How Carroll's Alice Deconstructs the Victorian Notions of Femininity - Case Study Example

“There’s no room to grow up any more here:” How Carroll’s Alice illustrates the problems with the Victorian construction of childhood and coming of age Lewis Carroll’s Alice has become a storybook ideal of childhood, arguably culminating in Disney’s flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked animated rendition of the Wonderland heroine, who curtseys and twirls her way demurely through the fantastic landscape she’s discovered. Alice is often listed with other heroines who find themselves transported to exotic lands – Dorothy from Baum’s Wizard of Oz books, the Pevensie sisters in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Wendy in Barrie’s Peter Pan, for example. What’s interesting about this pairing is that while Alice’s circumstances share commonalities with these other heroines – she finds herself in an unfamiliar place full of strange people – her experiences are entirely different. Unlike Dorothy, Susan, Lucy or Wendy, Alice has no purpose to guide and direct her wanderings through Wonderland. Even more significantly, Alice has nothing to offer the strange country she temporarily inhabits; nor does she change and grow emotionally as a result of her time in Wonderland. And though some feminist critics like Nina Auerbach have argued that Alice is a subversive feminist heroine, in fact, Carroll’s youthful protagonist seems to be nothing more or less than an ordinary Victorian girl – and rather than limiting the possibilities of the narrative, this realization expands them, allowing us to understand Alice as a creature of her own era, so that she – more than the Wonderland she traverses – becomes the vehicle of Carroll’s Victorian satire. In this paper, I will argue that Carroll’s Alice deconstructs the Victorian notions of femininity and female coming of age in several ways. First, rather than being a sweet and charming female heroine, Alice is bossy, pretentious and often downright unlikable – isolated by her manners and her education from creatures who might have been her friends. Second, that Alice’s behavior toward the Wonderland creatures is a reflection of how Alice herself is treated in her own “real” life, revealing problematic dynamics between children and adults in Victorian culture. And finally, I will show that Alice’s adventures in Wonderland have merit and meaning only when they are reconstructed — through the Carroll/Narrator, through Alice’s sister and finally through Alice herself — to “interpret” a hodgepodge of facts and experiences into a memory of happy childhood. In fact, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can be read as a satire of a Victorian girl’s education into the rites of womanhood, a satire that reveals underlying problems with the notions of both Victorian childhood and womanhood. From the beginning, Alice does not know how to get along in Wonderland – and though she laments aloud that she’s rejected by the creatures around her, the truth is, Alice is irritated with them for not conforming to her standards of behavior and logic. In this way, Alice is rather like the British colonialists, determined to live like English gentlemen and persuade native populations to do the same, whether they wanted to or not – after all, the British way is the proper way. Alice has the same single-minded sense of self-importance and unwillingness to consider different social mores that Britain demonstrated in India and the Congo, and as a result, she’s not welcomed to Wonderland by its inhabitants. In fact, as James Suchan points out, most of Wonderland’s natives see Alice as a monster and run away from her or try to drive her away from them: Alices sadistic treatment of the Wonderland animals, her refusal to accept the nonsense and chaos which is a “given” in Wonderland, and her persistence in interjecting rational, above-ground values into the environment cause the animals to reject her. (Suchan 79) There are dozens of examples of this behavior: Alice terrorizes the birds and mouse at the Caucus Race with tales of her bird-eating cat Dinah (40); liberates a baby because she feels its mother is mistreating it then gives up responsibility for the baby because it has become a pig and therefore “absurd” for her to care for (75); lectures the Mad Hatter and March Hare on good table manners after rudely inviting herself to their tea party despite their efforts to exclude her (82); and constantly interrupts the Mock Turtle and Dormouse when they’re telling her stories. Elaine Ostry points out that while much Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature uses change in physical form as a catalyst or result of moral and emotional change — bad children being transformed into beasts and good children being turned into Water-Babies, for instance (35) — Alice’s body is the only part of her affected by the fantastic physical changes she undergoes in Wonderland, implying a similar complacency associated with the physical changes of becoming a woman. Throughout the story, Alice talks to herself — reciting knowledge, arguing, reasoning and reassuring — because in her Wonderland, she is the only person she considers worth talking to. She dismisses the information other creatures offer her as “nonsense” over and over again, making it clear that she is unwilling to hear anything she has not said. She is also hypercritical of failures in others that she herself has: When the jurors at the trial write down their names on their slates “for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial” (130), Alice dismisses them as “stupid things,” though she has struggled with the notion of her own identity throughout the course of the novel. Though she is frustrated by the creatures’ constant requests for her to recite some poem or lesson, Alice misses their point: The rules, the moral and the meanings are different here. Though she repeats the lesson, she notices only that they are “wrong,” it doesn’t occur to her to consider whether they are simply different. In fact, of all the creatures she meets in Wonderland, Alice has the most in common with the Queen of Hearts, who — like Alice — is prone to giving unwanted lectures, threatening violence and generally lobbying hostility at any person or situation who fails to meet her standards. Alice’s attempts to make the March Hare use proper table manners or the Duchess stop throwing dishes are as ludicrous in the context of Wonderland as the red-painted white roses in the Queen’s garden. In fact, Suchan argues that “when Alice sees the Queen, she is in a sense seeing herself in an altered, reversed Wonderland form.” (90) What these events suggest is that the education, skills and experience that have prepared Alice for life as a proper young lady in Victorian society leave her woefully ill-equipped to deal effectively or compassionately with the world around her. Interestingly, this suggests certain ideas about Alice’s own parentage. Wonderland, as Suchan points out, is Alice’s creation — born from her tears, in a less gruesome sort of childbirth – and the creatures in it are therefore her children. It is telling that she finds them bothersome, irritating and hardly worth the effort of listening to. She finds their activities like the Caucus race “absurd,” their social activities like the tea party “stupid” and their laws as illustrated at the Knave of Hearts’ trial meaningless. As Elaine Ostry notes, Victorian conduct books weren’t just for children – parents used them, too, to understand how they could best care for their children. Ostry points out that early parenting manuals emphasized that parents were the moral, physical and intellectual superiors of children and that children should treat them as earthly stand-ins for God. (29) She cites J. Robinson, whose 1830 book A Manual of Manners notes that one of the most amiable traits in children, is their kindly receiving the advice of their parents and teachers; venture not on anything of moment without proper advice. Do not receive it with reluctance; but invite it; implore it; cherish it. Be then always pliant and obliging.” (29) Alice has similar expectations of her Wonderland “children,” and like many Victorian parents, finds herself frustrated by their failure to wholeheartedly embrace her methods and manners as their own: Ostry argues that “nearly every dialogue [in Alice] is flavored with the aggression and desire for power that underlies the traditional parent-child relationship.” (35) Alice, perhaps like any young mother, shifts emotional gears rapidly with regard to her creation Wonderland: one moment enchanted by its possibility, the next frustrated by its lack of order, the next terrified to the point of tears, always frustrated by its refusal to conform to her ideas of what it should be. Like any Victorian mother who read Victorian parenting manuals, Alice is overwhelmed by the autonomy of her creation. Wonderland is independent of her, and her efforts to control it are futile, sadistic or ridiculous. Both of these factors combine to create the idea that the parent-child relationship is idyllic only in retrospect. Alice’s adventure in Wonderland is really quite unpleasant — when she dismisses the Queen of Hearts’ court as a pack of cards, she’s ending a dream of which she has not expressed enjoyment for a single moment. Nothing in Wonderland has lived up to her expectations — the peaceful garden in a chaotic mess, the creatures are irritating and she gets no respect from any of Wonderland’s inhabitants. Yet Alice re-imagines her dream, first as a more neutral “curious” then progressing to a more emphatic “wonderful” (148) as she relates the strange tale to her sister. Her sister embroiders the tale even further, building on Alice’s idea of wonderful until Alice’s Wonderland becomes symbolic of all the pleasures and joys of childhood, a touchstone: Lastly she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland so long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. (150) Jennifer Geer suggests that this image links nicely with the Victorian ideal of what a good mother would be, setting up a sweet, idealized future of domestic happiness for Alice. (4) And yet, Alice’s initial reaction to her dream — “a little scream, half of fright, half of anger” (148) — is likely a truer reflection of what her life as a wife and mother will entail. Alice is ill-equipped to deal with Wonderland, Carroll’s book suggests, and it implies that she is equally ill-prepared to deal with life as a wife and mother. It is only by recreating her childhood from the perspective of an adult that she can make it beautiful and happy. Problematically, by doing so, Alice will be constructing a lie not only about her own childhood — and what it was and what it meant — but also about childhood in general, creating a false ideal that experience can never hope to replicate. Alice’s childhood is happy only in her memories, but the pressure to create a happy childhood is so great that she — and the people around her — immediately begin to retell events so that they falsely reflect an idyllic childhood that is a complete fallacy. Even more significantly, the events Alice invents aren’t even real ones — they are a dream, suggesting that imagination — and by extension, literature — rather than real life, are where happy childhood memories are found. Alice ends up home again, unchanged by her adventure, with little more than the raw creative materials to embellish her own childhood. When she runs in to her afternoon tea, she leaves behind the reality of her adventure almost entirely, exhibiting an almost stereotypical Victorian ability to ignore the unpleasant aspects of life. Her adventure has not changed her: Alice remains neatly convinced of her rational importance, and she never does learn that it’s rude to talk about mouse-eating cats in front of civilized mice. What’s more, she doesn’t care: She “won” in Wonderland when she dismissed the court as a pack of cards, rendering her entire experience there null and void. When she sits down at the tea table at home, there will be no Mad Hatter, no March Hare, no crazy seat changes — and Alice will not miss them any more than she will miss the magical ability to grow and shrink to the right size for different occasions. Her own size is unquestionably the right one. And when the time comes, Carroll, suggests, Alice will become a mother in the same rigid and certain mold, imparting impatient knowledge to her children, who will find their own Wonderlands to conquer in their turn. Carroll’s Wonderland is darker in this vision than the Technicolor Disney one, but this Alice is truer to the Victorian notion of what a woman should be — and Carroll, who cruelly illuminates each act of sadism, each instance of willful ignorance, each moment of arrogant superiority, demonstrates that Victorian England was a breeding ground for the Western cruelty that would terrorize the Congo, Indian and Britain’s other colonies. Alice is indeed both the ideal mother and the ideal child of Victorian society, and her dual role makes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland morph from charming tale to terrifying dystopia. Works Cited Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. Garland, Carina. “Curious Appetites: Food, Desire, Gender and Subjectivity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Texts.” The Lion and the Unicorn. 32:1. January 2008. Pp.22-39. Geer, Jennifer. “’All sorts of pitfalls and surprises:’ Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Children’s Literature. 31. 2003. Pp. 1-24. Ostry, Elaine. “Magical Growth and Moral Lessons; or, How the Conduct Book Informed Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Fantasy.” The Lion and the Unicorn. 27:1. January 2003. Pp. 27-56. Suchan, James. “Alice’s Journey from Alien to Artist.” Children’s Literature. 7. 1978. Pp. 78-92. Sherer, Susan. “Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis Carroll.” Philosophy and Literature. 20:1. April 1996. Pp. 1-19. Read More