Word: rabbiting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this point, most critics appeal to sex alone. Rabbits are noted for fecundity. Thurber is an old man. He puts rabbits everywhere. Therefore, the argument runs, fertility has become a fixation with the author, sure evidence of the frustration of age. This line of thought not only does Thurber an injustice, but reflects rampant intellectual cowardice. One must face the rabbit squarely, meet him head-on. The issue cannot be casually side-stepped...
...essential feature of this rabbit lies in the inversion of its natural role. The rabbit in question is an obstacle. One woman (whose name I have withheld) observed that the "enormous rabbit" resembles a chocolate Easter-bunny, from which she inferred that the author had made a sly cut at American middle-aged women (and men) for whom overweight is such a problem. The inversion in size would denote their making mountains out of mole hills. Needless to say, this is naive...
...more likely solution takes off at a tangent from sex. The obstacle, in this view, signifies adolescence. The spontaneous sex life of the rabbit embodies all that men (especially Americans) fear of this period. Hence the obstacle takes the form of a rabbit--a large rabbit. In support of this position it has been pointed out that one trait of American women is to keep small stuffed animals--tigers, dogs, and rabbits--long after they cease to be children. These stuffed animals, it is felt, represent efforts to avoid the adult role. To cling to these animals is to deny...
...horror of the "enormous rabbit" in Race of Life and the rabbits in The Last Flower stems from this inversion of the rabbit's traditional role in nature. In the first case, the rabbit is out of proportion, as is man's fear of sex. The denial of sex checks the emotions and inverts the flow of nature (as seen in rabbits and dogs), therefore creates an enormous (hence inverted) rabbit as symbol of this fear. Dogs could not serve the same symbolic purpose, for they are closely linked to man and have picked up some of man's vices...
Also, Thurber needs them in The Last Flower to play off against the rabbits--now normal in size, but fierce, not meek. Note the sequence: war ends; the dogs, symbols of normalcy, abandon man; fierce rabbits descend; with time, natural conditions resume; children chase away the rabbits; the dogs return to man. Nature at the start was inverted both by war and the denial of sex. The rabbits can be viewed as the scourge of the gods (or of nature) after war, and one might add that the "enormous rabbit" itself could be America's fear of warfare...