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Title: Watership Down
Author: Richard Adams
Genre: Classic YA
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: Rabbits escape the destruction of their old warren and try to find a new one.
Thoughts: I kept hearing references to this book, so I figured I finally had to get around to reading it. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it.
There appears to be a sub-genre of children's literature in which the characters' home is destroyed and they have to go adventuring until they finally make a new one. The Borrowers, the Bromeliad trilogy, The Rats of NIMH, and so on. I'm not sure if Watership Down kicked this off, but it's certainly an early example. And in a lot of ways, this is great children's literature. Adventure and great tension, some gorgeous descriptions, memorable characters.
I think a lot of my ambivalence comes from how the does are treated. Yes, I realize that the author based a bunch of this on real rabbit behavior. But real rabbits don't form military juntas or cooperate with seagulls, so it's not like he was completely constrained here. And the female characters are so very much treated like harem slaves that I found it deeply uncomfortable. They're passive and silly, praised entirely for their looks, unmourned when they die, and wanted solely as breeding stock. One rabbit abandons his "wife" in the land of the Lotus Eaters and never even tries to convince her to escape or thinks of her ever again. I realize this was written in the 70s. But the fact that it was originally written for two little girls and the author barely considers the female characters to be more than sex objects in the most literal sense is a bit horrifying.
If you can get past that, though, it's otherwise delightful. But I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable reading this to my kids. If I did, I think we'd probably have a marathon of Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess and The Secret Garden immediately afterwards.
Author: Richard Adams
Genre: Classic YA
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: Rabbits escape the destruction of their old warren and try to find a new one.
Thoughts: I kept hearing references to this book, so I figured I finally had to get around to reading it. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it.
There appears to be a sub-genre of children's literature in which the characters' home is destroyed and they have to go adventuring until they finally make a new one. The Borrowers, the Bromeliad trilogy, The Rats of NIMH, and so on. I'm not sure if Watership Down kicked this off, but it's certainly an early example. And in a lot of ways, this is great children's literature. Adventure and great tension, some gorgeous descriptions, memorable characters.
I think a lot of my ambivalence comes from how the does are treated. Yes, I realize that the author based a bunch of this on real rabbit behavior. But real rabbits don't form military juntas or cooperate with seagulls, so it's not like he was completely constrained here. And the female characters are so very much treated like harem slaves that I found it deeply uncomfortable. They're passive and silly, praised entirely for their looks, unmourned when they die, and wanted solely as breeding stock. One rabbit abandons his "wife" in the land of the Lotus Eaters and never even tries to convince her to escape or thinks of her ever again. I realize this was written in the 70s. But the fact that it was originally written for two little girls and the author barely considers the female characters to be more than sex objects in the most literal sense is a bit horrifying.
If you can get past that, though, it's otherwise delightful. But I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable reading this to my kids. If I did, I think we'd probably have a marathon of Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess and The Secret Garden immediately afterwards.
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no subject
Date: 2013-06-14 09:57 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-06-14 11:23 pm (UTC)From:(I also was obsessed with Redwall. Totally reading at least the first couple to ARR, when he's old enough. I hope they hold up. I do remember the later ones got kind of repetitive, but at least the first few seemed wonderful. My mom read a couple of them to us, and did different voices for all the animals and it was awesome.)
no subject
Date: 2013-06-18 08:17 pm (UTC)From:So I went into the book with two major reference points, I knew about the death rabbit from the film, and my friend Ben wrote a really terrific song about the book, which can be found here (There's also an MP3 if you go up to the songs level of the URL), so I went into reading the book with some basic ideas about the rabbit religious life as well.
I noticed a lot of the same gender disparity issues that you did. I spent a lot of the book waiting for a capable female character to show up, and not really getting it, although there is the various plotting done with does in order to get away from the lotus eaters. So while I liked the overall feel of the book and the world, I found it hard to get a handle on the viewpoint, even though I really liked some of the characters. I spent a lot of the book looking forwards to the next mythological bit, instead of focusing on the action in the main plotline.