engleski

“E is for Ernest who choked on a peach”: Food, Death, and Humour in the Works of Edward Gorey

In Edward Gorey’s numerous scenes of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and afternoon teas, food and drink often feature with more or less prominence, and are sometimes even found in the titles of his books, such as in The Fatal Lozenge or The Unknown Vegetable. However, their seemingly innocent appearance is often tied to violence or death: a head is discovered in a breadbox in one of Gorey’s limericks, a woman murders her husband by lacing his tea with atropine, a boy dies of exposure after being punished for “splashing his soup”, and several characters are consumed by more or less fantastic creatures. And yet, throughout all such seemingly gruesome events, Gorey’s characteristically playful and absurd humour removes the edge from scenes of food-related death, misery, downfall, and even murder. Whether much attention is drawn to such events (such as in The Unknown Vegetable, where the entire story revolves around the discovery of a giant turnip- like vegetable that leads to a woman being buried alive) or whether they are merely mentioned in offhanded comments (for instance, about a proctor who lures a pupil into the bushes by buying him ices in order to “practice vices few people even know exist”), Gorey couches them in a frame of the ridiculous and the absurd. It is therefore the aim of this presentation to explore how Gorey achieves this curious combination of the grotesque and the humorous in scenes revolving around food, and how this approach extends to a general confusion of tone in his darkly funny, seriocomic creations in which any manner of horror may be lurking in peaches, iced cakes, soda crackers, boiled turnips, a recipe for fudge, a family picnic, or under a haunted tea cosy.

children's literature ; Gorey ; food

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