Read our screenplay Rabbit Baby: HERE.
Our
story was based off of the strange tale of Mary Toft, who in 1726 convinced
everyone in England that she had given birth to a rabbit baby, or Sooterkin.
She eventually admitted that it was all a hoax and was arrested for fraud.
Despite this, Doctor Nathaniel St. Andre, surgeon to King George I, confirmed
that it was indeed a genuine case. We were intrigued by the idea that not only
regular people, but medical doctors were so convinced that this impossible
situation was plausible. At first, we did not know in what direction to take
the story. We approached the project from many different angles, but we finally
decided that the most interesting story would be found by assuming that the
fantastical elements of Mary Toft's story were in fact real. Despite being a
fantastical story about a half-rabbit child, the story focuses on human
elements and the difficulties of being a young woman in Rural England in the
1700s. The way that the character Wiley treats our heroine, Arley, is
characteristic of the sexist attitudes of the time. Indeed, their very species,
one half-rabbit and the other half-wolf, can be representative of the class
distinctions that were also enforced during that time period. Just like in
"The Veil", our protagonist is a young girl dealing with obstacles
over which she has no control or influence. In "The Veil", the
protagonist is oppressed by the cultural revolution in Iran, whereas in our
story she suffers from her mother's bizarre actions that have affected her life
since birth. By using the fantastical but fraudulent tale of Mary Toft as a
template for our story, we were able to analyze the difficulties of class
structure and gender roles in 1700s England.
As for outside media, the project reminded us of the
web-series-turned-Comedy-Central-serial, Drunk
History. Basically, Drunk History
is a project that consists of an intoxicated narrator recounting some
historical event from her/his foggy memory. Meanwhile, actors in period
costumes act out what is happening according to the drunk storyteller. First of
all, the Hi(Stories) and Memories exercise in screenwriting made us think of Drunk History because of content,
obviously. In Drunk History there is
a person trying to explain something historic as matter-of-factly as they can,
but it gets muddled and fictionalized because of their state of inebriation.
Our assignment did something (sort of) similar to this, because we also started
with a moment of historical truth but then extrapolated fabrications as we went
along and made up fictitious characters and scenarios.
Moreover, this project was also reminiscent of Drunk History because of its collaborative nature, and the way two ideas of an event or a story don’t quite line up perfectly when two or more people are trying to portray the ideas in the biased way that they think they happened/should happen. In Drunk History, it’s the collaboration between the actual historical event and the drunken storyteller and finally the actors attempting to kind of enact both things at once. In this assignment, it was two writers trying to wrestle two different views of what a story should look like into one space.
Moreover, this project was also reminiscent of Drunk History because of its collaborative nature, and the way two ideas of an event or a story don’t quite line up perfectly when two or more people are trying to portray the ideas in the biased way that they think they happened/should happen. In Drunk History, it’s the collaboration between the actual historical event and the drunken storyteller and finally the actors attempting to kind of enact both things at once. In this assignment, it was two writers trying to wrestle two different views of what a story should look like into one space.
Works Cited
"Mary Toft." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015
"Sooterkin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.
Haslam, Fiona. "2." From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-century Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996. N. pag. Print.
