Although she spends a lot of time looking, she can’t exactly grow legs and move so The Little House is at the mercy of people who make plans around her. I figure this represents the billow of smoke from polluting smoke stacks? What do you think? PLAN The margins of the text changes to a curvilinear design. The story opens with bright, comforting colours of the countryside which, across 20th century children’s literature, with surprisingly few exceptions, is presented as more wholesome, clean, friendly and better all round for children.Ĭareful what you wish for, or what you wish to know! At the beginning of the story The Little House wonders what it would be like in the bright city with all those lights. endpaper STORY STRUCTURE OF THE LITTLE HOUSE SHORTCOMING

Instead, a number of pages in the picture book look almost like a ‘spot the difference’ exercise. “The Little House” is the direct inverse of that - the perspective does not change. That picture book was ground-breaking in the way it utilises cinematic points of view - longshots, close ups and so on. The Little House read on YouTube SETTING OF THE LITTLE HOUSEĪs a good contrast, read The Story of Ferdinand (1936) by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson. The house has an expressive face of windows and doors, and even the feelings of a person, so she’s sad when she’s surrounded by the dirty, noisy city’s hustle and bustle: “She missed the field of daisies / and the apple trees dancing in the moonlight.” Fortunately, there’s a happy ending, as the house is taken back to the country where she belongs. Virginia Lee Burton won the Caldecott Medal in 1943 for her memorable picture book The Little House, a poignant story of a cute country cottage that becomes engulfed by the city that grows up around it. Here’s a real world example of that sort of thing: Incredible story behind squashed Aussie home PARATEXT An old man in a house won’t move as the world changes all around him. There’s a clear link between “The Little House” and Pixar’s animated children’s film Up (2009). See: The Little House (1952) on YouTube Mary Blair’s concept art for the Walt Disney short, The Little House 1952 Notice as you read the mention of the moon, linking something small on Earth to something universal.

He mentions it because of course Charlotte’s Web is another example of a feminine, domestic, circular structure. Peter Neumeyer in his annotated guide to Charlotte’s Web. In The Little House, the curvilinear lines of the illustrations represent not only the gender of the female Little House, and her surroundings in good times, but also the cycles, return, and renewal, the generation and the continuity, and the affirmations of life that are the theme of the book.

“The shape of a story” is, of course, a metaphorical phrase, but it is one that connotes profoundly. Circular plot shapes tend to have a feminine feel and star female characters (but not always).

The little house burton