Rabbits

Rabbits are a recurring animal presence at Styles, first associated with Dr John Franklin’s experimental laboratory and later with the grounds beyond the house. Their appearances link the estate’s scientific activity to its ordinary garden life; in the shooting incident, a rabbit becomes the immediate distraction that redirects Colonel Luttrell’s attention toward Daisy Luttrell.

In the garden laboratory

Mrs Luttrell describes Dr John Franklin’s studio at the bottom of the garden as fitted out for his work and stocked with guinea pigs, mice, and rabbits. Her account presents the animals from the standpoint of a household resident uneasy about the scientific activity taking place on the property. The rabbits belong to a collection kept for research, rather than to the garden’s wildlife alone.

The laboratory is also part of the setting in which Judith Hastings works as Franklin’s assistant. When Arthur Hastings visits, he sees scientific material and equipment, including microscope slides and photographs relating to West African subjects, and notices a rat in a cage. The visit establishes an enclosed research environment populated by animals, though the supplied evidence does not identify any particular rabbit as an experimental subject or describe what happens to the animals there.

The rabbit by the fruit trees

Later, while Colonel Luttrell is trying to shoot a bird, it escapes through the trees. His attention shifts when he notices a rabbit nibbling the bark of young fruit trees and remarks that he thought he had wired the place. He raises his rifle and fires. The immediate focus of the narration then changes from the rabbit to the woman who has been struck: Daisy Luttrell had been kneeling in the long grass, tying a stake to one of the small fruit trees.

Arthur Hastings reaches Daisy, with Stephen Norton following behind him. The narration explains that the long grass and confusing light made it difficult for Colonel Luttrell to distinguish her clearly; he had seen movement where he believed the rabbit was. The evidence therefore connects the rabbit to the shooting as the distraction that drew the Colonel’s gaze and prompted him to fire, while locating the mistaken identification in the conditions of the garden. It does not establish that the rabbit itself was hit or what became of it.

Animals between science and domestic life

The rabbits’ two settings give them a modest but distinct role in the story’s treatment of the estate. In the studio, they are part of a collection associated with Franklin’s research; among the fruit trees, one is encountered as an animal disturbing the garden and provoking a response from the Colonel. In neither scene do the rabbits receive an independent viewpoint or a developed individual identity. Their significance instead arises from the human purposes and interpretations surrounding them: scientific keeping in one instance, and the sequence leading to Daisy’s shooting in the other.

This contrast also links the apparently separate spaces of Styles. The garden laboratory and the fruit trees both contain animals, but the narrative gives them different functions: the first establishes the material presence of scientific work, while the second becomes the setting for a consequential error. The rabbit’s brief appearance does not make it an agent of the violence; rather, its ordinary movement becomes the circumstance through which the Colonel’s attention is redirected, with consequences for Daisy and the people who rush to help her.