Illustration as Interpretation: Trina Hyman's Folk Tales

Abstract

Illustration as Interpretation:Trina Hyman's Folk Tales Jill P. May (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration from Rapunzel, retold by Barbara Rogasky, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Holiday House, 1982. As a child, Trina Schart Hyman lived in the world of fairies and witches, princesses and queens. In her autobiography, she speaks of her early play with her younger sister: "Mostly we loved fairies. They were more real to us than anything we could really see" (Self-Portrait). Hyman's comment is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's idea that at play the child "behaves like an imaginative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, more truly, he arranges the things of his world and orders it in a new way that pleases him better . . . [H]e takes his play very seriously and expends a great deal of emotion on it" (Delusion and Dream 123). In her work as an illustrator, Hyman is not afraid to reach back into such childhood fantasies, in order to create a romantic world of happily-ever-after stories; nor is she afraid to evoke and reinterpret the work of other illustrators who have influenced her, or to use the faces of friends and family members in her pictures. In a sense her pictures order the old tales she illustrates in a new way. Her art is an eclectic, emotional medium that creates a new understanding of the real world by reinterpreting the elements of old world folklife. Particularly in her visual interpretations of folk tales, Hyman creates her own personal drama. Hyman's versions of the Grimm tales can evoke a deep response from the viewer because her personal interpretations of them unveil the universal conflicts of fidelity, trust, envy, and pride the tales contain; indirectly, they all deal with the Oedipal struggles lodged in the family. She interprets two of the tales, Snow White and Rapunzel, in Freudian terms; and her Snow White also contains Christian symbols which indirectly bring new significance to the tale's early roots. A third tale, Little Red Riding Hood, is Hyman's return journey to her own early fantasy world. These three books, when viewed as a progressive journey by the artist back to her own childhood world of play, reveal much about the artist and her interpretative skills. Snow White the first of Hyman's versions of fairy tales, was created while Hyman and her daughter were living with the artist Nancie West Swanberg and Nancie's twin daughters. Nancie became the model for the queen; Katrin, Trina's daughter, became the young princess. Hyman's steady, helpful, protective neighbor Hugh made his first appearance in this story; he was the huntsman. The dwarves were modelled on people who had influenced Hyman, including Hyman's father, Katrin's father, Paul Heins, Konrad Lorenz (and even Hyman herself). She once confessed, "My Snow White . . . is a very symbolic and personal story, and I really did put my own heart into those pictures" (private correspondence, August 19, 1976). The need to include so much of her personal life in her art is closely related to Freud's explanation of dream as being "rarely the representation—one might say, the staging—of a single thought, but generally of a number of them, a web of thoughts" (Delusion and Dream 82). At times, however Hyman's book contains material that seems to deal less with her own adult world than with the adolescent world of her daughter, Katrin, who was twelve years old when Hyman created Snow White. Perhaps more important, it addresses the real possibility that a child without familial protection will be vulnerable to the adults around her. Hyman has depicted Snow White's stepmother, the new queen, as a striking beauty with calm, cold eyes. While the queen is beautiful in outward appearance, there is nothing in Hyman's presentation of her to suggest that she is concerned about any other human being alive. Her magical mirror is appropriately surrounded with demonic images who solemnly lear at her. By the second illustration, Hyman makes it clear that this vain woman's concern is that her beauty will wane while that...