Finding Beatrix Potter: Bryan Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat

ABSTRACT

Applying adaptation theory, this essay demonstrates that Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel The Tale of One Bad Rat, which is presumably the story of an abused and homeless teen, is actually an adaptation of several biographies about Beatrix Potter.

KEYWORDS:

• Bryan Talbot
• Beatrix Potter
• adaptation theory
• sexual abuse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Talbot describes the origins of The Tale of One Bad Rat in this unpaginated afterword, dated May 1995. He obviously likes puns, since the afterword is the ‘tail’ attached to the novel about the rat.

2. The view of Beatrix Potter as a semi-prisoner in the third-floor nursery for her first 37 years, which was established by Margaret Lane’s 1946 biography, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, has been challenged in recent years by new biographies. Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2008) in particular takes a revisionist view of Potter’s life, claiming that she was not the unhappy child described in earlier biographies but that she was a normal, active girl who was close to her father. Lear takes pains to point out the differences between Potter’s real life and the version of her life portrayed by Lane. For example, the barred windows of Potter’s nursery seem to be a figment of Lane’s imagination. Bryan Talbot, however, would not have had access to this later view of Potter, so he presents the Lane version of her life.

3. Since The Tale of One Bad Rat is unpaginated, for the sake of this analysis, I have added page numbers, starting page 1 on the recto containing the first section head, ‘Town.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna R. White

Donna R. White is a Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University, where she teaches courses in young adult literature, graphic novels, folklore, fantasy, and science fiction. She is the author of Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics and A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature and co-editor of Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan In and Out of Time, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: A Children’s Classic at 100, and Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World.