66 pages • 2 hours read
Watership Down
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Literary Context: The Epic Journey
In Chapter 26 of Watership Down, Adams quotes a passage from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “On his dreadful journey, after the shaman has wandered through dark forests and over great ranges of mountains [...] he reaches an opening in the ground. The most difficult stage of the adventure now begins. The depths of the underworld open before him” (293).
Campbell’s book deals with a literary form called the Hero’s Journey, in which a protagonist leaves home, travels through a dangerous land, faces daunting challenges, grows in spirit, finds things of great value, and returns home in triumph. Watership Down is a form of this type of story: The main protagonist, the rabbit Hazel, leads his people from their doomed home to a new and better place, from which they journey into a dangerous land to retrieve new and valued members for their group.
A famous ancient epic poem, the Aeneid by Virgil, tells of a hero who leads a group away from the doomed city of Troy, and they establish a new city, Rome. In an introduction to Watership Down, Madeleine Miller writes: “The story can be seen as a sort of lapine retelling of the Aeneid—refugees from a fallen city search for a new home.” Miller adds that other famous tales, including the Sabine Women and the Odyssey’s episode at the land of the Lotus Eaters, also figure into the plot of Watership Down.
Adams’s book thus deliberately recalls the great epics in his story about an unlikely group of rabbits who make a heroic journey that demands much of them but also greatly enlarges their spirits.
Literary Context: Similarities to Another Great Animal Story
Watership Down, widely considered one of the great works of mid-20th-century English literature, shares similarities with a famous English novel from the early 1900s, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
Both books are children’s stories beloved by readers of all ages; both contain talking animals as the main characters; both take place in beautiful natural settings. The authors spent their childhood years roaming the regions described in the books; each writer built his work from stories he told to his children. Both novels contain lyrical passages that describe the loveliness of country landscapes.
Adams’s descriptions capture this beauty eloquently: “The sun, risen behind the copse, threw long shadows from the trees southwestward across the field. The wet grass glittered and nearby a nut tree sparkled iridescent, winking and gleaming as its branches moved in the light wind” (111).
This brings to mind similar passages in The Wind in the Willows: “At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see surfaces—meadows wide-spread, and quiet gardens, and the river itself from bank to bank, all softly disclosed […].” (Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. Kindle Edition, 2020, page 71).
Adams himself quotes Grahame’s book in Chapter 33’s epigram: “Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal [...]. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble” (377).
In other respects, the two books differ. Willows is essentially a comedy—its most famous character is the ridiculous Mr. Toad—while Watership Down is a saga with tragic elements. Grahame’s classic focuses on the enjoyment of riverside life, while Adams’s book deals with a rabbit warren’s struggle to survive. Still, in both, the beauties of the countryside seem to smile down on the characters, the light and color somehow reigning supreme over the storylines, reminding readers that what always remains after the adventures are done is the serene natural world itself.
Socio-Political Context: Gender Roles in Rabbits
Rabbit warrens are matriarchal. If the warren becomes compromised in some way, the females lead the exodus. In Watership Down, several male rabbits embark on a search for a new home. In their haste, the bucks completely overlook the need for females to keep the new warren from going extinct. This pushes the plot in a new direction.
The author notes that male rabbits are, by nature, somewhat cold and calculating about mating, much more so than humans. He also posits that humans aren’t innocent of this behavior: “[…] [M]en have made the same mistake more than once—left the whole business out of account or been content to trust to luck and the fortune of war” (245).
The author thus points up a moral flaw in his book’s characters. Effectively, they express what, among humans, is called male chauvinism, the belief that men are mentally and/or morally more important than women.
The characters’ quirks are based on research by naturalist RM Lockley, who wrote that rabbits often raid other warrens and kidnap females. (Lockley, Ronald M. The Private Life of the Rabbit. Macmillan, 1974.) In the story, bucks tend to give little thought to their does and look down on their accomplishments. One buck, Bigwig, says of the female expertise at digging burrows: “That sort of thing’s all right for does, but not for us” (79).
Some reviewers criticize the book for its disregard for the perspectives of female rabbits. (Lanes, Selma G. “Male Chauvinist Rabbits.” The New York Times, 30 June 1974, page 39.) The story, however, specifically concerns the adventures of a group of bucks. The author doesn’t advocate chauvinism—he comments on the rabbits’ bias multiple times, implicitly agreeing that it’s a moral flaw, at least in the human world. He declines to clean up the rabbits’ inborn tendencies; instead, he presents them as they are, warts and all.
Critics retort that the flaws lie with the author himself, and that the book bows to his prejudices. Authors write about what they know, and Adams fought in the Second World War, where close, male-only soldiering likely influenced his storytelling. The novel emphasizes male bonding and teamwork, and this gets singled out as a sign of gender bias.
Ironically, many of the bucks, including central protagonist Hazel, answer to names taken from plants and flowers, something male chauvinists wouldn’t do.
The idea that women somehow are less important than men was more prominent in the 1970s than it is today among westernized peoples. Still, the controversy dogged Adams, and his sequel, Tales from Watership Down, adds stories about the warren’s females.
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