Word: sexed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thurber chooses the comic motif, yet in this process presents to the reader's (perhaps subconscious) appetite a number of themes primary to our age. For Americans sex and war have replaced food and physical danger as cardinal concerns, and new symbols are needed to connote these fears. Thurber has answered with the rabbit myth...
...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...
...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...
...lucky feet--the unknown and the unexpected. The cartoon of the lady and the rabbit-psychiatrist ("You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit. Now just what did you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?" bears directly on this issue. The lady fears sex. She sees all men as potentially sexual creatures, and confuses this fear with the rabbits who so flagrantly violate her moral standards. The psychiatrist himself becomes a rabbit, for he shares with the beast the secret of sex. He speaks the dark words men hope to hear yet fear...