Willie Wild Thing (1878)

AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In this sequence of stories, Child emphasizes animal sentience and cognition, promoting animal welfare by means of an anthropomorphic rendering of non-human point of view regarding the daily toils and everyday lives of animals.

Through the character of a lively little country boy, who goes by the name of Willie Wild Thing, Child traces the intimate relationship between the boy and nature, particularly animals. “Before he was six years old,” the narrator tells us, “he knew all the wild flowers, and could tell in what places they best liked to grow. He knew how every little bit of moss looked in the winter, and how it would look in the spring. He talked of all such things as if he thought they were as much alive as himself” (111). In fact, Willie has “a great passion for calling every living thing brother and sister” (121) and frequently talks to animals, even though they cannot reciprocate or at least not directly. He also emphasizes a kind of anthropomorphic interconnectedness in nature: “I believe the flowers, and the leaves, and the blades of grass, tell things to birds,” Willie says at one point (137). But Willie's tendency to anthropormorphize cuts both ways. An avid storyteller himself (with his little sister as his audience), the narrative relates Willie's imaginary metamorphoses into several animal forms (facilitated by a wishing cap he received from a fairy), including a butterfly, a robin, a squirrel, and a bantam. Willie's stories invariably emphasize advantages and special powers acquired through these metamorphoses, such as the power to fly, a better sense of smell, enhanced musicality, and the capacity to run up a tree. In this way, the narrative emphasizes the unique capacities of all kinds of animals that far exceed those of humans.

In the first of Willie's stories, he is transformed into a butterfly. Willie happily roams the fields as a butterfly for a few days before he is caught and killed: “a fly-catcher whisked me up in a gauze net, and stuck a pin through me, to put me in his collection of insects. That hurt, I tell you! But it was all over before I had time to think. Some day, when father gives us a shilling, we will go to the Museum, and I will show you myself, pinned up in a glass-case full of butterflies” (117). This metaleptic twist towards the end of Willie's account forcefully places the reader at once in both positions of victim and perpetrator, and the narrative thus solicits empathy with the animal while simultaneously critiquing human cruelty that is motivated by, in this case, scientific disinterestedness.

Willie's imagined experiences in the animal world are invariably connected to his concern for animal welfare, from his perspective as a human. Thus, in the second story he tells his sister: “I wouldn't rob a bird's nest; not I. For I have been a bird; and I know how bad it is” (130). The story includes such an incident, where a neighborhood boy robs a nest, and the narrative subsequently focuses on the pain and suffering of the avian parents (one of whom happens to be Willie, 131) and their attempts to raise another set of children. This second story, too, ends with a metaleptic twist: a painter is said to have painted Willie and his mate and then to have given that painting to Willie's sister. “So those are portraits of me and my Mary Red Breast,” Willie says, “that are hung up in a nice little frame in your bed-chamber; and they are as much like us, as they could possibly be.” This painting was completed not long before Willie's premature death as a bird: “I stopped to rest a minute on the telegraph wire. I don't rightly know whether it lightened, or what was the matter; but I felt as I suppose birds do when they are shot; and down I dropped. So there was an end of my being a Robin” (136). Again, metalepsis elicits human empathy with the animal world.

In the third story Willie is a squirrel. Again, he is keen to point out how humans intrude on and negatively interfere with the processes of nature. He reports how the railroad disrupted life as a squirrel, instilling fear in his squirrel-mate, who supposed it to be “some awful great beast going by” (142). This story, too, ends with the same kind of metaleptic twist as the previous two stories: another neighborhood boy is said to have shot Willie “to be cooked,” which prompts his sister to reply that she will “never want to eat squirrel pie again, so long as I live” (143, 144).

The fourth and final story recounts Willie's adventures as “a beautiful white bantam cockerel” (145). Imported from India, Willie and his mate face xenophobia from the fowl on the farm to which they are taken, with Child subsequently also promoting cross-cultural tolerance and interchange as one of the local birds eventually admits that it is “very improving to talk with foreigners. How much one can learn!” (151). Again, Willie is eventually killed, this time accidentally, when a horse unwittingly kicks him to death.

The narrator remarks that Willie used his wishing cap on many other occasions, even as an adult, and “always kept up the same lively sympathy with every little creature in the woods and fields” (153). By means of the story's embedded narratives of animal life that are rife with Willie's narratorial comments, Child self-consciously deploys the power of imagination in the service of animal welfare, narratively situating the protagonist and reader in the place of these non-human creatures, inviting admiration of them and promoting the treatment of them with as much reverence as Willie Wild Thing.