This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Beating off to Norman Rockwell
In The Hopkins English Department




... Richard Halpern, an English professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the new book Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (Chicago University, $33), [asks of a Rockwell painting]: What's with that creepy doll on the floor?

"There is something slightly indecent about its posture," he writes, noting the raised rump. The doll, he suggests in language too colourful to repeat here, appears to be engaged in a quasi-sexual act with the mirror frame.

And it's no accident, as Halpern interprets it. Adolescence isn't all sweetness and light, of course, and the doll signals Rockwell's awareness of its more carnal side. The doll, he writes, "grotesquely amplifies ... the delicate point of sexual transition at which the girl finds herself."

Eroticized dolls — a running theme in Rockwell's work, Halpern says — are just one category of sexual or Freudian images that Halpern detects in Rockwell's paintings. He enumerates them in an effort to show that Rockwell is a "darker and more complex figure than most people are willing to accept."

"I think he intends to test the viewer," Halpern says in an interview from his Manhattan apartment.

To Halpern, Rockwell's main theme is not just innocence, but the denial required to make "innocent" images in our complicated world. As a result, people owe Rockwell another look: Innocence with lasciviousness peeking in at the edges, he says, is a lot more interesting than mere innocence. ...

Laurie Norton Moffatt, head of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., finds this all a bit much. Of Girl at Mirror, she says, not without a sense of humour: "I'm a woman who grew up as a girl loving her dolls. I would not see that in a doll.

"I think he is reading more into these pictures than was intended," she said. ...

Consider Cave of the Winds (Girl with Skirt Blowing Up), a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1920. With a grinning boy behind her, a girl at an amusement park is captured in the moment when jets on the floor fire air up into her skirt. The picture's true subject, Halpern says, is not childhood fun but "the shock of sexual difference." The girl has closed her knees and predictably grabbed her skirt, yet her hand finds itself in a suggestive location, Halpern notes. Her face is "flustered" with alarm, but also, perhaps, pleasure.

But Freud is really in the details. An empty peanut bag floats at knee level, its opening pointed at the viewer. Halpern says that motif is repeated meaningfully: "The Cave, the bag, the balloon, the billowing skirts, the girl's pursed but open lips — all are externalized emblems of the empty ... cavelike thing we are not allowed to see but see nevertheless."

Don't blame the critic, Halpern says: It's the painting, not his reading, that's "heavy handedly Freudian."

In his Christmas illustrations, Rockwell returned several times to the moment a child learns something unsettling about Santa Claus. But, Halpern asks, in Santa's Surprise (1949), is that really the revelation we're talking about? A boy has opened a door to find his mother on her knees, sewing the backside of Dad's Santa pants. Dad has only the bottom half of the suit on, and a tremendous pillow bulges out at a 45-degree angle from the front of his pants. "I trust I can leave this one to the readers' imagination," Halpern writes. (Maybe not. The Rockwell Museum's Moffatt says she sees no "sexual innuendo" at all in the painting.)