Ten Thousand Shards | Shard 00001

Passages Through This Magic Called ‘Real’:

Love, Risk, and Instauration in The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real

Internet blogger Heather Plett asks whether the Boy of The Velveteen Rabbit “recognize[d] the risk involved in loving the Rabbit into Realness” (“Loving,” 2019), which strikes us as another way of asking whether he knew that securing a foothold in reality through daily life with his plush toy would involve ruptures, destabilizations, negations, and reconstitutions of sense, certainty, and self. It is to ask whether he was prepared for the struggle by which recognition would unfold as a work undertaken in support of the Rabbit’s very own claim to a mode of existence yet to be realized but already in the making, and this precisely by virtue of the toy’s remarkably mundane materiality – the basis of an infinite becoming-other that would determine the duo’s shared experiences of the real as such.

We first encounter the Velveteen Rabbit in a rather banal situation: jostling for attention amid the crush of a motley selection of toys and edible treats “on Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws” (Williams 1922). While we note that he and his nursery companions appear to be endowed with nascent consciousness and selfhood, even as members of a world of otherwise inert things: simple commodities and products of nature and industry, we find that “there were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit,” they say, “was quite best of all” (ibid.). Still, what good, the modern child or consumer might ask, is a modestly appointed plush rabbit, however “splendid” for its “fat and bunchy” build, its “spotted brown and white” coat, its “real thread whiskers,” and its “ears […] lined with pink sateen” (ibid.), when one has at hand all manner of “more expensive” toys deemed “superior” for the complexity of their internal mechanisms? To what urgency might it possibly respond? Under what conditions, and to what end? 

Let us suggest to such questions that The Rabbit’s value and goodness lie precisely in its radical otherness, which is to say that it lies in its insurmountable difference from all the other things that populate and animate its world.  Not only is the Rabbit thus alien with respect to the various toys and edible treats with which it must compete for The Boy’s attention but, more importantly, so too is it absolutely other with respect to The Boy, himself, and it is precisely this alterity that lends their alliance its power and politically-aesthetically animates it.

But The Rabbit now finds himself conversing with the other nursery residents: all the haughty, “more expensive” “mechanical toys” who struck him as being “full of modern ideas,” including “a model boat” who “never missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging in technical terms,” and “the jointed wooden lion,” Timothy, who, in spite of his humble origins, is said to have “put on airs and pretended to be connected with the Government,” making the Rabbit “feel himself very insignificant and commonplace.” But it was his apprenticeship with the Skin Horse that alerted him to the difference between his current state of existence and the reality he sought. We can say that it was here that The Rabbit gained a new level of clarity in vision that would serve as the groundwork for his instaurative journey into becoming-real. 

The insignificance he felt with respect to all the other toys notwithstanding, it would seem that his very awareness of that condition implies a becoming already underway and according to which we consider The Velveteen Rabbit an agentic self. So that, for The Boy, the essential risk of lovingly ushering The Rabbit along its passage through the real is precisely loss of the real itself.

Works Cited

Plett, Heather. “Loving someone into Realness (what the Velveteen Rabbit teaches about holding space).” Internet blog entry: HeatherPlett.com. Dec. 5, 2019.

Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real. New York: Avon Books, 1922. Lit2Go, Florida Center for Instructional Technology. University of South Florida, nd.