“To a Joyous Land”: Nature and Gender in Kate Greenaway’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin

In 1888, Kate Greenaway—one of the most popular, influential, and imitated children’s book illustrators of the late Victorian period—published an illustrated version of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Browning’s poem tells the story of the rat-infested town of Hamelin. The town leaders hire a piper to musically expel the rats from the city, but when he completes the task, the town leaders renege on the agreed payment. In revenge, the piper uses his skills of musical seduction to abscond with the town’s children. Scholarship on Browning’s poem focuses on its ambiguity. Is the piper a villain or the children’s saviour? Have the children been kidnapped or freed from Hamelin? Yet Greenaway’s illustrations erase that ambiguity, offering her own interpretation of Browning’s poem that definitively portrays the piper as a liberator and the children’s destination as utopian. While I agree with Anya Krugovoy Silver that Greenaway presents a “sentimentalized piper” whose actions are “heroic and loving” (40), I approach Greenaway’s version and piper through an ecocritical—particularly ecofeminist—lens. As Mary Mellor succinctly explains, “[e]cofeminism is a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women” (1). I argue that Greenaway’s illustrations not only attempt to evade the poem’s emphasis on natural destruction but also yoke together ecological and gender concerns to critique Hamelin’s urban space and the traditional gender roles within it; furthermore, Greenaway depicts a pastoral paradise as the children’s refreshing escape from the constraints of the gender-stratified town.