Adolescence and the Subversion of Cuteness in Stuart Little

In E.B. White’s classic tale of miniature proportions, the novel’s diminutive hero, Stuart Little, comes into the world clocking in at under two inches tall to his unsuspecting and unassuming parents. In spite of several mouselike features, including but not limited to a tail, whiskers, and rounded ears protruding from the top of his head the Little’s accept him as one of their own. Bypassing infancy completely, young Mr. Little’s aging process is not entirely dissimilar from that of the gods of Greek mythology who were capable of cattle theft twenty-four hours after birth. Stuart enters the world with the ability of speech and White presents his readers with a mouselike man child who dons a gray hat and a small cane—a behavior that White attributes to mice, making it evident that the mice he was acquainted with were far more dapper than the ones I have encountered scurrying across my kitchen. Though the Little’s love their miniature son, it seems that they are not entirely sure what to do with him and there is an unspoken tension throughout the novel that places Stuart at odds with his parents who can’t quite decide whether they want to protect him or loose him. The bulk of the novel is concerned with the fortunes and hardships that our tiny hero faces culminating when his only friend, a small bird named Margalo who has been living in the Boston fern on the bookshelf in the Little’s living room, disappears without warning. Quite devastated by his loss, Stuart decides that at seven years old he is mature enough to leave home in search of his avian companion and, without even leaving a note to his parents (who might very well have been relieved by his absence), he sets out into the world in a tiny mouse sized car. Stuart’s travels, as I will explore in depth later on, provide him with experiences that demonstrate both his maturity and childishness, suggesting a complexity to his character that is often overlooked. Unlike his cinematic counterpart, voiced by the ever genial Michael J. Fox, White’s Stuart is not merely an endearing little addition to the family, but rather a complicated creature that teeters in between cute and unsettling, calling forth the notion that there may be a link between the two. Furthermore, the fact that Stuart never really fills the role of child nor adult, may be linked to a state of perpetual adolescence—a state itself that teeters in between cute and unsettling.

The term ‘cute,’ thought at one time to have originated as a synonym of ‘bowlegged’ carries a vague notion that offers both a collective and personal meaning. Not entirely different from ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness,’ it is rooted in biological function, drawing on a subconscious desire to preserve and care for that which we define as ‘cute’—generally animals or objects that display pedomorphic qualities. Literally living up to his name, Stuart, the child who is regarded as a little man, seems to both epitomize and subvert the idea of what cuteness is, suggesting that that which is small or infantile can reveal creepiness as well as cuteness. Rather than the side of the spectrum that is reserved for baby pandas and sleeping kittens, Stuart occupies an area shared with dwarves and those paintings from the 1970s depicting happy teenagers with
bulbous heads and enormous eyes. They maintain the physical attributes associated with cuteness, yet there is something distinctly unnatural about the way that those attributes are exhibited. Bordering on the uncanny they are trapped between awkwardness and normality, placing them in a position that subverts social expectation. Perhaps with a desire for preservation of the cute comes an equally biological and subconscious desire to preserve the ‘normal.’ This may be seen in Stuart’s interaction with his family, his mother and father in particular. Though the Little’s outwardly appear to protect their son, their actions suggest ulterior motives. A seemingly innocuous gesture, when Stuart is stuck in bed with bronchitis (which it may be of note was contracted after Mrs. Little shut the refrigerator door without realizing he was trapped inside) Mr. Little presents him with a pair of ice skates fashioned out of paper clips as a sign of well wishes, a gift that no doubt will get Stuart out of the house and into danger. He is frequently placed into dangerous situations by his family and it seems that his primary function in his home is to complete tasks that no one else is small enough to do. The act of standing in the piano to lift the stuck key when his father plays is reminiscent of child workers in the early twentieth century who were placed into large threatening machines because their little hands were just the right size to fixed jammed gears. The Little’s present us with a discrepancy between words and actions, treating Stuart as a means to accomplish menial tasks, such as fetching ping pong balls out from underneath the couch and going down the bathtub drain to retrieve his mother’s wedding ring, while showering him with verbal affection. There is an awareness and acceptance of this behavior on some level that always keeps Stuart separated from his brother and parents, placing him in the role of both child and pet.

One of the most significant differences between the novel and Rob Minkoff’s 1999 film adaptation (which on a tangential side note was surprisingly written by M. Night Shyamalan) is that rather than allowing Stuart to be an actual mouse who enters the family through adoption, as Minkoff does, White creates Stuart as a mouselike human that Mrs. Little gives birth to. Though I would assume an easy delivery, there must be something irrefutably disconcerting about giving birth to newborn not only bearing a strong resemblance to a mouse in several respects but also to a fully developed miniaturized man. A complaint of the novel is that this is never explained or discussed in full detail, but really, in what way is it possible to elaborate on such things without changing the tone completely? So much of the action occurs in an episodic structure where things are constantly moving ahead with little regard for what has happened in the past, that it seems reasonable within the context of the story that once Mrs. Little gives birth to a mouse there is no real use in referring back to that. Perhaps the reason that White places Stuart as the Little’s biological son is because it allows for conflict. Unlike the film in which the Little’s actively choose Stuart, in the novel they are stuck with him and have no other option but to take care of him. From the beginning there is a separation dividing Stuart from his family, a misunderstanding almost between expectation and reality, that is based not only on size, but species. So close to both human and mouse, yet neither, Stuart is beside himself. In her essay, “Species Trouble: The Abjection of Adolescence in E.B. White’s Stuart Little,” Marah Gubar writes “Neither fully human nor entirely animal, the status of miniature beings is always problematic: will they be treated like vermin (hunted down, caged, killed) or like humans (incorporated into the family, nurtured, embraced)?"

The feeling of isolation attributed to Stuart may be accounted for by the suggestion of his adolescence. Of his inability to fit as a human Gubar writes ,“it is my contention that such ‘species trouble’ symbolizes and speaks to the condition of another creature caught between two categories: namely, the adolescent. Even as miniature subjects like Stuart Little blur the line between the animal and the human, they also tend to inhabit the fraught frontier of adolescence, that unsettling period during which the boundary between childhood and adulthood is constantly breached and reasserted.”

Assuming Stuart’s adolescence the novel achieves cohesion that works to explain otherwise unrelated and unexplainable behaviors and events. It may be translated into a story about a clean well dressed young man with shifting views of himself who decides that has outgrown his home and goes out to find adventure and the woman he loves. The Holden Caulfield of mice, Stuart spends the first half of the novel trying to hold onto a semblance of childhood in which he desires both comfort and independence from his parents. Upon his departure he gets his first car and goes on his first date, two markedly vital elements of adolescence. Not quite grown, like Holden, his imitation of adulthood signifies that he has not yet made the leap.