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"The dove, the rainbow, and the unicorn": 170 years of the flood story retold for
children in words and pictures
England, E.E.E.
Publication date 2013
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
England, E. E. E. (2013). "The dove, the rainbow, and the unicorn": 170 years of the flood story retold for children in words and pictures.
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Part One, Chapter One: Introduction
Once upon a time there lived a man called Noah, a name that means “Comfort.” Blanche Winder, Bible Stories for Children, circa 1930
Analyzing the epigraph reveals much. “Once upon a time” suggests the flood story is a fairy tale set in a distant place and space, simultaneously real and imaginary. During this unknown time “there lived a man called Noah,” the focus of the story. We also learn that this man’s name “means ‘Comfort.’” The reader can therefore expect him to be a “comforting” character. This single sentence also enables us to surmise that the producers of the text have interacted with their Bible beyond Genesis 6–9. They have at least read Gen 5:29, perhaps in the King James Version (KJV), where “comfort” is used.
By looking at Bible stories written for children, we can do more than provide a literary analysis; we can also uncover changing attitudes to the biblical stories by those outside academia and the church. We can see hints at belief in the historical accuracy, literacy, and morality of the biblical stories. We can also see the changing use and influence of biblical scholarship. We can uncover ideologies about age, gender, and class. As the first, primary, and sometimes only medium through which people read or hear biblical stories, children’s Bible retellings are one of the most culturally significant means through which the Bible is reimagined.
In this study I explore retellings of the Genesis flood story published for children in England between 1837 and 2006 (170 years). I present a new methodology for recording them in a way that enables diachronic and synchronic patterns to be uncovered. The focus is on the presentation of actors and motifs in words and images, particularly addressing how words and images function together and in counterpoint. Analyzing these patterns through a narratological lens, I expose ideologies relating to (1) how and why actors in the Genesis
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flood story have been marginalized or enhanced, and (2) how, why, and which actors in the retellings are othered, based on normativity of gender, class, size, race, age, and species. A key aspect of this analysis is recognizing the increasing dominance of illustrations and the growth in cartoon styles. This recognition makes it possible to (3) witness the gradual ascendency of the fantastic mode and fantasy genre as storytelling and didactic devices. The analysis of the fantastic mode, the ideologies uncovered, and patterns of commonality and rarity in the retellings is compared with and sometimes sheds light on the Hebrew Bible narrative.
Telling the Untold Story
“There were giants on the earth in those days.” This, the inconsequential opening to the immense verses on Noah’s ark and the primordial flood were what got me when I was a child. At six I was the proud owner of an
illustrated comic book Bible in which the plangent words of the King James Version appeared in bubble captions as though they came from the mouth of Superman. Though the illustrator couldn’t go that far because the writers of Genesis didn’t, I imagined those giants, the waters rising inexorably up their bodies until they closed over a last howl of desperation. That’s what the King James Version was for me as a child: the ultimate brutal myth full of terror with occasional happy endings. (Schama, 2011)
Simon Schama’s words describe his most memorable encounter with the flood story: a story beginning with giants (after the Nephilim in Gen 6:4).1 As well as describing it as a brutal myth, he discusses the absurdity of Noah’s age (600, Gen 7:6), the inclusion of mosquitoes
1
References to the biblical text are to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Unless otherwise stated, all English citations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
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on the ark, but also the lyrical magnificence of the dove returning with the olive leaf. These are the thoughts and memories Schama took into adulthood.
The significance of retellings of the Bible for children is impossible to quantify and hard to overstate. Children’s stories have an impact; they are used to educate and socialize as well as to entertain. Many children’s Bibles also have another purpose: “to give their young readers a correct idea of the contents of Holy Scripture” (Bottigheimer 1994, 347). In this regard, they are similar to commentaries. What children read influences their perspective of the world. Understanding what they read is therefore a critical academic endeavor. Yet children’s Bibles are one of the least discussed forms of biblical interpretation.
There are many possible approaches to studying children’s Bibles, including child psychology, theology, and book history. I focus on literary readings of the retellings in order to uncover the explicit and implicit ideologies they represent. I use the Genesis flood story (6:1–9:19) as the case study because it is almost certainly the most commonly retold Hebrew Bible story for children (Neff 2001; Person and Person 2005, 57; Gillhouse 2009, [128]). My work uncovers the ideologies in the text with a specific focus on the relationship between word and image. I also explore whether there is any relationship between the retellings and contemporaneous commentaries on the Genesis narrative. In this regard, the flood story is an interesting choice because there are clear changes in its interpretation.
The End of the World
Excitement, danger, adventure, a God who walks with man, supernatural beings, and an inconceivably large boat—these are the things that make the flood story interesting. It is entertaining in the same way that disaster and monster movies are.2 Lots of people die and
2
The flood story has been retold on film, including Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009). In 2014 Darren Aronofsky’s megabudget ($130 million) film Noah will be released. The Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe will play Noah.
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there is endless destruction, but, ultimately, it is all good fun. Except the flood story isn’t that much fun. Humanity dies and the victory is given to a small handful of people. We then get to see the human hero sacrifice a vast number of the animals he saved.
The narrative appeals to me precisely because of the complex relationship I have with it. I enjoy reading it and trying to imagine what the ark was like. What must it be like to be one of the only people left on earth? What happened to the fish? What are Nephilim? In addition to that curious pleasure, I am horrified by the sheer terror of total annihilation. I am horrified by a God who could decide, apparently on a whim, that everyone and everything must die. I am shocked that the human hero seems to accept this without question. I am disgusted that the hero would slaughter animals seemingly en masse. To remove the invigorating or depressing elements of the narrative is to deny critical components of the text. The flood story needs to be read and understood as a whole. It is interesting, then, that the flood story is a cultural text not only prolifically abridged and retold for children but also analyzed through limited lenses by biblical scholars.
From an academic perspective, flood scholarship has almost exclusively been conservative and confessional (King 1892; Richardson 1959; Amos 2004; Harper 2009), (pseudo)scientific3 (Fairholme 1840; Filby 1970), and/or anthropological (Redford 1837; Bremmer 1998). These studies tend to be religious analyses discussing whether the flood happened, and/or the presence and history of global flood myths. This relatively unchanging analysis of the story occurs despite the advent of postmodern influences on the discipline (feminism, postcolonialism).4 Nonetheless, one area of study has been making more of an
3
The plethora of pseudoscience around the flood leads some scientists to frustration: “Media portrayals of a catastrophic turning point in human history on the scale of the biblical deluge have diverted serious attention away from its real geographical and cultural importance” (Yanko-Hombach, Gilbert, and Dolukanov 2006).
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Exceptions include Vandermeersch’s “Where will the Water Stick? Considerations of A Psychoanalyst about the Stories of the Flood” (1998) and Dundes’s The Flood Myth (1988).
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impact in the last 40 years (although it has a much longer pedigree): reception history.5 This field, in which scholars are often engaged unconsciously, considers how texts have been presented, rewritten, visualized, and understood in different media and by different communities (cf. Roberts 2011, 1–8).6 The majority of scholarly writings discuss how elements of the Hebrew Bible story have been interpreted in early Jewish and Christian works. The most frequently cited example is Jack P. Lewis’s A Study of the Interpretation of Noah and the Flood in Jewish and Christian Literature (1968; cf. Lewis 1984, 224–239; Deurloo and Zuurmond 1991).7 In parallel to these are studies that focus on the impact geology, anthropology, and other scientific developments have had on the reception of the narrative (Young 1995; Cohn 1996; Pleins 2003). Relatively few studies have presented retellings since the medieval period, including literature, art, and film (cf. Goetsch and Walsh 1997, 48–53; Swindell 2010, 38–63). A remarkable example is Richard W. Unger’s The Art of Medieval Technology: Noah the Shipbuilder (1991). It discusses the influence of shipbuilding practices on illustrations of the ark. By analyzing flood retellings for children, I am not only telling the largely untold story of children’s Bibles, I am also pushing the boundaries of flood scholarship further into the arena of reception history.
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The terms “reception history,” “reception studies,” “reception theory,” and “reception criticism” have different implications but are often used interchangeably within biblical studies. For convenience, and because of the nature of this study and how the reception of the flood has been studied, I use “reception history.”
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In 1998 Stephen Prickett wrote about the relationship between the Bible, literature, and art, claiming that “there is still little evidence that the historical centrality of that relationship to biblical studies has been fully recognized, or that its implications for the future have been considered. It must form part of the agenda for twenty-first-century biblical studies” (175). Despite the launch of journals such as
Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception (www.relegere.org) and Biblical Reception (Sheffield
Phoenix Press), by 2012 the process of embedding reception history within the biblical studies academy has progressed relatively little. At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies (Amsterdam), a series of 3 sessions around the theme “What Is Reception History?” took place. It involved discussion of the relative lack of progress and the treatment of reception history within the discipline as a whole. A volume based upon the sessions and edited by myself and W. John Lyons is forthcoming [2013].
7
Other examples discuss Jubilees (van Rutten 1998, 66–85), the works of the Christian polemicist Aphrahat (Kolyun-Fromm 1997, 57–71) and the Septuagint (Wright III 2010, 137–142).
6 Bible Publishing and Children, 1837–2006
My research covers 170 years, ending in 2006. By stopping in 2006, I was able to include the opening years of the twenty-first century, making the study as contemporary as possible. The start year of 1837 was consciously chosen as it was the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation. The Victorian era roughly correlates with the amalgam of developments that most heavily influenced the material. These include changing attitudes to children, the growth of education and literacy, the so-called golden age(s) of children’s literature (1865–1910, 1950–1970, late twentieth century), and the development of the mass market. This study is not a social or publishing history of children’s Bibles, and so I cannot discuss the history of children’s Bibles in detail. A brief history is nonetheless useful.
Children have been reading since at least the classical era, but it was not until relatively recently that texts were written in English specifically for children.8 One of the earliest known examples is The Babees Book offering advice about behavior around others (c. 1475; Stevenson 2011, 184). Since then increasing numbers of texts have been produced for children, with varying degrees of accessibility. They were always moralistic and sometimes seemed to include attempts to entertain child readers. The types of texts included catechisms, verses, and alphabets (Muir 1985, 23–33; Mandelbrote 2003, 19–39). Children were expected to read the whole Bible as soon as they could read their letters (Thwaite 1972, 20–21). The first major sea change happened with the publication of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693; cf. Grenby 2011, 99–102). He decried promiscuous reading of the Bible chapter by chapter, as it lacks pleasure and encouragement of both reading and religion (Locke 1693, 186–189). John Locke suggested that a good “History of the Bible” should be presented chronologically with various elements omitted until the child was old
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Gillian Adams argues that children’s literature is anything read by a child and that Sumerian literature is the oldest children’s literature because it is “an imaginative literature which may or may not have been originally composed for younger children or directed at them, but which was considered particularly suitable for them and to which they were regularly exposed” (1986, 26).
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enough to benefit from them (1693, 226).9 At least in part, this led to Bibles for children becoming more widespread during the eighteenth century, although they were only accessible by the wealthy (Mandelbrote 2003, 19–39). John Locke’s philosophy may have also influenced Nathaniel Crouch’s (pseudonym “R. B.”) Youth’s Divine Pastime (1691). It includes one of the earliest retellings of Noah’s Ark. The retelling is illustrated with a woodcut of Noah praying and the animals (including unicorns) entering the ark. It includes the somber verse:
Yet did he warn before he struck, Noah was sent to tell
They by their Sins would God provoke To cast them down to Hell
(from the scanned copy in Muir 1985, 32)
Compared with earlier and contemporaneous texts for children, it could be considered entertaining (Muir 1985, 33–34).
The eighteenth century witnessed the first major children’s publishers. John Newbery is widely credited as being the first English publisher to make children’s books a profitable product although many publishers came before him (Darton 1970, 122–140; Muir 1985, 59). He published an Abridged Bible in 1758. During this time, female involvement in books and education for children also grew. Mary Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in which she claimed that reading the Bible too early would inhibit spiritual growth (1787, 53–54). Arguably, most significant of all was Sarah Trimmer, who wrote numerous scripture histories and distributed scripture books to charities and schools. She also emphasized the significance of pictorial scriptures for children. It has been claimed that she
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He also suggested the need to turn to God as well as science for explanations of biblical events such as the Deluge (Locke 1693, 229). He explains the flood by claiming that God may have temporarily adjusted the center of gravity (Locke 1693, 229).
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was the first woman in the world to be called an author of a children’s Bible (van der Meiden 2009, 24). Women have been heavily involved in publishing books for children ever since (cf. van der Meiden 2003, 20-26).
By 1800, 600 books a year were published in Britain for children (Clark 1996, 473). Without detailed bibliographic research it is not possible to know how many of these could be defined as children’s Bibles or biblical retellings. Nevertheless, most would have been morally didactic and religiously inspired, sometimes including references to biblical verses and narratives. Moving into the nineteenth century, we can note that relatively few complete Bibles were specifically produced for children. Abbreviated Bibles would be cheaper for the growing numbers of readers in the lower socioeconomic strata. Furthermore, Bibles specifically translated or reprinted for children were not seen as necessary to replace the Authorized Version (Digby and Searle 1981, 11–20). The Bible was still considered the core of education for at least the first 60 years of the nineteenth century (Cunningham 2006, 66; Spitzer 2006, 68). Indeed, before 1870 most not-for-profit schools were run by churches, resulting in denominational education. Bibles were also considered critical to the good standing of society.10
The flood story itself varied in popularity over the years (at least in proportion to the number of books I read, see Appendix A, page 353). It became proportionately more common in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century. This was almost certainly because of the combined effect of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), George Smith’s presentation of the “Chaldean Account of the Deluge”/Epic of Gilgamesh (1872), and Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena (1878, English translation 1885). The
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Bibles were considered so important that they were published in vast numbers and were often sold at a loss by voluntary organizations and Bible publishers (Howsam 1991, xiv–xv). Between 1837 and 1847 the British and Foreign Bible Society purchased and distributed 58.9% of the 10,938,497 Bibles and Testaments produced by the privileged presses (Queen’s Printer, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press; Howsam 1991, 118).
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Prolegomena further developed source criticism (see pages 46-48), reframing the documentary hypothesis into a coherent theory. His ideas became widely accepted so that the Torah/Pentateuch was broadly believed to have been written at different times by different people and edited together. The increased influence on the understanding of the Genesis flood story from those outside of the church, specifically scientists, historians, and biblical scholars, helped to popularize the narrative.11
By 1938 the number of titles published a year had increased from 600 in 1800 to 1629 (Hunt 1995, 192). The major change, however, took place around the 1970s. By 1971 the number of children’s titles published a year was 2001. Yet only 4 years later the number was 2688 (Watkins and Sutherland 1995, 289). It is little wonder, then, that of my retellings, 60% were published after 1970. The increase is indicative of many things, not least technological developments resulting in cheaper and easier full-color printing (Feather 2006, 211–219; Sipe 2011, 240). This is reflected in my corpus. A third of the flood retellings published before 1970 do not have illustrations of the flood, as opposed to less than 1% of those published since 1970. The post-1970s retellings are almost always in full color, having been predominantly black and white throughout the nineteenth century with color only becoming proportionately more common in the 1920s.
Tony Watkins and Zena Sutherland neatly summarize the state of children’s publishing since 1970, and it is just as applicable for flood story retellings as the trade in general:
Contemporary children’s literature is a series of paradoxes…there has been an overproduction of some kinds of books – notably picturebooks – and a
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Numerous other influences affected the publication of children’s Bible retellings, including secularization, the history of education being inextricably connected to Sunday schools and English churches, and the two world wars. The relationship between social change and children’s literature (including children’s Bible retellings) is symbiotic. Changes in society affect content; content educates the people who change society. Studying children’s literature can offer (social) historians “crucial and immensely revealing data” (Grenby 2008, 202–203).
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general underfunding of education; some boundaries have been pushed back with metafictional novels and postmodern picturebooks – and yet internationalism has led to bland commercialism. (1995, 289)12
The “bland commercialism” refers to multinational conglomerates swallowing up imprints in the 1980s and 1990s. This resulted in a greater focus on the bottom line rather than trying to balance the relationship between profit and quality or variety (Taxel 2011, 484–485).13 It has had significant, and depending on one’s perspective, devastating effects on the presentation of the flood story in the retellings. This is most clearly seen with Lion Publishing, which was founded in 1971 “in order to publish books about Christianity” (lionhudson.com). It was enormously successful and has dominated the publishing of children’s Bible retellings. It has, however, gone through multiple changes, having numerous subsidiaries and merging with Angus Hudson in 2003 to become Lion Hudson. Of the 263 books in my corpus, at least 21 are by one of the various incarnations of Lion Publishing, even though 189 publishers are represented.14 They have undoubtedly published interesting and challenging retellings but they have also swamped the market with generic, unimaginative books. The more unusual and creative retellings are often published by smaller, independent publishing houses
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A picturebook is a heavily illustrated book in which there is an interdependence between words and images (p. 36). Throughout this study the spelling “picturebook” is used, rather than “picture book,” because it deliberately highlights the picturebook as a unique form of communication. The word “picturebook” is increasingly preferred by scholars specializing in picturebook research, see especially American Picturebooks (Bader 1976), The Potential of Picturebooks (Kiefer 1995),
Reading Contemporary Picturebooks (Lewis 2001), How Picturebooks Work (Nikolajeva and Scott
2006), and Postmodern Picturebooks (Pantaleo and Sipe 2008).
13
Another major influence was the cut in funding to public schools and libraries in the 1970s and 1980s. This reduced the impact of librarians as consumers; hence quality books became less commercially viable thereby helping the growth of bland commercialism (Taxel, 2011, 480).
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As an indicator of the incredible success of Lion Publishing, Publisher’s Weekly describes how: “In 1985 Lion, a British coedition specialist, published one of the first story Bibles to catch the American eye. Initial sales of The Children's Bible in 365 Stories (sic) by Mary Batchelor, illustrated by John Haysom, were impressive, and lifetime sales of the US edition, now distributed by Cook, have reached one million,” Neff 2001, publishersweekly.com.
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including Barefoot Press (McCarthy 2001, DBID 12415) and Walker Books (Williams 2004, DBID 273; Morpurgo 2005, DBID 296). Perhaps ironically, their works are often marketed through the use of the incredibly popular authors. Despite, or perhaps because of their creativity, these books are not used as templates for retellings; they are uniquely engaging. As I demonstrate they nevertheless share key patterns with the more generic examples.
In 1991, 6154 new titles were published (Watkins and Sutherland 1995, 290). By 2006, 29% of books sold in the UK were in the children’s market (Clark and Phillips, 2008, 53 [citing Richardson UK Publishers, 13]). It would be a major study in its own right, establishing the proportions dedicated to children’s Bible retellings, not least because the classification of them is so sporadic and ill defined. The numbers do, however, accurately reflect the flood retellings for children as influenced by external forces. This, then, is the basic background of the books themselves. What of scholarship discussing children’s Bible retellings?
The Journey So Far: Academia and Children’s Bibles
Studies on children’s books and the Bible have progressed little since Perry Nodelman discussed how much, and why, children’s literature studies ignored Bibles and religious material (1986, 54–57).16 Even in the Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Wolf et al. 2011) there is almost no mention of religious publishing or children’s Bibles. This is despite the fact that one of the editors (Coats) supervised one of the few doctoral dissertations about children’s Bibles: Elizabeth Gillhouse’s Framing Eve: Contemporary Retellings of Biblical Women for Young People (2009). Primarily, the thesis is a feminist reading of Garden of Eden retellings. The study also includes a discussion about
15
“DBID” refers to the unique number given to each retelling on the accompanying database; this ensures maximum integration between the analysis, database, and retelling.
16
Bibles are usually regarded as didactic texts, the critical study of which has been slow to develop (Glaisyer and Pennell 2003, 1).
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how the retellings can be used in different teaching scenarios. There is little direct engagement with the biblical text in the thesis.
Willem van der Meiden’s doctoral thesis was published as ‘Zoo heerlijk eenvoudig’: Geschiedenis van de Kinderbijbel in Nederland (2009). It has set the bar high for studies of the history of children’s Bible publishing in individual countries.17
It takes a predominantly book historical, theological, and pedagogical approach to the material. There is very little interaction with the Bible. The retellings are not discussed as children’s literature using the methodologies or vocabulary used within children’s literature studies.18 Like Gillhouse’s thesis, this dissertation utilizes what is undoubtedly the key text in children’s Bibles research: Ruth Bottigheimer’s The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present (1996). The book is a sweeping analysis of how at least 14 biblical stories have been presented in 7 countries/geographic regions across 500 years. It is an impressive piece of work, but it is limited by its enormous scope. The book is focused through the lens of social history and as such there is little analysis of the retellings as interpretations of biblical stories. Another monograph is more focused and is by the historian Penny Schine Gold: Making the Bible Modern: Children’s Bibles and Jewish Education in Twentieth-Century America (2004). The first half of the book discusses how the Bible is used in educating Jewish children, specifically in America. The second half includes an analysis of children’s Bible retellings, including looking at the representation of women, God, and children. It primarily discusses “the form and content of Bible story books in terms of their context in
17
This work highlights the interactions between producers of children’s Bibles and the lack of commonality in scholarly discussions thereof. From van der Meiden’s study we can surmise that European discussion of children’s Bibles is more advanced than elsewhere but is rarely used in Anglo-American work. Indeed, van der Meiden uses few Anglo-American texts in his research.
18
The definition of children’s literature is a hotly contested issue. It has historically been defined as material published for children for pleasure rather than (or at least more than) education. Despite being widely challenged, and no longer being fully accepted, this approach still dominates children’s literature studies, thereby limiting the material studied (cf. Darton 1970, 1; Hunt 1988, 42–64; Bottigheimer 1998, 190–210; Jones 2006, 287–315).
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inter-war America” (Schine Gold 2004, 178). It also offers a brief comparison with Israeli books and Christian books (179–204). The strength of the book is the way in which it socially locates the retellings within the culture and pedagogical practices of their time. This necessarily restricts the detail and depth to which the retellings are analyzed.
Arguably the most developed argument about how retellings of biblical narratives function is John Stephens and Robyn McCallum’s Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarrative in Children’s Literature (1998). They only include one chapter dedicated to children’s Bibles, but it should be a critical work for children’s Bible scholars.19 It suggests 3 categories for defining and exploring retellings of the Bible for children and in the next Chapter I outline what they are (see pages 18-20).
To my knowledge the only dedicated volume to children’s Bibles by biblical scholars is Text, Image, and Otherness in Children's Bibles: What Is in the Picture? edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Hugh Pyper (2012). It includes articles on a range of perspectives, including one by myself, partly drawn from this study. The volume also includes responses by Ruth Bottigheimer and the biblical scholar and children’s Bible reteller Cheryl Exum. The volume is an excellent example of the different ways people explore and understand the concept of “children’s Bibles.” In the volume is one article on comic-book Bibles (Dupertuis, 271-289), two articles on animated Bibles (Scholz, 99-120; Vander Stichele, 291-310), and a primer (Lee, 173-192).
Finally, numerous articles have been published in separate journals and edited volumes. Most of these are by children’s literature scholars and practitioners (teachers or librarians). I refer to many of them throughout this study. Specifically regarding the flood story retold for children, two scholars stand out: the biblical scholar Francis Landy and the
19
I say that it should be because it is not. Willem van der Meiden’s Zoo Heerlijk Eenvoudig (2009) does not refer to it. Likewise, in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children's Bibles: What is in the
Picture? (2012) only mine (217, 223) and Melody Briggs’s (166) article cite it. This further
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librarian Kathy Piehl. These articles demonstrate the diversity of flood retellings but also the drawbacks in not having a systematic interdisciplinary approach.20 Francis Landy, in an otherwise engaging article, describes the book How Mrs Monkey Missed the Ark (Kerr 1992, DBID 226) as “utterly innocent” (2007, 371). At the heart of children’s literature studies is the concept that no (children’s) book is “innocent.” Conversely Kathy Piehl, a children’s librarian and scholar, quotes an unspecified translation of an unspecified verse (it is actually Gen 8:1a) describing it, without justification, as “The pivotal verse in the Genesis account of Noah and the flood” (1999). Biblical scholarship teaches us that while statements like this can be made, they are never fact and always require justifying and explaining.
While children’s Bible research has been gradually increasing over the last 20 years, it is still underrepresented. The significance of the relationship between words and images and the growing importance of illustrations in Children’s Bibles and Bible retellings is particularly understudied. A key focus of this study is the word/image relationship as a deliberate or unintentional method of representing ideological viewpoints.
The Journey Continues: Structuring the Thesis
This thesis is in 4 parts. The first, “The Foundations,” presents the critical background information including this introduction. The second Chapter is my methodology. In it I explain how I sourced, catalogued, and classified the retellings on a custom-built database.21 I demonstrate how I approach the retellings as an informed adult reader. The Chapter closes with an introduction to my close reading strategy, incorporating narratology and children’s
20
Despite the limited amount of work undertaken on the flood story retold for children, there is already a canon. This is one of the drawbacks of all literature studies and is something I try to avoid by studying such a large corpus (263 retellings; p. 24). One of the most often cited among them is Peter Spier’s Caldecott Award-winning Noah’s Ark (1988, DBID 227).
21
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literature research. The third Chapter is my reading of the Genesis flood story as a final form narrative. It focuses on the actors and asks, “what is the story about?”
Part Two of the thesis (Chapters Four—Seven), “Flood Retellings for Children,” is an analysis of the corpus itself. Each Chapter explores a specific actor or group of actors and issues arising out of their representation. The discussion is influenced and informed but not necessarily governed by the quantitative analysis undertaken of the material, the methodology of which is described in Chapter Two. In Chapter Four, “God,” I focus on the dynamics of interpreting God’s anthropomorphism in words and images, specifically the mental, emotional, corporeal, and spiritual components. I discuss how God’s roles as punisher and destroyer are balanced. The Chapter is tied together with the theme of the ways in which God has gradually been diminished and why. Chapter Five, “The Survivors,” includes discussion of the humans alive before, during, and after the flood (Noah and the 7 members of his family). The specific focus is on gendering and the impact of changing illustration methods, especially after 1970. I also discuss how (often) the future generations of humanity are presented in the retellings and the implications for this. In Chapter Six, “The Other Humans,” I focus on the people who the retellings blame for the destruction. These include people who are performing explicit actions that could be described as wicked, violent, or corrupt, as well as additional actors. The latter group includes Cain, Adam and Eve, and the nonbiblical neighbors who mock Noah for building the ark. I explore the implications of blaming different people and the marginalization of different groups this can engender. Keeping with the theme of marginalization, I discuss the presentation of the people who drown during the flood itself, including men, women, and children. Finally in this Chapter I discuss human actors who have been added to the retellings but who are not part of the flood story itself, specifically those in embedding narratives. These actors may, for example, be parents narrating the flood story to their own children. The final Chapter in Part Two is Chapter
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Seven, “The Animals.” In it I use an animal centric reading strategy to analyze how animals are presented in the retellings. I focus on the apparent contradictions in the biblical text and how they are navigated in the retellings. This includes reflections on the protection as opposed to destruction of the animals, and the covenant with the animals as opposed to humanity being given permission to eat them. The latter half of the Chapter looks at the increasing fictionalization of the animals in the retellings. This includes anachronistic dinosaurs as well as more obvious forms of fictional being such as the talking animals and unicorns. This leads into a brief intermission where biblical giants and angels are discussed, before moving on to the third part of the study.
In Part Three (Chapters Eight—Nine), I explore how the retellings have increasingly been created as fantasy literature. In Chapter Eight, “Retellings in the Water Margins of Fantasy Literature,” I introduce key concepts in fantasy literature before considering key techniques for making a story a fantasy, using retellings from my corpus as examples. This includes a presentation of artistic techniques in the creation of fantasy in picturebooks. In Chapter Nine, “The Flood as Fantasy Literature,” I apply my reading of the retellings to the Genesis flood story. I explore various motifs as fantastic, including time, impossible spaces, and epic scale. I then look at the structure of the Genesis narrative as fantasy, specifically immersive fantasy (Mendlesohn 2008, 59–113). Finally I consider the new avenues of exploration this analysis leads to for both the Genesis narrative and the retellings. The fourth and final part of the study, “From ‘God’s Change of Heart’ to ‘Noah’s Ark,’” includes the conclusion and appendix. In Chapter Ten, “The Flood Story Reinterpreted,” I build on the conclusions developed throughout the thesis. This analysis is used to suggest practical applications for the findings. I suggest ways in which my methodology can be expanded. This includes proposals for new directions in children’s Bible retellings. Appendix A presents the core statistical data.
