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Although his work seems commissioned by the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, the work of Edward Gorey supercedes it. He pushed and expanded both literary and visual boundaries, borrowing from Japanese prints, Victorian and Edwardian memes, juvenile formats as well as various poetic and literary forms. The ambiguous shapes of Edwardian dress trimmings in Les Passementeries Horribles. The banal horror of The Loathsome Couple. The doomed yet somehow not entirely pitiable children in The Gashlycrumb Tinies, who perish in alphabetical order.



Some of Gorey's work was loosely based on cultural rememberances of times, places and class. Anglophillic sentiment pervades so much of his work, yet he actually hardly traveled and never visited England at all. Other works recall specific events. It may surprise some individuals, but The Loathsome Couple was based on a real romantically linked pair of child murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Together they killed five children, quite brutally. To view The Loathsome Couple as a dark comedy is quite incorrect. When Gorey first submitted it to his publisher, Robert Gottlieb, it was rejected as not being funny. To which Gorey replied, "Well Bob, it wasn't supposed to be funny. What a peculiar reaction."



Although there is some humor in much of Gorey's work, much of it is deceptively humorous, which is probably why it has an ineffable appeal. It is that strange quality that feels like truth and smells like darkness that draws us towards it. Gorey has an incredible imagination, but there's something about what he does that is quite earnest.

Something that never gets more than a passing mention is Gorey's extreme familiarity with antique and vintage clothing styles and how his use of them, as much as his writing or drawing style, told the story or set the scene. Yes, he mixes late Victorian with Edwardian, teens and '20s, but as an illustrator he captured the quirky details of fashion and made them stand-ins for mystery, murderous intent, ambiguity, suspicion, and eccentricity. The teens/early '20s siren who "toyed with her beads jadedly."




For those familiar with vintage clothing and antique fashion, the details ring true, even if they are rendered more with allusion than sartorial meticulousness. One can see the tight, revolutionary caps of 1914/1915 on his upperclass ladies with their vaguely Poiret-inspired, bat-wing capes. Intricately geometric designs of early 1920s evening gowns transform rich heiresses into solid columns of overwhelming pattern. Here a 1920s bicorn. There a long, trailing Isadora Duncan scarf billowing out from a slender neck. (Gorey, an utterly devoted acolyte of the ballet, no doubt was familiar with the manner of legendary dancer's death, a particularly Gorey end. As Duncan was riding in a friend's automobile, her preturnaturally long throat flag trailed behind her as the car sped and got entangled in the wheel's spokes, yanking her head back. Her whole body was jerked out of the car and she was dragged by her scarf in the auto's wake before the driver realized what had happend. Gertrude Stein famously commented on the incident, "Affectations can be dangerous.")





In The Blue Aspic, in the panel in which the Duke of Whaup meets a falling statue, there looks to be a Fortuny-esque panel in the background. The beturbaned opera-goer on the right might also be wearing Fortuny, or Gallenga. Further into Aspic, in the climactic scene in which Jasper stabs Ortenzia in the throat, she is swathed in a cocoon coat taken to the nth degree -- she looks more pupae than fashion plate at this moment, an amorphous, organic form in fur and the suggestion of scales from the train of her dress that trails away from her feet.



Probably Les Passementeries Horribles is most evocative for vintage fashion enthusiasts than any other reader. It is those folks who have observed 1880s bustle dresses up close who have wondered at the labyrinthine, marathon course gimp runs around and up layered skirts and cuirasses. It is the vintage clothing collectors who have most wondered at the visual tangle of braid tirelessly woven into Gordian knots on a turn-of-the-century evening coat. It is the antique dress enthusiasts who have seen superflous tassels swing like bodies from a gibbet from the wrists and elbows of Edwardian gowns. These folks best understand the strange wonder of Gorey's ambiguously threatening passementerie. The fringed, knotted cord that watches the oblivious infant from an open doorway. The strangely tasseled figure with an empty eye and a cap like a Napoleonic hat that drifts towards a reclining man on heathered slopes. Vintage clothing collectors are familiar with the wonderous strangeness of these forms, their slightly alien obscurity.



Who knows when or where, but Gorey definitely learned the language of Edwardian and Victorian fashions. It is not just the visual forms that engage him. Throughout his work are unfamiliar, antique words like "passementerie" (of course), and also "dustwrapper," and "muffler." As with much of his work, Gorey's interest and powers were not limited to a single sphere. Language, image, the ballet, recharche Victorian customs and antique costume were all of interest to him, and, for all their nods to the past, he interpreted them in new, meaningful and macabre ways.



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