The New York Review of Books: The Royal Family
For over seventy years, Babar has been the most famous elephant in the world?and the most controversial. He has been praised as a benevolent monarch, an ideal parent, and a model of family affection, loyalty, justice, good manners, and civilized living. He has also been damned as a sexist, an elitist, a colonialist, and a racist. It has even been proposed that he deserves to be burned alive: see Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl (1995). Clearly, a figure who arouses such intense and conflicting opinions must be more than the ordinary hero of a children's picture book: he must represent important and sometimes contradictory views of both childhood and society.
Alison Lurie investigates in the New York Review of Books...
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