The tales are more complex than a surface, or recreational read in dialect, suggests. Too much gets passed over because of the difficulty in understanding the dialect. Or, because the drive for entertainment leads to editing out serious thoughts.
It takes translating for yourself, each word, before the realization hits. For example, look what is happening with Uncle Remus. His world is like ours after all.
Read: "Miss Cow Falls a Victim to Mr. Rabbit," see Uncle Remus Tales, Miss Cow. Read it there. Not perfect, but you got an amateur here.
Some ethical issues in the story. The Plot. Rabbit and his family are hungry. He sees Miss Cow. He wants some milk, is not optimistic about his chances. He polites her up, gets her to butt the persimmon tree so he can get some persimmons, knowing she will get stuck with her horn in the tree; and she does, and it does, and he won't help her out.
He said he would get Brer Bull to help pry her loose.
Instead, he brings back his family with pails and they - ha ha - milk her dry and leave her there. No asking, no permission. All night she moos there. She finally gets loose, mad, and hatches a plan to get back at Brer Rabbit, by sticking her horn back in the hole so she can slide it out easy when and if he comes to help.
He sees her do it, won't get close - says he can help by doing the grunting while she does the work of getting loose. She pulls out that horn and takes off after him - he ducks in the briar patch, pretends he is another rabbit entirely, tells here where Brer Rabbit ran off to, and she heads on, not seeing that he is there.
Issues. Why does that sound like a gang assault (put in fear, in some jurisdictions) or battery (unwanted touching in some jurisdictions) or both. Yet, there are other angles - the nature of milking as necessary after all, and the use of young 'uns, worse - see ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape#Gang_rape.
Who owes what to whom. Still, see it from Sis Cow's view. She would have had choices, except that Brer Rabbit cut them off. What were Sis Cow's choices? Can her rights be valorized, a value put on it? Brer Bull could have helped gouge out the hole in the tree so she could get loose, and Brer Rabbit did say he was going to get him (never did). Unstuck, she would have gone back to the barn.
Brer Rabbit perhaps himself could have helped her get loose because he could see what was going on,, but instead he took advantage. But, here is the twist. As Uncle Remus knows, and tells the little boy, if Brer Rabbit had not milked Sis Cow, she would have been in great discomfort. It benefited her to get milked.
A cow + full udder = pain, etc.
But that is not enough to assess Brer Rabbit. None of this is intended to take away the enjoyment of an old folk tale with a trickster, that common character among cultures globally, but it is worth discussing.
Rights or not.
1. Does Sis Cow have a right to her bodily integrity: has she not the right to decide when and how a necessary milking will take place? Or to take the pain and defer it, until she is treated right.
Sis Cow Returns! Here she is, with reinforcements, to take her revenge.2. Did Brer Rabbit, once he caused her to change her position and butt the tree, have an obligation to follow through, get help, as he said he was doing (before he just came back with his family and he pails), and to ask if he could have the milk? Knowing she needed to be milked and was stuck in the tree trunk, she may well have agreed.
3. This story is a mess from the view of Sis Cow and others of her gender persuasion, who can imagine what it was like for her, stuck in the tree, betrayed when Brer Rabbit doesn't go for help, but instead Brer Rabbit and his folks are all over her. What is the role of the ask. Do time, place and manner determine ethics.*
And if that is so, that there is a Bovine Liberation Front (the BLF) out there (we will head it up), how do we see milking factories. Just a thought.Are there any?
Ethical issues in old trickster stories. See tricksters around the world at //128.32.250.47:8080/folkartandlit/stories/storyReader$27. Foxes and rabbits and ravens and Squirrel Nutkin. He's at://wiredforbooks.org/kids/beatrix/sn1.htm. Fodder - the receiving end of the trickster - in lit.
Uncle Remus' tales. There we are, laughing at Brer Rabbit as trickster, how the so-called underdog, the weakest critter in the neighborhood, a rabbit, prey, manages to do to get his way against the mighty and the supposedly wily. The subversive message of the slave besting the owner.
Then move from the funny images to see why we also get uncomfortable. The human condition in the mirror, mean delight in taking advantage, and can we ever rise above.
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* More on Ethics. Permissions. Choice. Time, Place, Manner.
Many acts seem ethical or not depending on the time, place and manner of execution. Is that so?
Does it matter when, where and how we do things. Or can we run roughshod over people, on grounds that we "can" and by pointing out some other benefit to them - while, on the other hand, we continue to benefit at their expense.
Not easy. Issues of dignitarianism arise, see the somebodies and nobodies, and the idea of "all rise" at ://www.humiliationstudies.org/news-old/archives/001256 and related searches for "dignitarianism" or rankism. Can we "valorize" ourselves or is it hopeless. Is there a right to autonomy, that we get to give permission before things are done to us, even if someone else thinks it is necessary.
Can we choose time, place and manner, even in extremis. For that, see //www.bartelby.org/61/42/I0124200.
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