engleski

Comic Stoicism as Reclaimed Agency: Children’s Resistance to the World of Adults in the Works of Edward Gorey

According to the description of the exhibit entitled “Hapless Children”, organized in Edward Gorey’s (1925–2000) house in Massachusetts in 2021, the author’s works are “populated with a menagerie of youngsters who come to bad ends” but without an attendant invitation to the reader to establish an emotional attachment. In fact, quite the opposite: “empathy is not to be served at this meal.” Inverting the mechanics of the classic Dickensian tale, Gorey plays on the reader’s expectations by parodically excising the genre’s happy endings and “transformative ascendancies”. In such works, child characters are often framed as victims: they come to harm because of adults who are shown to be incompetent or distracted (The Glorious Nosebleed [1975], The Retrieved Locket [1994]), or who harbour criminal tendencies (The Loathsome Couple [1977], The Izzard Book [2006]) ; they suffer at the hands of other, unsupervised children (A Limerick [1973]) ; or they perish for no reason at all, devoured by a careless or mysterious universe unconcerned with the sensibilities of children (The Gashlycrumb Tinies [1963], The Wuggly Ump [1963], The Evil Garden [1966]). Such a conception of a world would perhaps be overly bleak were it not for Gorey’s characteristic humour, and in works outlined above much of it is created by the visual depiction of the “hapless children”. Despite the grave circumstances in which they find themselves and the lack of agency which they experience, such children often remain impassive, bemused, or even bored. Their absence of a strong emotional reaction, when contrasted against situations which the reader might expect to be framed as frightening or tragic, leads to humorous incongruity. In my presentation I plan to show how this comic stoicism of Gorey’s doomed children enables them to reclaim their agency by retaining control over their own reactions and thus establish forms of resistance to the brutality or sheer incompetency of the adult world.

agency ; Gorey ; humour ; picturebooks ; stoicism

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