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TOWARDS A VISUAL DISCOURSE IN CHILDREN’S PICTUREBOO KS: BEATRIX

POTTER’S THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT (1902), JOHN MARSDEN’S AND

SHAUN TAN’S THE RABBITS (1998)

MARWA ESSAM ELDIN FAHMI

Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Foreign Languages & Translation,

MISR University for Science & Technology, Giza, Egypt

ABSTRACT

The present paper examines the contribution of visuals to narration, a process proposed by G. Kress and T.

van Leeuwen as “reading images”. Illustrations are created by the innovative use of line, shape, color and other

aesthetic choices to evoke setting, establish character, convey theme, display information, explain a concept or create a

mood. The selected Children’s picture books – to my knowledge - have not been studied against their fluid textual entity

incorporating lexical and visual signs codified in an interaction of word, image, and reader. The picture book, as a

potential sign, conveys a narrative through verbal language and visual grammar. The point of departure is that the

analysis relies heavily on the Kress and van Leeuwen theoretical framework of visual semiotics. It is my attempt to

address the following questions in Potter’s, Marsden’s, and Tan’s visuals: 1) What is the purpose of each picture? 2) Is

it narrative, referential, or symbolic? 3) Do the pictures add details to the text that are not in it? 4) Do the pictures leave

room for the child’s imagination, do they have gaps, or is everything in the text depicted in the pictures?

KEYWORDS: Multimodal Theory, Postmodern Picture Book, Visual Semiotics, Children's Literature

Received: Oct 07; Accepted: Oct 10; Published: Oct 20; Paper Id: IJELDEC20152

INTRODUCTION

“What is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures and conversations?”

(Carroll, Alice in WonderLand: 2)

The present paper examines the contribution of visuals to narration, a process proposed by Gunther Kress

and Thao van Leeuwen as “reading images” in relation to children’s picturebooks, a canon of literature worthy of

serious analysis and investigation. Most discussions of children’s picturebooks dwell on their educational uses and

visual literacy is restricted in classroom activities curriculum. Furthermore, the illustrative content of children’s

picturebooks goes unremarked or mentioned superficially despite the naming of the illustrators on the title page.

Yet, Perry Nodelman's Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Book (1988), Maria

Nikolajeva's and Carole Scott's How Picture Books Work (2001), in addition, David Lewis's Picturing Text: The

Contemporary Children’s Picture book (2001), to name just a few, are notable literary scholars who have been in

pursuit of the metalanguage of picturebooks. John Stephens, in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction

(1992), turns to look toward the ideological dimensions of the picturebook. Stephens holds the belief that learning

how to read a picturebook is itself a socializing process heavily imbued with ideological assumptions. He asserts

that reading even a simple picturebook is “quite a complex cognitive process” (161) in which the child reader

Original A

rticle International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028 Vol. 5, Issue 6, Dec 2015, 9-28 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

10 Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi

Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049 Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 3.0

needs to develop “an understanding of how to ‘read’ a picture in terms of the conventions by which it operates” (161).

In its broadest definition, a picturebook is about a book in which the illustrations play a significant role in telling

the story. Picturebooks are gorgeous to behold for the richness of their color, layout, and the attention given to the cover,

font, and texture. In fact, picturebooks are polysemic or multimodal, that is, they tell a story in a variety of ways.

Illustrations are created by the innovative use of line, shape, color and other aesthetic choices to evoke setting, establish

character, convey theme, display information, explain a concept or create a mood. With this rationale, picturebooks can be

defined as “text, illustrations, total design, an item of manufacture and commercial product; a social, cultural, historical

document, and, foremost, an experience for a child” (Italics mine, Bader, 1).

Thus, the selected Children’s picturebooks – to my knowledge - have not been studied against their fluid textual

entity incorporating lexical and visual signs codified in an interaction of word, image, and reader. The picturebook, as a

potential sign, conveys a narrative through verbal language and visual grammar. The point of departure is that the analysis

relies heavily on the Kress and van Leeuwen theoretical framework of visual semiotics in relation to children’s

picturebooks. This semiotic capacity makes picturebooks ideal for children to establish “contexts for literary and real world

understandings” (Kiefer, 260).

Visual Semiotics of Children’s Picturebooks

In his illuminative work, Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (1988), Perry

Nodelman pinpoints the fact that “it is unfortunately true that most discussion of children’s picturebooks has either ignored

their visual elements altogether or else treated the pictures as objects of a traditional sort of art appreciation … rather than

narrative elements (1988: ix). In “The Constructedness of Texts: Picture Books and Metafictive” (1990: 140), David Lewis

identifies the dominant paradigm of research of picturebook in three main types:

• Pedagogic, where the printed word supersedes the pictorial aspects of the text as the focus of examination in the

meaning-making process;

• Aesthetic, where the rationale for research is drawn from art history as an appreciation of form leaning toward the

pictorial aspects of the text at the expense of its lexical co-text;

• Literary, where the picturebook is subsumed in the vast oeuvre of children’s literature “as a marginal genre, or a

larval stage of literature proper”.

He also notes that “an adequate theory of picturebook must directly address the bifurcated nature of the form

(word and picture) and must account for the whole range of types and kinds including the metafictive” (1990: 141). In a

similar stance, Nodelman argues that it is convenient to understand images in picturebooks “in the light of some form of

semiotic theory” which suggests "the possibility of a system underlying visual communication that is something like a

grammar – something like the system of relationships and contexts that make verbal communication possible” (Italics

mine, ix).

The propensity of children picturebooks to be a highly an unconventional literary genre foregrounds the seminal

work, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) by Kress and van Leeuwen to employ visual systems of

signification. Kress and van Leeuwen set out the first social semiotic framework for analyzing images, noting that “we

intend to provide inventories of the major compositional structures which have become established as conventions in the

course of the history of visual semiotics and to analyze how they are used to produce meaning by contemporary image-

Towards a Visual Discourse in Children’s Picturebooks: Beatrix Potter’s The 11 Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), John Marsden’s and Shaun Tan’s The Rabbits (1998)


makers” (1). They develop a ‘grammar’ of images in order to present a socially-based theory of visual representation”

(Italics mine, 5).

In their rationale, Kress and van Leeuwen do not accept Barthes’s (1977) view of meaning of the image, that is,

his notion of dependency between image and verbal text, where he suggests that the meaning of images are related to and

mostly dependent on language for ‘fixing’ their meaning. They argue that Barthes’s essay on image-text fails to recognize

that “the visual component of a text is an independently organized and structured message – connected with verbal text, but

in no way dependent on it. And similarly the other way round” (1996: 17).

Kress and van Leeuwen utilize Halliday’s (1978) SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics) theory to provide an

analogy for the development of a visual grammar and to outline the kinds of categories that they regard as essential to the

analysis of the visual semiotics. In this regard, they write, “The visual, like all semiotic modes, has to serve several

representational requirements in order to function as a full system of communication. We have adopted the theoretical

notion of ‘metafunction’ from the work of Michael Halliday for the purpose of dealing with this factor” (1996: 40). The

categories of the visual grammar proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen are summarized in the tables below:

Table 1: Interactive Meaning Adapted from The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) p.56

Contact Image Act · Offer (Information) · Demand (goods/services)

Gaze

· Direct (degrees of Engagement) · Indirect (degrees of Engagement)

Social Distance Size of Frame · Close(Intimate/Personal) · Medium (Social) · Long (Impersonal)

Attitude Subjective Image Objective Image

· Horizontal angle (degrees of Involvement &Detachment) · Vertical angle (degrees of Power to the viewer, to the

RP, or a relation of equality) Color · Color saturation

· Color differentiation · Color modulation

Contextualization · Absence of background · Full detail

· Maximum abstraction · Maximum representation

Modality Depth · Absence of depth · Maximally deep

Illumination · Full representation of light & shade · Absence of light & shade

Brightness · Maximum brightness · Black & white or shades of light grey & dark grey

Coding orientation · Technological · Sensory · Abstract · Naturalistic

Table 2: Size of Frame and Social Distance Adapted from The



Grammar of Visual Design (1996) p. 130

Frame Size Characteristics Social Relation very close up less than head and shoulders of subject intimate close shot head and shoulders of subject friendly or personal medium close cuts off subject approximately at waist social or ' one of us' medium shot cuts off subject approximately at knee level 'familiar' social medium long shows full figure general social long shot human figure fills half image height public, largely impersonal very long shot and anything beyond (wider) than half height little or no social connection

Table 3: Visual ‘Clues’ for Compositional Salience Adapted from The

Grammar of Visual Design (1996) p. 212

Salience Indicator Features Size Larger objects are more easily noticed by the eye that smaller ones.

Sharpness of focus Objects are more clearly seen because their features are in sharp focus and are more easily noticed by the eye than those that have their features less sharply focused.

Tonal contrasts Areas of high contrast, for example black borders placed on white spaces are higher in salience than a grey-shaded, less distinct border performing the same dividing function.

Color contrasts The contrasts between highly saturated colors and softer muted colors, or the contrast between red, white, and blue.

Placement in the visual field The aspect of visual ‘weight’ - objects are ‘heavier’ when close to the top, and ‘heavier’ when placed on the left.

Perspective Objects or entities placed in the foreground are visually more salient than those in the background, and elements which overlap others are more salient.

Kress and van Leeuwen distinguish three types of systems those of (i) image and gaze, (ii) social distance and

intimacy and (iii) involvement and power. The three systems work to show the way in which Represented Participants

(RPs) are visualized within the interaction with the viewer. In this sense, the present paper examines the semiotic choices

made by Potter, Marsden and Tan in the verbal and visual cues to analyze children's picturebooks to establish them as

multimodal texts.

Beatrix Potter’s the Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

• Demystifying the Victorian Child Hero

The Tale of Peter Rabbit, written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, is one of the most popular children’s picture books.

It is a story with an exciting chase and exquisite illustrations in which Potter has created a mix of suspense and tensions

and praised for its simple rhythmic words. In Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007), Linda Lear states that the tale is “a

perfect marriage of word and image” and “a triumph of fantasy and fact” (154). She also notes that Potter has introduced “a

new kind of animal fable she made one in which anthropomorphic animals look and act like real animals” (153).

The tale was intended for children of English middle class in the Victorian era, characterized by strict and

conservative manners in court and in children’s education. Potter demystifies moralizing literature and despite the

moralistic values that predominate in the verbal narrative: “the good little bunnies” are rewarded at the end of the tale with

a nice supper while Peter ends up with a stomachache; she is on the side of the “disobedient” bunny advocating natural

instinct. Peter faces a giant who is stronger than himself, yet Peter manages to outsmart Mr. McGregor and proves to be a

hero.



Potter’s illustrations exhibit a juxtaposition of recognizable humanness and an understanding of rabbit's behavior.

The visuals convey the rabbit’s humanness by emphasizing its anthropomorphic nature, that is, Peter has a realistic rabbit's

body living in a typical rabbit's burrow, yet, he wears a blue coat and expresses feelings of distress. The illustrations

combine realistic details with fanciful intent to mock many accepted notions of Victorian society. Thus, the story conceals

social criticism in animal fantasy. Peter flouts the Victorian code of behavior a child was expected to observe such as

despite its boredom, home is a better place to be than the dangerous world outside. Peter’s flaw is his sense of curiosity (Id)

which his super ego tries to suppress. By his escape, Peter expresses his rejections of his adult-controlled world that all

children resent. Therefore, the child reader sympathizes with Peter who suffers at the end from a stomachache. In a word,

Peter is a symbol of rebellion and Potter deconstructs the portrayal of Peter as “a naughty hero with a proper moral at the

end” (Mackey, 2002:19) and changes the traditional good child and conservatism of Victorian era.

Throughout the story, Peter uses no direct speech. He lacks the voice and therefore has a position that is less

powerful. Peter’s transgression ignores four commands: “but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden”, “Now run along”,

“and don’t get into mischief” and “Stop thief”. These commands are not heeded by Peter: “he trespasses in the garden, not

because he needs food to survive, since that is provided by Mama Rabbit, but rather for the pure joy of breaking

established rules” (Scott, 2001: 19).

• An Interplay of Verbal and Visual Cues in The Tale of Peter Rabbit

The aim of this section is to explore both the verbiage and the illustrations and how far they combine to reinforce

the child reader’s identification with the protagonist, Peter. The illustrations are dramatic, intricate in detail and contribute

to the meanings of the text.

In figure 1, Mother Rabbit directs her gaze at the child reader to invite him/her to her family world. “The

realization of a visual demand”, Kress and van Leeuwen note, “is determined by the presence or absence of a gaze which

indicates a form of direct or indirect address to the viewer” (Italics mine, 1996: 121):

Figure 1

On the other hand, no eye contact is established with the viewer when Peter feels sick and looks for parsley to alleviate his

pain. Therefore, there is no demand on the child reader to be involved in an imaginary social relation.

The verbal components of the names of the four little rabbits are displaced towards the left from Flopsy to Peter.

Peter’s depiction is done through “a visual metonymy” (Forceville, 56), that is, Peter’s tail. Figure 1, moreover, conveys

more information about Peter’s different personality as a transgressor. The visual is a long shot and has a frontal angle to

show the difference between Peter and his sisters. The child viewer sees their heads, but Peter plays in the burrow and only

his tail is visible.

Figure 2 provides information that does not exist in the text. The child reader knows that Flobsy, Mobsy and

Cotton-tail are girls since Mama Rabbit dresses them pink coats and the boy a blue coat:



Figure 2

They are docile submissive and cute bunnies while Peter is “naughty”. This difference prepares for the forthcoming event,

Peter’s dangerous adventure which is a signifier of the ordeals that he has to go through to be unusual hero. The

underground burrow is a signifier of a safe childhood and Peter has to choose between dull respectability and mysterious

forbidden territory – Mr. McGregor’s garden.

A rhythmic pattern between words and the illustration below is established in the text that refers to Peter’s escape

from the garden:

Figure 3

Peter is almost under the gate; he is just about to slip underneath it and the action shown by the picture comes at some

point before the completion of the action. In this way, the text is read with a sense of anticipation and the illustration delays

the events, therefore increasing the narrative’s tension. As Nodelman affirms; “almost every picture in this tale shows a

moment towards the end of the actions implied by the text” (1988: 258).

Verbal and visual cues can contribute to the unity of message at the story level. The text describes Peter’s queasy

stomach: “And then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley”:

Figure 4

The illustration on the opposite page shows Peter holding his stomach drooping facial features, shaky posture and ears

pointed straight upward. This mirrors the interplay of both words and illustrations to convey Peter's current mood and

physical condition.

Potter narrates: “And squeezed under the gate! The conflict starts”. This highlights the significant use of

exclamation mark that makes the story progress. Peter’s adventure begins after enjoying the feast of vegetables. The



aggressor’s chase is expressed through the interrogative structure: “But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should

he meet but Mr. McGregor!”. The inevitable happens and the little bunny’s life is now at risk. Potter uses the mood

structures punctuation to generate meaning at the semantic level. Rather than a regular interrogative of the Wh- structure,

the structure of “should” and “but” expresses surprise through the exclamation mark.

The illustration below depicts RP in a state of danger. The child reader sees Peter’s back and he is portrayed as a

small creature whereas Mr. McGregor is delineated as a giant human being:

Figure 5

This establishes Mr. McGregor as Peter’s main antagonist and reinforces the Victorian conception that the world outside

home is hostile and ambiguous. In addition, Potter manipulates “visual focalization” which is an important technique in the

narrative art since “the reader is usually positioned behind the character and sees what is happening within the narrated

world through the character’s eyes” (Painter, 40). Peter gets into an awful lot of trouble. Potter’s description of Peter’s

entrapping in “a gooseberry net” shows her stance in the favor of Peter. This is manifested in the use of the modal verb

“might” which expresses factual possibility and in the modal adjunct “unfortunately”. This encourages the child reader to

support Peter’s escape from the oppressor and identify with the defenseless rabbit.

Peter escapes the gooseberry net by letting his clothes go: “It was the second little jacket and pair of shoes that

Peter had lost in a fortnight”. Peter’s garments are a signifier of repression of natural impulses and hostility to freedom.

Peter seems to be torn between his rabbit-like nature and his child-like behavior. By using clothing as a motive, Potter

creates the dilemma of whether Peter should act like a child as his mother wishes, following the civilized codes of

behavior, or naturally like an animal following his animal instincts (Scott: 1994, 79).

Again, Peter is portrayed through visual metonymy, that is, Peter’s ears, when both he and Mr. McGregor are in the

shed:

Figure 6

This puts the child reader in a position of dominance, as he/she knows more about what is going on than either Peter or his

foe. The illustration below is a middle-distance shot and the subjects of the illustration are situated from the sidelines:



Figure 7

It depicts the aggressor’s physical violence. Mr. McGregor’s booted foot is about to step on Peter before he manages to

escape from the tool shed by jumping out of a small window. The viewer sees the flowers petals falling, the tufts of Peter’s

hair as well as the studs on the sole of Mr. McGregor’s boot.

The following illustration is a masterpiece in which the verbal narration and the visual work in harmony. The

illustration transmits not only actions, but also feelings. It depicts Peter’s posture and facial expressions:

Figure 8

The unclothed Peter begins to cry standing upright against the door and one foot upon the other with a tear running from

his eye. Peter is a defenseless animal, but his human posture intensifies the child’s identification.

Nodelman notes that the great presence of long shots (65.6%) gives the tale a sense of objectivity (1988, 151).

These long shots tend to show RPs against the background in which the actions are carried out, for example, Peter is in the

foreground when he is looking from the wheelbarrow towards the gate and later escaping from Mr. McGregor. Long shots

also tend to reflect exterior/interior settings like the tool-shed, Rabbit family’s house, kitchen’s utensils, and Peter’s bed in

the last illustrations. Thus, long shots offer “a high degree of contextual detail” (Scott, 2001: 20). On the other hand, in

middle shots, the RP is shown in full, but without much space around it. It is represented as within the viewer’s reach. In

turn, in close-ups, the viewer gets engaged with it, unless the RP is very small and shown in parts; ears, tail, shoe. Finally,

while the horizontal angle determines the emotional involvement with the RP (Frontal angle), the vertical angle reflects

relationships of power and Vulnerability, depending on whether the RP is looked at from a low or a high angle respectively

(Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 160-163). For example, the Rabbit Family is shown from a frontal perspective:

Figure 9



In these two visuals, the child reader observes the privacy of their lives: cooking, dining, and resting in bed.

A visual is the result of “convergence of many different signifying systems” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 265).

Peter’s prominence is realized by relative size, place in the composition, contrast against background, color saturation,

sharpness of focus, and “psychological salience” which the RP’s face has for viewers (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 64).

These non-linguistic modes are the “grammar” of illustrations. Salience is a paramount visual grammar that refers to the

ability of RP to capture the viewer’s attention. For example, the larger the RP, the greater the salience and the RP in the

foreground has a greater salience too. Salience is also realized through color saturation. Potter illustrates an

anthropomorphic hero. Peter’s postures are detailed and naturalistic achieving a high level of modality, that is, Peter’s

tearful eye, frightened feelings, clothes, and human pose. Modality refers to how we feel about the illustration’s validity

and reliability (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 163). Potter’s visuals are expressive of high modality, that is, the realness of

the images. In addition, the full color saturation exhibits high modality. High saturated colors in the tale show intensity of

feelings and exuberant adventurous since the tale addresses children aged from five to seven years old. By adopting the

Kress and van Leeuwen social semiotic framework, The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a visual aesthetic work set by Potter

deliberately in no particular time. Peter is a signifier of every child in this timelessness to universalize his experience that

signifies the dichotomies between order and chaos, decorum and rudeness, home and wilderness, and family responsibility

and concern for oneself.

Anthropomorphism, as a literary device, has been deployed by Potter, Marsden and Tan to create a space for

children to explore challenging issues. However, in The Rabbits, anthropomorphism is manipulated to question

ecological/political issues in surrealistic illustrations, that is, the eighteenth century figures in strange antipodean deserts

versus Potter’s cute bunnies.

John Marsden’s and Shaun Tan’s The Rabbits (1998)

The Rabbits, a “sophisticated, compelling” (Mortimer, 1) non-white children's picturebook written by Marsden

and illustrated by Tan, was honored by the Children’s Australian Book Council for the Best Picturebook in 1999 and won

many other international awards. The Rabbits has been used in “secondary schools in areas of curriculum that include

English, Art, and environmental studies –from Years 5‐6 through to Year 12” (Mortimer, 2). However, this section of the

present study aims at establishing The Rabbits as a postmodern children's picturebook that stands in contrast to Potter’s

realistic illustrations and linear narration.

The Rabbits is “a strange metaphor” of the colonization of Australia, that is, the Europeans posing as rabbits and

aboriginals as tree dwellers and small lizards and marsupial-like animals. It is written from the point of view of the

colonized (the bandicoots) and the rabbits throughout the book are silent, yet, their destructive power and ominous number

are verbally emphasized and visually illustrated.

The rabbits are triangular-shaped creatures walk on two legs and wear the uniforms of western culture. The

indigenous inhabitants are robbed of their way of life, their cultural heritage, and their children are stolen by the invading

army of rabbits who arrive with all the hallmarks of European culture with devastating effects and ruthlessly displacing the

indigenous. More universally, it is “the story of colonization everywhere, about power, ignorance, and environmental

destruction” (Tan, “Originality and Creativity”: www.shauntan.net). In this sense, Tan uses a powerful technique of

nameless creatures to represent the indigenous inhabitants prior to invasion to tackle the colonial dichotomy of “Us” and



“Them”. What is more, Tan’s surrealistic art is functional in the sense that it helps avoid any specific cultural reference to

an Aboriginal experience as well as it signifies the sheer enigma of European culture. The rabbits themselves have only

two-dimensional legs and their faces are as concealed as their intentions. Rabbits are nicknames for strange and new

creatures that look a bit like rabbits.

• A Postcolonial Children's PictureBook: Rewriting the Past Surrealistically

What is outstanding about Tan’s visuals is that they reveal more meaning than the written narrative. Words and

images play off each other. Neither the text nor the image explains each other fully and the ‘implied reader’ must fill in the

gap of meaning with his emotional and intellectual reaction. When the text says, “they ate our grass”, there are no rabbits

eating grass, only a giant industrial fish-head machine stripping the landscape. When the text says, “they only know their

own country”, we see the rabbits examining the new environment through strange optical devices. Images of rabbits talk

through wires stung over vast distances and the rabbits have no visible mouths. For Tan, The Rabbits is a good example of

“reconstructed creativity”. It is a familiar story with a colonial/historical narrative and the subsequent injustices perpetrated

against the indigenous population. He believes that ‘originality’ is more about a kind of transformation of existing ideas

than the invention of entirely new ones (“Originality and Creativity”: www.shauntan.net).

The cover illustration is a good example of developing a visual from an old painting, a reference source. It is

based on a nineteenth century painting of Cook’s first landing at Botany Bay by E. Phillips Fox. The visual details of

British colonialists striding a shore from left to right are mirrored by the rabbits with their clothing, guns, and flag. In

addition, two aborigines on a distant dune are replaced by two marsupial animals:

Figure 10 Captain Cook’s First Landing at Botany Bay, a Painting by E. Phillips Fox

However, Tan’s illustration is exaggerated to magnify the horrors of colonialism. The challenging cover

illustration depicts the rabbits’ surreal, massive ship leaps forth like a skyscraper:

Figure 11: Front and Back Covers

The portrayal of the rabbits/colonizers is very apt to signify the devouring nature of colonialism. The white rabbits

have an enigmatic and fierce appearance, i.e., they are sharp-angled in military attire: “I wanted to introduce a surreal



dreamlike quality, ambiguous in terms of mixed awe and dread, exaggerated but not caricatured or didactic” (Italics mine,

Tan, “Originality and Creativity”: www.shauntan.net). The angular-looking beings arrive on a vast golden ship introducing

strange machinery into a newly discovered wilderness and whose culture is incomprehensible.

With this rationale, the cover illustration, as well as all the subsequent illustrations, creates a subtext to question

the notions of ‘peripheral’ and ‘alienation’ within the postcolonial paradigm. The visuals follow the typical historical

progression of colonization moving from friendship to a sense of curiosity until the inevitable violence takes place.

The study of Tan’s visuals and their positioning in their political context can be analyzed by adopting Kress’s and

van Leeuwen’s ‘reading images’ terms (1996):

• Referential meanings are constructed by the forms of visual representation of events in the material world, the

objects and the participants involved, and the circumstances in which they occur.

• Interpersonal or interactive meanings concern the kind of relationship constructed between the viewer and what is

viewed.

• Compositional meanings deal with the ways in which the layout of the image indicates information value or

emphasis among the elements of image. Factors such as the location of elements to the left and or the right of the

page, the relative size of elements and the types of borders etc. influence the ways in which attention may be

drawn to various aspects of the image. Fascinating details, not mentioned in the written text, regarding textual

features (format, typography, color scheme, the organization of the double page).

At the beginning, for example, Tan’s angles denote distance. The tree dwellers are viewing the rabbits from a far.

However, as the story progresses, the illustrations are close up signifying the colonizer-colonized conflict as manifested in

the ecological and cultural destruction and the natives’ loss of wars.

Tan’s visual complexity springs from its intricate ‘grammar’ design. The first illustrations (cover page, front page,

half title page, and title page) act as a foreshadowing of the consequences of the rabbits’ arrival. Each double spread is an

informational progression from the last. The Napoleon-like creatures cover page is followed by front paper which

illustrates a calm blue lilac, clean water that is home to graceful long legged birds - a billabong teaming with life:

Figure 12: Front/Endpapers

This serene landscape is about to be invaded and distorted by a ruthless colonizer. A dark brown half title page comes next:



Figure 13: Half Title Page

The Union Jack is ominous referring to the history behind the story. This indicates the reality of the postcolonial tale. There

is also a shield in the center superimposed over a map. It evokes a foreboding atmosphere. This threatening mood is felt in

the next page, the title page. It is a ripped sheet of paper, covering those blue-lilac birds:

Figure 14: Title Page

Some of the paper begins to soak up the water, turning the white into grey. The birds are moving away turning

their backs and looking to the right. They are observing something strange invading their environment. Typographically

speaking, the title font, as on the front cover, is not quite normal. The ‘e’ letter has a strange wave under it and the ‘t’ letter

is uncharacteristic. They are letters from the past, namely, medieval type font evoking religious connotations. Religious

purposes have always been the colonialist’s pretext or justification to invade the ‘Other’ territory. As a multimodal

picturebook, the blending of visual design elements and particular fonts are fused together to convey a message of warning.

In this sense, typography exists to “honor content” (19) – to use Bringhurst’s phrase. This religious typeface stands in

contrast to Potter’s traditional title font: “traditional fonts are naturalized to the point that readers are not expected to pay

attention to their design” (Serafini: 2012, 5) and this adds complexity to Tan’s illustrations to evoke a mysterious mood and

to enhance the theme of colonial dispossession and alienation.

The opening illustration depicts a wilderness in brown, yet it is moist. It is also an age-old land full of fossil-like

shapes in the dark cave behind a huge snake whose gaze in the foreground is not directed towards the viewer:

Figure 15

Tan does not seek the emotional identification of the child reader as Potter does in some of her visuals to evoke feelings of

sympathy towards Peter. There are also fleeing birds at the right edge of the page as if they are giving an alarm. “The

rabbits came many grandparents ago" is very suggestive of the depicted old landscape that looks epic and ambiguous.

The illustration below shows a juxtaposition of two different worlds watching each other: “At first we didn’t



know what to think”:

Figure 16

The rabbits in the background with their optical devices and the indigenous tiny creatures as birds and insects are in the

foreground as they are still in control of their immense homeland. The rabbits’ telescopes signify their inability to see

beyond their own preconceptions and flawed ideals. The land has been marked by the wheels of a strange machine as

illustrated on the horizon. This foreshadows the mechanical life that is about to invade the wilderness as illustrated in the

next visuals

Figure 17 is dazzling and startling in its unusual visual design. The illustration shows massive grass eating sheep

machines dressed in lambs' wool and cows are sketched as butchers’ knifes in rectangular shape:

Figure 17

These are strange creatures: "some of the animals scared us." Even the colonizers’ food “made us sick”. This is cleverly

illustrated in the right corner of the page to draw the viewer’s attention. A colonialist rabbit gives a bottle to aboriginal

creature collaged upon illustration of a dried up water bed, littered with flapping, gasping fish. What is unique is that the

last three words are turned upside as though rolling over with bellyache. The original inhabitants are unable to adjust and

adapt to new automated life.

The following illustration is very shocking and appalling. Hundreds of air machines with aboriginal babies inside

them and Mother creatures, in the background, screaming and their hands raised up towards their “stolen” children – their

hope and future:

Figure 18

The rabbits, in the foreground, are big, black with evil red eyes and their vertical backs turned against the mothers. They

use bloody ink dripping from a peacock feather to write the verbal text of this illustration; each word on a separate sheet of



paper, as though being spoken in jerks of distress: “and. stole. our. children”.

The final page shows a small cameo illustration against a black background. It depicts two solitary creatures, a

rabbit and an aboriginal, sitting opposite each other on the edge of a pond reflecting the stars in the sky. It is a remnant of

great land which has been distorted, wasted, littered with bones and broken pieces of machines and empty bottles. The

helpless marsupials are waiting for a savior: "Who will save us from the rabbits?"

The colonized remain peripheral to the center power of the rabbits. Inhabitants’ passivity is mirrored in the text.

The bandicoots are seen holding spears just watching the rabbits. They are less involved, except during wartime, and only

engaged in mental process as seen in verbs like “warned” and “liked”. In contrast, the rabbits have active roles with verbs

like “made”, “ate”, “brought”, “spread”, “ate”, “chopped” and “stole” (Unsworth & Wheeler, 72). The illustrations focus

on the rabbits, their destructive tools and abusive power while the bandicoots are seen destitute and stricken curled in tight

balls and sometimes appear to be dotted underground beneath the surface which is dominated by the rabbits and their flag

whose lines are like arrows pointing everywhere. The feeling of helplessness, after the natives’ loss of war, is brilliantly

portrayed by the fragmentation of the page into separate pictures showing different episodes of the war and the colonizer-

colonized fights.

Drawing upon Kress’s and van Leeuwen’s terms (1996: 142-3), the difference between The Tale of Peter Rabbit

and The Rabbits lies in the use of angles. That is, the frontal angle, in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, “projects a message of

inclusion”, suggesting that the RP is part of the viewer’s world. In contrast, the oblique angle, in The Rabbits, “projects a

message of exclusion” suggesting that the RPs are not part of the viewer’s shared world and as a result there is a lack of

involvement since the indigenous inhabitants are not part of the colonial world that has devastated their homeland.

Furthermore, Potter’s illustrations are very delicate, detailed, and realistic to depict Peter and his environment achieving

high level of modality while Tan’s visuals, full of geometric shapes and lines, achieve low level of modality since they are

startling images as one could experience in nightmares or in a state of hallucination.

• ‘Color as a Semiotic Mode’

In “Color as a Semiotic Mode: Notes for a Grammar of Color” (2002), Kress and van Leeuwen state that “textual

cohesion can be promoted by ‘color coordination’ rather than by the repetition of the same color” (Italics mine, 349). They

pinpoint that “color itself is metafunctional”, that is, “color fulfills three metafunctions” (347-350): ‘ideational function’,

‘interpersonal function’, and ‘textual function’. Color can be used to denote specific people, places and things (ideational

function). Just as language allows us to realize speech acts, so color allows us to realize ‘color acts’. It can be and is used to

do things to or for each other, e.g. to impress or intimidate, to warn or to subdue people (interpersonal meaning). Color can

achieve internal cohesion through ‘color saturation’, color modulation’, articulation of background and articulation of

detail, depth, illumination and brightness to attain ‘color coordination’ (textual meaning). With this raison d'être, the aim of

this section is to examine color as central to the construction of the possibilities of the three metafunctions in the visuals at

hand.

Tan’s surreal illustrations rely heavily on his dazzling use of colors. There is interplay of dark and bright colors.

Some illustrations are in browns, blacks, and grays to evoke uncertainty and to create a foreboding mood to expose the

horror of colonialism while other illustrations are blue, and green or moist brown to refer to pre-colonialized Australia.

They are happy colors and evoke optimistic feeling. At the beginning, color is bold and bright; however, when the text



begins to discuss war, the color becomes dark and gloomy to lament the destruction of animal and plant life. For example,

the pages tell of the ominous spread of rabbits are in dark grey with small patches of yellow illuminating the rabbits’

presence. Tan comments on his surreal illustrations: “when working I often like to think of words and images as opposite

points on a battery, creating a potential voltage through a ‘gap’ between telling and showing. It requires the reader’s

imagination to complete the circuit, their thoughts, and feelings being the current that fills the silent space, without

prescription” (Tan, Lingua Franca: 2).

What is remarkable about Tan’s surreal visuals is the insertion of monochrome portion of the page which impinges

on the main story. “Monochromatic color scheme” uses “variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. It deals

with color without sacrificing quality and impact” (Straub, 84). Finally, Tan’s use of color underlines the tragedy of the

colonized in sepia tones, that is, the indigenous’ fight and resistance are illustrated in sepia-tinted cameos.

In the beginning, the rabbits make a cordial appearance symbolized in their delineation in a blue horizon. ‘Blue’

evokes a sense of peace, calmness, and stability. In contrast, the rabbits’ ruthless practices are symbolized by sucking the

blue out of the sky:

Figure 19

The illustration below sets juxtaposition between the rabbits’ mechanical/geometrical buildings and the natural setting of

the marsupials and tree dwellers:

Figure 20

This spread communicates ‘interpersonal’ relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in layers within color

‘ textual cohesion’. The slightly lighter blue strip at the top is the original layer and belongs to the indigenous who watch

the deformation of their environment. The darker blue is a superimposed layer due to the rabbits’ colonial distortion of the

wilderness. The rabbits’ buildings are like puzzles spewing black smoke. The rabbits’ houses stand on furniture legs

because they have no conceptual relationship to the raped environment as Tan himself remarks.

Figure 21 illustrates a grey automated world polluted and filled with grayish rabbits. The gigantic curved

chimneys sucking in blue sky and puffy clouds:



Figure 21

Then, the defeated inhabitants pose a number of questions: “where is the rich dark earth brown and moist? Where are the

lakes with long legged-birds? Where is the smell of rain dripping from the trees?” The background of this spread is in full-

saturated dark color to illustrate the land that has become bare and lifeless. Here, utopian past and dystopian present are set

in contrast to dramatize an aesthetic ‘strange metaphor’ of colonial rape of natural and virgin land.

To sum up, Tan's The Rabbits declares itself as “a rich and haunting allegory of colonization suitable for all ages

and cultures”. Tan believes that the subject of colonization is “an event of utter strangeness where two very different

worlds collide. I realized a long time ago that everything is fundamentally strange, but you need some oblique means of

puncturing familiar surfaces to appreciate the strangeness” (Italics mine, “Interview” with Shaun Tan done by Nick

Stathopoulous for the Eidolon magazine). The act of illustrating, for Tan, is “automatism”. He explains that the Surrealists

and Dadaists experiment with making uninhibited marks that are largely “subconscious” – an activity called “automatism”

or “automatic drawing”, like Max Ernst who makes dreamlike images from random mark-making. He adds that the process

is not “a casual or simple one. I find that good drawing requires conscientious effort: active research, careful observation of

things around me, ongoing experimentation and reference gathering, all of which exist ‘behind the scenes’. (Tan,

“Introduction”: 4).

Recapitulations and Perspectives

The compound term “Picturebook” is used in contrast to “picture book” or “picture-book” since the compound

term “recognizes the union of text and art, that results in something beyond what each form separately contributes” (Sipe:

2007, 273). Picturebooks are “print-based, multimodal texts” (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001) manifesting fluid and open forms

embodying lexical and visual signs and codes in an unceasing interaction of word, image and reader. Multimodal means

incorporate a variety of modes including visual images, hypertext and graphic design elements along with written text.

Multimodal texts are complex, sophisticated and challenging. Picturebooks, especially postmodern ones, are multimodal

texts since they highlight “grammar of images” such as gaze, framing, color schemes, typography, and salience. Regarding

the features of postmodern picturebook as a ‘self-referential text, it has a non-linear plot as well as a non-linear format

with a gloomy indeterminate ending, and surreal images. It presents the world as a place of destruction and injustice. The

pages and illustrations are cluttered and require the reader to decipher their intentions. The printed text does not run from

left-to-right as is the structural tradition of English language, and the charactesr are not always attractive while in classic

picturebooks the protagonist resolves his conflict, learns a lesson and the story embraces a happy ending through a clearly

laid-out beginning, middle and end (Italics mine, Goldstone, 366). The use of ‘grammar’ implies the attempt to examine

the ways in which what is depicted in images is combined into a coherent, meaningful whole, in much the same way that

discourse analysts examine how words are combined into clauses, sentences, and whole texts. Kress and van Leeuwen

(1996) use semiotics to analyze the complex composition of images on a page. They have suggested that there are several



tendencies in the reading of complex layouts, for instance taking the left as given and the right as new, or the top as ideal

and the bottom as real or the center as salient.

CONCLUSIONS

Picturebooks are artful books that occupy a unique place in the world of children's literature. Children are more

visually oriented: “they need to ‘see’ in the fullest sense and to recognize the significance of what they are seeing – to

become visually literate” (Considine, 38). In tackling picturebooks, we need to address the following questions: 1) What is

the purpose of each picture? 2) Is it primarily narrative, referential, or symbolic? 3) Do the pictures add details to the text

that are not in it? 4) Do the pictures leave room for the child’s imagination, do they have gaps, or is everything in the text

depicted in the pictures? I think that the present study sheds light on the poetics of the visual narrative art in picturebook as

exemplified in the tales at hand in to order to establish them as multimodal texts while previous studies only regard them as

useful material for school curriculum. My choice of these two picturebooks is deliberate to show the contrast between

Potter’s realistic visuals and Tan’s surreal ones in relation to the ‘implied reader’ – to consider the age and experience of

the child reader. Potter’s child reader belonged to the rigid and conservative Victoria era, so her illustrations have full-

saturated colors and accomplish high level of modality in order to respect their sensibilities. However, Tan’s children reader

is passionate about science fiction, fantasy, and dream-like imagery. Consequently, Tan’s visuals evoke a sense of

bewilderments, perplexity, and uncertainty in a highly surrealistic, yet meaningful manner. This establishes Tan’s visuals as

postmodern as manifested in his written language that is often positioned in atypical manner. Tan’s typography – visual

shape of the word – is full of expressivity and meaning to be decoded to illuminate textual structures and visual codes as

exemplified in his innovative use of angles, collage, geometric shapes and lines and the interplay of intense and subdued

colors. Although Potter’s visual narrative art is representational and that of Tan is presentational (show and not tell), their

pictorial details are rich in suggestiveness, record of their socio-political contexts and exhibit an excellent example of the

complexities of the word-and-image relationship in children's picturebooks. Finally, the Kress and van Leeuwen semiotic

framework has been deployed to construct a visual interpretation or discourse through ‘reading images’ in classic and

postmodern children's picturebooks. It is my attempt to pursue the metalanguage of children's picturebooks, a genre of

literature worthy of serious analysis and investigation.

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2. english- ijel - towards- a visual- discourse-marwa-essam-eldin

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