![]() Without making clear what story he was told about these events as a child, Bemelmans later summarized his child hood feelings thus:Īnd then one autumn the leaves in the park were not raked, the swan stood there forlorn and it was all over-all had come to an end. If she indeed had given birth out of wedlock before becoming Ludwig’s nurse, with the results as described by Drucker, the prospect of repeating this scenario may well have been unbearable. In despair, Gazelle committed suicide by drinking sulfured water. ![]() When Ludwig was six-years-old, Lampert ran off with yet another woman, leaving both Ludwig and Gazelle, who was pregnant with Lampert’s child. In the picture accompanying, a portrait of himself and Gazelle drawn from memory, note how Ludwig’s head overlaps her body in the shelter of a small gazebo covered with vines-the vines that will reappear as an organizing motif in Madeline.īemelmans’s father’s sexual liaisons apparently included not only Ludwig’s mother and Gazelle, but Ludwig’s maternal grandmother. In any case, Gazelle nurtured the boy on “long hours with postal cards of Paris, the Album of Paris, the children’s stories of France, the songs written for French children” (Bemelmans 1985, 10), even as he imbibed through her the rhythms, colors, and weather of Gmunden. According to Doris Drucker, who was a young child in Cologne and Mainz during the prewar and wartime years between 19,Ī wet nurse was usually a village girl who had gotten herself “into trouble.” As soon as her baby was born, it was given away to an “angel maker” (a woman who starved to death the babies in her care), and the young mother was hired out as a wet nurse. Gazelle may well have suckled Ludwig, since putting a child out to nurse was the custom among well-off Germans at that period. Reliving his earliest memories in an essay called “Swan Country,” Bemelmans recalled that “I was her little blue fish, her little treasure, her small green duckling, her dear sweet cabbage, her amour” (Bemelmans 1985, 7). The boy spent his earliest years on the grounds of his father’s Austrian hotel in Gmunden, cared for by a Frenchwoman whom he called Gazelle (his pronunciation of Mademoiselle). Ludwig Bemelmans was born in 1898 in Austria during the last days of Empire, the child of a failed marriage between an eccentric Belgian artist and a German brewer’s daughter. In order to convey a sense of these riches, I will first sketch events from Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Swan Country” period from birth to six, and his Lausbub period from six to sixteen. This storybook’s forty-four pages of seemingly light entertainment feature one child’s story of primal loss, death, war, and a bittersweet survival, and range in scope from intensely private scenes to evocations of world history, all against a backdrop of joyful immersion in color and form. ![]() Thus, the classic picture book can be seen as a secret space of childhood whose deepest significance is hidden in plain sight.Ī masterful and amply supported example of such an auteur picture book is Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline, originally published in 1939. The manifest storybook explanation for this primal scene is benign and reassuring while the latent and historical interpretation is traumatic and unbearable. One or more pictures stand out as the book’s primal raison d’etre that is, there is at least one picture which activates a “flashbulb memory” from the creator’s childhood and which the story explains in an ambiguous way. From encountering several classic picture books that fit this pattern, I hypothesize that a necessary ingredient to make a picture book a classic-that is, a book of great and enduring literary value and appeal that meets the conventional criteria of a picture book for a manifestly light tone and happy ending-is that the book be motivated throughout by a creator’s restaging of early trauma (primarily through allegorical narrative and line drawing).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |