The Vile Village - Cultural References and Literary Allusions

Cultural References and Literary Allusions

• The Nevermore Tree is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," in which a raven repeats the word 'Nevermore'.

• At the start of the novel Mr. Poe receives a phone call from Mr. Fagin, a character from Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. Fagin tells Poe that he won't accept the children because they are trouble makers, which is ironic because in Oliver Twist, Fagin runs a gang of pickpockets.

• The alias that Olaf uses, Detective Dupin, may be a reference to C. Auguste Dupin, a fictional detective character created by Edgar Allan Poe.

• Five of Sunny's utterances, Pipit, Grebe, Merganser, Towhee and Vireo, are the names of birds.

• The film The Village is possibly referenced as the novel's main plot, as both stories concern a very backward village which is at least a century behind modern times and despises outsiders, with having very strict rules.

• One of the towns on the brochure for "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child" is named Ophelia, perhaps referencing Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet; Mr. Poe dislikes the bank in this town, perhaps because Ophelia's father is the originator of the saying "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

• Officer Luciana, Esmé's disguised name, is probably a reference to a character in Catch-22, a novel by Joseph Heller, who tears up an address and can never find it again, just as Esmé tears the Quagmire notebooks and they are never fully reassembled.

• Ogden Nash is mentioned in the book, a poet who wrote couplets.

• Mr. Lesko, a town resident, has the same last name as the author Matthew Lesko who offered to teach how to get free things. Mr. Lesko says in this book that he is fine with getting his chores done for him but not having to parent the Baudelaires (he wants free laborers).

• The initial unnerving nature of the crows in the city may refer to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

• Sunny uses the word "Scylla" to explain that it would be better to live with regret on Hector's flying mobile home than to be burned to death at the stake. This is a reference to one of a pair of sea monsters in Homer's Odyssey. The two monsters live so close together that it is virtually impossible to avoid both, and so Odysseus chose to head towards Scylla (the less dangerous of the two). Interestingly, Scylla and Charybdis were also mentioned in The Ersatz Elevator, although Klaus incorrectly claims that Heracles encountered them and escaped "by turning them both into whirlpools".

• Hector quotes Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' he said, quoting one of the Baudelaires' favorite books."

• The name Hector of the character may refer to a book Holes written by Louis Sachar.