House at Pooh Corner
Paula T. Connolly makes the point about A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner that the escapism of the text is, in its own way, inherently political: to posit the existence of an Edenic locus amoenus like the Hundred Acre Wood necessarily implies the existence of a world that requires escaping from. We can see an interesting demonstration of the dynamics Connolly describes in the short poem offered by Pooh and Piglet in the chapter "Tigger Has Breakfast" in The House at Pooh Corner. I hope to demonstrate by a close reading of this short lyric that indeed the construction of the Edenic ideal in Milne's work is necessarily aware of the darker possibilities it intends to shut out.
The basic joke of the chapter "Tigger Has Breakfast" is fairly self-evident: Tigger behaves precisely like a willful child, in claiming that a certain food is "what Tiggers like best" then immediately rejecting it as unsuitable once it is offered. However part of the humor depends upon the young reader's knowledge that, for example, thistles -- which are painful to touch -- do not really make...
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