“We’ll See Who Knits the Fastest”: Female Emotionality and Embodied Knowledge in Annemarie van Haeringen’s Dutch Picturebook Sneeuwwitje breit een monster and Its American Translation

The belief that women are more emotional than men and less able to control the influence of their emotions on their thoughts and behaviours is one of the strongest gender stereotypes in Western cultures. While gender representation in children’s books has been studied since the 1970s and has led to numerous books that challenge gender stereotypes, the notion of women as emotionally irrational persists – even in picturebooks that rewrite or circumvent other gender-stereotypical elements. Drawing on feminist (fairy-tale) studies, translation studies, cognitive theory, and picturebook studies, the author of this article seeks to examine how verbal and visual choices in the Dutch picturebook Sneeuwwitje breit een monster [Snow White Knits a Monster] by Annemarie van Haeringen (2014) and its American translation, How to Knit a Monster (2018), can reinforce or challenge the Western stereotype of women as emotionally unstable and lacking control. The author’s comparative multimodal analysis reveals that visual split depictions and dramatic irony in the selected case studies uphold the harmful association of women with emotional irrationality and ignorance. In contrast, word-image interactions that allow for ambiguity and that suggest the main character’s use of embodied knowledge offer a potential challenge to these connotations.