Children’s literature and human-canine culture: Transformations of James M. Barrie’s dog Nana in cross-cultural translation

Abstract

The representation of dogs in children’s literature forms the subject of this article. It is framed within the concept of human-canine societies introduced by the French anthropologist Dominique Guillot who claimed that alongside any human society there exists a hybrid society formed by human beings and dogs in which dogs are regarded as its full members. Such societies exist in each country and they generate their own cultures that are developed gradually through ontogenetic ritualization but may change over time. The focus of the following research is the interconnection between children’s literature and such human-canine cultures. I claim that children’s literature is influenced by them and influences them at the same time. The key figure of the research, the Scottish writer James M. Barrie, not only gave dogs the status of full members of the society but endowed them with the status of his muses in his personal, public, and literary life. His own dog, a landseer Newfoundland called Luath, was his pet, friend, muse, and a prototype for Nana, a nanny dog from Barrie’s most famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. I aim to study and analyze the transformations that occur to Nana when the play was staged, adapted, illustrated and published into a different human-canine culture. The source material of the study is a draft version of the play, the first published version of the play, illustrations for numerous British and American adaptations of the Peter Pan story, and the first Soviet edition of the play. The three parts of the article describe the history of the creation of Nana and the formation of her iconography in Great Britain; the history of the first American production and two further adaptations of the play, as well as the changes that Nana underwent in the American tradition; the history of the first translation of the play in the USSR and the work of the translator and artist in the construction of the Soviet Nana. I come to the conclusion that the image of Nana is formed in the period of time when the contemporary human-pet culture was introduced and incorporated into British mindset. I prove that Nana was Luath’s copy: his character and even his black marks were recreated in Nana’s costume. Moreover, Barrie’s popularity and his daily walks with Luath in Kensington Gardens turned the writer and his dog a landmark in London, so the British iconography of Nana developed rapidly and practically did not change over time. In the United States and the Soviet Union, the countries with their own unique human-dog cultures, Nana was transformed into a St. Bernard and a Cocker Spaniel respectively. Such transformations may be explained by different reasons. While in the United States this is a consequence of the blend of Luath with Barrie’s first dog, St. Bernard Porthos, which the writer himself confessed, in the USSR the reasons were rooted in politics and ideology which to a large extent influenced Soviet human-canine culture and hence the representation of dogs in children’s books.