A Sacrilege Has Been Committed

[ymarkov]

The Hundred Acre Wood, Invaded

By CHRISTINE ROSEN

Pity the person who attempts to update an icon—particularly if that icon is charming, ageless, fuzzy and embraced by children all over the world. Last week, Dutton Children's Books released "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood," the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne's beloved Winnie-the-Pooh stories, which were first published in the 1920s. Over the years the Pooh Properties Trust has received many unsolicited proposals for a sequel, but it only recently approved British writer David Benedictus as the author of the first new Pooh book in nearly 80 years.

In Milne's original stories, "The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner," our stuffed hero, a teddy bear that belongs to a young boy named Christopher Robin, spends his days singing, writing poems, visiting his friends and counting up and devouring the contents of his honey pots (with occasional breaks to perform Stoutness Exercises). Although the stories occasionally teeter on the edge of twee, the characters, such as fussy Piglet, cynical Eeyore and clever Rabbit, are sharply, affectionately drawn, and the book is full of the kind of not-quite-correct language that young children often use to great effect. Reacting to the dutiful applause of his friends after reciting a poem, Eeyore says: "Unexpected and gratifying, if a little lacking in Smack."

The author of the new Winnie-the-Pooh sequel didn't believe the old stories lacked Smack. What they lacked, apparently, was a civilizing feminine influence, and so Mr. Benedictus has given us a new character, Lottie, a boastful, bossy otter who emerges from a boggy section of the Hundred Acre Wood to prod and scold its inhabitants. If the notion of a modern-style Super-nanny in the Hundred Acre Wood sounds disconcerting, it is. And it doesn't help that Lottie is one annoying otter. She declares the other animals of the Wood "Quite Uncouth" and with a hectoring air lectures them on deportment. She demonstrates unappealing class snobbery. Her tiara "comes from a very good house," she assures Pooh.

Worse, for a character that, like Eve, represents the first appearance of a woman in a kind of Eden, Lottie is a pastiche of unflattering stereotypes of female behavior. She frequently references her accessories and "sleek" appearance, telling the assembled animals, "See my fine fur coat . . . and see my golden eyes." She behaves like a diva, demanding a bath in Christopher Robin's tub and a meal of Portuguese sardines, and frequently tosses off bon mots such as "Yes, I am remarkable." She bosses the others around but, like all flighty women, "she could not keep her mind on anything for very long." At one particularly low point in the narrative the reader is even subjected to a glimpse of protean otter lust, as Lottie "lowered her voice and said a little huskily: 'I thought maybe you, Eeyore.' "

Lottie's behavior is all the more remarkable because the traditional world of Winnie-the-Pooh was generally free of references to the sex of its characters. Yes, Christopher Robin is obviously a boy, and Kanga, carrying Baby Roo around, must be female. But The Hundred Acre Wood is a refreshingly neuter world, with no male or female archetypes to distract from the charm of the story. In the new Pooh, however, this neutrality, which allowed boys and girls to connect to the characters regardless of whether they identified themselves with their gender, is gone.

Of course, any attempt to update a classic is a fraught with peril, and Pooh might have had to endure far worse indignities than the quasi-lascivious Lottie. In the wrong hands the new female denizen of the Hundred Acre Wood might have been a Bratz doll, and Pooh might be Twittering about his honey habit. And yet, for all of Mr. Benedictus's efforts, the introduction of Lottie gives the book a feeling of forced whimsy. It's a bit like finding Scarlett O'Hara tending the cannons in the middle of a Civil War re-enactment. You sense the enthusiasm and good intentions, and can even appreciate the elaborate effort that went into the display, but in the end the anomalous female figure becomes an ever-present reminder that this is a superfluous imitation. After all, Milne's Pooh stories ended with his protagonists in no need of female solicitude, otter or otherwise: "In that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing."
—Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.