Reading Notes: Brer Rabbit, Part A

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    I loved these stories! I had some vague memories of reading similar stories when I was little, and this reading brought those flooding back. My family owned some of Thornton W. Burgess's stories that I read, and Uncle Remus was a major influence of his stories. It was nice to gain some new insight (basically read the source material!) for these stories, and get to learn more about characters I had already grown to love in another author's stories. 

    The thing that's both so charming and so frustrating about all of the main characters we read about is both how clever and how easily fooled they are. For example, in the sixth story, "Mr. Wolf Makes a Failure," Brer Rabbit is very clever in the way that he escapes from Brer Fox. He plays a trick on him by loudly saying that dead people raise their legs and shout when others come to look at them. Brer Fox doesn't know any better, so he does it, and Brer Rabbit gets away really easily. So Brer Rabbit came up with a good and clever way to not get eaten, but he still came to visit the "dead body" of Brer Fox in the first place. Similarly, Brer Fox falls for the same trick twice! Brer Rabbit uses what we would now call reverse psychology to get Brer Fox to throw him into the briar patch. Old Man Tarrypin uses the exact same reverse psychology to get Brer Fox to throw him into the water. But Brer Fox can be clever, like when he made the tar-baby in the first place. Yet he is so easily outwitted by the same method twice. I know that part of what makes these stories just so wonderful and charming is that, like in a cartoon, the audience knows what's coming and can anticipate it, and then laugh with delight when they see that they were right. It still does astound me a little bit. But I think that I'm using the wrong lens, then, when I read these stories.

Bibliography: Brer Rabbit Tales by Joel Chandler Harris. Tales collected in the U.S. in the 1870's and 1880's.