Filles d’albums, les représentations du féminin dans l’album (review)

Nelly Chabrol-Gagne’s long anticipated book on the issue of gender in picture books uses a corpus of 250 books published between 1990 and 2009. The works were selected from the annual selections of La Revue des livres pour enfants [The Journal of Children’s Books]. Chabrol-Gagne paints a picture of women’s issues and their representation, which demonstrates that, despite the seemingly sophisticated artistic attire, picture books have a hard time modernizing girls.

Chabrol-Gagne organizes her subject chronologically. The first chapter deals with New-borns. At birth, girls and boys are uniformly designated “infants.” In many of the picture books she examined, she found that the baby does not actually become a girl or a boy until it is a few years old. This first deceptive assessment suggests that initiatives to counter the stereotype of the asexual baby are nonexistent, even among the most enlightened publishers.

The following chapter is dedicated to «les fillettes» [“little girls”]. The study focuses on works produced by the publishing house Talents hauts, which claim to address gender issues, but the results do not appear to match the statements of intent. An unexpected revaluation of Martine à la foire [Martine at the Fair] (1958) is to be noted; it shows the little girl driving a scooter on a merry-go-round, while the boy is relegated to the back seat.

“Young girls in high heels” are the subject of the third chapter. The girl has grown up; she is not “little” anymore. The girls who are “engaged in a maturing process” appear only in a few picture books (67). Which heroines, asks Chabrol-Gagne, can join the lineage of Antigone, of Juliette, these two figures of young girls willing to die rather than give in to archaic laws imposed on them, or Agnès with a less tragic destiny? It is to be noted that finding rebel heroines or great women lovers in picture books is very difficult. The risk of contesting the adults’ power is too high.

As we move further ahead in the ages of female life, we reach the “mothers.” They are expansive in the corpus studied: “The mother is the real heroine in picture books”, states Chabrol-Gagne in an article published on the Ricochet website. The fourth chapter starts with a presentation of works centered on Adam and Eve with a special mention of La Famille Adam [The Adam Family] by Michel Tournier (2003). Chabrol-Gagne then shows that the portrait of the mother is still too often a copy of role models from the nineteenth century—like the model of Mère Barberin [Mother Barberin], the adoptive mother of Rémi in Sans famille [Without a Family] by Hector Malot: a loving and reassuring woman who is always present. In fact, as in Une vraie Maman [A Real Mother] (2008), the mother in picture books “has 18 pairs of arms and legs” (99). Very few imperfect mothers emerge.

The fifth chapter begins by exclaiming, “After Mom, long live Grandma!” The grandmothers are either young and beautiful, or are “cake” grandmothers: cooks, gardeners and guardians of their grandchildren. The image of old age is typically outdated in the visual images. It is sometimes easier for picture book creators to stage a “physically beat” man rather than a woman (Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake, Quand je suis triste [Sad Book], 2005). While Chabrol-Gagne emphasizes the existence of picture books depicting the self-managed, solidarity-based and public-spirited “Babayagas” initiatives,¹ she regrets the absence of grandmothers in love, of lesbian and sexy grannies, or of women who live only for themselves (Sonja Bougaeva, Deux Sœurs reçoivent de la visite [Two Sisters Receive a Visit], 2007).

The final chapter is dedicated to the “forgotten” and the “survivors,” to girls who appear in the corpus as if...