The Wind in the Willows - Conclusions

This is a directory for the microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"After this climax, the four animals continued to lead their lives, so rudely broken in upon by civil war, in great joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions."

-from The Return of Ulysses

And so the Willows series comes to a close. I've already summarized and synthesized my observations, so I'll let this entry serve primarily as a directory. For easy navigation between the different chapters in my series, here are links to all the posts, with an explanation of each piece's purpose.

1. Introductions

Brief history of the book's creation and reception, an explanation of the series, and capsule reviews of the different film adaptations - plus links to other Willows posts

2. The River Bank

Celebration of the story's central location, focusing on the tension between the river's comforts and excitements, with a digression on the Piper at the Gates of Dawn

3. The Wild Wood

Meditation on Willows' "heart of darkness" and its psychological implications

4. The Wide World

Examination of the Wayfarer's "call of the South" - what the world "beyond" represents in the tale, and why its siren song must be resisted

5. The Open Road

Drive down Toad's highway to hell, using his motormania to discuss Edwardian society and what it represents in the book

6. Toad Hall

Exploration of Toad's ancestral manor, its seizure by the weasel rabble, and its social and political resonance - from conservative aristocracy to liberal preservationism

7. The Animal Kingdom

Digression on the subject of Grahame's wacky yet clever anthropomorphism

8. Dulce Domum

Reflection upon the importance of home in Wind in the Willows, including a short biography of Kenneth Grahame and a synthesis of all the previous entries in the series

The Wind in the Willows - Dulce Domum

Part 8 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him." 

-from Dulce Domum

Mole and Rat are trekking back from a winter excursion. It is late in the evening - "the shades of the short winter day were closing in on them, and they had still some distance to go." For one reason or another, they find their path winding through a village and there they stand on the outside looking in, observing scenes of domesticity idealized all the more for being somewhat hidden. Briefly comforted by these visions of half-dreamt coziness (like the boy given visions of Christmas in Lois Lowry's The Giver) their minds quickly return to their bodies, cold and tired in the snowy dusk. Their own home calls - Ratty's cottage by the river with its fireplace and furniture and view of the icy bank out its windows. Yet in truth, this is not their own home, however welcome Mole has been made to feel within its walls. Rat hurries on but Mole freezes when this revelation hits him, with the force of a physical blow, but one tenderly applied, and all the more aching for it.

"[Mole] stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood." Rat insensitively impels his friend on and when they stop to rest further down the trail, Mole begins to weep; with a little prodding he reveals how homesick he has become, how suddenly and painfully he has been overpowered by the desire for his simple little hole in the ground. A sympathetic Rat tracks down Mole End - in this the animals, returned to their natural instincts, are guided by scent. Together Rat and Mole restore the shabby little apartment to a tidy and appealing state, then invite a group of carolling field mice inside, and lay out a Christmas feast on the table, with singing, and merriment, and camaraderie filling the air. Finally they turn in for the night, and as Mole drifts off to sleep, he pleasantly contemplates the rich fulfillment he can find in his own home:

"He saw clearly how plain and simple--how narrow, even--it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."

The Wind in the Willows - The Animal Kingdom

Part 7 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"'Of course he will,' chuckled the Otter. 'Did I ever tell you that good story about Toad and the lockkeeper? It happened this way. Toad...'

An errant Mayfly swerved unsteadily athwart the current in the intoxicated fashion affected by young bloods of Mayflies seeing life. A swirl of water and a 'cloop!' and the Mayfly was visible no more.

Neither was the Otter. ...

The Rat hummed a tune, and the Mole recollected that animal etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one's friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever."

-from The River Bank

Who exactly are the animals in The Wind in the Willows? Are they animals at all? Even if the creatures of the wood and the river could speak, would they really converse about "Toad and the lockkeeper"? (And anyway how could a toad engage a lockkeeper in the first place, assuming the lockkeeper is decidedly non-amphibian?) Perhaps, then, "Otter" is just a droll Edwardian gentleman, physically no different from you or me. After all, many theatrical and one or two cinematic interpretations of the famous story don't even bother to disguise the actors as animals - a couple whiskers for Rat, a bit of green face-paint for Toad, a tail for Badger if the production is feeling adventurous. At times this seems in keeping with Grahame's strategies. So then, these animals are clearly just people with animal names. Case closed. And yet, in a flash, that complacent conclusion is shattered, when Otter becomes an otter once again, leaping into the river after his insect meal. And what of that Mayfly?! One moment he's a "young blood" following a "fashion" (might as well be a dandy parading down Carnaby Street) and then, unexpectedly, he's Otter's lunch. If these animals are merely people in disguise, then we've just witnessed an act of cannibalism! Perhaps it's best if we follow Mole's lead, ask no questions, and, accepting the strange rules of The Wind in the Willows for what they are, go along for the ride through this topsy-turvy animal kingdom.

The Wind in the Willows - Toad Hall

Part 6 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"Arriving within sight of his old home, he rested on his oars and surveyed the land cautiously. All seemed very peaceful and deserted and quiet. He could see the whole front of Toad Hall, glowing in the evening sunshine, the pigeons settling by twos and threes along the straight line of the roof; the garden, a blaze of flowers; the creek that led up to the boathouse, the little wooden bridge that crossed it; all tranquil, uninhabited, apparently waiting for his return. He would try the boathouse first, he thought. Very warily he paddled up to the mouth of the creek, and was just passing under the bridge, when... Crash!"

-from "Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears"

That crash is the sound of "a great stone, dropped from above, smashed through the bottom of the boat." The stone is a physical reminder of the brute reality: Toad Hall no longer belongs to Toad. It is now in the possession of the weasels, ferrets, and stoats, two of whom stand on the bridge over Toad, jeering the vain, bewildered beast below. How did this happen? Well, of course, Toad stole an automobile, and went to prison, leaving his home untended and vulnerable to attack from the nasty animals of the Wild Wood. But why did they seize the opportunity, why were they laying in wait, what motivated them? Sheer deviancy? Jealousy? Or something a bit more substantial? And why did Toad Hall so easily fall into their hands - why was this grand estate vulnerable to attack? Jan Needle, in The Wild Wood (a revisionist retelling of Grahame's tale from the perspective of Baxter Ferret), suggests answers to these questions, but in fact clues can be found within the original story and confirmed by studying British society at the turn-of-the century. There the working class was ascendant, the aristocracy of old was crumbling, and the landed class found themselves - suddenly, unexpectedly, and dramatically - unlanded.

The Wind in the Willows - The Open Road

Part 5 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"As if in a dream, he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver's seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leaped forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him."

-from Mr. Toad

And so at last we reach Toad. To Toad, the Wide World of last week with its vague, nearly intangible longings, its abstract dreaminess, is a chimerical afterthought with which he has no patience. His Wide World is the Open Road, and it's not meant to be tramped with the open heart of a Wayfarer but raced across with the headlong enthusiasm of a reckless driver. The above energetic description of Toad's inadvertent theft is followed immediately, in droll fashion, by a magistrate passing sentence (twenty years!) on the wayward animal - after all, if Toad's world is one of tantalizing reward, it is also a world of drastic consequences. Indeed, what marks the Open Road and sets it apart from the previously explored River Bank, Wild Wood, and Wide World is its tangibility. This is not a timeless arcadia, existential terror zone, or exotic imaginary realm, but a world tied to a certain time and place - specifically, Edwardian England, a world in flux, shining pristinely like one of Toad's motorcars, yet on the verge of achieving a colossal and irreversible wreckage.

The Wind in the Willows - The Wide World

Part 4 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!"

-the Sea Rat in Wayfarers, All

Of the three central thematic locations in The Wind in the Willows - the River Bank, the Wild Wood, and the Wide World - the last is the only one we never see. Oh, I suppose you could say that Toad's adventures occur in the "wide world," amongst humans and in towns and prisons and woods populated by gypsies, but those amphibious mishaps will be considered, alongside the advent of the automobile and the modernization of England, in "The Open Road," our next chapter. Toad's world is not one of a "blithesome step forward" but a restless drive into the ever-receding distance - very modern and instinctive rather than ancient and existential. The Wide World as laid out above is almost wholly Rat's concern and its siren song is otherworldly, though unlike the Piper's music it does not belong to an underlying level beneath our everyday existence but rather a restless desire to go "out there," to escape boundaries and explore. We "see" this in the sense that the Sea Rat's descriptions are vivid and juicy, but this sight remains a glimpse, a suggestion, not a concrete vision. Ultimately, Rat is prevented from experiencing the Wide World firsthand, and it's never entirely made clear why this must be.

In a way, it seems, the Wide World can only exist as an imaginary realm, fruit for Rat's poetry but not a place that can actually be visited - like Mole's visit to the Wild Wood, Rat's flirtation with the Wide World only serves to remind him of home's value, its tempting quality something to be resisted. But Mole at least gets to find out the hard way why the Wild Wood must not be trespassed upon; Rat never gains that privilege. And so at the end of "Wayfarers, All," the chapter in which Grahame teases us with the call of the southern seas, only to withdraw and finally put the last traces of Willows' dreaminess to rest (the remainder of the story will be brusque and comical) we are left with a tantalizing, elusive, frustrating feeling. We are not scared straight as after our encounter with the Wild Wood, nor vaguely forgetful as after the experience with the Piper; the song of the South has not been silenced and the Sea Rat's presence lingers, haunting the rest of the book, an unshakable reminder of the River Bank's limitations.

The Wind in the Willows - The Wild Wood

Part 3 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"And as he lay there panting and trembling, and listening to the whistlings and the patterings outside, he knew it at last, in all its fullness, that dread thing which other little dwellers in field and hedgerow had encountered here, and known as their darkest moment - that thing, which the Rat had vainly tried to shield him from - the Terror of the Wild Wood!"

-from The Wild Wood

As the last entry proved, the River Bank contains multitudes...but it does not contain everything. Outside of its bounds lay the Wild Wood and the Wide World, both introduced briefly in the first chapter of Grahame's book. Mole asks his friend about the Wild Wood a few pages into the story, "waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water meadows on one side of the river." We detect a bit of unease in Rat's curt response: "We don't go there very much, we river-bankers." The conversation quickly turns to the denizens of the wood, and indeed the looming forest has a social significance as well as a geographical and psychological presence, but for now we will be focusing on the latter two. At any rate, Rat's subtle warning suffices for the time being, but as the seasons pass, Mole grows restless, and in the dead of winter, as his friend snoozes by the fireside, Mole gets up, throws on his scarf, and ventures forth to explore the Wild Wood. What he encounters is a dark night of the soul - a journey into the depths of both a physically hostile environment and a deeply rooted terror of the unknown, which will seize his imagination and bring him face to face with "that dread thing."

The Wild Wood is not just a place - it's a state of mind.

The Wind in the Willows - The River Bank

Part 2 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations.

"'And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!'

"'By it and with it and on it and in it,' said the Rat. 'It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it's always got its fun and its excitements.'"

-from The River Bank

The river is the central symbol of The Wind in the Willows, the story's anchor and motor (at least until Toad's automania commandeers the narrative). As that dual metaphor suggests, the river is deeply ambiguous. Early in the book, in that same speech just sampled, Rat introduces Mole to the world through his own eyes. Ratty's globe is divided into three spheres: the River Bank, the Wild Wood, and the Wide World. If the Wild Wood represents certain danger and threatening instability, while the Wide World connotes an unknowable, intimidatingly vast outside universe (which Rat dismisses with a wave of his hand and a curt "that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or to me"), then the River Bank must stand for stability, familiarity, and comfort, right? But this is not how we are introduced to it.

The book begins not at the shores of the bubbling river, not even in the fresh meadows of springtime, but underground in a den perhaps once cozy, but now merely oppressive. Mole is fussing about his subterranean home, attempting a spring-cleaning but increasingly distracted by a vernal tremor from above which penetrates "even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of discontent and longing." Accordingly, Mole throws down his paint bucket, gathers his coat, and burrows up through the dirt. "So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

Mole strolls through the countryside, enjoying the fresh air and the verdant scenery, but it is not until he reaches the unseen - and unforeseen - river that his spirit truly stirs for the first time: "Never in his life had he seen a river before - this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver - glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble." It is this river, whose qualities as a subtle storyteller are shortly celebrated, which stands for the drama of this tale, helps Mole grow into a mature and skilled animal, and leads our furry friends to their auroral encounter with the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

The River Bank - consisting of rushing river and the sturdy bank surrounding it - is both home and the call of adventure, new experience and old comfort, lazy pleasure and soul-shattering mysticism. Ultimately, the very life-force that draws Mole to the river in the first place may provide its own undoing, forcing a choice and then shrivelling itself into a little brook, babbling with pleasing familiarity but speaking of fleeting sensations that disappeared as quickly as a breeze in the willow leaves.

The Wind in the Willows - Introductions

Part 1 of a microseries devoted to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and its film and television adaptations. (This post was heavily revised 11/1)

"The Willow Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank. Though it was past ten o'clock at night, the sky still clung to and retained some lingering skirts of light from the departed day; and the sullen heats of the torrid afternoon broke up and rolled away at the dispersing touch of the cool fingers of the short midsummer night. Mole lay stretched on the bank, still panting from the stress of the fierce day that had been cloudless from dawn to late sunset, and waited for his friend to return."

-the first lines of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

A little over a century ago, in an England uneasily poised between Victoria and the Somme, a slender volume hopped into the hands of skeptical critics and a delighted public. It originated as a bedtime story told to Kenneth Grahame's young son, focusing at first on the misadventures of a proud and foolish Mr. Toad. The story began its formation as a comical odyssey, in which an amphibious and buffoonish Ulysses crisscrossed the countryside in drag, eventually vanquishing the rascally weasels and stoats in order to restore himself at his ancestral home. Yet as Mole, Rat, and Badger entered its pages, as room was made for the River Bank, the Wild Wood, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the call of the Wayfarer, the book took on a richer palette, a more wistful tone, earning the title The Wind in the Reeds (which, already the title of a W.B. Yeats collection, was eventually changed to The Wind in the Willows). The book resonated with Grahame's life, his disappointments and frustrations, his dreams and fears, but more importantly it resonated with readers, and it hasn't stopped resonating with them up through the present day.