ABSTRACT
Nancy Tillman’s The Crown on Your Head is a simple text, but one that harbors an important lesson on humanness. Taking the form of a parental or adult narrative voice that speaks to an implied child recipient, the picturebook informs the reader that he or she wears a crown “made out of magic most people can’t see.” The existence of this crown, the reader is told, serves to “announce” something particularly special about the child who wears it: it reveals a “magnificence” so innate that it exists even before the child understands the term. Perhaps most generously read as a work that seeks to build self-confidence (if we forgive a rather patronizing, parenthetical gloss that recalls the very worst of Charles Kingsley), the book validates individualism and is marketed as suitable not merely for those to be tutored in long or difficult words but also for pre-and graduate readers. The Amazon.co.uk
blurb suggests that the book is: “a perfect gift for baby showers, graduation, and for any other occasion to tell dear ones that they are loved” (https:// www.amazon.co.uk/Crown-Your-Head-Nancy-Tillman/dp/1250040450). Set alongside this play with individuality and similitude is a series of images simultaneously suggestive of a hierarchy of being. Although the narrative itself makes no direct reference to them, each page of Tillman’s text depicts at least one animal alongside a sovereign child. The extent to which the animal is directly involved with that child varies from spread to spread: in one, the flight of two oblivious swans serves merely as a marker for the “heights” one might reach (here a child stands triumphant in a treehouse, towering above them); in another, rabbits look on curiously as a toddler becomes accustomed to the delights of playing checkers. In three of the spreads, a child is mounted upon exotic beasts-a leopard, an elephant, and a zebra-the wild animals rendered naturally supplicant to their royal cargo. That the images comprise manipulated photographic montages adds a peculiar sense of authenticity to this dominion-centered depiction of the child’s place in nature. The book is evocative of what Gary Snyder locates as the American dream-phrase “Wild and free”—words that are both “profoundly political and sensitive” but “have become consumer baubles” (5). Animal “wildness” here serves as a cipher for the freedoms afforded those who command the cosmos. There is little doubt that it is the human, in the form of “every child,” who rules.
