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Mystery! Unraveling Edward Gorey's Tangled Web of Visual Metaphor

1993; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1207/s15327868ms0803_4

2379-0288

Victor Kennedy,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Abstract This article examines the manipulation of visual metaphor in the cartoons of Edward Gorey. Like verbal metaphor, visual metaphor may be analyzed using I. A. Richards's categories of tenor, vehicle, and ground. Gorey's fictional world is dark, macabre, and strange, yet his style is at once brooding, dangerous, and familiar, old-fashioned in appearance yet modem in theme. He uses Victorian motifs and Gothic settings to examine modern beliefs and fears, capitalizing on the formula of the menace inherent in the familiar. Gorey uses symbols, signs, and icons from the common visual lexicon but changes their contexts to simultaneously emphasize and undermine their sentimentality.