CONVENTIONAL ILLUSTRATION AND INTERPRETATIONPutting Humpty Dumpty Together Again

Presentation overview “Humpty Dumpty” as an example of how

nursery rhyme illustrations have become conventional.

The relationship between text and image in illustrated works

Visual conventionality ‘closes’ the text to interpretation

Re-opening a text closed by illustration Why do we care?

Answer the question What is the first answer that comes to

mind when I present the question: What is Humpty Dumpty? Did you say ‘egg’? Now look at the words:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wallHumpty Dumpty had a great fallAll the king’s horses, and all the king’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

Illustration and Words in Relationship 1

While the words match the well-known illustration, the words do not exclusively demand an egg.

It is the conventionality of the illustration that determines the meaning of the words.

The finality of this image closes off some of the text’s interpretive potential.

This interpretive potential was re-opened in three different ways.

1 – Visualizing with words alone

What else could Humpty Dumpty be, given the words alone?

Some favorite responses from my students: A watermelon. A clock. I know, because I tried it.

A second-grader who was helping me manage interviews about Humpty Dumpty turned to me after hearing several responses, and said: “It could be anything, as long as it’s breakable.”

2 – Historical Inquiry When did the egg image become

conventional?

How did the egg image become conventional?

Why did the egg image become conventional?

Parrish was “quoting” existing illustrations, especially John Tenniel’s illustration from Through the Looking Glass. But the breadth of his celebrity ensured that all following illustrations held to this standard.

Maxfield Parrish (1927)

The visual elements remain constant: Not only is egg-man the only possible answer to this riddle, but it is a conventional icon. Egg as head and body, with limbs sticking out. Spiffy clothes, including collar and tie. Dozens of collected images hold to this convention, all printed after 1927.

Post-Parrish Humpty Dumpty

The visual elements were NOT constant before Parrish. Even the egg was not considered a ‘given’. Kate Greenaway in the 1880s used a child. Walter Crane in the same period used Richard III. The Dalziel brothers (the engravers who worked closely with John Tenniel on Alice), gave an ‘egg head’ with a separate body. Each of these images is thematically dark by comparison to the whimsy Parrish brought in.

Pre-Parrish Humpty Dumpty

This illustration depicts three interpretations corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary’s historical sampling method. The fact that the illustration predates publication of the OED suggests that these interpretations were still part of popular knowledge in 1843. This popular understanding seems to have disappeared after Parrish.

Earliest Known Illustration - 1843

2 – Historical Inquiry When did the egg image become conventional?

By 1927 How did the egg image become conventional?

Popular saturation with the Tenniel Parrish image Illustrators after Parrish were more or less obliged to

‘quote’ the most popular illustration Why did the egg image become conventional?

Because the genre of the ‘Mother Goose’ collection came to depend on a pantheon of recognized characters in illustration

The intent of the genre was to ‘domesticate’ street rhymes for use with upper and middle class children. The darker and more adult elements were removed.

3 – Visualize with Less-Known Rhymes

There was a man in our townAnd he was wondrous wiseHe jumped into a bramble bushAnd poked out both his eyesAnd when he saw what he had doneThen thought his little brainI’ll jump into another oneAnd poke them in again

3 – Visualize with Less-Known Rhymes

Dickery dickery dareThe pig flew up in the airThe man in brownSoon brought him downDickery dickery dare

Why do we care? How do texts get closed to

interpretation? In what ways does illustration contribute to this process? Farm Stable Hero

Implications Each of the three approaches used with Humpty

Dumpty re-opened a closed, canonical text Each approach coached re-visualization as a way of

reinterpreting words Conventionality is a historical process, and historical

processes in visual literacy are as important as individual psychology and development processes

Visualization working with and from words should continue as a vital area of study in Visual Literacy

Critical visualization involves not only the critique of images, but learning to make mental images instead of consuming them

REVIEW: Revisualizing Conventional Illustrations

Questioning conventional illustration with the words

Historical inquiry to discover the origin of the convention

Visualization with alternate texts in the tradition, that are not already bound by convention

Connections John Medina’s popular book on neurology: Almost

everyone is primarily a visual learner Gary Wells: sociologists’ research on eyewitness

identification in police lineups Inverse effect noted in memory of live events:

Talking about what happened shapes the visual memory of what actually happened –words shape and determine the potential for visualization

Visuals increasingly dominate informational text for young people (‘National Geographic’ effect)

When a historian friend did a close visual ‘reading’ of this picture, he discovered that it was staged by children who were doing a school skit. But the was being used in informational texts throughout the state as an iconic representation of child labor.

Colorado, 1920

James.Erekson@unco.edu

James Erekson, Associate Professor of ReadingUniversity of Northern Colorado