Niffenegger's Art

First off Niffenegger's art creeped the hell out of me. I was glad it
was shown at the end of class, because (for some reason) it really
bugged me. It did something interesting though, it made me look at the
novel in a different way. It was said in class, that she intended to
write The Time Traveler's
Wife in the style of her other "picture books", which is
without words, the entire story told in pictures. Seeing her art made
me imagine what that not-produced book would have looked like, and itcreeped me out.

Now
I can appreciate the dark (it reminded me very much of Tim Burton),
almost Gothic aesthetic which fills her artwork, I just have to know
that is what I am getting into. Reading the book I did not picture it
that darkly, even though there certainly are dark events within the
story. Maybe it's that I imagined the meadow brightly, so that when
even when in the dark and dreary city of Chicago, I had a relatively
colorful mental image.

Now I picture Henry as much more like Edward Scissorhands or Jack Skellington
out of Burton's early 1990s films. He is no longer the bright and
bookish librarian who randomly travels through time and meets hissoul mate
when she is a child. While his character is the same, I now see or
picture him as having something odd and kind of creepy that you can't
place your finger on. It especially makes my mental images of Henry and
the young Clare far creepier. Not because of the content, but because
of the juxtaposition between an innocent young girl, and a slightly
creepymysterious older man. It had already bugged me a little bit, and
now it is even weirder. It went (in my mind) from being a
fantasy-influenced romance to a dark fantasy novel with elements of (a
more) modern American Gothic.

While I would say that Niffenegger's
art is helpful, as it is informative about the author, it really
negatively affected my mental image of the novel. Even scenes like old
Henry and his younger self at the Field Museum, a scene I really
enjoyed, takes on a creepy dark tone, that changed or affected my
reading of that portion of the novel.