Elizabeth Hale

Truth and Claw: The Beastly Children and Childlike Beasts of Saki, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame

This essay explores how three writers active in the Edwardian period represent childish bad behaviour. Despite their obvious differences of genre and approach, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) share an interest in bad or naughty characters, adult and child. These characters are driven by a fierce internal logic that cuts across social convention and the needs or desires of other characters: particularly when they write about children, Potter, Grahame, and Saki characterize bad behaviour as wild, natural, and even honest. They do this by associating wildness with animal behaviour; in doing so, they draw on Romantic ideals of the child’s purity and honesty (in the face of corrupt adult society), as well as ideals of animality. The term ‘beastly’ is thus useful here. Bad behaviour can be termed ‘beastly,’ in the sense of ‘acting in any manner unworthy of a reasonable creature,’ but it can also simply mean ‘resembling a beast in conduct, or in obeying the animal instincts’ (OED). Beastly children and childlike beasts live ruthlessly, pay heed only to what they want, are inconsiderate of the wants of those around them, and cause trouble. However troublesome to adults this behaviour might be, it underscores the natural and original qualities of idealized childhood, in stark opposition to the corruption and mixed motives of the adult world.

James Bond and the Art of Eating Eggs

James Bond eats a significant quantity of eggs in the Ian Fleming novels. In contrast to his popular, decadent image, the food consumption that provides Bond with a private identity is simple, everyday food, such as eggs, which underscore his qualities as an English Everyman, who shares the food habits of his post-war British audience, but does so with style and connoisseurship. Eggs possess further symbolic resonances for Bond9s character. In On Her Majesty9s Secret Service, eggs underscore his essential solitary individuality, but also his potential to act as a binding agent on behalf of British society. In Thunderball, in their less than healthy aspects, eggs represent the lure of forbidden food, underscoring Bond9s machismo as a lover of food and women.