Romantic Ideas in the Allegory Watership Down
Romantic Ideas in the Allegory Watership Down The novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, like Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene, is an allegory. Watership Down also embodies many romantic ideas. Fiver, a rabbit who sees visions from Frith, represents the turn toward imagination that occurred in the Romantic period. The rabbits in the novel also value freedom and rebellion against tyranny, two important Romantic ideas. Many of the rabbits that left the Sandleford warren were unhappy with authority there, and the Watership Down warren helped the rebellion against Efrafa. Hyzenthlay, a doe in Efrafa, questions authority and longs for freedom from tyranny. She embodies the individualism valued in the Romantic period and, like Fiver, sees visions from Frith. The rabbits in the novel search for better ways to live- another important Romantic idea. Fiver leads the search. "I know what we ought to be looking for - a high, lonely place with dry soil, where rabbits can see and hear all round and men hardly ever come. Wouldn't that be worth a journey?" (Adams 48) Watership Down is an allegory, "a story in which the characters, settings and events stand for abstract or moral concepts" (Sime 1189). The different warrens in Water
Holly and the other Watership Down rabbits "were sniffling at him; absolutely horror-stricken. The Romantics embraced imagination and naturalness. a strong rabbit could always do just as well by leaving the warren. "There are rabbits there who'd be the same as we are if they could only live naturally, like us. Lettuce-stealing isn't my idea of a jolly life, nor sentry duty in the burrow. At cowslip's warren, the rabbits thought they had found a better place to live when they saw the carrots available daily. The rabbits of Watership Down, like Romantics, "believed in individual liberty and sympathized with those who rebelled against tyranny. This doe rebelled against the tyranny of General Woundwort. He speaks of one of his visions, "I know there's something unnatural and evil twisted all round this place. This prophecy was later fulfilled when Holly and Bluebell came to Watership Down and told how the men destroyed the warren.
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