viz. - children

Playing with Darkness: A Problematic New Cover for The Jungle Book

Deb Streusand — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 01:21:20 +0000

Following up on my last post’s discussion of the 2008 Alice in Wonderland cover, today I’m exploring another dark reimagining of a children’s book cover. The image above was designed for the Vintage Children’s Classics series. In Vintage’s own words, “Rudyard Kipling’s collection of fables have a much darker feel than the Disney musical, and we wanted to reflect this in the cover. We chose Italian illustrator, Gianni De Conno, to come up with an image which has engaging animal characters peering out from dense jungle foliage. The resulting cover illustration has both charm and intrigue, and a hypnotic feel from the staring faces.” But what makes the image “darker,” exactly? Certainly the literal color is much darker than the general color palette of the Disney film, as shown in the image below:

Image Credit: fanpop.com

The animals look considerably more realistic and therefore much more threatening, even though the animals pictured are the ones who help Mowgli in the story. The flowers, however, are bright and colorful, making Mowgli’s desire to stay in the jungle more understandable. The green foliage is rather neutral-looking, dark without being jagged or otherwise ominous. The center of the image’s darkness, I think, is in Mowgli’s half-shadowed face, which almost appears to be covered by a mask. His eyes are shaded by the plants looming over him, and in combination with the somberness of the more visible part of his face, this shading argues for a Mowgli who is more beast than man.

Of course, there are multiple complex racial issues involved in re-issuing The Jungle Book. There’s the initial question of whether Rudyard Kipling, author of “The White Man’s Burden,” should have his work promoted as a classic. If one is going to re-issue his work with visual accompaniment, then the image of the central character should have two characteristics: the hero should unambiguously be a person of color, as he is in the story, and he should not be portrayed as savage. This cover fails in both of these respects. The shade of the unshadowed portion of Mowgli’s skin could be that of a white person, or of a light-skinned person of color. It’s not clear. What the cover does is choose a shade that is non-threatening, to white readers, for its hero. Then, with a Mowgli who could be white, it becomes safe to play with the idea that this specific person has inhuman elements to his character. But the implication that he is inherently uncivilized can’t be separated from Mowgli’s explicit identity, in the story, as a person of color. The cover ends up both whitewashing Mowgli and reinforcing the idea that people of color are savages. So it’s certainly darker, but, I think, not only in the way that its commissioners and creator intended.

Tags:

book covers

children

race

Visual Rhetoric

Alice or Wonderland: How Visual Representations of a Story Change Over Time

Deb Streusand — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:31:14 +0000

Image Credit: Deb Streusand. Taken at the Harry Ransom Center.

The Harry Ransom Center’s current public exhibit is on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the children’s book by Lewis Carroll. It displays many fascinating artifacts related to the book, including a selection of about twenty-five different covers the story has had over the last century. (The picture above shows the entrance to the section of the exhibit containing the book covers.) These covers demonstrate what people have found most interesting and most attractive about the story over the years. This post will discuss just three of the covers, though I certainly recommend going to look at all of them if you have the opportunity.

Image Credit: Deb Streusand

The above cover is from 1903. It emphasizes the magical and mysterious aspects of Wonderland, showing a mushroom and a caterpillar that are both far bigger than Alice. The exotic hookah and the accompanying puffs of smoke look rather magical as well. Alice’s eyes are wide with wonder, but most of her face is obscured – the story is more about Wonderland than it is about Alice. The cover shows no sign of concern about whether prominently displaying a hookah is an appropriate way to sell a book for children, which demonstrates some of the cultural changes that have taken place between 1903 and the present day.

Image Credit: Deb Streusand

This cover of an Alice in Wonderland comic book from 1945, by contrast, emphasizes Alice over Wonderland. Alice is by far the largest thing in the picture. All the other entitities in the picture are much smaller, and even look like they could be toys, not living beings. The playing cards are flat and can be held in the hand – they are not the rather unmanageable characters they become in the actual story. Alice, in saddle shoes and letter sweater, is clearly immersed in the modern world. The background is plain and shows nothing of the Wonderland environment. In fact, it bears some resemblance to the cover of an Archie comic from the same year:

Image Credit: Comic Vine

The Archie comics are set in the real world, not in a wonderland, and this Alice looks like she would fit right in there. This cover sells Alice as someone the audience can relate to.

Image Credit: Deb Streusand

This much more recent book cover, from 2008, does not show Alice at all. It shows the White Rabbit, in color, against a dark and formal-looking house and garden. Rather than portraying Alice in Wonderland, it depicts a Wonderland creature in Alice’s England. The Rabbit brings the magic into this colorless background, but it is a rather forbidding environment for him. This cover seems more directed at adults who are interested in exploring the sinister aspects of the story, or perhaps children who like their fairytales dark.

These three covers demonstrate what were considered the most saleable or most interesting aspects of the story at their respective times. The 1903 cover sells the tale as magical and mysterious. In 1945, Alice needed to be an accessible figure to the readers. The 2008 cover argues, “this is not your grandmother’s Alice in Wonderland.” The book covers from these three time periods sell the same story in entirely different ways.

Tags:

“Kids These Days”: The Not-at-all New Phenomenon of Fashionable Childhood Sexualization

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:00:06 +0000

Last year, when Miley Cyrus gave us this delight:

Image Credit: Mirror

the interwebs exploded with home critics—often sloppy analyses of Cyrus’s performance, rife with moral judgment and fear for the future. The outrage regards not whether the singer is talented, or whether her show was successful, but over her behavior, and, especially, her clothing.

Of course, a large part of this reaction to the VMA show was due to the “weirdness” of Cyrus’s dances-with-bears schtick. Still, we’d be naive to overlook the role of her clothes in this kind of backseat judgment. Many of the blog posts, op-eds, and social media comments linked the VMA performance with Cyrus’s then-new video, “Wrecking Ball,” pointing out the “provocative” dress as a sign of the girl’s unstable nature or corrupted innocence. “Where is Hannah Montana?” these articles bemoaned. The issue seems to be not only the amount of skin shown, but that Cyrus is a girl dressed too maturely.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I don’t want to reduce all the pushback here to Cyrus’s age. Of course, this little blowup raises interesting questions about the public performance of one’s sexuality, about an artist’s attempt to transition from child to adult, about the public’s need to police her body. All of those concerns, I take as the given subtext of this kind of event. I’d like to focus, specifically, on the way that this issue has been framed as a kind of violation of maturity, wherein the clothes represent a certain age category, one many audiences see as inconsistent with the performer’s actual—or “appropriate”—level of maturity.

Actually, this kind of link between clothing and age is a strange inverse of what M. Gigi Durham calls the “Lolita Effect,” “a construction of sexuality that both exploits and limits sexual expression and agency, and is deliberately focused on young girls.” Here, sex is associated with youth, and young bodies are then co-opted both to support the demands of sexual management and to mobilize standards for older women as well. We see this effect both in the way the Toddlers in Tiaras are dressed as much older, hyper sexualized women and in the way older women are then infantilized. For example:

Image Credit: Oh No They Didn't

Image Credit: Stop Toddlers and Tiaras

Here, we’re outraged because these toddlers are dressed up as women. We cannot tolerate the concept of child sexuality—despite the fact that every solid study on childhood development acknowledges it. On the other hand, these:

Image Credit: Steven Meisel

Madonna did this photoshoot for Vanity Fair in 1992. The public seems to have a love-hate relationship with these images. They serve up female bodies; fashion facilitates the role of the viewer as couch critic, so that we can all bemoan the downhill spiral of the way “Society” is going these days. I think it’s important to include Madonna in this discussion not only because these images offer a counterpart to Toddlers & Tiaras, but also because they remind us that this phenomenon is not in any way new. Durham, for example, charts a whole series of sexualized girls (JonBenet Ramsey, Brooke Shields, The Little Mermaid...). Here, more than two decades ago, we have Madonna performing hyper sexualized girlhood through a fashion shoot. The adult female is sexy because she’s childish. So all of these panicked responses to Miley, the fear-mongering that suggests we have somehow crossed a threshold in the female sex/fashion industry, might do well to remember, as Don Draper tells us in another blithely misogynist episode (s01e04) of Mad Men: “Maybe every generation thinks the next one is the end of it all. Bet there are people in the Bible walking around, complaining about kids today."

Tags: