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Help me out with something here: What, exactly — even approximately — is the deal with mice? meaning, specifically, mice as humans? (I do recognize there are many deals with mice.) And of course when you extend the question to the rest of order Rodentia, well, the mystery deepens: rats, beavers, chipmunks, groundhogs… There’s no end (so it seems) to the number and variety of normally furry, four-legged, big-incisored, nose-twitching creatures wearing little suits and dresses and hats.
Sometimes, indeed, people even become rodents — and rodents, people — as here:
No other group of animals gets such a disproportionate, inexplicable share of “They’re just like us!” attention.
You can’t count the non-human primates. Picturing them in our heads as the people in neighboring cubicles, say, requires almost no imagination at all. Fingers, big sympathetic eyes, wrinkled and laughing faces, language language language. Child’s play.
At the other extreme: iguanas and snakes; guppies and goldfish; parakeets and canaries (not counting Tweetie) — their eyes unapologetically alien, faces inexpressive, apparently incapable of showing emotion, let alone feeling it… I’m sure people talk to these sorts of pets and (in the case of birds) can get answers more “eloquent” than blank stares. I’m sure such people would wince at the eye-rolling which goes on behind their backs.
No, I’m talking of the rest of the animal world, particularly other mammals.
Consider dogs and cats: anthropomorphizing them comes naturally. After all, they live with us, eat at about the same times we do, sleep in our beds, seem fascinated by us, touch and are touched by us, listen to — and sometimes studiously ignore — the sounds of our voices; how could our charms not rub off? How could they not want to be us? So they must be like us, right?
(Think about it. Coyote — a dog, really — vs. Road Runner: how many people identify with the former? how many, the latter? Exactly my point.)
But rats, mice, squirrels: where’s our common ground with them? Why, in a video like the one below, are they so… recognizable?
Or in this video game, the last great game for the Nintendo 64?
And don’t try to duck the question by citing Babe, either. Or Charlotte the spider. Or Jemima Puddleduck. Or the Frog Who Went a-Courtin’. Or Shrek (whatever he is), or his Donkey pal, or Puss in Boots. They’re exceptions, not rules. They’re freaks.
Why aren’t talking, dancing, rodents?
Why does Mickey talk so normally, and the mice in Cinderella sing so sweetly, while Donald and Goofy are caricatures — animals merely playing dress-up?
I’m just sayin’.
Aha. Your site finally came up for me.
Maybe it all boils down to pure and simple neotony?
I guess I should have added:
If it’s neotony, then that still begs the question of WHY people like “cute”* / juvenile things.
On a sort of similar note, I’ve often wondered why it is that we humans determine beauty the way we do. I mean, truly and really—evolutionarily speaking perhaps—why are children drawn to the face of say, freakin’ Ariel or Belle or Cinderella, yet not to someone like what’s-her-name, that poor “American Idol” lady everyone wants to make over? Does it have to do with “classical beauty”? Why are we drawn to what we call classical faces?
Why do people like teeny, cute things? Hell if I know.
* I must add that I’ve always been very close to putting a statement on the blog somewhere that says: No one is allowed to use the word “cute” to refer to any of these children’s titles. In grad school, my fabulous prof forbade us from describing titles that way. But then that’d make me kind of jerky, I think.
P.S. Am I even making any damn sense?
Well, now I’ve gone off and read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty.
“The experience of ‘beauty’ often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature.”
Maybe it all boils down to: Your left eye is not disproportionately bigger than, say, your nose, OR your facial features line up in such a way that brings about just the perfect symmetry….Or, you know, I’m rambling.
But then the question remains: What is it about us humans that craves that symmetry, the harmony?
For the official record: I referred to that “American Idol” insta-star as “poor,” only BECAUSE everyone wants to make her over, not because I think she’s necessarily pathetic in any way.
Are you wishing I’d shut up now?
Jules: Okay, thanks, I just read up more about cuteness and neoteny than can be healthy.
For the record, I never had the same knee-jerk finger-down-the-throat [Ed.: Wow, mixing up the anatomy much?] response to the word “cuteness” as you apparently have. BUT the one word which is almost guaranteed to send a mail-order catalogue to the recycling bin in our household is “whimsy” and its variants.
Do you know of a hilarious, rather twisted comic strip called “The Perry Bible Fellowship“? (Do NOT leap to conclusions based on the name.) Below are a couple of apropos samples; click on the images for the full strips (including punchlines).
“Lumberjack”:
“Executive Decision”:
Those are good ones, John.
I also flinch at “whimsy.” For the record, I know that—okay, okay—some books are just flat-out cute, but what makes me cringe is stopping at, when describing a children’s book, the word “cute.” As if it’s not worthy of further analysis. In fact, telling some people you once did a scholarly study of children’s lit and would like to do even more gets you some funny looks. Lots of people still assume children’s lit isn’t worthy of that. That’s just sad and their own big loss, but still…
And all those squealy girls who showed up in my children’s lit classes, calling the books “awwwwwwwwwww! so cute” didn’t help. Sorry, but it’s cringe-inducing to me. It was like watching a master at work, seeing my children’s lit prof gently and expertly steer them away from that kind of simplistic thinking. One day I want to do what she did.
Am I just managing to make myself sound like a snob here? And I know we’re off-topic…
What I find the most interesting is even when we are faced with evidence that there are animals that really do have “human” qualities of understanding life and death. Like elephants who bury and grieve their dead, we still slaughter them or lock them in cages expecting them to perform for us at every whim. I hate the idea that animals are here for human entertainment and consumption.
Maybe we can humanize rodents (and I’m not getting into the cute conversation because I just can’t. Not today) because they can’t really kill us. I mean, I’ve seen Reechicheep (sp?) in Narnia, but seriously, mice are small and if they’re tiny pseudo-humans, we’re still bigger than them.
Or maybe it is because we do terrible things to them, we have to make them like us–make them cute–so that we don’t have to think about lab rats with pins in their eyes. I don’t know.
I think about this since my son reads all kinds of books and sees plenty of movies with funny, adorable, lovable, smart animals–animals that we kill for dinner. It is a strange disconnect–”Hey, do you want to watch Chicken Run while you eat your chicken nuggets?”
Rodents do have the ability to be trained and they’ve got hands (of a sort). I read somewhere that it has to do with eyes. Humans are programmed to respond to certain types of eyes (hence the big eyes in Manga and so on). Most all good-guy rodent-types have big eyes and bad guys have the inevitable small eyes.
Okay, I don’t have time for this. Sigh. Next thing you know I’ll start blathering on about cute.
Jules: Don’t worry about snobbery here. (I actually have a saying, “Everybody’s a snob about something” — probably the only saying I’ll ever contribute to the Humanity’s Top One Million Quotations in English book, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. :)
kelly: Do you know of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee? One of The Missus’s and my favorite causes. But the idea of animals “being here for human entertainment” (consumption aside) is interesting. I mean, I’m sitting here looking at the new May page in the 2009 B. Kliban Cat Calendar. It depicts a family of cats — one adult, and five identically colored kittens — drifting downstream like a flotilla of boats. Does that count as using animals for entertainment?
marta: Blathering on about being cute? Blathering?!? Hmph. I’ll pretend not to be insulted.
When Jules mentioned neoteny, although I’d heard and understood the term before I went looking for more info. That thing about the eyes counts for a lot, yeah, likewise the, er, approximate hands. But (most) rodents don’t seem to fit the bill otherwise — bulging hairless heads, for instance, and chubby extremities.
My most recent theory, since posting this, does in fact have to do with the lab-animal thing. Like, if mice and rats (especially) are so often used for just-before-human-testing tests, then maybe there’s some underlying genetic or other biological properties we share with them which call to us, as it were, not just in the laboratory for “practical” reasons but also in art and literature.
Or maybe I’m just, uh, talking through my hat.
Good heavens, the only person blathering here is me. I’ve seen no other blathering as you run after your hat.
I think I can clearly take the Blathering Award here.
But this is a fun place to blather.
marta: Oh, I’m never so busy running after my hat that I don’t have time to stop and talk through it.
(Aside: That sentence is a good example of why the English language must be so hard for non-native speakers to get a handle on.)
Jules: You’ll take it, and I’ll step back out of the spotlight and let you. But personally, I got a kick out of seeing four comments from a single person in the space of 15 minutes. Seemed to flip a switch in your head!
I come a bit late to this one, but on the subject of beauty a doctor friend of mine once proposed this curious theory.
And Blather was the name of a student humour magazine founded by Flann O’Brien (who is known to you, I believe, John).
ReCaptcha: Klux That!
froog: Very interesting theory, that, although it does seem a bit arbitrary. It would be easier to accept at (ho ho) face value if it included more than one dimension (even if that one dimension remains constant). For instance: maybe beauty’s a function of a specific, constant IPD relative to the distance from pupil to lips.
I just found a blog, of all things, on the subject of “the psychology of beauty.” A post from February of this year expresses skepticism about the IPD effect.
Flann is never far away, but I didn’t know about his Blather. Excerpts from it are apparently included in a book called Myles Before Myles. A search of Google Books, alas, yields only a few tantalizing snippets, but one of them is a chapter heading: “The Romance of Blather,” which seems to tie up the beauty-blather package rather neatly.