Author: Margery Williams
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by William Nicholson.
Everything I know about one-sided relationships I learned from The Velveteen Rabbit. Not really, but some people might genuinely feel that way! This is a pretty cool short story (~4,000 words) dealing with mature themes for young children.
"...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” Doesn't that say it all? If you are at all familiar with the concept underlying the Pixar Toy Story movies, you will also understand what a complete rip-off they are of this 1922 classic. Toy Story itself was rooted in an earlier Pixar short, an Oscar winner titled Tin Toy. In some ways, this novel also foreshadows Watership Down.
Because I grew up outside of the US and because of family circumstances and income brackets, I actually had never even heard of this story until well into adulthood. I only just now read it because it was a free book from an on-line vendor, and therefore a golden opportunity to see what it was all about. You can read it for free here.
The plot is simple - a rabbit made from velveteen (an imitation of velvet) and stuffed with sawdust (as they were wont to do back when this book was written) feels rather unloved after Christmas day. It's only when the boy's primary toy goes missing (the rabbit is innocent, I swear!) that our velveteen friend is allowed to step up and become the new favorite.
From that point on there's no looking back, but even as he is loved, the rabbit still feels less than whole. In a real sense he's handicapped, and not by his being a stuffed toy, but because he's effectively a paraplegic, having no use of his back legs, which are essential to a rabbit not only for running, but for defense. He only realizes how handicapped he is when he encounters real rabbits during a trip into the forest with his owner.
The rabbit learns from a venerable toy horse that a toy can become real if he is truly loved. Until then, he is just a toy, and like women in the workplace (whose opportunities are thankfully improving these days), the chances for any given toy to move up are slight. Fortunately for this rabbit, the opportunity falls right into his lapin, and he and the boy become the closest of friends. Even this costs the rabbit. As the months go by, he starts growing old at a far faster rate than the boy does. His velveteen sheen is lost and his body parts start failing. His whiskers are whisked away. He was warned about this by the horse, but he realizes that the horse was right: he doesn't care, because to the boy, he is still beautiful and loved.
The problem arrives on hot wings: scarlet fever, a much more serious illness in 1922 than ever it is now. Make note of this all ye who think the past was somehow cleaner, better, brighter, whatever, than is today! There is no vaccine for what was once known as Scarlatina, but antibiotics currently work since it's actually a form of strep infection; however, scarlet fever caused two deaths in 2011, so it is no less deadly now than it was when this fairy tale was written, given the right circumstances.
The doctor, who is rather clueless, advises the parents to burn all the boy's toys. Unless the toys are going to be given to other kids, burning them isn't going to do a darned thing! Does the doctor somehow think that the boy will re-infect himself with his own variety of the bacterium? If no one else became sick, it's run its course in this household. However, this was 1922, and the rabbit is collected up and bagged with the rest of the toys, but there's an escape clause, and it doesn't involve rabbit claws. I'll leave the details to blossom for you as they did for me. To cut a short story shorter, the rabbit rabbits!
I don't have any emotional investment in this story, not having read it as a kid, but I do recommend it. Within its parameters, it was realistic, charming, inventive, warm, and quite remarkable for its time.
