What a Girl! Fighting Gentleness in the Picture Book World: An Analysis of the Norwegian Picture Book What a Girl! by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus

Abstract

The Norwegian picture book What a Girl! (original title Snill) by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus was published 2011 and immediately gained a large audience. The book tells the story about a girl who always behaves in the ways expected of her: she never confronts her parents, her teacher or her classmates. This behaviour makes her invisible; she disappears into a wall, causing those around her to take notice. After a while, she fights herself out of the wall, emerging a completely different girl, a strong girl with a will of her own. However, she does not come alone: she has taken with her all the silent females, who had disappeared into the wall before her. The picture book story has fascinated both young and adult readers, and many student teachers have discussed it as part of their curriculum at university. The experienced reader will find intertextual relationships to other texts, where women disappear into the wall such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1899) and Patrice Kindl’s The Woman in the Wall (1997). The less-experienced reader will encounter a fascinating story of a girl fighting for her freedom and self-esteem. This article will present a multimodal analysis of the cover page and some significant spreads building on social semiotic theory and tools for analysing multimodal texts. The analysis will give a basis for discussing the development of the main character as a liberation project.