A Wolf in Tiger's Clothing: Danger, Desire, and Pleasure in Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Written by Tim Beasley-Murray, published by Children's Literature Association and found through Academia. This paper discusses whether the Tiger within the Story is not really a tiger at all. One of the reasons I had decided to read this paper was that I had been to look at the original art created for this particular book when I was down in Gateshead at the Seven Stories archive. There are several areas of interest within this paper with reference to Kerr's own life in relation to being the daughter of a Jewish opponent to the Nazi regime. The knock at the door possibly being a threat most Jews were afraid of, hence the reason her family moved to the UK. However there are elements touched upon which I don't agree with such as the careworn and all too human Father not being cast as a virile huntsman, one who is only disappointed when there is no supper. This is a theme that showed also in some of Kerr's unpublished works I also looked at, mainly The crocodile under the bed. Again I was able to look through the original art for this book which contained several scenes where the father missed out on supper for various reasons. Perhaps it was as simple as that the rest of the family were to eat during these times of war often leading to the father missing out? Maybe they were all starving on the rations they were given but with her father it was more noticeable? One area of this paper I am unsure about is the references to the sexual nature of the book. I understand the tiger is unlikely to just be a tiger, it most likely represents some dominant person or intruder into their lives such as the Gestapo.
I have come to realise that at present I feel my research seems a bit sporadic, which is maybe just how I work. My thoughts are to continue in this way without worrying too much, my aim is to try to find any papers that interest me or are related to my area of study. Once I have marked up which parts of these papers deal with issues of interest and I have went through enough I will begin to collate. The information from each will be extracted, placed together and then assembled with all others in the same fashion. Hopefully this will allow me to recognise patterns, highlight issues that resonate with me and should then help me push all of this seemingly random information together in order to direct one coherent area of research. Again this will require many more readings and may also only highlight areas lacking in information but this is how I will approach this matter for now. Some extracts of the aforementioned paper are shown below.
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