He kept thinking about the bird downstairs asleep in the fern.” A not dissimilar repression figures, incidentally, for Snowbell himself when a cat friend asks him how he can “live in the same house with a bird and a mouse and do anything about it,” the miserable feline admits that he’s possibly “got too much self-control for my own good. Stuart’s affection for Margalo begins as concern for her safety - what if the family cat, Snowbell, were to choose her as prey? But the markers of his worry quickly emerge as not unlike those of a sexually frustrated lover: “He tossed and turned and the bedclothes got all rumpled up. This first comes up in the young mouse’s interest in Margalo, a sickly bird passing through the Little household, who is nursed back to health by the family. With matters moving at such a rapid clip, could sexual maturity be far behind? Stuart Little is a children’s book and yet White managed to inject a discomfiting sense of his protagonist’s adult frustrations into the narrative.
HOW OLD IS STUART LITTLE PATCH
Little makes him “a fine little blue worsted suit with patch pockets in which he could keep his handkerchief, his money, and his keys” and at what would be considered toddler age, he wears a hat and carries a cane. At birth, he walks for his infant clothing, Mrs. From near the moment Stuart emerges from his mother’s womb, he is a fully formed mouse-person.
Little frets.) But even stranger than the muddling of the border between man and mouse, I’ve always felt, was the blurring of the distinction between boy and man. (“I should feel badly to have my son grow up fearing the farmer’s wife was going to cut off his tail with a carving knife,” Mr. On the other, the fear, specifically, was that these songs would be ones that belittled or menaced rodents. On the one hand, we had the Littles worrying, just like any regular human parents would, that their boy might have nightmares were he exposed to inappropriate nursery songs. Part of Stuart Little’s appeal, of course, was its continual toggling between naturalizing the mouse-as-person gambit and emphasizing its weirdness. But even more notable to me was an episode in the book that I’ve returned to in my mind again and again over the years, ever since I first read it: the chapter in which Stuart goes on a blind date. A woman giving birth to a mouse - how could that come to be? What would that look like? I couldn’t, as they say, help but wonder. But even when I was an 8-year-old with a still primitive grasp of the facts of life, my mind kept wandering back to the biology of the matter, the sheer mechanics of it. It’s true that the book’s opening lines manage to elide the cruder aspects of the situation - Stuart, a two-inch-tall baby looking “very much like a mouse in every way,” simply “arrived” to take his place as second son in the Upper West Side-dwelling Little family. White’s Stuart Little has always been odd to me, even a tad perverse.
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