Dr. Allysha P Winburn

With a life that spanned nearly a century (b. 1894-d. 1978) and an artistic career that exceeded six decades, artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell was synonymous with the idyllic, late-twentieth-century, New-England-tinged brand of Americana that came to characterize the U.S. television crime drama Murder, She Wrote. While Rockwell's work during the 1960s delved into struggles related to the civil rights movement, his early work did not tackle deep-seated structural racial, economic, or sexual or gender inequities. Instead, the young Rockwell painted idealized portrayals of white Americana filled with nostalgia, humor, and hope. His earlier art reflected a cisgender, heteronormative, overwhelmingly white traditional idealism, and in re-presenting it (sensu Latour, 1987), reproduced and reified it within American culture. Perceived as lighthearted and optimistic, his earlier artwork served as a kind of beacon that even among the turmoil of world wars and economic depressions, all things would ultimately return to normal, and balance would ultimately be restored-albeit a balance tipped in favor of the status quo. This sense of balance, and the feelings of security and 'coziness' it produces, is echoed in Murder, She Wrote, which also depicts an idealized, whitewashed world in which disruptions-in this case, homicides and the processes that surround them (including processes of both investigation and grieving)-are resolved and the status quo restored.