ERNEST THOMPSON SETON: WILDERNESS DEBTS

There is a story, as Margaret Atwood relates in her 2008 Massey Lectures book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, that on his twenty-first birthday Ernest Thompson Seton received a bill from his father for the entire cost of his upbringing, including the doctor’s fees from his birth.[1] As odd as this seems, the young Seton paid the bill in full, thereby redeeming himself of any debt to his father, even the debt of his very existence. Later in his career, Seton went on to found the Woodcraft Movement and the Boy Scouts, as well as making a name for himself as a naturalist. Throughout his life he supported the idea that there is an inherent morality to nature, which does out punishments or rewards depending on the correctness of one’s actions. I would argue that this desire for balance is the driving force behind Seton’s career as a naturalist, his illustrations and his animal stories, set in the wilderness where the creation and maintenance of one’s own life establishes a balance owed to Nature. I intend to discover what methods Seton uses to demonstrate this concept of balance, how he delivers it to his audience and why he considers it so important to pass the lesson onto to future generations.

Seton uses this mode of borrowing and payment as his model of proper behavior, and sets out to teach a generation of young readers to obey the natural law as he interprets it, in favour of the artificial law of the courts. He first sets up perceptions of unity between his animal heroes and the young children who are his intended audience, through anthropomorphic descriptions and pictorial representations of the creatures taken from conventional portraiture. He allows his audience not only to see the animals as reflections of themselves, but also as molds into which they can project themselves. Having presented his young readers with protagonists who are similar to themselves, Seton describes the lessons learned by these wild animals, the lessons of fairness and connection to Nature which are at the heart of woodcraft. He thereby instills in his readers a sense of justice according to forest laws in which every act of taking sustenance from the natural world, including the innate debt of existence, must be paid for by obedience to a strict code of behavior which is driven by survival. Only man disrupts this balance, and it is man in the form of the hunter who represents evil in Seton’s stories. Every creature has an abundance of beastly enemies, but man is the enemy of them all because he takes and does not give back to the wood; he does not repay his debts. Thus, in words and illustrations, E.T. Seton attempts to teach the children who read his books to grow up more like animal heroes than human villains, in favor of the law of the wood over that of the city and to respect the debts they owe, by virtue of their birth, to the natural world.

Zoe Yuristy aptly captures this attitude with her photograph Ms. Cristie McNabb and Animal Friends from 2007, in which she juxtaposes the scene of a young girl surrounded by stuffed animals and foliage against William Notman’s Campbell McNabb and his Hunting Trophies, Montreal of 1873. The two photos illustrate the opposing roles of hunter and child. According to Seton, children occupy a privileged space between humanity and nature; Christie McNabb with her stuffed animals and foliage is claiming that space, although not without a sense of play. Campbell McNabb, on the other hand, is Seton’s stereotypical hunter who accumulates the heads and pelts of forest creatures as trophies, as a way of dominating the wilderness without ever really contributing to it.

Seton’s first task in his stories is to break the psychological barrier between human-self and nature-other so that his young readers can see themselves as connected to the animal heroes featured in these tales. In The Wild Animal Play for Children he literally puts young people in the animals’ shoes, casting them as the many heroes of his stories: Redruff the partridge, Vixen with her son Tip, and Molly Cottontail with her son Raggylug, for example. The two fox characters, Vixen and Tip, are drawn in a way that emphasizes both their childish innocence and their connection to the animal heroes from Seton’s story, The Springfield Fox. Tip’s extreme youth – Seton recommends casting a child as young as two years – makes him innately vulnerable and appealing, an impression which is supported by Vixen’s protective gestures, one arm around his shoulders while the other hand leads him gently forward. Seton’s drawings present Vixen as an idealized Victorian child-mother, her neat dress and flowing curls acting as symbols of goodness while her enlarged eyes, tiny hands and small pointed feet associate her with the fox she represents. The fox cap, collar and tail she wears work in tandem with these animal-like traits to unite the three ideals of innocent child, virtuous mother and unspoiled wild creature. The image of the boy-fox Tip is similarly constructed, his full-body fox costume resembling a toddler’s romper while his eyes are even rounder and his hands even smaller than those of Vixen. The innocence of his character is tied to his identity as a very young child, which inspires sympathy in child and adult readers.

In the drawings of each character in costume, the youth of the actors is emphasized and they are clad in outfits which combine elaborate animal features such as head or wings with items of regular dress that emphasize the children’s sweetness.[2] Large, widely spaced eyes in the children’s faces echo the eyes of their animal-hero caps, while their tiny hands and feet suggest beasts’ paws as well as innocent youth. Some even adopt the postures of the animals they are portraying, the rabbit girl leans forward a little, bringing her “paws” up like a seated cottontail. If the imagery is not enough to convey the association of youth and gentleness with wild animals, the captions must be; Molly Cottontail’s description begins, “A sweet little rabbit-girl in white,” the colour of her costume immediately establishes her as good, while the hyphenated “rabbit-girl” suggests a hybrid between the two species.[3] Finally, the speeches each character delivers underlines the fact that they thrive only as long as the laws of the forest are observed, which man is often guilty of breaking. Vixen makes this statement outright:

Only my poor little Tip was saved,              To be chained like a slave to a box;

They talk of fair play – that’s the sportsman’s way –

But there is no fair play for a fox.[4]

She refers to the slaughter of three of her four kits, while Tip, the youngest, was kept chained in the hunter’s yard. His life was spared out of a feeling that it was unsportsmanlike to kill the last of a litter and instead he became a prisoner, a lot, which for Seton represented a fate worse than death.[5] Regardless of the hunter’s satisfaction in sparing the young fox’s life he is actually treating the animal even more cruelly by chaining it up, a deed, which Vixen ratifies by killing her son with poisoned meat.[6] The pretty girl-fox and baby Tip in Seton’s play elicit not only pathos from the viewer; by her words Vixen points out the unfairness of the hunter, and the sympathetic viewer is called on to disapprove of his actions.

In the final passages of this play, all the animals gather around Molly Cottontail, the self-sacrificing mother rabbit who is rewarded by being crowned Queen of the Forest. The animals sing:

              Then hail Molly Cottontail, Queen of the Woods!

              Her duty she did as she could;

              She died, so must all, but in triumph she died,

              So Molly is Queen of the Wood.[7]

Molly is being honored because her good deeds are never repaid in life. By teaching her son Raggylug everything she knows about forest law, protecting him from enemies even at the cost of her own suffering, and ultimately giving up her life while leading a hound away from her son, Molly accumulates a wealth of rewards owed to her that finally results in her coronation as queen of all wild animals.

Seton reinforces this connection with his drawings of animal heroes, focusing on their youthful experiences and especially their places within their families, often through mimicry of human family portraits and personification. These images look very much like the tableau of Molly Cottontail and the photograph of Christie McNabb. In one of the drawings for The Springfield Fox for instance, Vixen is represented as a human matriarch, lying neatly at the top of the image while her four kits squabble over a hen’s carcass below.[8] Granted, hens’ corpses are not a traditional element of family portraits, but the image of a mother with her children laid out in front of her is a common way of depicting domestic groups. The caption, “They tussled and fought while their mother looked on with fond delight,” clearly substantiates the association between the vixen and a doting human mother, in addition to the link between the kits and the children reading this book.

The image of a fond mother overseeing her young is repeated almost exactly in The Biography of a Grizzly, where the illustration of a scene in the main character’s youth shows him with his siblings eating ants, “Like children playing ‘hands’”, according to the author, while the mother grizzly watches indulgently.[9] These images of young animals playing also bring up issues of debt, since children have their first exposure to rules of “fair play” in games. Seton’s audience would know that grabbing a toy from someone else is bound to result in trouble, so when they see the image of one bear cub raising his paw angrily at another, they can divine what is going on. The latter cub is licking ants which do not belong to him from the right paw of the first, engaging himself in a debt which he will pay for by suffering the blow of his brother’s raised left paw. Since the children reading this book will have already identified themselves with the young bears, this incident would drive home the idea of debt and payback in their own lives as well as in the wild.

The bear cub’s lesson in fair play is part of a greater trend in Seton’s work, which I’ll call the “lesson stage.” During this part of its life an animal hero learns how to survive and behave in wilderness society: what to eat, what to flee, and how these two categories balance each other out. The adage taught in Redruff: The Story of the Don Valley Patridge is “foes and food for every moon,” a lesson which is supported by Seton’s drawing of Redruff’s Calendar, showing each month with its prominent feature, threats alternating with things to eat.[10] Redruff and his siblings learn from their mother how to survive, while disobedience is punished by death from a hunter or other predator. The majority of lessons in Seton’s tales stress the importance of filial obedience, constant alertness and the superiority of brain over brawn, but the overriding factor is the inherent balance in nature between what helps and hinders a creature’s existence. During this phase of a young animal’s development it learns to hate and fear the human hunter, who is inexplicably dangerous by virtue of iron traps and guns. During his formative years in The Biography of a Grizzly, Wahb the giant bear has his foot caught in a beaver trap and all his strength is useless in freeing him.[11] Seton’s illustration emphasizes the strength and desperation of the bear with solid, dark shading, his limbs flailing, his face in a ferocious snarl, while the chain anchoring the beaver trap to its post is barely visible, apparently too weak to hold the beast’s mass. The situation seems unfair to Wahb and to the reader; why should man, without even being present or putting himself in any danger, be able to triumph over this young grizzly? The protagonist eventually frees himself through trial and error, but this injustice and other encounters with traps and guns teaches him to loathe the scent of man, a smell which later drives the giant grizzly into a violent rage.[12] Unprovoked assaults on a growing bear cub lead to a man-killing grizzly, whom Seton defends with the words, “It was all fair. The man had invaded the Bear’s country, had tried to take the Bear’s life, and had lost his own.”[13] There is no question as to Wahb’s justification in attacking the trapper who fired at him, making it very clear that those who unfairly provoke with violence will have to suffer violent consequences. Having taught his child readers to identify with the animal heroes of his stories, Seton now teaches them to respect the balance of debt in nature as well as in civilization.

The ideal child according to Seton’s books and drawings is one who is poised between the human and animal kingdoms, like Christie McNabb in Zoe Yuristy’s 2007 composite photograph. Her throne tableau is mirrored by Yuristy’s photograph in which Christie McNabb is seated, like Molly Cottontail, amidst a slew of adorable undersized animals. McNabb adopts the dual roles of princess and child-mother, holding court and dispensing justice in the assurance that she is always right by virtue of her privileged position. Molly’s sacrifices earned her the animal’s worship while McNabb takes it as her due, an expectation which can be justified when one accepts the connection between girl and rabbit mother. The girl here represents both the animal mother who teaches her offspring the ways of the forest and the young creature learning these lessons. The arrangement echoes Seton’s drawings of mothers with their litters, which in turn elicit empathy from the reader by echoing conventional human family portraits. The apparent harmony between the species shown, some predator and others prey, is like the final tableau of The Wild Animal Play in that it stands for the stability and harmony of the wilderness when rules of fairness are obeyed.

William Notman’s Campbell McNabb and his Hunting Trophies, Montreal, seems at first to be similar to the previously mentioned tableaus, but the implications of this scene are exactly opposite to them. The heads of the moose, caribou and deer surrounding him, dwarfs Campbell McNabb, but he was able to destroy every one of them thanks to the gun resting on his knee. The hunter amidst a pile of dead animals is a paragon of what Seton’s work was against: he who kills without need, without provocation, and without earning his victory by woodcraft or strength. Campbell McNabb is an example of what Seton’s readers should not become, as they grow older because he is in irredeemable debt to Nature. Whereas selfless Molly Cottontail is enthroned after her death, the hunter enthroned among his trophies has no such glory waiting for him; his status as king of the forest is bought with traps and guns, but these currencies are worthless in the moral sense. Seton’s young readers have learned to sympathize with the wild creature, but this image teaches them to despise the unjust human hunter.

An essential aspect of Seton’s tales is the balance found in nature, the inevitable implications of an ethical code which has little to do with humanity’s artificial justice. Correct behaviour is taught by animal mothers and rewarded with survival, while disobedience to basic laws of right and wrong is punished with death. Using anthropomorphic imagery and description, Seton allows his readers to identify with the animal heroes of his stories so that they may learn the same lessons and follow similar paths, growing up in the image of the creature living in harmony with the wilderness instead of the hunter who upsets its balance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto: Anansi Press, 2008.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Wild Animals I Have Known. Ed. Malcolm Ross. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1898.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. The Biography of a Grizzly. Toronto: The Copp Clark Company, 1899.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. The Wild Animal Play for Children. New York: Doubleday, Page and
Company, 1900.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Woodmyth & Fable. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Rolf in the Woods. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1911.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Selected Stories of Ernest Thompson Seton. Ed. Patricia Morley. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 1977.

Smyth, Jean F. Ernest Thompson Seton: The Romantic Imagination. Montreal: MA Thesis for Concordia
University, 1978.