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“Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day” (1917) is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, functioning mainly as a character study.

Chris Lilley’s hipster-ironic comedy techniques have been criticised for enforcing stereotypes rather than critiquing them. That said, Mansfield’s Mr Reginald Peacock reminds me very much of Chris Lilley’s high school drama teacher, and I consider Mr G. the modern Australian equivalent of this very old archetype: The youngish white man who considers himself sensitive, unappreciated, entitled and artistic, solipsistically the star of his own show, and wholly unable to empathise with others.

Mansfield’s Reginald Peacock has a clearly symbolic name, and so do other characters in this short story.

This post will be sprinkled with peacock art, because peacocks were once very fashionable in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime. Mansfield would have been surrounded by peacocks in fashion and in art. The peacock is still widely understood as a symbol of vanity, which is pretty unfair to peacocks, who are born with their magnificent plumage, and who don’t get to mate unless they strut and rattle their trains.

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SHORTCOMING

As a rule of thumb, readers are like ducklings and fall in love with the viewpoint character but I doubt I speak for myself when I say that Reginald Peacock is less empathetic than his wife from the get go, whose point of view we don’t see at all. Reginald is clearly an unreliable narrator. He imagines his wife wakes him up deliberately, but only because the world revolves around Reginald, not because his wife has a full-time ob of her own, and housework really was a fulltime job back in the early 1900s.

Reginald Peacock embodies a number of deadly sins: sloth, vanity, quiet wrath of his own wife. He is clearly envious of the aristocratic acquaintance who asks his children to shake their father’s hand each morning, and comically tries to gain the same respect from his own son by instituting the practice in his own household. He’s basically a comically depicted flaneur. I have a feeling Mansfield was surrounded by flaneurs in her adult lifetime, hanging around with artists and poets. She was also involved in theatre and acting, so I wager she knew a few Reginald Peacocks in real life.

Mansfield has Reginald self-describing himself as a bird, and how his wife clips his wings, which is a bit of an inversion because it’s most commonly women who are described as birds in fiction and art. I almost forgot for a second that peacocks are a bird. Perhaps the peacock is one of the few masculinised birds in fiction, outshadowing the peahens because of their highly decorative plumage. Mansfield didn’t exactly shy away from describing her female characters as birds. I guess Mansfield was equal opportunity on that score. By the way, what do you call the technique of comparing a human to an animal? If it happens the other way round we call it personification, so I’m going for animalification. At one point, Reginald Peacock is also likened to a frog. (He’s doing his daily exercises.) This is interesting because there’s a particular frog-person archetype which is basically the middle-aged equivalent of the younger peacock. (Peacocks are beautiful, like youth; frogs not so much.)

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Apart from the seven deadly sins, at first glance Reginald seems prone to coveting, about to breakone of the Christian commandments, first by fantasising about the latest and most beguiling of his female students. The word ‘latest’ is key here, because these women are not fully rounded in Reginald’s mind. So long as they fit his outsourced image of a desirable woman any one of them could easily be exchanged… and oh, they are, as Mansfield demonstrates with one woman after another. Ostensibly this works because Reginald sees a succession of women over the course of his working day. Aenone Fell, Miss Betty Brittle, the Countess Wilkowska, Miss Marian Morrow. The job fits him well: constant novelty all day, and the opportunity to perform in front of a revolving audience. None of these women has the time to get utterly sick of him.

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Reginald wants to be the star of his own show, leading a better life than the one he already has. As happens to the best of us, reality punctures his romanticism. For Reginald, it wouldn’t matter who he married, the day-to-day familiarity of his partner would be the killer. Reginald is all about cultivating and seeking out novelty, constantly drawn to mystery.

OPPONENT

The wife remains mindfully unnamed. She goes without a name because she exists as a function to Reginald, not as a human in her own right.

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In a flashback we learn that the wife has learned to deal with Reginald by immersing herself in the day-to-day running of their household. Reginald earns enough to keep her and their son, and in an era of no social security, this was something.

I think most people have the ability to unsee things if it’s to our detriment. It would be to the wife’s emotional advantage if she were to occasionally play along with Reginald’s games. A number of Mansfield’s short stories end with a female character seeing something (perhaps with the fling of the boot, in this case), then mindfully disregarding it. “Her First Ball” is an excellent example of that. The ‘temporary epiphany’ (more commonly known as ‘phantasmagoric’) is a feature of Impressionist fiction, though contemporary short story writers regularly use it, too. As one example, Helen Simpson utilised the phantasmagoric epiphany in her modern climate change story “ip加速器破解“. Climate change is the ultimate ‘look away’ example of our times.

Reginald seems to have some kind of phantasmagoric epiphany in this story though goodness knows what it is. I’m sure it’s only champagne-induced.

We get no insight whatsoever into the psychology of Mrs Reginald Peacock. I am relying heavily on Mansfield’s oeuvre when trying to deduce her motivations.

Reginald himself doesn’t have much of a plan other than to reluctantly be broomed about by his wife, then quietly seeths about her while fantasising about other women. If you can call that a plan.

BIG STRUGGLE

It’s pretty unpleasant being stuck for a (short-story-length) day with this pair, who clearly despise each other. (At least, Reginald despises her.) And we don’t get any big fight scene, either. The scene where Reginald comes home drunk is truncated, or perhaps that’s all that happens before husband and wife drift off to sleep.

ANAGNORISIS

In Christianity the peacock is considered a symbol of rebirth, but there’s no such rebirth here. Mansfield clearly isn’t using that particular aspect of peacock symbolism. Reginald starts out lazy, self-absorbed and vain, and ends the same way.

It’s possible that his wife finally had a gutsful of the guy and experienced a self-revelation of her own. But we don’t get to hear her response. (And I don’t imagine that’s how it went down. See below.)

NEW SITUATION

However, there’s one small shift that happens at the end, and that wholly resides within me (and I assume in other readers). I see what Reginald’s wife must have initially seen in him, and how she might put up with him still. To be clear, it’s not evident that she does put up with him. This was an era in which a married woman with a child was economically and socially unable to leave her husband. But when Reginald draws her into his own game for a moment, even after scaring her with the clunk of his flung boot, he says, “Dear lady, I should be so charmed–so charmed!” and I’m reminded of the ending of another Mansfield short story, “A Blaze“. At the end of “A Blaze”, husband and wife (Elsa and Victor) come together in what I consider an 伕理ip破解版无限试用relationship, in which one person loves to be ‘babied’ by the other. Both get a lot of reward from it. (The Japanese concept has far more to it than that.)

If “A Blaze” had been published after “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day” I’d have guessed that the marriage dynamic in “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day” were a practice story for the more sophisticated but similar relationships in “A Blaze”. In fact, “A Blaze” is the earlier story.

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EXTRAPOLATION

The title “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day” suggests this is a typical day-in-the-life-of story, not an extraordinary one.

Wouldn’t you like to know how (if) Reginald’s wife responded? I want her to throw his other boot at his head, but I doubt that happened. I suspect this is one of those relationships where it’s fight fight all day, kiss kiss at night.

But I don’t know. My prior reading experience of “A Blaze” is colouring my interpretation of Mr Reginald Peacock’s marriage. Sticking only to this particular story, my best evidence for a peaceful reunion is the darkness. Reginald is clearly a night person, preferring to sleep into the day and partying at night. When he returns home to his wife, he can’t see her through the darkness. Aided by liquor and by the fantasy life he’s been living all evening without her, the darkness itself might provide sufficient mystery for him to pretend his wife is not his wife, but a more mysterious and alluring member of his cast. In turn, she might imagine Reginald is not Reginald.

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RESONANCE

Even today, highlighted by the 2024 pandemic, the work traditionally expected of women has less social and economic value attached to it than work traditionally done by men. Today, much of women’s work is also invisibilised. I’ve wondered at times if the housewives of the early 20th century at least had their work considered proper work, even though they weren’t personally recompensed, of course.

Mansfield’s 1917 creation of Mr Reginald Peacock is the painfully comic portrait of a man who sort of does consider the running of a house ‘work’ but sort of actually doesn’t at all. We know this because he encourages his wife to hire someone (while also making it impossible for her to 伕理ip破解版无限试用anyone). The hiring of help is more about status for himself rather than help for his wife. Reginald’s his cognitive dissonance is right there on the page, because when his wife requires him to get out of bed by late morning, and to let her know if he won’t be in for his evening meal, he clearly disrespects the job she is doing.

This short story shows that in the first half twentieth century, while housework and childcare were indeed considered a fulltime job, the cognitive dissonance of husbands infuriated women, even temporarily married and child free women like Katherine Mansfield: Wifely work was proper work — invaluable! — but not 伕理ip破解版无限试用.

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Header illustration: ‘Le Soir’, a decorative panel by Camille Martin (1861-1898)

Gaslighting, parentification, spousification, self-objectification, coercive control… People living in 1974 did not have ready access to the language of psychology and found it difficult to describe emotionally abusive relationships, let alone talk about the shame. Likewise, there wasn’t the language to describe that disorienting transition from girlhood to womanhood.

Continue reading “Rich As Stink by Alice Munro”

Tawny Scrawny Lion is a Little Golden Book first published in 1952, written by Kathryn Jackson and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. The same team worked on The Saggy Baggy Elephant (1947).

This picture book is an interesting example — indeed, the peak example — of how storytellers for children must cast aside certain unpleasant food chain facts when anthropomorphising animals.

Specifically: lions cannot live on carrots. Carrot soup does not provide nearly enough calories required to live as a lion. Even when made with fish, a lion would need a hell of a lot of it.

Nor do rabbits eat fish. The fish in this story are not considered live, empathetic creatures. Unlike the land animals, their eyes are dots. (The lions and rabbits have human-like eyes, with ‘whites’ (yellows) indicating where they are looking.

Why is the tawny lion so scrawny even though he catches everything he chases? There is no realworld biochemical reason. This is classic fairytale physics, in line with the nonscientific cooling rates of the three differently sized bowls of porridge in Goldilocks And The Three Bears.

SETTING OF TAWNY SCRAWNY LION

At first I assumed ip加速器破解 is set in a utopian, picture book jungle, looked harder at the pictures and realised it was probably a savannah, then saw a Golden Book Video Classic called ‘Tawny Scrawny Lion’s Jungle Tales’ and realised the setting is meant to be a coded as a jungle. Compared to other picture book jungles, there is comparatively little typical jungle imagery. (Compare to The Saggy, Baggy Elephant, full of classic jungle imagery.)

The social world of Tawny Scrawny Lion starts out more like a real savannah/jungle (where larger carnivores eat smaller ones) and ends in a place completely divorced from a real world place. In any picture book starring animals, those animals will be anthropomorphised to some degree. Normally the storytellers pick a spot on that continuum and stay there, though animals in the same story are frequently positioned at different points on the anthropomorphising continuum.

The rabbits in this particular story are more civilised than the lion, who must become equally anthropomorphised before any of them can live in harmony. (The rabbits have access to bowls, spoons and a cauldron for cooking their carrot soup. They also have access to fishing lines and, most importantly, wear clothes, which are gendered.) Becoming more civilised (more like a human) is the lion’s main character arc. Tawny Scrawny Lion moves from wild animal to gentrified patriarch.

The poor old fish remain as foodstuffs. It’s clearly more difficult for humans to empathise with fish than with land mammals.

Tenggren’s illustrations are appropriately folk arty for this fantasy picture book world, with just the suggestion of savannah, and shapes placed on the page without an attempt at real world perspective.

The implicit ideology is clear; if animals could live more like (vegetarian) humans, the savannah would be a kinder, less brutal place.

This is what dates the book. Mindfully leaving vegetarian ideology aside, we now know how vital large animals are to an ecosystem. 伕理ip破解版无限试用, the reestablishment of just one pack of previously eradicatedwolves to an ecosystem can do an amazing amount of good… precisely because they hunt and kill. Lions are equally important.

STORY STRUCTURE OF TAWNY SCRAWNY LION

PARATEXT

Once there was a tawny scrawny lion who chased monkeys on Monday—kangaroos on Tuesday—zebras on Wednesday—bears on Thursday—camels on Friday—and on Saturday, elephants!

So begins the funny, classic Golden story of a family of ten fat rabbits that teaches the hungry lion to eat carrot stew—so that he doesn’t eat them!

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SHORTCOMING

The Tawny Scrawny Lion has a fantasy medical condition where the more animals he catches the scrawnier he becomes.

DESIRE

The lion seems content enough continuing to chase animals, probably never understanding what satiety feels like. The rabbits seem to understand that if they can persuade the lion to eat carrot soup, the benefits will be two-fold: The lion will feel more vigour and the rabbits will have saved all the animals further down the food chain (including themselves) from getting eaten.

OPPONENT

Since lions eat rabbits, they are natural opponents.

PLAN

Though this is left off the page, I imagine a belling the cat scenario in which the rabbits have a meeting, make a plan to invite the lion to change his diet, then invite him around to eat carrot soup.

But we only see the plan being carried out.

THE BIG STRUGGLE

Anyone who knows anything about lions will be expecting disaster, but anyone who knows anything about Little Golden Books from the mid 20th century will know that this is a cosy story and the animal characters will be friends by the end.

The prose contains plenty of suspense. When the little rabbit stops to catch some fish ‘this is almost too much for the hungry lion’. The illustrations support the reader’s fear that the lion will lose control and gobble the little rabbits up.

Peak danger: four little rabbits ‘plumped themselves down in the lion’s lap’. Don’t you love the author’s use of ‘plump’? And the illustrator’s depiction of a wide open lion mouth, with those tiny, crazed pupils…

Turn the page and we learn that the carrot soup has worked as a magic potion to quell the lion of hunger. ‘And somehow, even when it was time to say goodnight, that lion wasn’t one bit hungry!’

ANAGNORISIS

The lion realises he feels much better eating carrot stew, albeit made with fish stock. He will give up hunting and from now on live the more civilised life of a stew eater…

NEW SITUATION

… so long as the rabbits keep making it for him.

EXTRAPOLATED ENDING

It’s true that large cats (or any wild animal) won’t hunt unless they are hungry. Humans are the only species who kill more than we need for our own sustenance.

So long as the rabbits keep feeding the lion that soup, and so long as it contains plenty of fish, maybe I can believe this happy scenario will continue forever.

RESONANCE

It could be argued that this storybook world is so far removed from reality that young readers wouldn’t draw any connection between morality and diet. But that’s not how children’s stories work at all. The surface interpretation is clearly fantasy. Covert ideology carries a story’s resonance; in this case, that animals who eat animals further down the food chain are morally wrong, and until they mend their ways, they will lead an unhappy life.

Adults love a story for children in which enemies become friends. Over the second half of the 20th century The Tawny Scrawny Lion stood the test of time a popular picture book character and sequels followed. ‘Tawny Scrawny Lion’ was now ‘THE Tawny Scrawny Lion’.

I hate being lost. I’m not the only one. Before the age of cities, suburbs and GPS, it really was dangerous to separate from your tribe.

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Professor Kenneth Hill has studied the psychological effects of getting lost, and was interviewed by Jim Mora on the RNZ Sunday morning radio show. Jim asks, why do people freak out when getting lost?

No surprise, I’m not a huge fan of mazes. I’ve been in a hedge maze, and once rented a barn at a maze made of maize, but never entered the maze. Wasn’t interested.

Mazes and labyrinths look a little similar at first glance but once you’re stuck inside one it feels quite different. Here’s the difference: Mazes have many different paths branching off into dead ends, making their symbolism similar to that of the crossroad. If you’re ever stuck inside a maze you’ll have to make decisions about which path to take.

But once you enter a labyrinth you are forced to trudge along a single, massively long pathway. The path takes you round and round until eventually — after the longest path possible — you will end up at its centre. According to Greek mythology, a scary part-bull, part-man lives at the centre of the labyrinth at Knossos. He was a ip加速器破解 creature killed by a prince called Theseus. Theseus found his way back out by following the length of string he’d unspooled on his way in. (This was actually Ariadne’s idea, the daughter of Minos, who was in love with him. He later abandoned her on an island.)

A similar kind of trickiness is utilised in the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, but unfortunately birds ate the starving children’s crumbs.

Theseus’s length ofstring may seem clever, but was a bit overkill. It shouldn’t be that hard to find your way out of a labyrinth. I haven’t tried this, but apparently you pick a hand, touch the wall with it. Keep that same hand touching the wall and walk until you’re out. A labyrinth is not like a maze, where you have to remember which decisions you made on the way in, only in reverse. This technique also works for mazes actually (with the only tricky bit being bits of wall not attached to anything). You won’t get out by the fastest route doing this, but you’ll make it out alive.

In modern English, the words maze and labyrinth are often used interchangeably and can function symbolically in many various ways, as reflected in ancient traditions:

• protection against supernatural powers
• a path the dead must follow on their way to the world of the spirits (mazes as liminal spaces)
• Mazes divorce the traveller from the comfort of cardinal direction, shucking off all symbolism to do with points on a compass. This is how a labyrinth/maze can help you find your spiritual path. Removed from the constraints of linear time and markers of ‘the real world’, the traveller has no choice but to focus inward. This is how you find your ‘true path’ in life.
• In more modern dystopian fiction, the labyrinth can symbolise organisations in which it’s impossible to get anything done — paperwork, bureaucracy. The labyrinth is especially good for conveying this idea because it takes you on the longest journey possible to the centre, or truth.
• Related to this, the maze/labyrinth symbolises anywhere clarity is deliberately suppressed. This often harks back to a much older story (e.g. the Garden of Eden) in which knowledge is the ultimate taboo (especially for women).
• The maze/labyrinth is a paradoxical symbol because when viewed from above, or when designed by its artist, the maze is this beautiful, symmetrical work of art. But when you’re stuck inside one at ground level, you become confused, frustrated and ultimately hit peak despair.
• The labyrinth as an idea is closely related to the knot because they both symbolise journeys. The difference is that in knotwork design there is no beginning and no ending. (The branch of mathematics known as knot theory also studies knots with no beginnings and endings. The simplest mathematical knot is a ring.) A story like Andrea Arnold’s film American Honey resembles a knot more than a labyrinth because the ending suggests our main character will be on the road forever.
• To enter a labyrinth and make it out alive symbolises a rebirth. Therefore, the labyrinth might be regarded a womb. Fairylands function similarly, or any land beyond the fantasy portal. Once inside, the hero’s mission is to make it out alive.

THE GREEK LABYRINTH

Returning now to Greek mythology, the word ‘labyrinth’ means ‘house of the double axe’. The labrys is an ancient and symbolic axe. What have axes got to do with labyrinths? The labrys was a powerful emblem in Minoan culture — Bronze Age people of Crete (c. 3000 BC — 1100 BC). The Minoans got their name from Minos, a legendary figure from Greek legend, and that’s where ‘Minotaur’ comes from as well. (Minotaur = Minos + bull.)

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• The labyrinth is found on fragments of ip加速器破解 from Ancient Egypt, who believed the labyrinth mirrored the afterlife
• in Turkey
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• in the tantric texts of India and in the design of mandalas
• on Mycenean seals
• and Etruscan vases
• in Ireland and Britain, pre-figured in the ring-and-cup marks of stonework and at sights such as Newgrange. (Hedge mazes were an English variation.)
• Labyrinths were adopted by Christian churches (initially in Algeria)
• For a while, labyrinths were found in almost all Gothic Catholic cathedrals because walking them was meant to be meditative. But I guess some people found them too fun because most were later removed. They distracted from the religious services in the nave.
• The Dearinth is a symbol invented by Oberon Zell, used as the symbol for his Church of All Worlds. (That guy also coined the term neo-Pagan.) This symbol is a labyrinth and also looks like a god/goddess stretching their arms above the head.

Labyrinths are sometimes called ‘Solomon’s Mazes’ because there’s a famous labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, about 80 km outside Paris, which is exactly 666 feet long (the devil’s number!). At the centre of this labyrinth there’s a six-petaled flower containing the Seal of Solomon inside it. (Either a pentagram or hexagram shape. If it’s a hexagram, it’s known as the Star of David in Jewish tradition. It was meant to be a signet ring owned by King Solomon.)

GOTHIC LITERATURE AND THE LABYRINTH

Gothic stories tend to feature castles as part of the ominous setting. The massive castle is basically the home equivalent of a labyrinth.

Related to these actual Gothic castles are labyrinthine computer game stories, or anything set in cyberspace. Thematically, these settings tend to explore ideas around double consciousness and moral disintegration. They are often metafictive. From 19th century Gothic fiction to ultra-contemporary speculative work, the concept of the labyrinth is heavily utilised as a symbol in fiction.

URBAN STREETS AS MYTHIC MAZE

In the 伕理ip破解版无限试用 anime The Cat Returns, a girl rescues a cat and finds herself caught inside a fantasy world inhabited by talking cats. A castle within the fantasy world features a maze as part of its fortress. This maze is remarkably difficult because the walls keep moving around. The cats are wearing bits of wall, which means the walls have legs.

What’s especially interesting about this setting: Haru’s suburban Japanese life melds into the fantasy world. Some of the cats in the real world are magical, for instance. Apart from that, the narrow, winding, maze-like alleyways of suburbia echo the literal maze of her fantasy world.

The Cat Returns is a super clear example of this, but any urban story which features characters running between tall buildings, perhaps on a chase, perhaps on a ticking-clock mission, is drawing on ancient maze symbolism, and the terror of feeling lost.

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People who study storytelling tend to use the labyrinth as a symbol of the classic mythic journey. When I say ‘classic’, I mean masculine. Christopher Vogler’s book The Hero’s Journey even features a labyrinth on the cover.

In the hero’s journey, earlier described by Joseph Campbell, a character leaves home to embark upon a journey into the centre of his soul, fights a massive opponent (the Minotaur) and then finds his way out of the labyrinth/subconcious. At the end he’ll have either returned home or found a new one, but either way, he’s changed forever.

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It’s fascinating to consider how bad humans are at directions compared to almost all animals, especially certain birds, like homing pigeons. When did we lose this ability to know where we are in space? And might it be possible to get it back? A fascinating podcast on this topic a podcast entitled “A Sense of Direction” from Seriously…Presents:

Many animals can navigate by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. Not humans, though. But might we have evolved the sense but forgotten how to access it? 40 years ago a British zoologist thought he had demonstrated a homing ability in humans. But his results failed to replicate in America and the research was largely discredited. But new evidence suggests that our brains can in fact detect changes in the magnetic field and may even be able to use it to navigate. … Is the magic still there for all of us, just waiting to be rediscovered?

Header image: Scene from The Cat Returns