#highstakesbingo

Chiaroscuro aligns with Despereaux in that both love beauty. This love of beauty alienates both from the roles assigned to them in their species. In this way, species is a performative category, like gender in our world (see Judith Butler...or some video essays on her work). Both Roscuro and Despereaux are not supposed to love light and reading/princesses, respectively. These desires are trained out of them by the same-species male role models around them (Botticelli for Roscuro and Furlough for Despereaux.) Of course, the fact that they have these desires at all counters Botticelli's/Furlough's/mouse-and-rat-societies' fundamental premise. If mice and rats simply 'do not' like the things that Roscuro and Despereaux like, then these two characters would not be in tension with the others around them, because they already would not have these desires. In other words, the fact that they have to be discouraged away from what they like shows that mouse and rat societies' ideas of "natural" are already flawed, because their construct of "natural" has to be reinforced. This isn't the only work centering on animals to show species roles as similar to human social roles, but it's really interesting to see this tension so central in a work of children's lit.

The other really interesting thing I want to note in this short essay is how the desires are coped with. Despereaux's response to the taboo against loving princesses seems to be a sort of twee, innocent inability to process his brother's scoldings. He is told to eat the paper. He just... does not do that. He gets punished for this. This makes Despereaux easy to root for as a hero; he isn't defying mouse society, he is just ignorant of it. He doesn't argue or fight back at any point. In a longer work, I'd want to question this portrayal in how it maintains the idea of a perfect martyr, but for here, I'm gonna leave it and move to the comparison with our second central character.

Chiaroscuro, in chapter 17, goes through a sublimation process led by fellow rat Botticelli. Botticelli repeats to Roscuro that he does not want the light because rats, as a whole, don't want that. He offers that Roscuro must ~actually~ desire the shiny red tablecloth visible in the light. Roscuro accepts this as true. The narrator is very blunt about this process. Its importance is highlighted when chapter ends with, "And he told himself, reader, that it was the cloth he desired and not the light." One could argue that Roscuro is just as naive as Despereaux, being so easily pressured into self-deception by the rats around him. This process also really stood out to me as gendered in nature. Rats, which we ~biologically~ are, do not like X thing, so you must be simply mistaking your desire for Y thing that is adjacent to X thing in some way (and this maintains *my* idea of what being a rat is---you wouldn't want to threaten BOTH our identities by claiming to like X thing, would you?)