Idon’t remember which came first, my obsession with horse books or my obsession with horses. But I know they were both full blown around the time I was 11 and had blown over around the time I acquired my first boyfriend, at 14.
Coincidence? Certainly I’ve heard the snickering sexual explanation of the attraction between adolescent girls and horses: all that sheer physical power, so palpable between the legs. But I would argue that–to borrow a phrase made popular by our current favorite national scandal–it’s not about sex. Or at least not the physicality of sex.
Dip into any of the best-beloved horse books of the past 120 years, and you start to see it’s about the politics of sex, or of sexual love. At just the moment when adolescents stand on the brink of their first intimate adult relationships, not yet quite ready to engage the opposite sex, horse books offer them a conveniently veiled set of instructions about what to expect and how to conduct themselves. And just as our ideas about love have varied from era to era, so has the advice.
Many of the great horse books are essentially romance novels. Central to most is the issue of the breaking of the horse, which serves as a metaphor for the kind of domesticating that takes place when finally, as lovers, we have to “settle down.” In your basic courtship novel, from Jane Austen to Margaret Mitchell to Harlequin, this provides most of the tension of the plot: Will the feisty hero be “broken in” by her love for the elusive stranger, and will he in turn be “broken in” by her love for him?
But in “Black Beauty,” originally published in 1877, the breaking in is automatic and over with early. The horse, who narrates the story himself, maturely explains to us in Chapter 3 that a well-broken horse “must never start at what he sees, nor speak to other horses, nor bite, nor kick, nor have any will of his own; but always do his master’s will, even though he may be very tired or hungry; but the worst of all is, when his harness is once on, he may neither jump for joy nor lie down with weariness.”
“So you see,” Black Beauty concludes, with what may or may not be a note of irony, “this breaking in is a great thing.”
The only trouble, as Black Beauty discovers, is that a horse can be passed from owner to owner, with little control over the treatment he receives. The once-aristocratic Black Beauty learns through experience that there are bad men in the world, who care only for drink, or money, or fashion, and consequently abuse their dependent beasts of burden; and good men, who wield their power kindly. But the story mostly involves a long, downward slide at the mercy of the former. Rather than a courtship novel, the plot of “Black Beauty” most nearly resembles darker novels by Thomas Hardy, Henry James or Edith Wharton, in which a hero is slowly destroyed, socially and economically, by her inability to marry well.
Coincidence, perhaps. But it’s certainly possible that a young girl reading the book at the end of the 19th Century, when the suffrage movement hadn’t yet made much of an impact, would at some level make the connection between the horse’s plight and her own potential destiny as a wife totally at the mercy of her husband’s character. And for the young male reader–potential husband and wage earner–there’s also a parable in Black Beauty’s broken-in, dutiful acceptance of becoming a workhorse who gets up every morning and plods through his unrewarding servitude. Either way, Black Beauty seems to say, don’t expect to “jump for joy nor lie down with weariness” till you get old and they let you go out to pasture–unless you drop dead first of overwork like his good friend Ginger.
By contrast, the classic 20th Century horse books promote the great romantic myth of our time: That by falling in love, you shall be set free. In subduing the untamed stranger, you shall connect with your own true and wild spirit, which right at this very moment the grown-ups in your life are probably trying to stomp right out of you by forcing you to go to school and grow up just like them.
That’s essentially the plot of Walter Farley’s “The Black Stallion” (1941), Marguerite Henry’s “Misty of Chincoteague” (1947) and Enid Bagnold’s “National Velvet” (1949). In all three books, the youngsters fall in love with a horse that no one, including the adults, has been able to tame, and wind up beating the pants off all the established champions in a glorious climactic race scene.
The variations, though, are amusing. “The Black Stallion” (by a male author, with a boy hero), is sort of the swashbuckling, Playboy fantasy of this love affair: Alec gets to rescue the horse from slavery and shipwreck and is marooned with him on a desert island during the slow seduction that leads to the “breaking in.” In “National Velvet” (by a female author, with a girl hero), Velvet has to disguise herself as a boy to sneak into the race, but her victory strengthens her matriarchal identity, confirming her deep bond with her mother, who had once been famous for swimming the English Channel.
“Misty of Chincoteague” is a sort of Dick-and-Jane version of all this, aimed at a much younger reader and featuring brother-sister protagonists who don’t seem to have hit puberty. And yet the lessons they learn about love are perhaps the most profound. They have managed to capture Misty’s wild mother, The Phantom, only because she’s slowed down by the need to protect her vulnerable foal. And though The Phantom forms a relationship with them, and lets herself be ridden to the requisite race victory, the moment Misty becomes self-sufficient The Phantom bolts for freedom. And little Paul and Maureen let her go, because at some level they understand that even love has limits and, as their grandfather tells them, “Some of ’em you jes can’t gentle. Not after they’ve lived wild. Only the youngsters is worth botherin’ about, so far as the gentlin’ goes.”
Today the horse story, like practically everything else, has been seized upon as a “concept” that can be packaged and sold to appropriate demographic groups. So there are now several horse-book series clearly packaged for girl consumption. Just at random, I checked out the “Pony Pals,” Vol. 5, “Pony to the Rescue,” apparently aimed at about the same-aged readership as the “Misty” books. And there wasn’t a shadow of a romantic metaphor to be found. No question at all about the breaking in: The three starring ponies are sturdy and dependable enough to give kiddie rides at the local fair. No exploring of the wild spirit: The three starring girls make grocery lists before camping out overnight–under adult supervision–in a neighbor’s back yard. And nothing that could remotely be construed as attraction: The plot actually revolves around their wish to get rid of a bratty neighbor who tries to muscle her way into their exclusive clique.
If there’s a veiled message in here about sex, a suggestion to those on the threshold, it is a rather grim, AIDS-era disclaimer: Take care of yourselves, girls. Maintain your boundaries, stay celibate if possible, and if you must engage in any kind of adventure, above all use your crash helmet.
As though we’ve come to agree with Black Beauty, that this breaking in is, in fact, a great thing after all.
