When you think of political fiction, authors that spring to mind might include George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984), or maybe John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath); or perhaps those 19th Century pioneers of social realism, Charles Dickens or Emile Zola, whose work condemned poverty and social injustice. Alternatively, feminists among us might cite Angela Carter or Fay Weldon’s eviscerations of patriarchy, or Zadie Smith’s exploration of the shifting landscape of modern multi-cultural London. But I’m guessing that Beatrix Potter would not be at the top of anyone’s list.
Take her Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903). The plot is pretty simple. Nutkin is one of a band of red squirrels who regularly visit an island on a nearby lake to forage for nuts.
The island is home to an owl named Old Brown, to whom the squirrels bring dead mice and honey. Old Brown receives their tributes in aloof silence and the squirrels are duly deferential, with the exception of Nutkin, who bobs around hyperactively, chanting riddles. Old Brown ignores him, but this merely emboldens Nutkin to step up his impertinence, tickling the owl with a nettle and continuing to bombard him with his infuriating riddles.
Eventually, Nutkin crosses a line by jumping onto Old Brown’s head, whereupon the owl grabs the squirrel by his tail and holds him upside down intending to skin him, a fate Nutkin only eludes by pulling free, snapping his tail in two in the process.
‘And to this day’, concludes the story, ‘if you meet Nutkin up a tree and ask him a riddle, he will throw sticks at you, and stamp his feet and scold, and shout— “Cuck-cuck-cuck-cur-r-r cuckk-k!”
Like many stories written for small children this one contains a moral: respect your elders and betters, or else... But it can also be read as a political allegory, a kind of miniature Animal Farm.
Old Brown becomes the feudal overlord demanding submission and tribute from the squirrels, whose gifts are a form of tithe. Old Brown does nothing to earn these gifts, and brutally punishes transgressors, like a feathered and taloned mafia boss. Nutkin is the rebel spirit who rejects the meek subservience of his brother squirrels, ending up mutilated and embittered. But even leaving aside allegorical readings, it is not hard to see political dynamics at work in the story, and the listening child will absorb their unspoken message: know your place and behave yourself!
Of course, the real power lies not with Old Brown but with Beatrix Potter. The author of any story dictates the narrative and how the story is told. The author can manipulate the reader’s sympathies, withhold information, and play on our emotions.
The very word, author, with its roots in authority, denotes power. To write is to exercise power, therefore, to write is a political act. Marxist critics argue quite plausibly that all literature is political, from the mildest nursery rhyme to the angriest dystopian novel.
All literature reflects the assumptions and opinions of the author’s particular worldview: in the case of the Western canon, an overwhelmingly white, male, Judao-Christian worldview. It reflects the socio-political climate from which it is born. Class hierarchy, social rules and power systems are baked into stories, whether we notice it or not.
There are no neutral stories or storytellers. Even squirrels are political when they are given fictional identities and quasi-human nature.
Twelfth Night
Let’s raise our literary sights a little.
William Shakespeare cut his teeth writing history plays exploring the political machinations of the Wars of the Roses. They delve deep into the intricacies of statecraft and kingship and acknowledge a debt to Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with political skulduggery. Shakespeare also explores political violence through tragedies such as Macbeth and Julius Caesar.
But even the crowd-pleasing romantic comedies he was knocking out in the 1590s were deeply political works despite their light and laughter.
Take Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s latest and greatest comedies, written and staged shortly before the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 against a febrile backdrop of courtiers jostling for power, Catholic plots and brewing social unrest. Shakespeare by this time was a court favourite but he had to tread carefully in his work to avoid official censure and even imprisonment.
This is one reason why his plays tend to have far-away settings, either in time or geography, even though the issues they explore are topical and indeed timeless.
Twelfth Night is set in Illyria, an obscure Mediterranean state that acts as a proxy for Elizabethan England. Its ruler is the Count Orsino, who at the play’s start is seeking to marry the wealthy and beautiful Countess Olivia. Had Shakespeare’s story followed the conventions of his time, the union would have taken place as the natural and proper way of things: wealth marries wealth, power is extended, an heir is produced to continue the ruling dynasty. This would have been expected, and accepted, even if the couple involved were not in love, especially among the social elite. But this would have made a very short play.
As it is, there’s a snag... Olivia refuses not only to marry but even to meet Orsino. She is in mourning for her recently deceased brother and has shut herself away for seven years.
Orsino, hamstrung by unrequited love, and not a little irked that his romantic overtures are being flatly denied, falls into a state of melancholy, incapable of doing anything but flop about listening to soppy songs (“If music be the food of love, play on...”).
With the country’s two most powerful figures temporarily out of action, rival parties jockey for power. In Olivia’s household, the ambitious steward Malvolio plans to marry his mistress, defying social convention, and leapfrog into the aristocracy, while her drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch, plots Malvolio’s downfall and the marriage of his wealthy friend Sir Andrew to his niece.
Meanwhile in Orsino’s court the androgynous figure of Viola, who is masquerading as a boy, secretly longs to marry Orsino whilst paying court to Olivia on his behalf. Feste, Olivia’s Fool, offers sardonic commentary throughout, like a kind of Renaissance Squirrel Nutkin, channelling anarchic energy and the spirit of misrule into the drama.
A complex plot develops involving many comic misunderstandings, rolereversal and gender-bending, before finally resolving into a conventional happy ending that marries off the lovers but leaves behind a host of questions about the role of money, social ranks, gender, sexuality and – oh yes – love, in human relationships.
It is not difficult to read Shakespeare’s history plays politically since their subject is politics.
But in fact, all of Shakespeare’s work invites political readings since all his work poses fundamental questions about human nature and the social order.
And while his plays generally end on a conservative note, with the status quo of social power structures restored, the journeys to that politically safe resolution explore genuinely radical alternatives.
Alternatives that in Twelfth Night reflect a startling number of society’s most urgent concerns: gender instability, LGBT and identity politics, class barriers and feminism. As Olivia observes at the end of the play: “Most wonderful!”.