To Grow Pale

My research has unearthed a TON of picture books suitable for high school use. One title that keeps cropping up is Roberto Innocenti’s Rose Blanche (1985).  Sunday, this book and I spent some quality time together—and I know it won’t be our last visit.

I often tell my AP Lit students to carefully consider the title of a book.  Allow those musings to float around in your minds as you read, I tell them, and then, when you are finished reading, perhaps some interesting insights will occur to you.  And certainly be ready to revise your initial speculations.

I tried this technique with Rose Blanche and want to share here how that impacted my reading.  So, my thoughts about the title as they occurred to me …

On the cover, there’s a girl looking out of a window. I realize Rose Blanche must the girl’s name.  These are old-fashioned names, ones a grandmother might have, yet she’s young.  So the book is set, perhaps 50 or more years ago.  Other details on the cover confirm this, as she appears to be in some sort of a makeshift military hospital, and the uniforms of the wounded men place the story in either WWI or WWII.

Then, I began to read and to look at the pictures. Rose Blanche appears in almost every illustration.  And with one exception, she always wears a large, pink bow in her hair.  “Ah,” I think, “Pink!”  In French, the word for pink is rose.  So now I ponder the word blanche … and voila, the French word for white is blanch/blanche.  Suspicions confirmed; Innocenti is asking us, though his title and illustrations, to think about color in connection with his story.

I keep reading …

The illustrations at the end of the story verify my theory that color matters.  Here’s why: throughout the book, Innocenti relies almost exclusively on browns and dark greens—specifically, army green and dirty snow brown.  Although most pages contain a tiny bit of a surprising pastel, the vast majority of every page is given over to muddy, hopeless colors. But this is not true of the illustrations on the last two pages. Although there is still plenty of green, it’s new-life spring green.  In fact, the last sentence of the text reads, “Spring sang.” And now, too, the pastels abound.  Wildflowers dot the fields and wind up their way around the fences that have, at last, been destroyed.

So … a bit more ruminating on the colors.  In the face of the horrors of war, Rose Blanche exists as a tiny, bright spot, much like the bits of color scattered throughout the text.  More interesting ideas could certainly evolve from this line of thinking (the importance of maintaining hope in the face of evil, for example, or how beauty impacts survival).

Yet, a new idea began to nag at me by the end of the story.  And it, too, connects with color.  The word “blanch” also means to grow pale.  Because of the privations of war, Rose certainly does grow paler and thinner as the story progresses.  And too, she gives  most of her food to the children in a nearby concentration camp.  So the reader literally witnesses Rose Blanche blanch.  Eventually (spoiler alert), she grows pale because dies.  A sweet rose of a girl turns white in death.

Rose Blanche sacrifices not only her food, but also her safety.  Perhaps Rose Blanche’s sacrifice saves some of the children in the story; we do not know for sure.  But we do know, I think, that Innocenti wants his readers to consider the idea that not all soldiers wear uniforms. 

Just by contemplating the title and its implications, readers of all levels and abilities have much to gain from this story.  I have barely scratched at the surface of Innocenti’s brave book.  At the very least, in my classroom, I will pair it with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I find it incredibly interesting that both authors use extremely spare style to address the notion of innocence, sacrifice, and loss.  And both writers offer up a wealth of clues to rich meaning through the simple words in their titles.