Men and Animals (1996)

Men and Animals Gillian Adams (bio) Boria Sax , The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of Animals. New York: Pace UP, 1990. The Frog King is a sustained meditation on the relationship between animals and men. It is not a book about children's literature, although children's classics with animal protagonists form part of a frame of reference that includes verbal and nonverbal texts, fiction and nonfiction, and that stretches from the cave paintings of early man to Richard Adams's Watership Down (1972). One of the book's most attractive features is the multiplicity of black-and-white illustrations of animals, taken from sources ranging from medieval manuscripts to a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon (62). These well-chosen illustrations and their captions, in fact, constitute an interesting running subtext. In his introduction, Boria Sax speculates on the internal states of animals versus those of humans, instinct versus socialization, heredity versus environment, communication between people and animals, and on the degree (if any) to which "animals share the human capacity for reason and morality" (7). It is here that he would have benefited most from the admittedly controversial work of Vicki Hearne, notably Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name (1986). It is not until page seven of Sax's introduction, however, that it becomes clear to the reader what the subject of his book is actually going to be, "stories and anecdotes of animals . . . taken from folklore and literature [and], most frequently, from old books of zoology," and not until still later that we learn his purpose in assembling such material: to "try to identify the themes consistently associated with various animals" (12). Sax has decided to select not only "the most popular and influential" tales but more often "just the ones I happened to find on the musty shelves of second-hand bookshops and in the library of The American Museum of Natural History"; he notes that such stories of animals "are not included in the extensive motif indexes compiled by folklorists" (11). Such honesty about the role that serendipity plays in scholarship is refreshing, and Sax's point that "it is surprising how little use folklorists have made of stories which appear in scientific works" (12) is a good one. Nevertheless, his closing remarks in the introduction on how various periods viewed the legal status of animals and their place in the Great Chain of Being might have been enriched by the material in the second chapter of Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984). Sax's second chapter, "Fairy Tale or Fable," looks further at our judgments about the morality of animal behavior and makes distinctions between the pictures of animals found in fairy tales and fables, and those found in more or less realistic animal stories such as Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) and Felix Salten's Bambi (1928). Sax continues to look at traditional literature in his third chapter, "The Frog King," attempting to "reconstruct something of the relationship to the natural world of those who told the tales around the fire" by examining "the very first fairy tale in the collection by the Brothers Grimm" (41). In the course of this chapter, which owes much to Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate (1987), we are treated to perspectives on the keeping of pets and on witches, familiars, and frogs, with reference to material by Bruno Bettelheim, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes. The transition from folklore to "science" in chapter four, "Darwin and Folklore," I found the most interesting section of the book, based as it is on Sax's researches into eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works on zoology and natural history. Particularly telling is Sax's contention that "as new scientific developments increasingly documented the similarities between man and animals, theories of racial superiority enabled those of European ancestry to retain their threatened pride" (83). Sax notes at the conclusion of this chapter that as people have tried to distance animals "as a psychological defense against Darwin's theory of evolution," they have "dehumanized the animal world" (86). Once Sax has established the parameters of his...