toy characters' personalities. See especially Alison Lurie, "Now We Are Fifty,"New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1976, 27; Carpenter, 194-96; C. Milne 121, 144-45.
5. Hunt pairs the characters, showing how Piglet serves as Pooh's foil, and Rabbit and Owl contrast each other. To Hunt, the interplay of the characters reveals much about their personalities.
6. Winnie-the-Pooh's name has had a confusing history. In the introduction Milne explains that "you will find some lines about a swan here.… Christopher Robin … has given him the name of 'Pooh.' This is a very fine name for a swan, because, if you call him and he doesn't come … then you can pretend that you were just saying 'Pooh!' to show how little you wanted him" (vii). In the later Introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh Milne states, "If you happen to have read another book about Christopher Robin, you may remember that he once had a swan … that he used to call … Pooh. That was a long time ago, and when we said good-bye, we took the name with us.…Well, when Edward Bear said that he would like an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was." According to Pauline Cockrill, in The Ultimate Teddy Bear Book (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1991), the name "Winnie" "came from an American black bear in London Zoo, the mascot of a Canadian regiment from Winnipeg" (56). Goran Kjellmer states in his article "Why Is Winnie the Pooh?: On the Use of the Definite Article in Some English Personal Names" (English Studies 58 [December 1977]: 508-14) that the use of "the article archaic" emphasizes the mock-heroic, for such a use of the article in a name was "usually associated with noblemen and giants in English history" (510).

TITLE COMMENTARY

WINNIE-THE-POOH (1926)

C. J. L. Culpepper (essay date 1963)

SOURCE: Culpepper, C. J. L. " O Felix Culpa ! The Sacramental Meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh. "In The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook, edited by Frederick C. Crews, pp. 53-62. New York, N.Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963.

[In the following essay, Culpepper attempts to link Winnie-the-Pooh to Christian theology, asserting his desire to demonstrate that Milne's book "contains Christian dogma; and secondly, to raise it to the level of great literature by showing the historic purity of its connection to the traditional sources of Christian thought."]

The miniscule handful of persons already acquainted with my studies in English literature will recognize by my present title that a new, and perhaps not insignificant, effort is being made here: namely, to find within a children's story the components of genuine art. By "art" I of course understand the dulcis et utile canon familiar to classical, medieval, and renaissance writers alike—with a good deal greater emphasis on the utile, to be sure. When Homer saw to it that the impious Hector was dragged around the walls of Troy three times, he was teaching a lesson about the triple pitfalls of Pride. When Tamburlaine was permitted to sack cities and sink himself in every luxurious vice, the saintly Marlowe was (as Roy Battenhouse has shown us) pointing a moral about the impermanence of the flesh. In every case of authentic literature—and the reader will be able to supply innumerable examples from his own experience—the literary value results from a kernel of serious moral doctrine that is surrounded by a superficial appeal to the eye and ear. The business of criticism, as I comprehend it, is to peel away this outer husk, discard it where it will do no further harm, and expose the core of sententia for all to understand. The responsibility I am currently imposing upon my modest analytic powers is that of finding this central meaning in Winnie-the-Pooh.

It comes as no surprise, I feel sure, to most readers when they are told that this charming little volume contains exhortations to virtue. The hasty view of Robertus Tracy, that from Winnie-the-Pooh " Educatio ethica clementer abest, "¹ cannot be generally shared. It may well be doubted whether any children's literature, much less a book that has proven its durability so convincingly as this one, is lacking in instruction. What remains at issue, however, is the far more interesting question whether the moral teaching is of a Christian or merely a generally "moralistic" nature, as is unfortunately the case in most such stories. It is all very well for little red engines to huff and puff up steep gradients to illustrate the necessity of Trying Harder, but this doesn't bring us any closer to salvation, does it? The Iliad, in contrast, though its author labored under the inconvenience of a painful anachronism, points us heavenward as surely as does the wand of Mercury in Botticelli's "Primavera." The task before us is therefore clear: first, to certify Winnie-the-Pooh as legitimate literature by demonstrating that it contains Christian dogma; and secondly, to raise it to the level of great literature by showing the historic purity of its connection to the traditional sources of Christian thought, in opposition to the erroneous whimsies of Latitudinarians and Enthusiasts.²

Let me proclaim at once that, although there are few overt citations of Holy Writ in Winnie-the-Pooh, the subject of the book is nothing other than the central drama of our faith: the Fall and Redemption of Man. We Christian critics learned long ago not to be put off by a secular or even an impious tone in literary works. If one is convinced that a particular book contains greatness, and if that book persists in refusing to come out forthrightly and preach to us, the only answer must be that its dogma is communicated allegorically. This, by the way, was exactly St. Augustine's principle in recommending the study of the ancient classics, and gentle Chaucer expressed the same sentiment: "al that writen is / To oure doctrine it is y-write, y-wis." When we return to Winnie-the-Pooh with the exemplary tradition of Spenser, Bunyan, and Milton in mind, we perceive without difficulty not one allegorical plot, but many—and all tending, I need hardly say, to the moral education of the Christian gentleman, the very purpose that guided Spenser unflaggingly through 3,850 thrilling stanzas of the Faerie Queene.³

To begin at the beginning, the reader is invited to peer more closely than is his wont at the opening chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh. What does he find? A story about a certain tree which proves irresistibly attractive to our hero, who conceives a passion for removing and eating something he finds upon it. With increasing pride in his ability to snatch the spoils without assistance, much less with official permission to touch this certain product, he climbs nearly to the top of the tree and—falls ! (Italics mine.) Moreover, once the lapsus has been acted through, it must of course repeat itself endlessly, at least until the Atonement comes. Thus Pooh, the Adam-substitute, having landed sorrowfully in a gorse-bush (East of Eden), betakes himself directly back to the forbidden food with renewed lust. This time he is significantly black from head to toe, and is pursued and tormented by " the wrong sort of bees " (italics Pooh's), little avengers which, in bringing to my mind both Christian devils and the Eumenides of Aeschylus, provide a perfect illustration of that marriage of pagan and holy which we call by the name of Christian Humanism.⁴

This simple example will suffice to orient us to the iconographical technique which is everywhere at work in the pages of Pooh. Let us proceed to a far weightier matter, one that must be approached in a spirit of combined reverence and determination. Who is the Savior in this book ? Now, we all realize that no work can be regarded as an immortal classic if it fails to contain a Savior. Shakespeare understood this perfectly well when he invented Cordelia. So did Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage,⁵ and Faulkner in Light in August—both novels that I would, I confess, find altogether repulsive were it not for this winning feature. Must we, in default of a Redeemer, lower Pooh in our estimation to the Unitarian or Ethical Culture level? Redoubled study reveals that Milne, with great subtlety, has merely placed the Savior-figure somewhat to one side of the main action, in order to allow the others to fall more spectacularly and thus become ever more tragically aware of their need for Him.⁶

Searching for a literary Savior is, if I may confide in the reader, often a rather trying affair, since this personage must be an epitome of meekness and at the same time act as a strong moral guide for the other characters. In Pooh we have no dearth of meek characters, but a frustrating want of moral pronouncements. Yet there is one Character, blessedly, Who outdoes all the others in humility while managing, at one dramatic moment, to reveal His true identity in a divine Uttering: "A little Consideration," He says, "a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference." What an electrifying effect this produces on the reader! At one stroke we have been transported back across all the materialistic heresies of the modern world, back safely across the wicked Counter-Reformation into the purity of Cranmer, Henry the Eighth, the early Church, and the Sermon on the Mount. Here we have none of the hypocrisy of the crafty Loyola, none of the foaming frenzy of the Anabaptists, but a simple assertion of the Golden Rule. The Speaker is of course Eeyore, the Lowly One, the Despised, Acquainted with Grief. His dictum of pure caritas is the moral standard by which every action of the lesser characters in Winnie-the-Pooh must be severely judged.

Once Eeyore's role has been understood, the reader will naturally be able to perceive innumerable familiar stages in His career. The chapter, "Eeyore Has a Birthday," is a charming parallel to the coming of the Magi, with Piglet and Pooh's balloon and pot forming a primitive but nonetheless heartfelt equivalent to frankincense and myrrh. The third gift of gold is supplied by Christopher Robin's generous offer of a box of paints. Eeyore's sermon against washing, "this modern Behind-the-ears nonsense," is His plea that we become as little children, avoiding, by the way, a confusion of materialistic porcelain-and-chrome "progress" with genuine spiritual improvement. "Take no thought for the morrow" would be an approximate rendering of His remark. Again, His placing of His tail in the stream when Roo appears to be drowning is His offer of salvation to all; Milne luckily realized the universal implications of the scene and resisted the opportunity to narrow them down by having only Roo, or indeed anyone, accept the offer. The giving of His own breakfast of thistles to Tigger reminds us of the Loaves and Fishes, but at the same time, to judge from Tigger's reaction, serves as a reminder that the path to Heaven is thorny. His breaking of Tigger's near-fatal fall from a tree (italics mine) is, in contrast, a very exemplum of the Atonement, while His later contemplation of three sticks forming the letter "A" is an icon at once of the Trinity, the three Cardinal Virtues, and His Own role as the second Adam. His Baptism takes place in the Poohsticks chapter; His Last Supper is the farewell banquet in which He makes the central speech; His exchanging of an earthly home for a Heavenly one occurs in the "Pooh Builds a House" episode; while His Own opening of the gates of the New Jerusalem for all the Saved is bodied forth in "Eeyore Finds the Wolery." Even His Name, as is invariably true in allegorical literature, contains a secret clue to His prototype. A phonetic transliteration into Italian (the language of sweet Boccaccio) yields us IO RE, "I [Am the] King." That the King should be identified with the lowly Ass is a paradox which every reader of Scripture will recognize as quintessentially Christian.

Less taxing than the exegetical work I have done above is the identification of God Himself, namely Christopher Robin. This is patently evident from His very first intervention in the plot, when, at the end of a week's waiting (for Pooh to become slender enough to leave Rabbit's door), He thunders out the single word: " Now !" (Italics God's.) The tone, the delay of a week, and the very diction leave no doubt that here we have an analogue of the Creation of Man.⁷ In the ensuing chapter, when Piglet and Pooh have lost themselves in a moral maze of endless circular error, it is Christopher Robin Who enlightens them from Above. As Piglet states with relief at once, "You'll be quite safe with him. " Throughout the book He manifests Himself in the form of Divine Providence, a kind of omnipresent Force at work for the rescue of the weak and the instruction of the ignorant. Even at moments of maximum danger, as when Kanga discovers that her helpless infant is missing, a Peace That Passeth Understanding calms all fears and erases all forebodings.⁸ As for His Name, this has given me some difficulty, but I recognize within it the following anagram: I HOPE CHRIST BORN. R. I take this to be a decree in the hortatory imperative, dispatched to the Heavenly Host, urging the speedy fulfillment of the Incarnation and signed "R" for REX.⁹

At this point, I believe, everything essential has been said about Winnie-the-Pooh, and I prefer to draw my explication toward its close. One could, of course, go ever deeper into the book's allegorical subplots, remarking, for instance, the Noah-parallels in the "Surrounded by Water" chapter, studying the Exposition to the North Pole as a Holy Crusade, or laying bare the universal implications of Christopher Robin's nailing the Sacrificial Tail upon the Submissive Eeyore. For myself, I admit, I prefer to leave such matters to more industrious scholars and to contemplate the book in its own terms, as a forthright plea to join the Church of England. Doubtless there will be readers who will continue to laugh indecorously at some of the incidents in Winnie-the-Pooh —callous scorners who insist upon taking the chaff and leaving the wheat. My own feelings about this book, if I must say so, are rather more solemn and reverential. I cannot find words to express them, and so will end merely by quoting one of my colleagues who, when faced with the problem of defining and epitomizing the work of another devout writer, Hawthorne, used these words:

The Light is a process of seeing and disclosing; the Word is a process of uttering and investing; the Act is the intuitive union of both. Truth comes as a reward for intellectual discipline and human sympathy, but the ultimate incarnation that unites light and letter, spirit and flesh can only be.¹⁰

Notes

1. Robertus Tracy, "Ursus Minor, or, The Bear as Swain," Carleton Miscellany, II (Summer, 1961), 118.
2. I cannot recall, at the moment, the name of the English novelist who described Sophocles as a kind of Anglican Bishop before his time; but the similitude is just, and expresses the measure of that dramaturgist's enduring appeal.
3. Which was left tragically incomplete about halfway through the author's original plan.—Ed.
4. Pooh's phrase, " the wrong sort of bees, " in suggesting that there are two sorts, a right and a wrong, leads us back to the tradition of the medieval encyclopedists who glossed all objects in the universe both in bonum and in malum, thus providing literary criticism with quite pliant tools of allegorical interpretation. It is a sign of the decadence of our times that this custom has withered away.
5. R. W. Stallman was the first to discover that Jim Conklin in that novel is really Jesus Christ, who brings about "Henry's spiritual change" (Modern Library edition, 1951, Introduction, p. xxxiii), resulting in salvation. I find this admirable insight preferable to Mr. Stallman's remark, one year later, that Henry "has undergone no change, no real spiritual development."—Stephen Crane: An Omnibus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 221.
6. Those doubters who have alleged to find a degree of incompatibility between tragedy and the Christian drama of salvation must be wrong, for tragedy, as the highest form of literature, necessarily contains the highest truth. The typical Christian-tragic hero is buffeted about by Fortune (really Providence in disguise), undergoes from two to five Tragic Insights, expires, and is wafted up to his reward. See Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, for example.
7. The Vulgate text offers an even clearer sense of this meaning: "Itaque per hebdomadem Christophorus Robinus librum talem apud extremitatem septentrionalem Pui praelegit, et Lepus lintea in extremitate meridiana suspendit … et inter eas Pu se ipsum magis magisque graciliscere sensit. Extremo hebdomadis Christophorus Robinus dixit: 'NUNC!'" A. A. Milnei, Winnie Ille Pu (Novi Eboraci: Sumptibus Duttonis, MCMLX), p. 22.
8. "Just for a moment, she thought she was frightened, and then she knew she wasn't; for she felt quite sure that Christopher Robin would never let any harm happen to Roo."
9. That both Eeyore and Christopher Robin thus share the title of "King" will hardly surprise those who have taken the trouble to read the Nicene Creed. "I've got two names," is the very first statement that God makes to Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh.
10. Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1957), pp. 102f.

Elliott Gose (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: Gose, Elliott. "Id, Ego, and Self." In Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children, pp. 29-41. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Gose argues that Winnie-the-Pooh acts as a series of psychological lessons—among them acceptance, indulgence, and integration—that are ultimately about the growth of Christopher Robin "whose worries are exposed through the animal surrogates."]

Winnie-the-Pooh offers the child a sensuous world in which the appetites are not discouraged, a protected world in which no serious mishap will occur. But we don't have to look very far into the book to discover that it is not mere escapist literature. Within the reassurance offered by its simple premiss that stuffed animals have a life and nature of their own, each adventure functions as a testing of physical and psychological realities from which the listening child can learn. The first two chapters, for instance, are cautionary and deal quite directly with the results of attempts at satisfying appetite.

Chapter 1 carefully inducts the young child into a world of toys impervious to pain. The author-father talks to Christopher Robin about his stuffed bear. The chapter is framed by Christopher Robin's dragging the bear first down and finally up the stairs. The importance of this action becomes evident at the end of the chapter. The father has finished telling the tale of Pooh's attempts to get honey, attempts that end with his being accidentally shot by Christopher Robin. The boy asks whether he hurt Pooh, and the father reassures him. Then Christopher Robin goes upstairs, dragging Winnie-the-Pooh ' bump, bump, bump ' behind him.¹ Several implications are to be found in this juxtaposition of concerned inquiry and unconcerned actions. First, the father can be seen as superior in comprehension to the child. (Here and at the beginning of the chapter and elsewhere in the book, an adult may find the author too condescending.) Second, the child can be seen as granting more credence to the story, in which the bear speaks and acts on his own, than to reality, in which the bear is only a soft, passive thing that the child can treat as he likes. Third, the children who hear the story are reassured that, whatever happens or threatens to happen in the stories, no real harm is going to come to any of the actors. It is with the knowledge of such a cushion at the bottom that the young child can allow himself or herself to slide into the appetite-indulging and reality-testing adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Although both Milne and Kipling provide reassurances to their young readers, Milne has inserted his into the very structure of his world, as well as into the relaxed pace of the action and the low-pressure interactions among most of the characters. Kipling, as we saw, aimed to attract his young readers through appealing sounds and rhythm, but the world into which they are introduced is quite a violent one of prey and predator. The relation between them is usually treated humorously rather than graphically, but the threat of death is there when the whale swallows the mariner, the crocodile grabs the elephant's child, the jaguar attacks the hedgehog, or the leopard catches the zebra. The immediacy is undercut somewhat by the action's taking place in various foreign countries and in 'High and Far-Off Times.' In contrast, Milne's forest is a recognizable environment, one in which children can easily imagine themselves. Its most violent action is a kidnapping, in which we accompany not the victim but one of the gang that has the tables turned on him. This chapter ends with the full integration of two aliens into the animal community.

But in the opening chapter such complex social interactions are still far-off. Pooh is propelled into adventure by his love of honey. Psychologically Pooh represents here the appetitive drive that relates everything to its needs. Having concluded that the bees are making honey just for him, he begins to climb the tree around which the bees are buzzing. This first attempt at satisfying appetite is frustrated when a branch breaks, and he falls into a gorse-bush. The second attempt is less direct, made with the help of Christopher Robin. Pooh uses camouflage to ascend with a blue balloon, to look like the sky, having himself rolled in the mud in order to look like a dark cloud. When the bees become anxious, Pooh allays their suspicion by having Christopher Robin walk under with an open umbrella, pretending it's going to rain. When a bee stings Pooh, he asks to be brought down, which Christopher Robin does by shooting at the balloon with his gun. His first shot misses the balloon but, as we saw, hits Pooh. The second shot is successful. Although Milne is discreet enough not to insert any overt moral into the tale, its cautionary nature is quite evident: an appetite unbridled is likely to bring more trouble than satisfaction, more pain than pleasure.

Pooh's attempts to disguise his aims are so transparent and the naïvety of them so appealing that we may feel the author heaps too many punishments on him. More interesting than Milne's conscious moral stance seems to me the unconscious dynamic apparent in the relations of the characters in the tales. Freud's three-part diagram of the psyche seems to me so far appropriate that we can see Pooh acting as the instinctive id (appetites and drives) and the author who constructs the plot functioning as a superego (the conscience as punisher). Christopher Robin, on such a reading, could be featured as the conscious ego, which tries to mediate between the other two parts of the psyche. He does have a greater reality sense, but in this tale is too easily manipulated by Pooh's need to fulfil his appetite. I think these attributions are neat and accurate as far as they go. Finally, however, they are limiting, and as we move into later adventures I shall introduce a less mechanical approach to the drama of the psyche as I see it in the book.

Chapter 2 offers another cautionary tale, one that gets its plot from Aesop's Fables: A hungry fox found some food left by a shepherd in a hollow tree; slipping in he ate until his stomach was so distended he could not get out. Another fox, hearing his cries of self-pity, suggested, 'Well, stay there until you are as thin as you were when you went in; then you'll get out quite easily.' This brief narrative illustrates the editor's contention that 'in a good fable the lesson is implicit in the narrative itself.'² His use of the word lesson is deliberate, since the word moral would imply higher concerns than this or many other animal fables warrant. In fact, this fable supports an even stricter observation made by Ben Edwin Perry, that the primary aim of a fable is often not even 'instructive but satirical.'³ The second fox offers a solution, but it is one the first fox would be forced to follow in any case. Neither self-righteous nor really helpful, the second fox falls halfway between two more pronounced reactions that we shall see in Milne's adaptation of this fable situation.

The chapter begins with a bit of foreshadowing, Pooh doing his stoutness exercises in front of a mirror. He then goes out walking, sees a hole in a bank, and goes into a sequence of reasoning almost identical to the one that got him into his difficulty with the bees. He infers that Rabbit is in the hole and will provide him with food and a chance to show off his talent for humming. Although food, including honey, is again the main stimulator of appetite and then action, added to it is a naïve egoism, also hinted at in the presence of the mirror in the opening scene. This new theme plays its part in the story and distinguishes this chapter from the first. Pooh does find Rabbit inside the hole and is offered tea, on which he gorges himself. As a result, when he tries to get out of the hole, he can't, and when he tries to back into Rabbit's burrow again, he can't do that either. He is stuck, and Rabbit willingly lets him know it is from eating too much.

The lesson is overt, but enunciated by a character who does not have our sympathy. (Rabbit had tried to pretend he was not at home when Pooh first called and clearly wanted Pooh to leave before he actually tried to.) In fact, Milne is about to present us with a contrast between the responses of two characters whose attitudes represent the positive and negative poles of an important theme. The other character is Christopher Robin, who when he hears what has happened says, 'Silly old Bear.' He goes to Pooh and gently establishes that the greedy bear must go a week without food in order to get unstuck from the hole. But unlike Rabbit's recriminatory attitude, Christopher Robin's is positive and supportive. He offers to read to Pooh during this week of enforced slimming. Rabbit, meanwhile, deals with Pooh's other end, inside his burrow, in quite a different fashion, hanging his towels up to dry on Pooh's legs. While it is true that it would be pointless for Rabbit to read to Pooh's legs, it is also true, as we shall see, that Rabbit is the sort of person who treats others according to his own convenience. The humour of his using the legs as a towel rack illustrates Bergson's contention that the imposition of the mechanical upon the living is always comic. Pooh is demeaned, or to be exact, his subhuman physiology is emphasized. But the focus is less on him as stuffed toy than on him as id-driven and ego-centred child. After he has lived through the consequence of overeating, the story closes with an affirmation of his naïve egoism. He walks away humming, somehow still proud of himself.

The imaginativeness that Pooh showed in his plan for getting the bees' honey is evident again in chapter 3. The comedy of this adventure depends on Pooh's going in a circle as he tracks his own, and then his and Piglet's, paw marks. They decide that the big prints are those of a Woozle and the small ones those of a Wizzle. By the time there are four different sets of tracks, Piglet has become frightened and insists he has an important matter to attend to at home. He is then startled by Christopher Robin, who has been enjoying an overview of the whole tracking adventure from high in an oak tree. Piglet recognizes him, but instead of being reassured, still runs off home. Christopher Robin describes what he has seen in such a way that Pooh is able to reason out that he has been following his own tracks. The chapter concludes, as did the last one, with an affirmation of Pooh's essential nature. Although he claims, 'I am a Bear of No Brain at All,' Christopher Robin insists he is 'the Best Bear in All the World,' at which Pooh brightens up and goes home for lunch.

The introduction of Piglet in this chapter adds another dimension to the book's gradually emerging picture of basic psychological traits. Piglet is small, his name a diminutive; he is vulnerable, fearful. His psyche is so underdeveloped that when fear arises it can be allayed only by a retreat to his home. In contrast, Pooh wishes Christopher Robin would appear and is fully reassured when he does. By running home, Piglet escapes the immediate threat of Woozles but carries the fear with him. By remaining, Pooh discovers that the Woozle tracks are his own, that he has nothing to fear but his own imagination.

Freud contended that instinctual drives and naked emotions are basic, primary. D. W. Winnicott disagreed, believing that 'it is the self that must precede the self's use of instinct'; thus 'instinctual satisfaction,' though pressing and important, is not really primary. Winnicott's formulation of his sense of an individual's vital centre is important to our understanding not only of Pooh but of ourselves. 'The individual can come together and exist as a unit, not as a defence against anxiety but as an expression of I Am, I am alive, I am myself.'⁴ The phrase 'defence against anxiety' can be illustrated from this adventure. At the point where anxiety appears, Pooh and Piglet believe they may be on the track of a number of Woozles. Pooh licks his hot nose to cool down his anxiety. But as Piglet finds when he emulates Pooh by licking his own nose, 'it brought very little comfort.' Piglet, who is usually unable to get beyond a search for relief from anxiety, then reverts to the one sure defence, the walls of his house. Pooh at this stage, though more advanced than Piglet, also looks outside himself for reassurance. But he looks to a person rather than an object, and to the qualities in that person. Schematically, I would contend that Christopher Robin stands for the self; he has an overview of the whole situation and is able to see that the two lower centres are frightening themselves. Pooh, in an advance over chapter 1, can be the developing ego, and Piglet can represent the fears of the id. From another point of view, of course, Pooh also contains all three of these facets of the psyche: he is driven by id appetites, he is developing that realistic sense of cause and effect by which the ego learns to manage the id, but most important he has that sense of 'I A m, I am alive, I am myself' that we shall see unfolding in future adventures and that can be clearly distinguished from mere ego assertiveness. (Pooh's modesty and empathy never desert him.)

Chapter 4 introduces two new characters, Eeyore, a gloomy, self-pitying anti-self, and Owl, a pompous, unperceptive word-monger. Meeting Eeyore, Pooh notices that his tail is missing. As Eeyore intensifies his guilt-inducing demands for pity, Pooh experiences a minor conflict, which provides the central theme of the chapter. Unable to think of anything helpful to say, he resolves to do something instead. He promises Eeyore he will go find his tail. His choice of commitment and action over soothing but unproductive words will carry Pooh through to success in his undertaking. Characteristically, he begins by looking for help from someone with superior insight, in this case, Owl.

At Owl's door, Pooh is confronted with a puzzle that provides the reader with a first hint of just how helpful Owl will be. Owl has a knocker and a bell-pull, with confusing instructions for each. These instructions tell us that we are about to meet an intellectual game player. As with Eeyore, Pooh in his naïvety does not see through the game but nullifies its effect by calling out for Owl, who opens the door. Having told Owl of Eeyore's loss, Pooh waits for advice. The ensuing exchange is revealing: Owl says, 'The customary procedure in such cases is as follows.' Confused by these abstract words, Pooh again reveal his naïvety, asking, 'What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?'

Pooh's modesty balances his ignorance. But the nature of his misunderstanding is characteristic. Having just finished the long walk to Owl's home in the Hundred Acre Wood, Pooh is not only tired but hungry. He will soon hint that he would like some food (and will be ignored by Owl), but at this point he simply reduces Owl's abstractions to particulars, the kind of particulars that appeal to his sensuous nature. Psychologically, Pooh's reduction to concreteness of Owl's intellectualisms illustrates an observation of Freud's, that an infant takes pleasure in sounds themselves: 'He puts words together without regard to the condition that they should make sense, in order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm or rhyme. Little by little he is forbidden this enjoyment, till all that remains permitted to him are significant combinations of words. But when he is older attempts still emerge at disregarding the restrictions.'⁵ So Pooh, under stress, reverts to infantile understanding. But this regression, as the Freudian would view it, is actually Pooh's strength.

Having failed in his hints for food, Pooh attempts to rise to Owl's level, but cannot keep his attention on Owl's increasingly abstract words. When Pooh is finally allowed to leave, Owl proudly shows off his bell rope at the door. Since it reminds Pooh of something, he asks Owl how he came by it. When Owl responds that he pulled it off a bush, Pooh recognizes the rope as Eeyore's tail. Just as Owl's wordiness hides an insensitive nature, so Pooh's lack of intellect hides a perceptiveness that allows him to fulfil his pledge to Eeyore. After returning the tail, Pooh goes home to satisfy his appetite with 'a little snack of something' and to express his sense of self with a little verse, celebrating his achievement.

Chapter 5 continues from the Woozle chapter the tension between a desire for adventure and a feeling of fear. As in the earlier chapter, Pooh initiates the adventure, telling Piglet he has decided 'to catch a Heffalump.' Piglet as before joins in, at first with interest and later with fear. During the discussion stage, they try to work out a plan to get the Heffalump into the trap they will dig. As in the first two chapters, appetite turns into the motivating force. Pooh asks Piglet how he would bait the trap if it were Pooh he was trying to catch. Piglet suggests honey, and Pooh's imagination is immediately transported into a scene in which he excitedly verbalizes sampling a jar of honey. Piglet finds it difficult to interrupt Pooh, whose reality sense has been overpowered by a fantasy of appetite indulgence.

Pooh goes home to bring a pot of honey as bait, taking a generous sample to verify that it really is honey. Having dug and baited the trap, he and Piglet return to their separate homes for the night. Pooh wakes late in the night and realizes he has donated his last honey jar to the Heffalump trap. Unable to get back to sleep, he goes to the trap and begins licking out the small amount of honey he left in the bottom of the jar. Meanwhile, Piglet has also awakened and begins to have anxious thoughts. Whereas Pooh had imagined a Heffalump eating his honey, Piglet worries that the Heffalump may eat pigs. He thinks of pretending to have a headache when it is time to go inspect the trap the next morning, but realizes he will have wasted half his day if there is no Heffalump there. So he decides to go while it is still dark to see if the trap has worked.

When he gets near the pit, Piglet hears a creature roaring inside; he runs off, crying, 'a Heffalump, a Horrible Heffalump!' As he continues, this cry for help gets distorted to 'a Herrible Hoffalump! Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump! Holl, Holl, a Hoffable Hellerump!' The seeming realization of his fears causes Piglet to lose control of meaningful language completely. Whereas Pooh earlier interpreted abstract words he had never heard before into concrete ones compatible with his experience and nature, Piglet begins with a statement whose meaning is clear, but under the stress of his emotion distorts it to comic confusion. The comedy comes partly from Piglet's loss of control. In Freud's view, each of us has experienced such a loss and is anxious not to repeat it, especially since society puts so strong a premium on keeping control, maintaining decorum. When we see someone else lose control, we feel superior. If our anxiety has been great enough the relief we feel can easily be expressed in laughter. As Freud put it, the listener to a joke 'laughs with the quota of physical energy which has become free through the lifting' of anxiety or inhibition.⁶

We need to look more closely at the comic meaning in Piglet's distortions. The first merely transposes two vowels: 'a Herrible Hoffalump.' The second becomes more scrambled, and gets more communicative: 'Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump.' Connecting 'Hell' with the pit they have dug is not difficult. The third is clearly Freudian—at least for those of us who ordered our reading glasses from a Viennese oculist: 'Holl, Holl, a Hoffable Hellarump!' Here in the climactic position, we find Hell given additional meaning by its connection with a taboo lower part of the anatomy. While not suggesting that Milne intended the effect, I am insisting it is there. As Freud emphasized, 'The joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible' to consciousness.⁷

Piglet takes Christopher Robin to the trap, where they see a creature bumping its head against a tree root. Suddenly recognizing it as Pooh with his head stuck in a jar, Christopher Robin begins to laugh. He laughs because he gets the joke. That is, like a joke, the situation has kept Christopher Robin in suspense until the punch line when he sees the double entendre—roaring Heffalump equals Pooh with his head stuck in a honey jar. Since the surprise has involved anxiety, generated by Piglet's fear, we can understand why Milne describes Christopher Robin as laughing so hard. He is also laughing at Pooh as an example of Bergson's 'mechanical encrusted on the living.' By this reading, Pooh is the butt of the joke, an outcome consistent with the pattern of chapters 1 and 2: Pooh's appetite gets him into trouble. But there is more to the situation than that.

The outcome, though familiar, is different from our expectation. Pooh finally frees his head by breaking the jar. But rather than his being the butt of the joke, it is Piglet who feels ashamed and runs away. As Christopher Robin takes Pooh home to breakfast, he confesses his love of Pooh.

As before, Pooh's feeling of worth is reinforced by Christopher Robin, and he emerges from the experience with his sense of self intact. But Piglet feels humiliated and goes home with (as I take it) an actual headache to match the one he had earlier thought of using for an excuse. Or we could say he goes home with the headache Pooh has earned from smashing his head against a root to break the jar in which it is stuck. Piglet functions as a scapegoat, carrying off all the shame, while Christopher Robin and Pooh can rejoice in the release of tension that follows their earlier anxiety and restraint.

Yet rightly seen, Piglet's actions deserve praise, not shame. He it was who overcame fear to go to see if there were a Heffalump in the trap. Why is his courage not recognized? The answer, I think, also lies in Piglet. He is so defensive that he cannot laugh, at himself or another. It is his choice to run away, to opt for isolation instead of companionship. If he had been less ego-conscious, he could have begun by laughing at Pooh and ended by laughing at his own fear, a fear that was certainly not unwarranted. But he chooses retreat and pain. In the adventure we are about to turn to, he will again suffer but will finally be pushed to self-assertion.

Chapter 7 is the only chapter in the book in which overt hostility appears. The source of it is Rabbit, who wants the newcomers, Kanga and Roo, to leave and proposes to kidnap Roo to effect their departure. He involves Pooh and Piglet, but finds them poor planners, not really able to focus on his plot. Piglet even suggests that since Kanga is said to be somewhat fierce, the plot may not be sound. But Rabbit scorns Piglet's lack of courage and carries on with a plan to have Pooh distract Kanga while he stuffs Piglet in her pocket and takes Roo away. As in the Heffalump chapter, Piglet is the one who is shamed. His suffering begins immediately, as he is bounced around when Kanga hops away. Arriving home, she recognizes Piglet immediately, but decides to play her part in the deception by pretending that Piglet is Roo and treating him roughly while putting him to bed. Despite Piglet's best efforts to assert his own identity, Kanga persists in the pretence, giving him a (cold) bath, scrubbing him (hard), getting soap in his mouth, and finally telling her child that if he doesn't take his medicine, he will grow up to be 'small and weak like Piglet.'

At this point, Christopher Robin arrives with the news that Roo is enjoying himself at the house of Rabbit, who has become fond of him. But like Kanga, Christopher Robin refuses to recognize Piglet. He and Kanga play the game of who-is-it? While Kanga feeds Piglet the medicine, Christopher Robin decides he is a relative of Pooh's named Henry Pootel.

Pushed too far, Piglet finally takes action. As he has done twice before, he runs off home, but this time not in fear. When he is almost home, he rolls in the dust until he has resumed his old dirty colour again. This assertion of his own sense of his identity receives an implicit reward at the end of the chapter in the pairings that become a new part of the weekly routine: Kanga with Pooh, Roo with Rabbit, and Piglet with Christopher Robin. When Pooh gains a new mentor in the competent mother, Kanga, Piglet is able to take his place with Christopher Robin, an important advance over the end of the Heffalump episode.

As constant second fiddle to the more assertive Pooh, Piglet is a character that draws on the sympathies of many young children who have an older sibling. His repeated failure to rise to the challenges that Pooh always meets successfully is finally corrected in this episode. Even here, however, his attempt to play the trickster meets with initial failure. When his emulation of Roo is discarded, he cannot step straight back into his identity as Piglet. Instead he must undergo an aggressive undermining of his identity by both Christopher Robin and Kanga. He runs from this threat but erases the unaccepted new clean identity in favour of his old soiled one. We may speculate that there is an important difference between being un-washed and alone out of self-pity and actively choosing that condition. Not only has Piglet gained recognition by Christopher Robin, we shall find in the next-to-last episode that he has become capable of creative action.

The three final chapters of the book provide respectively an impulsive act of modest heroism, a thoughtful and daring confirmation of it, and a concluding celebration of Pooh's full selfhood. If the chapter we have just considered represents a break in Pooh's development—as he goes along with an authoritative but mean-minded Rabbit—the chapter that follows it balances Roo's kidnapping by having Pooh save Roo's life. The goal of the adventure proposed by Christopher Robin is to find the North Pole. All the animals of the forest are collected and march off in a line behind Christopher Robin. When they stop for lunch, it comes out that none of them knows what the North Pole looks like. Then Roo falls in a stream, and most of the animals respond in their characteristic and unhelpful ways. But Pooh gets a pole and holds it over the water so that Roo can cling to it and climb out. Christopher Robin looks at the long stick Pooh has used and proclaims that Pooh has found the North Pole. He then plants it in the ground with a message to that effect tied to it. The expedition over, they all go back home. Thus Christopher Robin's pretend quest culminates in an actual crisis in which Pooh's down-to-earth nature again triumphs. The pole that he unthinkingly uses is then proclaimed as the goal of the quest. With the help of Christopher Robin, he has triumphed in reality and in imagination.

If unthinking action characterizes Pooh's quick response in chapter 8, cogitation and a plan precede his heroism in chapter 9. This chapter has the most literary structure of any in the book. It shifts point of view three times, the fourth being a return to the first. Each of the first three sections begins with the same event, rain that lasts for days. But we shall be keeping our attention on psychic development.

The first section is Piglet's. Isolated by the flooding caused by the downpour, he wishes for company but decides that since he is so small he, unlike any of his friends, 'can't do anything. ' As the rain continues, Piglet finally asks himself what Christopher Robin would do. This reminds him of a story Christopher Robin told of a man on a desert island who had put a plea for help in a empty bottle and thrown it into the water. Piglet is inspired to do the same. His desire for company and his taking an initiative to be rescued are signs of Piglet's growth.

Pooh, meanwhile, has awakened from a long sleep to find his living room flooded. He takes ten jars of honey out on a limb of his house, and consumes all the honey over the next four days. Then, seeing a bottle floating near, he jumps in the water for it, hoping it contains honey. Instead, it actually contains Piglet's note, which disappoints Pooh until he makes out a P and decides it is intended for him. Wanting to get it to Christopher Robin to find out what it says, he comes up with an idea, to float on one of his empty honey jars. He names it The Floating Bear. Despite difficulties keeping his balance, he starts for Christopher Robin's house.

Christopher Robin has been marking the growing height of the water with sticks. After the rise on which he lives is turned into an island, he is visited by Owl, who converses in language so abstract that even Christopher Robin can't understand him. The boy is worried about Pooh, who suddenly appears. When Christopher Robin has read Piglet's message, he asks Owl to rescue Piglet. Owl declines: 'It is doubtful if the necessary dorsal muscles—' Christopher Robin interrupts to urge him at least to go reassure Piglet that help is coming. He concludes, 'Oh, don't talk, Owl, go on quick!' Left to plan the rescue, Christopher Robin and Pooh agree that the jar will not be adequate for two. Then Pooh comes up with a suggestion so unexpected and helpful that it leaves Christopher Robin open-mouthed. He suggests they use the boy's umbrella as a boat. And so they do.

In this chapter, both Piglet and Pooh become more mature and resourceful. Pooh outgrows the limitation that has also been his strong point through most of the book. As a Bear of Very Little Brain, he has allowed his appetite to get him in trouble, but he has also shown up Owl's hollow wisdom in finding Eeyore's tail. He has dreamed up a Woozle and tried to catch a Heffalump, two imaginative but unrealistic exercises. But he has acted instinctively to save Roo. Now, however, he has come up with two innovative insights, both of which he is able to execute successfully. His only remaining limitation is his inability to read, and that problem is addressed in the book's conclusion.

The final chapter contains the apotheosis of Pooh, as well as the exposure of Eeyore.⁸ When Pooh hears about the party, he makes up a song in which two voices contend. One celebrates Pooh and the other tends not to know what all the fuss is about. One of the affirmative lines in the song is important: 'Well, Pooh was a Bear of Enormous Brain—' Since Pooh has throughout insisted the opposite, the exaggeration in the song represents a turning point. Because of his insight in seeing two objects as potential boats, Pooh must give up the stance of self-deprecation and accept the justice of Christopher Robin's naming the second boat ' The Brain of Pooh. ' This advance is validated by the present Pooh receives, 'a Special Pencil Case.' The box and its implements indicate that Pooh is ready to move beyond simple illiteracy to the world of reading and writing. We may fear that our hero will thereby lose the ability to take direct action. But taking Christopher Robin as an example of the dispassionate (but active) self, we can see that this gift continues Pooh on the right path.

At the end of the tale, just before Pooh is dragged upstairs one last time, Christopher Robin asks whether Pooh's pencil case is better than his. The story-teller replies that it is 'just the same.' The author seems to be making two psychological points here. He is probably suggesting a connection—if not an identity—between Christopher Robin and Pooh. And he is certainly showing an awareness of that childish egoism that his son later quoted Milne as believing in.⁹ But the passage also assumes that Christopher Robin's enforced socialization at school does not mean giving up the chief companion of his freer development in that make-believe world of animals where he first played out important feelings. His sense of limitation and potentiality, fear and confidence, gloom and joy find their integration in Pooh, who does not let the negative personae dominate, whose own positive responses are dependable and whose self-doubts have been resolved by the end.

Winnie-the-Pooh is a book full of acceptance, as we have seen; it is also full of integration, not just psychologically in Pooh, but in the happenings of its plot. All the animals are gathered together in the second chapter, to help free Pooh, in the eighth, when they go to discover the North Pole, and in the tenth, at the final party. Newcomers are integrated into the community. The pairings at the end of the chapter in which Kanga and Roo arrive in the forest provide benevolent links between Rabbit and Roo (aggressor and victim), Pooh and Kanga (the dreamy and the down-to-earth), and Christopher Robin and Piglet. This last pair, as indicated earlier, is in some ways the most important. Even the smallest and weakest, the most fearful and retreating of the individualized inhabitants of this world, even Piglet advances to a special relation with the support figure of the tales.

Christopher Robin is the authority who decides when to pull Pooh out of Rabbit's hole, the removed one who has an overview of the Woozle adventure, the involved one who sees through the supposed Heffalump, the trusted one who Kanga knows will ensure that no harm comes to Roo, the adventurous one who leads the North Pole expedition, the resourceful one whom Piglet, Owl and Pooh wish to join when the deluge comes, and the considerate and appreciative one who gives the party that draws them all together at the end. The party is in honour of Pooh, whose development of many of Christopher Robin's own traits the boy has been mainly concerned to support.

The party indulges the animal pleasure in eating and the social need for harmonious relations among diverse creatures. It thus reinforces the consistent import of the narrative, that both fearful and ignorant creatures can gain confidence and mastery. Pooh and Piglet function as the backward parts of the psyche. Their humorous adventures are the main focus of the episodes. But just out of the limelight is the human being who is really the concern of the tales, whose worries are exposed through the animal surrogates, whose strengths are implicitly emphasized by contrast with the protagonists' relative lack of competence. Christopher Robin makes room at the party table for all the animals—gloomy Eeyore, aggressive Rabbit, expressive Roo, competent Kanga, pontifical Owl, anxious Piglet, and a basically self-confident Pooh, who is now revealed as brainy. The covert reassurance to the child is both psychological and social: yes, impulses are sometimes contradictory and friends do sometimes disagree, but somehow they can be brought together in that integration that makes possible both outer relationships and inner growth.

Notes

1. A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton 1974).
2. Fables of Aesop, trans. S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982) 3 and xiii.
3. Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1965) xxii.
4. Playing and Reality, 116 and 66.
5. Sigmund Freud Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, (New York: Norton 1963) 125.
6. Ibid 149.
7. Ibid 103.
8. A creature of gloom, Eeyore demonstrates ego consciousness each time he appears. In this chapter he shows if not his true nature, at least the motivation behind his persona of ironic gloom. Deciding that he is about to be given the present intended for Pooh, he makes a self-approving speech that exposes both his lack of social perception and his misplaced egoism (since he has done nothing to warrant receiving the gift).
9. The Enchanted Places 42-3.

PRINCE RABBIT AND THE PRINCESS WHO COULD NOT LAUGH (1966)

Lavinia Russ (review date 10 October 1966)

SOURCE: Russ, Lavinia. Review of Prince Rabbit and the Princess Who Could Not Laugh, by A. A. Milne, illustrated by Mary Shepard. Publishers Weekly 190, no. 15 (10 October 1966): 74.

A magic name doesn't always make a magic book: in these two stories [Prince Rabbit and the Princess Who Could Not Laugh ] the magic of A. A. Milne's name is spread so thin as to be almost invisible. They aren't bad stories as stories go—Milne couldn't have written a bad story if he'd tried—but neither are they "the very best butter," and that's what his other stories have conditioned us to expect from him. But you had better have it on your shelves; his name coupled with Mary Shepard's (who illustrated them) on a jacket would sell a "History of Bollweevils for Young People."

FURTHER READING

Biography

Thwaite, Ann. A. A. Milne: The Man behind Winnie-the-Pooh. New York, N.Y.: Random House, 1990, 553 p.

Biography of Milne that stresses the connections between his personal life and his writing career.

Criticism

Bruno, Orpheus. "The Importance of Being Portly." In Postmodern Pooh, edited by Frederick Crews, pp. 65-79. New York, N.Y.: North Point Press, 2001.

Argues against prying too much literary meaning from Winnie-the-Pooh, which Bruno equates to being a Shakespearean work for the very young.

Catheter, Sisera. "Just Lack a Woman." In Postmodern Pooh, edited by Frederick Crews, pp. 47-63. New York, N.Y.: North Point Press, 2001.

Heated argument from a feminist scholar that Milne and, by extension, the Winnie-the-Pooh books are anti-feminist.

Hunt, Peter. " Winnie-the-Pooh and Domestic Fantasy." In Stories and Society: Children's Literature in Its Social Context, edited by Dennis Butts, pp. 112-24. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Critical reinterpretation of Winnie-the-Pooh as a form of domestic fantasy.

Newell, Ethel. "At the North End of Pooh: A Study of Bibliotherapy." In Readings about Children's Literature, edited by Evelyn Rose Robinson, pp. 40-5. New York, N.Y.: David McKay Company, Inc., 1966.

Discusses the benefits of employing the Winnie-the-Pooh books as a form of bibliotherapy.

Nikolajeva, Maria. "Land of (Condensed) Milk and Honey." In From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children's Literature, pp. 93-103. Lanham, Md.: Children's Literature Association/Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000.

Analysis of how the Hundred-Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh is an example of "Arcadia," which represents a simple life of joy and contentment.

Window, Harvey C. "Paradoxical Persona: The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh. "In The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook, edited by Frederick Crews, pp. 3-12. New York, N.Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963.

Suggests that Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books succeed as works of children's literature through a mixture of subliminal and subtextual meaning.

Additional coverage of Milne's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 5; Children's Literature Review, Vols. 1, 26; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 133; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 10, 77, 100, 160; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 2005; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Children's Writers, Vol. 5; St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Vol. 4; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; Something about the Author, Vol. 100; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 6, 88; Writers for Children; and Yesterday's Authors of Books for Children, Vol. 1.