Edward Gorey's illustrations of misshapen children

Twentieth century American illustrator Edward Gorey’s pen and ink drawings subvert traditional images of children; his images represent the tenets of disability theory, cuteness, and whiteness in relation to child figures in children’s literature. Inspecting Gorey’s illustrations provides insight into traditional images of children, and emphasizes how his portraits represent children as disabled figures. I examine four books containing Gorey’s illustrations for literary and aesthetic analysis. In The Doubtful Guest, a boy deals with psychological challenges; in The Beastly Baby and The Shrinking of Treehorn, both the infant and Treehorn live with disabled bodies; The Gashlycrumb Tinies displays aspects of psychological, physical, and positional disabilities through alphabetized portraits of girls and boys. This thesis connects disability theory, cuteness, and whiteness to children’s literature to address pervasive, predetermined images of children in Western literature and questions the larger issue of whether the elements comprising adult interpretations of child-images can harm real children.