Oh, the sofa! I’m excited to see what you think! I always found The Hapless Child too unrelentingly cruel. Nice catch on the demons in the background, Rebekah!
Absolutely, ‘aesthetic cruelty’ seems to be at the heart of both the original stories and Gorey’s parody but it’s Gorey who confronts us with how much we’ve been enjoying the grim details. It feels like he’s slightly ahead of the curve re. more recent criticism of genres like true crime or ‘misery porn.’
I think you could be right about the monsters and the omnipotent narrator, I suppose the reason I’ve leant towards associating them with the reader instead is the fact that they seem to be *looking* rather than speaking. Their mouths, if visible at all, are shut — then again, perhaps Gorey’s point is that reader and narrator are equally monstrous (the two demons on the front cover?) since we collude together to enjoy her misery. Maybe the point is that she’s surrounded by monsters of various kinds…
Oh, the sofa! I’m excited to see what you think! I always found The Hapless Child too unrelentingly cruel. Nice catch on the demons in the background, Rebekah!
Thanks Sheila! It’s a bit too sad for me, too. But the sofa, that one really haunts me…(to be continued)
Absolutely, ‘aesthetic cruelty’ seems to be at the heart of both the original stories and Gorey’s parody but it’s Gorey who confronts us with how much we’ve been enjoying the grim details. It feels like he’s slightly ahead of the curve re. more recent criticism of genres like true crime or ‘misery porn.’
I think you could be right about the monsters and the omnipotent narrator, I suppose the reason I’ve leant towards associating them with the reader instead is the fact that they seem to be *looking* rather than speaking. Their mouths, if visible at all, are shut — then again, perhaps Gorey’s point is that reader and narrator are equally monstrous (the two demons on the front cover?) since we collude together to enjoy her misery. Maybe the point is that she’s surrounded by monsters of various kinds…