Alice in Wonderland (1865), classic
Victorian fairy tale by Lewis Carroll
(Latinized pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–98). First
published as Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1863), it was
inspired by a boating party with Alice Liddell and her sisters,
daughters of an Oxford don. The fictional Alice is a 7-year-old who
falls down a rabbit hole, changes from microscopic to telescopic
proportions, and encounters a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, Mock Turtle,
and Cheshire Cat. This early version was expanded to include the Mad Tea
Party, the Pig and Pepper episode with the Ugly Duchess, Alice's trial
by the Queen of Hearts, and parodies such as ‘Speak Roughly to Your
Little Boy’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat’. The revised text also
included illustrations by John Tenniel,
the political cartoonist for Punch who also worked on the
sequel. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871) has Alice participating in a Rabelaisian living chess game with
Red and White Queens and a White Knight. On her way to becoming a Queen,
she meets talking flowers, a battling Lion and Unicorn, Humpty Dumpty,
and the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who recite ‘You Are Old, Father
William’ and ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. ‘Jabberwocky’, perhaps the
most celebrated English nonsense poem, and ‘Upon the Lonely Moor’, a
parody of Wordsworth, are also included.
The fact that nonsense
and literary parody coexist in these novels underscores the dual nature
of their child/adult readership—and their author. Often described as a
Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, C. L. Dodgson was a celebrated Victorian
photographer, ordained deacon, and Oxford don who delivered dry
mathematics lectures and published logic texts. As the pseudonymous
Lewis Carroll, however, he wrote whimsical fiction that challenged the
moralizing children's literature of the period. His Alice is in the
tradition of the abandoned child heroine, but the Wonderland she
explores borders on Victorian Gothic horror fiction. Carroll's
originality was to combine the two genres. He tempered his allegorical
portrait of socio-economic upheaval with humorous doses of
thought-provoking paradox. This fresh didacticism made his ‘love-gift of
a fairy-tale’ so popular that his books were second only to the Bible
in bourgeois Victorian nurseries.
Alice's commercial value rose
as she was reproduced on everything from teapots to chess sets.
Marketing reached new heights with playing cards, puzzles, songs, plays,
and broadcasts once the copyright expired in 1907. Alice, the Mad
Hatter, and the Ugly Duchess had long entered national folklore by 1928,
when Sotheby's auctioned the original manuscript for the unheard-of sum
of £15, 400; it was later sold to the Parke-Bernet Galleries for $50,
000. In 1948, to show its appreciation of Britain's war efforts, the
United States donated this national treasure to the British Museum—where
it was received by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
What
in the Alice books could possibly have commanded such respect?
For many, Alice is the epitome of the brave Victorian innocent in a
confusing magical land. Translated into languages ranging from Swahili
to Esperanto, her fairy tales are surpassed only by Shakespeare and the
Bible for expressions that have entered the English language (such as
‘mad as a hatter’). Given this lofty company, it is little wonder that
those who wax nostalgic for these children's books find it a sin to
dissect them. Psychoanalysts, for example, puncture the Alice
books' myth of childhood innocence. Focusing on the author's sexuality,
they document his fantasies about becoming a little girl and cite scores
of letters to ‘little-girlfriends’ whom he adored kissing, sometimes
photographing or drawing them in the nude. They also speculate on his
attraction and rumoured marriage proposal to young Alice Liddell, and
find phallic symbolism in the fictional Alice's snake-like neck and
bodily distortions from large to small. Freudians feel that this may
also represent a return to the womb; others posit a hallucinogenic drug
experience. Literary historians, on the other hand, note that Gulliver
and Micromégas underwent similar changes, and place the Alice
books in the satiric tradition of Swift and Voltaire. Socio-political
criticism of a fragmented bourgeois society is also noted by historians:
they find parallels with the dizzying pace at which the early
Industrial Revolution reacted to technological, demographic, and
political changes as it embraced industrialization, laissez-faire
capitalism, and a free-market economy. Still others analyse Alice's
dream and parallel universe that violate spatio-temporal laws. For them,
Alice exists in an eternal moment out of time, a Heideggerian space
between consciousness and reality where she poses existential questions
of identity and confronts problems of maturation. Moreover, she must
function in a metaphorical world where everyone is ‘quite mad’ and
relationships are paradoxical. Indeed, linguistic and physical realities
rarely coincide in Wonderland, and semioticians annotate disjunctions
between sign and signifier whenever smiles represent Cheshire cats or
boys turn into pigs. In addition to Alice's numerous meta-referential
allusions to her own fairy tale, they examine Carroll's linguistic
experimentation and portmanteau words with reference to Edward Lear (a
contemporary) and James Joyce (who was reared on the Alice
books). Carroll's marvellous images are balanced by Tenniel's
illustrations, which caricatured real-life politicians like Disraeli
(the Unicorn) and Gladstone (the Lion). It is in this combination of
text and image, of fantasy and reality, of the abstract and the concrete
that Alice's dual readership finds meaning and enjoyment.
Alice's
enduring influence is attested by some 200 pastiches and parodies, some
reproduced in Carolyn Sigler's Alternative Alices: Visions and
Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997). Many of these texts
were produced by Victorian women writers: just as the Alice
books comment on Victorian girlhood, so these imitations construct
women's cultural authority. Other texts were blatantly didactic, still
others were humorously political. All were subversive. Their popularity
waned during the 1920s when Alice left popular culture for high culture
and was appropriated by scholars and theorists. Film-makers adopted her
as well, and her representations ranging from Disney
animation (1951) to pornographic musicals (1976) underscore her mythic
capacity to adapt to genres for both children and adults. Today's Alice,
a bit wiser than Carroll's, is a postmodern empowered heroine in
control of Wonderlands of her own (feminist) design.
Bibliography
- Bloom, Harold (ed.), Lewis Carroll (1987).
- Gardner, Martin, The Annotated Alice (1960).
- Heath, Peter, The Philosopher's Alice (1974).
- Rackin, Donald, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (1991).
- Sigler, Carolyn (ed.), Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997).
— Mary Louise Ennis








