Easter Sunday is here, and with it, a chance to fete one of nature’s cuddly-wuddliest critters – the adorable bunny rabbit. But what of the rabbits that don’t come bearing festive gift baskets laden with treats? What of the rabbits who don’t inspire joy with their every hippity-hop? What of the rabbits that aren’t really rabbits at all? From toys to thieves to buxom babes to bureaucrats, rabbits in literature take many forms. So let’s hop down the bunny trail for a look at some of fiction’s most iconic cottontails.
THE WHITE RABBIT (AILICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, LEWIS CARROLL)
For a fellow with major anxiety about promptness, The White Rabbit sure seems to spend a lot of time accessorizing – see his signature waistcoat-and-pocket watch combo. Apparently, life as a put-upon flunky for a mercurial monarch offers plenty of opportunity to flex one’s wardrobe. When the White Rabbit reappears on the scene, he’s “splendidly dressed” and carrying a pair of white kid gloves and “a large fan.” Karl Lagerfeld would approve.
BUNNY SCALE: Four Easter Eggs (Working a look is no excuse for poor time management.)
HARRY “BUNNY” MANDERS (THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN [AND OTHERS], E.W. HORNUNG)
As delinquent careers go, there are worse gigs than being the sidekick to former cricketer and gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles. The narrator of E. W. Hornung’s “Raffles Stories,” Bunny plays the criminal Watson to his best pal’s felonious Holmes. When we first meet him in the short story “The Ides of March,” he’s moral enough to be ashamed that he’s not turned off by his dear friend’s passion for burglary. But he quickly and enthusiastically settles into life as an accomplice, exclaiming, “I’ve gone to the devil anyhow. I can’t go back, and wouldn’t if I could.” A man who loves a good flannel suit, he’s a more subdued dresser than the natty Raffles. Still, Bunny is well-aware of the value of seasonally appropriate dressing. In “The Rest Cure,” he raids a closet in search of a feminine disguise and is dismayed that the woman whose house he has broken into “had all her summer frocks away with her in Switzerland.” He settles on “a big black hat with wintry feather…as unseasonable as my skating skirt and feather boa.” In the end, a thief’s gotta make do with what’s available.
BUNNY SCALE: Seven Easter Eggs (Stealing may be wrong, but being a game and devoted friend is always au courant.)
JESSICA RABBIT (WHO CENSORED ROGER RABBIT, GARY K. WOLF)
A Rabbit by marriage, not by birth, Jessica is the ultimate dame to kill for. Almost everyone who encounters the ex-Mrs. Rabbit is beguiled by her, including jaded P.I. Eddie Valiant. No surprise there – as Valiant explains, she’s got “a body straight out of one of the magazines adolescent boys pour over in locked bathrooms.” As cartoon ladies go, she’s more femme fatale than Disney princess. It’s hard to imagine Snow White sauntering around in a “clingy pastel green number.” It’s also hard to imagine Snow leaving behind a trail of murdered paramours, or seducing the son of one of those dearly (and not-so-dearly) departed former lovers in hopes of cashing in his inheritance like “a lottery ticket.” Still, it's a hard world for a dame, no matter how gorgeous; who can blame a girl for making the most of her charms? As for the novel’s two homicides, Jessica’s saucy hands are clean. After all, she’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.
BUNNY SCALE: Nine Easter Eggs (Vampiness so well-worked that only Kathleen Turner’s voice could do it justice.)
HARRY “RABBIT” ANGSTROM (RABBIT, RUN [AND OTHERS], JOHN UPDIKE
One day you’re a high school basketball star, the next you’re an embittered, anxious 26-year-old trapped in a loveless marriage and hawking a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler. Meet Rabbit Angstrom, the dishonorable Everyman at the heart of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest). Depressed and dissatisfied, Rabbit lashes out by driving off into the night in an attempt to abandon his pregnant wife, Janice, and young son. His time as a runaway is brief, and upon returning home, he works out his malaise through carnal means, embarking on a torrid affair with a prostitute named Ruth. While “going at it like rabbits” is a playful, if crass, assessment of couples in the honeymoon-phase, “going at it like Rabbit” means embarking on a downward spiral of agita-laden, emotionally violent psychosexual behavior as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the doldrums of middle-class life. Rabbit’s existential crisis leads to tragedy and heartbreak for everyone in his orbit. Governed by an out-of-control libido and spiritual transience, he’s both a double-Pulitzer-winning main character and a shame to individuals with leporine nicknames.
BUNNY SCALE: One Easter Egg (Caddish, nasty sad-sackness is never en vogue.)
PETER RABBIT (THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT [AND OTHERS], BEATRIX POTTER)
Sure, he’s an adorable, universally beloved figure from children’s literature, but Peter is a bit of a brat. While kids naturally rebel against Mom’s wishes, flaunting maternal orders by taunting the man who baked your father into a pie is recklessness beyond measure. Peter escapes the encounter with his life, but not with his outfit – a blue jacket with brass buttons and a pair of shoes. Adding insult to injury for poor Mrs. Rabbit, her son’s carelessness with clothing is a recurring issue. In fact, the “quite new” pieces that end up as a scarecrow in Mr. McGregor’s garden represent “the second little jacket and pair of shoes that Peter had lost in a fortnight!” A show of shockingly casual disregard for one’s single mother’s finances.
BUNNY SCALE: Five Easter Eggs (If one must hew toward an overly precious statement piece, one should at least be fastidious in caring for it.)
THE BUNNIES (BUNNY, MONA AWAD)
What’s worse than a bunch of performatively intellectual twee gals who all call each other by the same insufferably cute nickname? Why, a bunch of performatively intellectual twee MFA students who all call each other by the same insufferably cute nickname, of course. In Mona Awad’s hallucinatory, darkly hilarious Bunny, creative-writing student Samantha Mackey finds herself taken in by a quartet of smart-but-still-girly peers who have merged into a post-grad hivemind. The girls share everything, from literary sensibilities to sartorial preferences. Think the Heathers by way of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – better read, perhaps, but every bit as vicious. (“We've read Jane Eyre
, too, you c*nt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes,” one of them spits when her intellect is questioned.) By the time Samantha realizes that the Bunnies are more cult than clique, it’s too late; she’s already well on the way to a violent downward spiral into madness. Aspiring authors beware: If a cadre of Peter Pan-collared, lavender cupcake-baking, Virginia Wolfe-loving cool girls invites you to join a writers’ group, run.
BUNNY SCALE: Three Easter Eggs (Borderline psychotic cultishness is bad enough, but “precocious adult” style is a bridge too far.)
THE VELVETEEN RABBIT (THE VELVETEEN RABBIT, MARGERY WILLIAMS)
A floppy-eared sweet pea with a big heart and a sad backstory, this bunny takes his fair share of hard knocks. His stint as sickbed comfort object to a little boy gets repaid not with gratitude, but with a trip to the trash heap. One could forgive this bunny for becoming bitter. Still, with a good heart and some fairy magic, even the most outlandish dreams can come true. It’s hard not to be moved when this loyal little plush pal gets rewarded with realness.
BUNNY SCALE: Seven Easter Eggs (Always in the buff, so no points for stylistic ingenuity, but he makes up for it in authenticity.)
EDMUND “BUNNY” CORCORAN (THE SECRET HISTORY, DONNA TARTT)
The least academically inclined member of Donna Tartt’s much-celebrated campus novel, Bunny Corcoran is a bigoted blowhard whose voice sounds like “W.C. Fields with a bad case of lockjaw.” There’s an important moral lesson at the heart of The Secret History: Even if a member of your social circle is a homophobic, anti-Catholic jerk, pushing him into a ravine will result in a lifetime of devastating consequences for all involved. Lest anyone be tempted to come to Bunny’s defense, he does have a hand in his own demise. After learning that his friends’ bacchanalia resulted in the death of a local farmer, Bunny turns to blackmail rather than to the authorities. The morally correct proscription against victim-blaming has its limits, and Bunny hops right over them.
BUNNY SCALE: Three Easter Eggs (The ability to read the room is equally important as knowing how to dress for the event.)
HARVEY (HARVEY, MARY CHASE)
It’s important to embrace a loved one’s eccentricities, but an ever-present imaginary friend might be a bridge too far, even for the most tolerant of siblings. Such is the case for Elwood P. Dowd and Harvey, the unseen six-foot-tall rabbit driving the action in Mary Chase’s comedy of manners. Vera, Elwood’s socialite sister, can no longer tolerate her brother’s invisible pal, and so she embarks upon a quest to have him institutionalized. For anyone who, after one too many politically charged holiday dinners, might find Vera’s impulses understandable, this play ultimately offers up an important lesson about seeing the good in even the most offbeat of family members.
BUNNY SCALE: Ten Easter Eggs (Impossibly tall and invisible? It’s the height of minimalist chic.)