The History of Bo Peep:
An Agricultural Employee's Tragedy
in Contemporary Literary Perspective
Published in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 2 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 823-29In the recension of this traditional tale/1/ with which I am most familiar/2/ the text runs:
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn't know where to Þnd them.
Leave them alone and they will come home,
Wagging their tails behind them./3/
1. Formalist
In a formalist mode, we observe Þrst how we are plunged into the narrative by the omniscient third-person narrator who knows everything--not only what has been happening to Little Bo Peep but also what is going on in her mind, what she knows (that she has lost her sheep) and what she doesn't know (where to Þnd them). Surprisingly, then, we hear in the third line another voice, addressing Bo Peep, from a position of authority and control. This voice can tell her what to do, or rather, what not to do, in a manner so authoritative that, for all we can tell, Bo Peep has nothing further to do or to think. She doesn't answer the voice, she adopts the voice's view as her own.
Whose is the voice of wisdom or authority? It must be someone who knows more about sheep than Bo Peep does. Compared with her loss of conÞdence, the speaker has no doubts about the future of the sheep. Not only are they at this moment safe, they will Þnd their own way safely home. What kind of a person could it be who would know this? Only another shepherd. But is it a male or a female shepherd? The voice is the voice of experience, of someone who knows what she or he is talking about only because she or he has had the same thing happen to her or him. My suggestion is that we have here the voice of an older and wiser shepherdess, who can speak both assuredly and assuringly to Bo Peep because she has been in just the same position.
2. Intertextuality
This text reeks with intertextuality, of course. It is referring to an old topos in shepherd literature, of the shepherd who is not a shepherd, the shepherd who fails to herd the sheep but loses them. This is an identity question, of course, viewed psychologically; but in the history of the topos there is no automatic judgment against sheep-losing shepherds. It is an occupational hazard that afþicts all shepherds, good, bad and indifferent. What sorts out the good shepherds from the bad ones is what they do about the lost sheep once they discover they have gone missing. The Good Shepherd sets off at once to Þnd the lost sheep, even if it is only one among ninety-nine. In our text, we observe, we have the very antithesis of the Good Shepherd, not so much in the Þgure of Bo Peep, who is--at Þrst at any rate--the victim of the loss of sheep, and not personally culpable. No, the Bad Shepherd, or rather, as I think, the Bad Shepherdess, recommends ignoring the lost sheep completely and letting them Þnd their own way home. The Bad Shepherdess will not advise Bo Peep to go looking for the sheep, even though she has lost not one in a hundred, but all 100% of her sheep. And Bo Peep is taken in by the advice of the Bad Shepherdess, and becomes in her turn and in her own right a Bad Shepherdess herself.
3. Genre
So, from the point of view of genre, the Bo Peep story has to be viewed as a tragedy. It is the tale of the downfall of one who is originally a merely unfortunate shepherd but who soon becomes a wilful and deliberate loser of sheep, an unshepherdly shepherd. The circumstances are against her: her sheep have gone missing. But that of itself does not make her a tragic Þgure; it is how she responds to the blow of fate that determines whether she will be a truly tragic hero. By some þaw of character, or perhaps through some over-riding pressure from outside herself (the familiar distinction between the tragedy of fate and the tragedy of þaw breaks down in this case), she falls into the role of the Bad Shepherdess, and, with her silent acquiescence in the advice of the Tempter Þgure she, in the one moment, abandons her sheep to their destiny and, in so doing, loses her own identity. For what is a shepherd without sheep? What is the raison d'être of a sheepless shepherdess?
4. A Feminist Reading
The text plainly demands to be read from a feminist perspective. Its central Þgure is a fascinating female character, a fundamentally effective woman who has obviously managed to hold down a job as a shepherd, and has established a nurturing relationship with her charges, who are called 'her sheep'--not because she owns them, for shepherds are usually servants, women shepherds especially, but because she holds herself responsible for them. This positive female character is set off against the negative female character of the Evil Shepherdess, who has learned from her greater experience only how to be negligent of the sheep and nonchalant about their loss. This is a woman who believes in laissez faire, who refuses to let her own equanimity be troubled by triþes, and whose speciality is the corruption of younger women who turn to her for advice.
Since Bo Peep obviously adopts the advice of the older woman, the Evil Shepherdess is portrayed as entirely successful in her urge to destroy youthful idealism and Bo Beep's sense of responsibility. And in any case, even if Bo Peep had resisted the older woman's suggestion, Bo Peep is destined to become through the passage of time an older shepherdess herself, who will inevitably come ultimately to speak in the world-weary tones of the Evil Shepherdess. There are only two kinds of women, according to this narrative: evil women and good women who will become evil.
The text may thus be seen to reþect a male hostility to women. Women, it teaches us, are either simply failures, losing the sheep they are supposed to be looking after, even though they have nothing to do all day except shepherd their sheep, or else they are wilfully negligent, encouraging younger women who have failed to adopt social norms that they are not in default in any way. What male would want to employ a female shepherd after reading this text?
This patriarchal text shows itself in its true colours at the very beginning, when it refers to the hero of the narrative as 'Little' Bo Peep./4/ What can this epithet mean in reference to a woman who is managing a þock of sheep? It cannot be in reference to her physical size, since (unless the author is guilty also of heightism) it is hard to see that size can have anything at all to do with an ability at shepherding. No, she is 'little' just because she is a woman; she is being patronized by the narrator, who thinks he is being affectionate and wryly amused at her incompetence, but who is in fact marginalizing her because she has attempted to play a valuable economic role in a man's world, stepping out of the domestic environment into the rough and tumble world of the agricultural worker. In line with this image of Bo Peep is the emphasis on her incapacity to handle the misfortune that strikes her. Not only does she lose her sheep, she doesn't know where to Þnd them. Read literally, this may sound tautologous: does not 'losing' mean precisely 'not knowing where to Þnd'? This narrator wants to present the loss both as an external description of the event and as an internal perception from the point of view of the character, in order to maximize the culpability of the female character. At the same time he has recourse to the stereotype of the conspiracy of women in subverting the social order determined by males.5. A Materialist Interpretation
When we come to look at the social and economic realities presupposed by this narrative, we are struck above all by the freedom these shepherdesses seem to have with the þocks they are tending on some wealthy sheepowner's behalf. Not only does Bo Peep allow herself to mislay the sheep, to the point of having no means of locating them, the older shepherd is able to dismiss the problem with a wave of the hand as a matter of little consequence that will no doubt solve itself.
Real shepherds and shepherdesses were never like this. The lot of the shepherd has always been an exceedingly humble one: their isolation from human society, their exposure to the elements and their inevitably low wages have always ranged them near the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. (We recollect that the biblical Jacob had to serve as a shepherd for seven years in order to earn a dowry for his wife.) The swagger of the Evil Shepherdess in this narrative has the ring of a spoilt member of the upper classes about it. And the complicity of Bo Peep in the fecklessness that is urged upon her, ignoring the reality that she will soon be called to give an account of the missing sheep to her master, and will no doubt answer for their absence with her livelihood, sounds nothing like the reaction of a downtrodden member of the lower orders.
We must conclude that this narrative is an exercise in bad faith, and the shepherdess is nothing but a Þgment of some wealthy person's imagination, who has never known the disaster that comes from carelessness with the property of the rich.
6. A Deconstruction
This is self-evidently a deconstructable text. The whole narrative arises from the dichotomy between Þnding and losing. In case we did not know it, the surface of the text makes everything abundantly plain: she lost her sheep and didn't know where to Þnd them. Losing is not only antithetical to Þnding; losing prevents the possibility of Þnding.
Bo Peep's dismay stems from this dichotomy. If losing were not categorically opposed to Þnding, she would not have so much to worry about. As for the Evil Shepherdess, she operates with not dissimilar categories: for her, 'leaving alone' must imply its opposite, viz. not leaving alone, going and looking for, searching for. If this binary structure were not presupposed, Bo Peep would not be troubled, the Evil Shepherdess would have nothing to suggest, Bo Peep could not adopt her advice, and there would be no narrative.
But the very text that depends for its life upon these distinctions at the same time undermines them. For what the narrative envisages is the sheep coming 'home', of their own accord. If they know where 'home' is, and they can come there whenever they like, in what sense are they 'lost'? What in fact can the concept of 'lostness' entail if it includes a being conscious of 'home' and the material possibility of return to the 'home' at any moment within the subject's choice? Bo Peep may not know where they are, but does that make them 'lost'? They know where they are, they know where home is. So too does Bo Peep: she knows where she is, she knows where her home is; and the narrative does not call her lost.
What is going on in this text is a reconceptualization of categories, a calling into question of familiar and unproblematized distinctions. Once we have viewed this text deconstructively, we know that we can never again speak glibly of 'lost' and 'found', and the comfortable verities of childhood are irretrievably disturbed./5/
7. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Who is Bo Peep? Her name tells all. She is Beau Peep, she is looking (peeping) for a beau. She is a young girl looking for a suitor, and she is in an anxiety state because they all seem to have þed. She is a shepherdess, a healthy country girl, a type noted for its lustiness and availability. But not only has she lost the lovers she had, she doesn't know how to going about retrieving them (or Þnding new ones). You have been trying too hard, says the voice to her. Leave them alone, pretend you're not interested, and you will Þnd them come þocking, like sheep.
Bo Peep is the Id, beset by its desires for sexual gratiÞcation and tormented by the absence of any object. The voice is the voice of the ego, struggling to adjust the demands of the pleasure principle to the constraints of the reality principle. It is building a defence mechanism to cope with the stress of the loss of desire.
The narrative is also a dream, of fear and wish fulÞlment. The dreamer fears the loss of sexual desirability as a losing and not knowing how to Þnd. The unconscious attends to this fear by associating letting go with Þnding. It is not searching that will lead to Þnding, but not searching. If she 'leaves them alone' they will come home. And the unconscious displaces the fear with the wish, portraying the arrival of the sheep, wagging their tails behind them. In this last clause everything is uncovered about the dream. There is a little displacement over the location of the tails, of course./6/
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