Domesticating the Bear: Explorations of Cuteness in Children’s Literature

The purpose of my research is to investigate the domestication of the image of the bear in children’s literature. I begin my thesis with an introduction to the bear in historical and ancient storytelling, distinguishing characterising traits of bears which are continually presented in children’s literature. My primary text for this chapter is Sophie Anderson’s The Girl Who Speaks Bear (2019). I argue that the bear is used similarly to ancient and historical storytelling; however, it is adapted and used to challenge adult normativity, evoking conversations around child agency and metamorphosis in children’s literature.
As such, these texts highlight the anthropomorphic metamorphosis of real bears into cute subjects. Therefore, in my second chapter, I introduce and discuss the aesthetic of cuteness and how this has led to a situation in which the bear has become a domesticated animal in children’s literature. I draw on the Japanese kawaii industry and cuteness as an affect (Dale 2016) to explore how bears embody cuteness through the four senses: sight, sound, taste and touch, with cute-coded objects such as human clothing and food creating a continuum of cute. For this chapter, my primary texts are A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), and Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington (1958), with reference to film adaptations of both characters respectively.
My final chapter identifies the dichotomy created when bears like Pooh and
Paddington participate in cuteness but simultaneously recall the wild of ‘real’ bears, positioning my argument around Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” Furthermore, through a series of empirical studies, I look at the effects of fear and disgust when humans encounter wild animals. These factors culminate in Hannah Gold’s Last Bear duology (2021-2023), evoking conversations around child activism and eco criticism. Overall, the combination of cute aesthetics and unnerving animalism creates a bear which occupies that grey area between the safety of the cute inferior and the dangerous, uncontrollable wilds of nature to which animals belong. Overall, when bears are anthropomorphised, they become interpellated as cute subjects and domesticated into a new subspecies: Ursus literatus.