Contextualizing Alice
HUM 3085: Britain Through the Looking Glass
Spring 2010
Professors Perdigao and Ruane
January 20-25, 2010
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From Victorian to Postmodern
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), born 1832 (five years before Victoria ascends
throne), dies in 1898 at age 65 (three years before the queen)
As “model Victorian” (Cohen)
July 4, 1862, Dodgson and friend Robinson Duckworth take daughters of Christ
Church’s Dean Liddell—Lorina, Alice, and Edith—on a boating trip on the Isis
(Thames River, near Oxford). Girls ask Dodgson to tell them a story and, after he
creates the Alice story, Alice asks him to write it out. He gives her the story in
November of 1864 as a Christmas gift—that text is titled Alice’s Adventures Under
Ground.
Encouraged to publish it by those at the deanery; Dodgson adds chapters and works
with John Tenniel as the illustrator; changes title to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Published in 1865 by Clarendon Press—Dodgson recalls two thousand copies after
Tenniel states reservations about the illustrations; printing is redone. Through the
Looking Glass follows in 1871.
Issues of biographical context—Dodgson’s relationship to the Liddells, to Alice
Ashbourne, M.S. “The Cheshire-Cat: Sign of Signs.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Marie
C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 79-106. Literature Resource Center.
Gale. Florida Institute of Technology. 19. Jan. 2010
http://go.galegroup.com/exproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.
Cohen, Morton N. “Lewis Carroll and Victorian Morality.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed.
Marie C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 3-19. Literature Resource
Center. Gale. Florida Institute of Technology. 19. Jan. 2010
http://go.galegroup.com/exproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.
Framing Criticism
• Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Postmodern
• Formalist (New Criticism)
• New Historicist
• Deconstructionist (Poststructuralist)
Defining the Postmodern
• Arbitrariness
(signs signifying)
• Heteroglossia, polyphony
(multiple voices, no authoritative account)
• Indeterminancies
(gaps, ambiguities)
• Fragmentations
(collage rather than unities, cohesion)
• Decanonizations
(high/low culture divide reconfigured)
• Hybridization
(mixing genres, frame-breaking)
• Metafictions
(self-conscious, self-reflexive, fiction about fiction)
“and what is the use of a book… without pictures or
conversations?”
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Didactic literature
“Golden Age” of children’s literature
Place of fairy tales—Brothers Grimm and Anderson
Dominant mode
Satire
Girls’ development—through reading—notions of girlhood (meta-Alice in
original)
Authorial crisis: Carroll not the real author (Shakespeare theory); Queen
Victoria as author (based on her diaries); Mark Twain as author
Religious allegories; psychoanalytic readings; representations of historical
contexts (Alice as Queen Elizabeth I)
Relation to Romanticism (freedom, independence, nature), critique of
Victorian attitudes or substantiates them (court system, educational
system [memorizing poems])
Modern as well, postmodern: “associative, non-sequential plotting”; selfconsciousness (metafiction), if self is a fiction, reality as subjective
Clark, Beverly Lyon. “Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books: The Wonder of Wonderland.”
Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 44-52.
“Well! What are you?”
• “One critic has conclusively proved that Alice was not written by Lewis
Carroll and that the real author was Queen Victoria. An earlier writer
toys with the notion that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an allegory
of the Oxford Movement, another an allegory of Darwinian evolution.
Still another tells us that the story of Alice represents Dodgson’s own
birth trauma in the isolated Cheshire rectory where he was born. Other
psychoanalysts tell us that the book is about a woman in labor, that
falling down the rabbit hole is a hidden expression of Dodgson’s secret
wish for coitus, that Alice is a phallus (that one, at least, rhymes), or that
she’s a fetus. Or, if we prefer, we can take the view that she is a
transvestite Christ. A more recent essay claims that Dodgson was the
first ‘acidhead,’ while Kenneth Burke tells us that the story is about toilet
training and bowel movements. . . .”
Cohen, Morton N. “Lewis Carroll and Victorian Morality.” Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism. Ed. Marie C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 319. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Florida Institute of Technology. 19. Jan. 2010
http://go.galegroup.com/exproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.
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Applied Alice-isms
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome:
A syndrome of distorted space, time and body image. The patient with the Alice in
Wonderland syndrome has a feeling that their entire body or parts of it have been
altered in shape and size. The syndrome is usually associated with visual
hallucinations. The majority of patients with the syndrome have a family history
of migraine headache or have overt migraine themselves. The syndrome was first
described in 1955 by the English psychiatrist John Todd (1914-1987). Todd
named it, of course, for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Lewis Carroll suffered from severe migraine. Also
known as a Lilliputian hallucination.
(http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=24174)
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Alice and Pop Psychology
Context of dreams—frame narrative
Freud, Jung, Campbell
Infantile psyche
Pastoral daydream/“escapist fantasy”
Children’s literature
reassertion of unified self
Victorian constructions of gender
Alice’s world and her role within it, even within Wonderland
Rackin, Donald. “Through the Looking Glass: Alice Becomes an I.” Children’s
Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 68-87.
Alice in Crisis
• Applied rules and logic: mouse, caterpillar, pigeon
• Language games
• Identity crisis
• “Who are you?”; “What are you?”
• Redefining the self
• Body reconfiguration
• “Civilization” and “propriety”
Dividing Alice
• Characteristics of the Victorian (Victorianisms)
• Characteristics of the modern/postmodern (modernisms/postmodernisms)
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Notions of education (memorization, standardized forms)
Uses of storytelling (didacticism, metafiction)
Identity construction (girl, woman)
Language (conventions, language games)
• Realism, moral didacticism vs. fairy tale (as Victorian conventions)
• Victorian children’s book—representing “girl angels fated for an early
death” or “impossibly virtuous little ladies,” or “naughty girls who
eventually reform in response to heavy adult pressure” (qtd. in Kelly 13).
• Moralizing
Duchess’ example
• Dream vision (form dating back to middle ages) but this is episodic, third
person point of view
• Dream within a dream
Garden
Symbolic Patterns
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Romanticism of the garden—changes
Red roses
Romanticism in Alice’s emotions
Drowning in her tears (uncontrollable emotions)
Language games
Duchess, baby, pig
Instability of identity, forms
“Without stable points of reference, reason is helpless to defend one
against disorder” (Kelly 27)
• Cheshire-Cat’s role—question about the baby
• Relative definitions of madness—Cheshire-Cat’s answer
Deconstructive Turns
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Curtseying and falling
“Curiouser and curiouser” (13)
“Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking” (14)
“I wonder if I’ve changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same
when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a
little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the
world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (15)
“However, the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify!” (16); “I’m sure
those are not the right words” (16)
“There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!” (29)
“Keep your temper” (36)
“It is wrong from beginning to end” (41)
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent
something” (45).
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Structuring
Chapter I: Down the Rabbit Hole
(Rabbit, shrinks)
Chapter II: The Pool of Tears
(grows, Rabbit, fan, shrinks, Mouse)
Chapter III: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
(Dodo, Mouse)
Chapter IV: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
(Rabbit, Mary Ann, grows, house, Lizard Bill, shrinks, puppy)
Chapter V: Advice from a Caterpillar
(Caterpillar, grows, Pigeon, shrinks)
Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper
(Fish-Footman, Frog-Footman, Duchess, Cook, baby, pig, Cheshire-Cat)
Chapter VII: A Mad Tea-Party
(March Hare, Hatter, Dormouse)
Chapter VIII: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
(Cards, King and Queen of Hearts, croquet, Cheshire-Cat)
Chapter IX: The Mock Turtle’s Story
(Duchess, Gryphon, Mock Turtle)
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Structuring
Chapter X: The Lobster-Quadrille
(Mock Turtle, Gryphon)
Chapter XI: Who Stole the Tarts?
(King and Queen of Hearts, Knave of Hearts, White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, March
Hare, Dormouse, guinea-pigs, Duchess’ cook)
Chapter XII: Alice’s Evidence
(goldfish, Lizard, White Rabbit, Knave, King, Queen, sister)
• “How doth the little—” (16)
Revisions
• Mouse’s tale (25)
• Book written about Alice (29)
• “You are old, Father William” (36-40)
• “Speak roughly” song (48-49)
• “Twinkle, twinkle little bat” (57)
• Dormouse’s story of three sisters, Elsie, Lacie, Tillie (58)
• Mock Turtle’s education (76-77)
• Chapter X: “Lobster-Quadrille”; “‘Tis the voice of the sluggard”; “Turtle
Soup”
Tensions
• “The strategy of Wonderland is to defeat different systems of logic, to
keep details from culminating into some meaningful order” (Kelly 23).
• “Carroll thus draws a significant parallel between the strangeness of life
and that of fiction. Life mirrors fiction; both are fabrications that create
the illusion of purpose and meaning. Alice’s adventures, however,
ultimately reveal no such purpose and meaning, and her experiences in
Wonderland are fundamentally different from those of children in fairy
tales. She achieves no particular goal in her adventures nor does she
learn a morally uplifting lesson. Indeed, the reader discovers in her
dream the terrifying vision of the void that underlies the comfortable
structures of the rational world.” (Kelly 24)
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Kelly, Richard. Introduction. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. By Lewis Carroll.
Broadview: Ontario, Canada, 2000. 9-40.
Lessons
• Alice’s education (lobster story)
• “I mean what I say” (81)
• “No, no! The adventures first… explanations take such a dreadful time”
(82)
• “it sounds uncommon nonsense” (83)
• “What is the use of repeating all that stuff. . . If you don’t explain it as
you go on?” (84)
• “Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about
them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew th4e name
of nearly everything there” (86); “very few little girls of her age knew the
meaning of it all” (86)
• “this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate” (87)
• “Don’t talk nonsense. . . You know you’re growing too” (88)
• “I’m glad I’ve seen that done. . . I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at
the end of trials, ‘There was some attempt at applause, which was
immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,’ and I never
understood what it meant till now” (90).
Verdicts
• “Begin at the beginning. . . And go on till you come to the end: then stop”
(92).
• “Then the words don’t fit you” (96).
• “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” (96).
• “Stuff and nonsense” (96)
• “Who cares for you? . . . You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (97).
• “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” (98).
• “the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (99)
Resolutions?
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Ending
Victorian girl/woman
Queen/Duchess/sister
Dichotomies, tensions
Breakdown of distinctions of “public and private, masculine and
feminine, child and adult, nonsense rhymes and edifying poems”
“The Wonderland frames suggest that the tale of Alice’s dream fosters
the happy, loving childhood that will enable her development into a good
woman and mother, while the Looking-Glass frames anticipate that the
tale will create a domestic space powerful enough to keep the stormy
world at bay” (Geer).
Victorian child—Wordsworth’s “Imitations” ode, ideas of happiness,
innocence, and promise
“This image of a serene mother who has never forgotten her childhood
affirms the contemporary belief that an ideal woman retains a child’s
unselfconscious spontaneity and innocent affection” (Geer).
Ideas about reading, influence on development
As happy memories—endings of two stories
On Endings
• Upsets codes and conventions
• “Domestic order thus disappears in Wonderland: traditionally feminine
spaces such as kitchens, croquet grounds, gardens, and tea-tables are
infused with the contentious, competitive values that Victorian domestic
ideology ostensibly relegates to the public sphere. In such a world, Alice
can gain happiness only by being rebellious and calculating” (Geer).
• Alice as Duchess and Queen of Hearts, shared attributes—not “Selfdenying love and service, but individualism and a will to power.” “She
does emulate these figures, but the result is conflict rather than harmony”
(Geer).
• At trial, Alice as “Screaming, domineering woman” and “For an instant,
Alice assumes a position directly contrary to those prescribed by domestic
ideology or ideals of girlhood” (Geer).
• Queen’s own tensions within role—public position as monarch, private
role as wife and mother
To Reconciliation
• In the final shift and waking from the dream suggests that
“Wonderland’s anarchy is less an outright reversal of contemporary
idealizations of girlhood and domesticity than an exaggeration of
tendencies already present within those ideals” (Geer).
• Ultimately intensifies desire for idealized vision of childhood and
domesticity so that they remain conventional ideals, reconciling tensions
within the period
• Poem at the end of Looking-Glass—validates storytelling as the “best way
to satisfy the desires behind mid-Victorian idealizations of childhood”
(Geer).
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Geer, Jennifer. “All Sorts of Pitfalls and Surprises’: Competing Views of Idealized
Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns.
Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 1-24.
http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.