Ralph S. Mouse

Beverly Cleary has endeared herself to readers through her cast of human characters. However, Cleary also includes animals in all her novels. Whether it be Henry Huggins’s beloved Ribsy, Ramona’s prickly feline Pick-picky, Leigh Botts’s Bandit, or the Bricker family’s Socks, Cleary fills her novels with interesting animals, creating opportunities for adventure, humor, and heart-warming moments within the larger narrative.

Cleary is drawing on a long tradition in children’s literature. Many children’s books use animals as characters because of their relatability. Like children, animals experience the world differently. Animals are also used in storytelling to teach children empathy and respect for other living creatures. Finally, incorporating animals into stories can add humor or heartache as humans form attachments to them. Cleary uses animal characters for all these reasons and more. However, in her ambitious Ralph trilogy, Cleary attempts to do something unique with her animal character, something she’d never tried and never attempted again. The trilogy’s protagonist is a mouse who can speak and powers a toy motorcycle by making sounds. By blending her signature realist tone with elements of magic, Cleary plays with the low fantasy genre while still tackling true-to-life subject matter, like loneliness and isolation, the quest for identity, and finding empathy for others. By making an animal the main character as opposed to a pet or a sidekick, Cleary explores the way animals see the world and how they view their relationships with humans (Runge, Renee. “Why Are There So Many Animals in Children’s Literature?“ Kidpressroom, 2022).

Anthropomorphism, or the act of giving animals human-like qualities, is a tactic long used by authors to impart wisdom or teach a lesson. There are even talking animals in the Bible, such as the serpent in Genesis and Balam’s donkey in Numbers. Indigenous myths and stories, such as the Muskogee tribe’s “How Grandmother Spider Stole the Sun,” incorporate talking animals to pass down wisdom to children and explain natural phenomena, and Aesop used animals in his fables to relate practical daily lessons that are still relevant today. Over time, novels such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows experimented with the trope by telling the story from the animal’s perspective. In Ralph S. Mouse, Cleary employs anthropomorphism to create a relatable and engaging character in Ralph, whose explorations of the human world force him to confront feelings of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and self-doubt. Building on the tradition of using animals to teach lessons, Cleary uses Ralph’s experiences to illustrate the value of healthy communication and conflict resolution, the importance of vulnerability in relationships, and how to draw on one’s inner strength to overcome obstacles and develop resilience in the face of difficulty.