I think “cited” is a bit strong a word. In my copy, Adams acknowledges Lockley in the forward:
I am indebted, for the knowledge of rabbits and their rabbit ways, to Mr. R. M. Lockley’s remarkable book The Private Life of the Rabbit. Anyone who wishes to know more about the migrations of the yearlings, about pressing chin glands, chewing pellets, the effects of overcrowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats or any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work.
It seems unfair to act as though Adams was treating Watership Down as some sort of zoologically accurate depiction in all manners based on that. If there’s other places where Adams was asked about the patriarchal hierarchy and defended it with “Lockley says so” then that would be different (and maybe he did, I dunno) but the “cite” for Lockley in the book is “This is a great book about rabbits that taught me some cool rabbit stuff”
Did he specifically cite that source for the gender dynamics, or just for rabbit behavior in general? It might be that he didn’t read the whole book, or that he did, but had enough written with the all-male cast before then that he didn’t want to go back and re-write it all.
Eh, I don’t think either the book or its film adaptations need to apologize for telling a male-centered story, which was part and parcel of the sexism of its time. (Personally, I liked both the film and the miniseries.) Again, I think the more recent shift in perception about Watership Down is more about how it misrepresented the natural world that it was claiming as the basis for its story.
And sure, some folks also don’t like how all the female characters in this particular story are so peripheral or secondary, but as you noted, that has always been the case ever since the book was published.
Yup, he cites Lockley several times in Watership Down, including about buck and doe relations; he just suppresses and ignores all Lockley’s discussions of matriarchal aspects of rabbit society.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant storytelling device to explicitly assert a naturalistic basis for a novel as almost a natural-history study in its own right, and then expand that into a fantasy dimension (a device that Tolkien also employs to good effect when introducing hobbits, for example, although of course he has no real-world studies of hobbits to cite).
But I think Le Guin has a point in saying that Adams “cheated”. He didn’t present a naturalistic basis for rabbit society and then layer fantasy aspects of rabbit speech and poetry and social artifice on top of it: he presented a distorted naturalistic basis for rabbit society to build his fantasy world on, all the while claiming that the naturalism was genuine, just ask Lockley.
And again, I’m not sure how much of that distortion was even a conscious act on Adams’s part. Like many of the biologists in the article I linked in a previous post, he may simply have been pre-programmed to think that sexist distortion of animal behaviors was the “natural” and “obvious” way to interpret them. His eye may have just bounced off Lockley’s references to rabbit matriarchies, as many ornithologists’ eyes just bounced off evidence of female dominance or promiscuity in birds, to focus instead on a model that conformed better to baked-in ideas about what was “natural” and “obvious” in relations between the sexes.
[ETA: And since this makes my fifth or sixth post on this aspect of the same book in this thread, maybe I should shut up a bit and leave some air for discussion of other classic books?]
He doesn’t though. I’m looking at a PDF of the book right now and, besides the forward, he mentions Lockley three other times, once as a chapter intro-blurb and twice in the story:
These young rabbits must move out if they are to survive. In a wild and free state they stray sometimes for miles wandering until they find a suitable environment. R. M. Lockley, The Private Life of the Rabbit
Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss.
The wise Mr. Lockley has told us that wild rabbits live for two or three years. He knows everything about rabbits: but all the same, Hazel lived longer than that. He lived a tidy few summers—as they say in that part of the world—and learned to know well the changes of the downs to spring, to winter and to spring again.
Nothing remotely about buck/doe dynamics or warren gender structure attributed to Lockley. I’ll also leave it at that since this is becoming a full-fledged hijack but it really looks like Le Guin overstated her case.
Very last last indulgence in this hijack on my part: But it’s not only in the spots where Adams specifically mentions the name “Lockley” that he is making authoritative-sounding claims about “real” rabbit behavior based on his reading of Lockley! Okay, shutting up for real now.
Having read the book earlier this year, I was cringing a lot due to his characterization of the female rabbits. The male rabbits were gorgeously realized: rich, complex, different. Some were clever, some were loyal, some were brutal, some were whimsical. All of them took initiative.
The female rabbits barely had names. The ones from Efrafa show a tiny bit more leadership than the ones from the hutches–but even they are mostly there to follow orders of the big manly brave clever male rabbits. They’re there to be protected, and to breed, and very little else.
Was Adams inspired by his WWII experiences? I’d rather say he was constrained by them. He could imagine a glorious pseudonaturalistic society of rabbits with myths, language, culture, politics, and war–but he couldn’t imagine that the female rabbits would have agency.
Both his tremendous imagination, and its awful limitation, coexist.
A search for “buck” (“does” includes too many do/does to be useful) only gives a few instances of how bucks don’t typically dig much and does do most of the warran construction in terms of “authoritative” remarks on buck/doe dynamics. At this point, I’d leave it to the person making the argument to cite an actual chapter and verse because the whole thing sounds pretty inflated the more I look into it. Did Adams write a male-centric story? Absolutely. Does it deviate from actual rabbit behavior? Yup. Does Adams (within the book anyway) use Lockley as an excuse for the story being male-centric or to say that its male-centric bits are “accurate”? Not in any instance I can find actually searching/reading the book text. I suspect, at this point, we’ll be stretching it to “Adams said this and in another part he mentioned Lockley so he really means this part is by Lockley as well”. Might as well state that Adams is claiming that Lockley taught us rabbits organize paramilitary police groups called the Oswla and can talk to seagulls since Adams “authoritatively” states that all woodland critters share a common patois.
I majored in English literature, so I’ve read a lot of classics and as a whole, I really don’t like them. I did, however, like The Catcher in the Rye, so maybe I just have bad taste?
Aside from The Catcher in the Rye, I can think of two classics that I read for school and enjoyed: The Outsiders and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I also liked Fahrenheit 451, which I never had to read in school – and I do wonder if I still would have liked it if I had had to write a paper or take a quiz on the subject matter.
The Good Earth and The Tale of Two Cities are two which I still re-read. I didn’t appreciate TTOTC one bit when I was in high school, but when I picked it up again at age 50, I discovered it was a masterpiece.
We were never assigned Moby Dick, so I never read it. Sometimes I thought I had read it, but in reality I had just seen the movie and imagined that I had. Then when I was in my 50s, I tracked it down on Project Gutenberg and read it and loved it. I wouldn’t have as a kid, though.
I think if we start talking about Shakepeare, it’s going to go forever. Honestly, his best plays really do live up to their reputation. Hamlet, most of all. If you watch Kenneth Branagh’s movie(it uses the entire play), you can see just how great a play it is.
Personally, my favorite Shakespeare is The Tempest, but for best overall, it’d probably be either Hamlet, MacBeth, or King Lear. Though of course, they’re plays, and thus better watched than read (and what would old Willie think if he knew that any one of us, at any time we chose, could watch a performance of any of his plays, by the best actors of the past century?).
I have a certain fondness for Titus Andronicus (or, as I like to call it, “Shakespeare’s chainsaw movie” ). In fight scenes in most plays, the stage directions tell you who dies. In the climax of this one, the stage directions tell you who survives. It’s a short list.
Yes–as the pandemic began, I took lots of long walks and explore parts of my extended neighborhood that I’d never been to before. On these walks I listened to the audiobook of David Copperfield–all 40+ hours of it–and was amazed not only at the quality of the prose and the powerful characterization, but at how funny it was. Dickens is a hoot.
Some years ago I saw a local production of Hamlet (with a female lead!), which was then backed up by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with the same actors playing the same roles. Brilliant!
actually my english teachers were smart after freshman year the two years I had a normal english class they gave us the bok but played a tape we followed along to…and being a history buff I have a fondness for julius caesar (in literature in civilization 6 not so much lol)
post redux( had a phone call, then the cat wanted to eat…)
actually, my English teachers were smart after freshman year (the two years I had a normal English class) they gave us the book but played a tape we followed along to…and being a history buff I have a fondness for Julius caesar (in literature anyways in civilization 6 not so much lol)