The Significance of the Repetition of Rabbits

 Sydney Prenkert

Blog Post 10-22

In Tess Gunty’s novel, The Rabbit Hutch, rabbits are mentioned on sixty-eight different occasions, not including Todd’s drawings. While Gunty mentions several other types of small animals, rabbits clearly hold the most importance. One might think that the use of rabbits is meant to play along with the title of the novel, but readers know that “The Rabbit Hutch” is really an old nickname for La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in Vacca Vale, an apartment complex where many of the novel’s characters reside. At a first glance, there does not seem to be a clear trend in Gunty’s use of rabbits. Yet somehow, they end up being in nearly every chapter. If Gunty wanted the readers to pick up on the symbolism of the rabbits, she was not trying to make it easy. At the very beginning of the novel, Gunty describes Blandine as she exits her body: “She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city” (Gunty 4). A chapter later, we learn that the “cottontail rabbit population surpassed the rat population” in Vacca Vale, but we never learn why (Gunty 35). According to the Indiana State Government official website, “Dry upland areas often support above-average rabbit densities” (Indiana Department of Natural Resources).  This fact does not explain the overpopulation of rabbits in Vacca Vale either, an area that is prone to extreme flooding. If rabbits tend to live in drier climates, then why are there so many instances of them in Vacca Vale?

           Physical rabbits are not the only mentions of rabbits in the novel. For example, Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz receives a rabbit emoji in a text from Death (Gunty 52). Todd says, “I think she ate a rabbit once,” when referring to Blandine’s food preferences (Gunty 63). The child in Ampersand smashes a brown plastic rabbit into a Tyrannosaurs rex, at which Blandine notes, “the rabbit is winning” (Gunty 78,79). When Jack tells the story of how he killed his first fish, he mentions rabbits twice in the span of three paragraphs (Gunty 86,87). James feeds his cats rabbit pâté (Gunty 127). The one thing these examples seem to all have in common is the theme of death and killing. This idea suggests that Gunty intended to purposefully portray rabbits as prey, or weak creatures. The correlation of rabbits being mentioned in nearly every chapter, however, show that the creatures are meant to be intertwined with the characters’ lives. Each character is portrayed with unique circumstances in the novel. Yet, these truths are often hidden to virtually everyone but the reader. This idea suggests that the characters themselves are all essentially rabbits in Vacca Vale: overpopulated, overlooked, and underappreciated.

 

 

https://www.in.gov/dnr/fish-and-wildlife/wildlife-resources/animals/cottontail-rab bit/