Preserving the Present: Retrospective Childhood in Memory Jars

In Vera Brosgol’s Memory Jars, time and memory are key themes. Freda learns how her grandmother preserved her grandfather’s favourite blueberries into jam for him to enjoy all year, and then goes on a quest to preserve everything she loves in jars. While Freda’s journey ends with her accepting the passage of time and the things she loves to transform into memory, the static picturebook medium, like the things trapped in Freda’s memory jars, cannot grow and change once put down onto paper. Brosgol’s illustrations instead are created in such a way that aspire to, ideally, withstand the test of time in their own way.

The problem, however, with attempting to make a thing timeless, according to Nina Christensen, is it often instead produces a more retrospective representation of childhood (365). Freda’s world, which readers see most notably in an illustration of her grandmother’s plant-filled and sunny kitchen. Almost no discernible marker of period is present in this room: no phones, no computers or Alexas or technology of any kind. The result of this choice, among others made throughout the book, is that “contemporary child life is depicted as pre-modern” (Christensen). Even the central act of canning and preserving fruit that one has towed from a patch of bushes in a little red wagon feels steeped in a nostalgic idea of childhood. That isn’t to say no contemporary child knows how to make blueberry jam, or has a grandmother who wears pedal-pushers and cat eye glasses, but the further the present gets from the first introduction of home technology and child-friendly screens, the more archaic and alien these idyllic, period-neutral illustrations will feel.

The question then becomes, is having identifiable time period markers really a detriment to the picturebook’s depiction of childhood? If the attempt at creating a timeless universal might still read as retrospective, the takeaway seems to be perhaps a story, or a depiction of childhood does not have to actually be universal (a futile effort anyway for a whole myriad of reasons) to be relevant or beloved by child readers.

Works Cited

Brosgol, Vera. Memory Jars. Roaring Book Press 2021.

Christensen, Nina. “Picturebooks and Representations of Childhood.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kummerling-Meibaurer. Routledge 2018

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