The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse - Scholarly Commentaries

Scholarly Commentaries

Ruth K. MacDonald of the New Mexico State University writes in Beatrix Potter (1986) that the tale is about housekeeping and dealing with insect pests in the home, and points out that it reflects Potter's pride and pleasure in keeping her house at Hill Top tidy. Tales about humanised mice came easily to Potter, but, unlike the urban mice in The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Two Bad Mice, Mrs. Tittlemouse is a country mouse living beneath a hedge somewhere near Potter's Sawrey. With its narrow passages, small rooms, low ceilings, and well-stocked storerooms, Mrs. Tittlemouse's dwelling is similar to Potter's own at Hill Top. The author's obvious approval of Mrs. Tittlemouse's fastidious housekeeping has its source in her own pleasure in keeping her farmhouse neat, and (like Mrs. Tittlemouse) in being the mistress of her domain. Mrs. Tittlemouse's abhorrence of insect pests reflects Potter's own, but the artist in Potter preserves their beauty in the illustrations – she does not censor their antennae or their groping limbs. Potter thought girls would like the tale best, and would experience the same sort of reaction to insect pests she did – to wit, complete horror and disgust.

M. Daphne Kutzer, Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh and author of Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code (2003), points out that the tale is a comic one taking place completely indoors and one with an obvious anxiety about dirt. There is not the sort of revelry one would expect in a tale about a miniature household but rather a "desperate sense" of wanting to keep that household free of invaders and unwanted outsiders. The Tale of Two Bad Mice is another tale about a miniature household, but there Potter is on the side of the invading two bad mice. Mrs. Tittlemouse is concerned as much about middle class proprieties as the dolls Lucinda and Jane in The Tale of Two Bad Mice but, in Mrs. Tittlemouse, Potter is on the side of the invaded rather than the invaders, who are purely animals with no human characteristics.

Kutzer attributes some of the tale's anxiety to Potter's own unhappiness over her fame as a writer and the intrusiveness of visitors at Hill Top who assumed a presumptuous familiarity with the author or regarded her as nothing more than an exhibit for the tourist to take in. Potter was proprietary over Hill Top and jealously guarded it to and for herself and some of this jealousy is projected onto Mrs. Tittlemouse's anxiety about the sanctity of her home. She is not a recluse – she invites her friends to a party – but like Potter she needs to be in complete control.

Kutzer thinks the tale has a "nightmarish quality". Poor Mrs. Tittlemouse cannot keep one step ahead of the various intruders. Although the house is her own, she has no control over who inhabits it: she finds bees nesting in an empty storeroom and woodlice hiding in the plate rack. She is trapped in her own home, her hours occupied with fighting off invaders from without to the point where she is sure she will "go distracted". Although Mr. Jackson drives the unwanted intruders away, he leaves behind a mess of honey smears, moss, thistledown, and dirty footprints that Mrs. Tittlemouse invests two weeks of her life into cleaning up.