Recentering the Rabbits

An Analysis of Animality and Anthropomorphism in Richard Adams’ Watership Down

Abstract

This paper responds to scholarly disagreement within literary animal studies as to whether anthropomorphism aids or hinders human-animal relations and cross-species understanding. Taking Richard Adams’ Watership Down as its case study, the paper argues that the novel retains an interest in portraying its animals as animals despite the heavy anthropomorphization of its animal characters. The analysis highlights four strategies that the novel employs for communicating an animal experience to a human reader: 1) A careful attention to the physicality of its rabbit characters, 2) the use of rabbit mythology to aid the reader in imagining a rabbit-centric worldview, 3) the framing of the entire text as a work of translation, which provides an in-fiction explanation for the occasional untranslatability between human and animal experiences, and 4) thematic exploration of animal vulnerability. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Watership Down successfully fosters a sense of human-animal empathy that calls attention to both commonalities and power imbalances between humans and animals.