Winnie-the-Pooh - Nostalgia Analysis

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) has a strong atmosphere of nostalgia, as Pooh Bear and his friends innocently engage with the benign woodland world around them. On his return to England from fighting in World War I as a signaling officer, Alan Alexander Milne continued his writing career. After writing several moderately successful but no longer remembered plays, he created the iconic, universal character of Winnie the Pooh. More accurately, he created a fictional version of his son, Christopher Robin, and his toy bear.

The devastation of World War  I certainly has a large role to play in the appealing nostalgia in Winnie-the-Pooh. The war brought an end to many things—a generation of men, romanticization of the glory of war, and the class system (a progressive but upsetting social and political change). The pastoral setting of Winnie-the-Pooh longs for a simpler past of simpler language and the clean innocence of a child at play. Today, Winnie-the-Pooh still creates a nostalgia for a pastoral, pre-war past, but its legacy has also created new forms of nostalgia.

The writing style itself throws the reader back into an idealized childhood, of a parent reading a bedtime story to their child. Milne acts as both the author and the narrator, interacting with the characters in such a way that he is interrupted by them while he is addressing the reader. It’s as if the reader were sitting in on a scene of a father reading to his son. For example:

“…he likes to sit quietly in front of the fire and listen to a story. This evening—”

“What about a story?” said Christopher Robin.

“What about a story?” I said.

“Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?”

“I suppose I could,” I said. …

So I tried.

(pg. 4)

Milne’s use of “you” changes from addressing the reader and addressing Christopher Robin who is also a listener while the narrator tells stories involving him. The texts language also reflects an idealized past as it is very polite and charming while imitating the speech of a child. Pooh Bear is constantly saying things like, “Oh bother!” while Christopher calls him “Silly old Bear!”

Obviously, nostalgia can only be created when time has separated us from a period of life, but experience is also crucial to nostalgia. Children are unable to romanticize their lives as they are in them, not just because they are currently living them but because they lack the experience required to feel the keen sense of loss (at least in terms of time) that makes up nostalgia. Returning to the past is only appealing to us as adults because of the new knowledge we bring with us. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh appeals to the adult experience over the child’s with its small jokes of misspelled words, gentle mocking of social niceties, and a comic appreciation for child logic. Piglet’s sign, “Trespassers W,” (broken sign of “Trespassers Will Be Shot,” not the name of his grandfather), and the logic that Pooh must lose his fat for a week rather than digging him out, are examples of needing adult experience to appreciate the childish aspects of the story.

But most of all, Winnie-the-Pooh calls to our own experiences of our parents reading the story to us, a nostalgia evoked by the narration style and illustrations. It is a common childhood experience that appeals to most adults as they remember a shared memory of an idealized past, listening to a story deep in the Hundred Acre Woods where Christopher Robin was free to play and imagine with his friends.