Edward Gorey and Moments of De-Normalization

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology


I think we all have a moment, if we're cut from a certain cloth, when we realize as adults that we didn't turn out like the other kids. Full disclosure: I have had several, if not dozens of these moments. 


This is the story of the most recent. 


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This Christmas, I was given a sewing machine by Bug, a terribly thoughtful gift to feed the fires of my love for fashion. I just picked it up this weekend and, in my typical learning curve, immediately dove into a project way too advanced for my skill level. Without hubris, I ponder earnestly, would I ever learn anything? 


The first of these projects was a doll for my cousin, who I adore. It's fairly straightforward, and so fun to design. But did I chose a princess? No. 


Did I choose a classic character from children's literature? Oh, no no no. 

I choose to make my 3 year old cousin a doll, made with my loving intentions, depicting one of the 26 children who meet their untimely demise in Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. I picked Una! 

It's my favorite Gorey book, and I read the tale of dancing with the afterlife in (told in rhyming dactylic couplets) when I was, oh, say seven? I think I found it at Granny Bates, on a high shelf. Gorey drew his famous illustrations with a stern Victorian whimsy which, yeah, seems like an oxymoron until you see his work. He plays with ideas of moral instruction, strange comforts of the macabre and dark and sinister ideas of the familiar domicile. 

Gorey played this mild terror straight and for the same resons I read and love Roald Dahl, spared no unfortunate circumstance for his young (or possibly not so young) readers. He said, "Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either." For that, Edward Gorey is one of my secret obsessions. He's dark and weaves a similar tapestry of childhood, which I've always looked back on as a Gothic, vaguely sinister time, full of half-understood languages and inherited secrets. 

Anyway. The doll is almost finished. I hope she likes my Gothic little friend! I even made a little tag so that when my cousin gets older and grows a sense of humor, we can bond over the delights of the macabre. Una the doll has no hair right now, but she does have the blankest, most dour expression. Place your orders now---I might sew up all 26. 




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The Clever Problem of Matilda

by Jillian Leigh, Ampersandology

In writing my most recent piece for the Scope, I was reminded how wonderful the 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda is. It’s the story of Matilda Wormwood, a child genius who’s writing before she can speak and reading Charles Dickens in kindergarten.

Unfortunately, her parents couldn’t care less. They balk at her reading during “family hour” (which in reality is closer to “yelling at the TV hour”). They don’t even bother to send her to school until an option emerges that sounds more like a military training camp than a facility of learning.



The trailer does little to convey just what a cleverly subversive and smart children’s film Matilda is. I’d honestly say that until recently I hadn't seen the film in 9 or 10 years, but I never forgot how much I loved it. I’d read the book some years earlier, and admittedly, probably over-identified with the young heroine.  But after rewatching the film, I think what I admired most was its unflinching faithfulness to the book. The film, transplanted from the book’s staunch British setting to the American suburbs, loses none of its viciousness towards narrow-minded people. In fact, it becomes a tidy little tirade against pride in lowbrow idiocy.

In theory, Matilda is a disturbing book, full of child neglect, abusive authority figures and gross injustice. During the introduction to the book’s villain, Headmistress Trunchbull, she is so offended by a student’s flaxen pigtails that she pitches the girl by her braids out of the schoolyard. Of course it’s absurd, but it confirms the very thing that most children have suspected at one time or another: that the rules and punishments that adults inflict upon them are arbitrary, uncontrollable, and beyond unfair.

Of course, I didn’t catch any of the disturbing bits when I was little. I just relieved to hear a story that finally admitted the unfairness of being a kid, especially a clever one.

Matilda was also my first Dahl, given to me by my mother who thought I’d find something to relate to in a little girl who loved to read. After that, there wasn’t much hope: Roald Dahl became THE beloved fixture from my formative years, able to uncannily pinpoint the precise fears a child believes is true even when grownups reassure them that all is well. I think that’s the lesson that stood out most for me from a steady diet of Dahl: the world is a scary and unfair place sometimes, but there are glimmers of wonder in even the bleakest situations. Dahl’s storytelling never deviates from this basic axiom, giving his tiny little readers the certainty that although it might get hairy, there’s usually something resembling a happy ending at the story’s close.

Of course, when little Matilda is left by her on the lam parents to live with her angelic, aptly named teacher Miss Honey, and you’re cheering for parental abandonment, you realize: with Roald Dahl, the definition of a happy ending is impressively broad.

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Anyone else got a favourite? I’d hate to see offbeat treasures like Matilda be lost to the Disneyfication of childhood.

The Fantastic Mr. Dahl

by Jillian Leigh, Ampersandology

My latest piece on The Fantastic Mr. Fox is in print and online over at the Scope -- if you're a Roald Dahl fan (and quite frankly, you had better be), buzz over and check it out.

Wes Anderson + Roald Dahl + creepy stop motion = I am so there.