EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Easter rabbits and March hares
NOT EVERY RABBIT is temperamentally suited to the role of Easter Bunny; it is specialist work requiring rare discretion. Life has never been easy for rabbits. At best they are perceived as merely pretty; more cuddly-cute than interesting and are associated with indiscriminate breeding. Most difficult of all for any discerning rabbit of intellectual ambition is the comparisons with a close relative, the hare.
Larger, more athletic, slightly crazed, the hare, unlike the rabbit, possesses real presence. When Punch cartoonist John Tenniel came to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) he conveyed the pomposity of the dapper White Rabbit, a self -obsessed, chinless bureaucrat fretting about being late.
Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit is also a snob, although not above exchanging his jacket, waistcoat and gold pocket watch when donning the uniform of a herald in order to blow the trumpet before calling the witness at Alice’s trial in the pivotal “Who Stole the Tarts?” chapter.
True, the March Hare is an unusually witless specimen. Still back to rabbits; self-taught artist Beatrix Potter favoured pretty and sweet. Young Peter Rabbit is both, if also very cheeky, even stupid, as he ignores his mother’s advice to stay away from Mr McGregor’s vegetable garden where Peter’s father had ended up in a pie. Peter is no Easter Bunny; he disobeys his mother to gorge on McGregor’s radishes, is pursued and loses his smart blue jacket. Peter’s cousin, Benjamin Bunny, another daredevil, persuades Peter into a second raid.
Beatrix Potter began the story in a letter to the son of her former governess, publishing it herself in 1901. Neither Peter nor Benjamin are Easter Bunny material.
Easter remained a largely religious festival until the 1890s when an English card manufacturer produced a card with a rabbit on it, possibly intending a more secular celebration of seasonal renewal.
Rabbits, in common with chicks, became associated with spring and also with fertility, supported by coloured and chocolate eggs. By the early 20th century US merchandisers had inherited a mixed bag of European customs and began marketing Easter cards, with cute bunnies among the most dominant themes. It was only a matter of time before a formula emerged the chicks would become the hens that laid the eggs to be delivered by rabbits.
In 1951 Disney recast Carroll’s White Rabbit as absent-minded and dithering, causing rabbits everywhere to sigh gratefully when Richard Adams in Watership Down (1972) conferred some much needed tragic gravitas through the character of Fiver, the noble seer figure. Because by then there was no disputing the world’s most famous rabbit was an indolent wise guy named Bugs Bunny, complete with Brooklyn accent and an anarchic catch phrase, “What’s up Doc?” The first cartoon icon to appear on a US postage stamp, Bugs Bunny, created by Warner Brothers, fled his warren about 1940 and has his own star in Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
Though physically more elongated hare than rabbit, Bugs would liven any dinner party, but lacks Easter Bunny commitment.