I really enjoyed reading about Brer Rabbit this week. I had heard of the stories plenty of times in my life, but I had never read them before so I was excited to finally get the chance this week. What I liked about them was the central character of Brer Rabbit who I find to be one of the only American tricksters I know of from our storytelling tradition. Unlike the coyote or Loki, this trickster usually only unleashes his talents on the deserving Brer Fox who is always scheming to eat him or his children or other family members. Most of the time, he's just pulling a fast one on the fox to try to get out of whatever plan he's cooked up this time and doing so in a clever, humorous way.
However, there was one story in which the rabbit was a pure trickster without regard to right or wrong: Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear. In this tale, Brer Rabbit gets caught in a trap when trying to steal peanuts from Brer Fox's garden and is helped out of the trap by Brer Bear. That was nice of him right? Well, Brer Rabbit decides to trick Brer Bear into putting himself in the trap (he told the bear he was acting as a scarecrow) and then tells Brer Fox it was Brer Bear who had been stealing the peanuts, suggesting that he beat him with a stick (especially in the mouth to keep him from spilling the beans about what really happened). While this makes Brer Rabbit more of a true trickster because he doesn't care that Brer Bear did nothing to him to deserve such treatment, it did nothing to endear the character to me. Mischievous tricksters can have their funny moments, but I prefer that justice and fairness always prevail whenever possible. The fact that Brer Rabbit gets away with hurting a person who only ever helped him really damaged his reputation in my eyes. However, it must be taken into account that, in the rest of the stories, he only uses his cunning to escape the clutches of Brer Fox. Even when he goes out of his way just to mess with Brer Fox, he never steps over the boundary between good, clean fun and outright mean-spirited pranks. But, as the old saying goes, nobody's perfect.
 |
| Depiction of Brer Rabbit (Wikimedia Commons) |
No comments:
Post a Comment