“E is for Ernest who choked on a peach”

Abstract

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 (1960) or The Unknown Vegetable (1995). Their seemingly innocent appearance is often tied to violence or death: a head is discovered in a breadbox, 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 gruesome events, Gorey’s characteristically playful and absurd humour adds levity to 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, Gorey couches them in a frame of the ridiculous and the nonsensical. It is therefore the aim of this paper 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, cakes, crackers, boiled turnips, a recipe for fudge, a family picnic, or under a haunted tea cosy.