Vermin beings : Anthropomorphism and dehumanization in children’s literature

In this article, I will discuss depictions of vermin in order to investigate what these portrayals signify in stories for children. Vermin are here defined as animals or insects that are considered harmful or a nuisance. I will examine what the use of the motif signifies in books for children and will specifically study stories where vermin are used to describe an experience of otherness, discrimination, or dehumanization. I am specifically interested in stories where the boundaries between animal and human are blurred or critically investigated. I have therefore chosen to discuss a small selection of children’s stories with animal or humanoid protagonists depicted or described as vermin. Considering that dehumanizing imagery and metaphors have historically been used to evoke the moral emotion of antipathy or discrimination in different cultural contexts, I have chosen to discuss texts from different eras. Besides a contemporary picturebook, which functions as the starting point for my discussion, two stories from post-World War II years and two novels from the 1960s are examined. In my analysis, I am interested in investigating whether literature for children reflects, or possibly questions, dehumanizing imagery concerning animals, and how this is done in the texts. As a theoretical standing point for the analysis, I will apply children’s literature research and posthuman theories that investigate size and power and, more specifically, dehumanizing metaphors and images. The article aims to discuss how insects, mice and rats in these children’s stories are used as expressions for otherness, but also how they are used to question ideas concerning dehumanizing rhetoric. While doing so, these small characters point at a muddling of categories, of different systems and hierarchies of bodies, big and small, organic and mechanic, human and nonhuman