Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis Carroll
Susan Sherer
ictorian novels quiver with morbid secrets and
threatening discoveries. Unseen rooms, concealed doors, hidden boxes, masked faces, buried
letters, all appear (and disappear) with striking regularity in the fiction of Victorian
England. So many of these secret spaces contain children, and especially little girls,
little girls in hidden spaces. The young Jane Eyre sits behind a curtain in the hidden
window seat, escaping the vindictive wrath of John Reed. Repulsed by her angry brother,
Maggie Tulliver flees to the house attic, fantasizing that her family will fear that she
has died. Little Dorrit withdraws from the common space of the Marshalsea into her private
room above the prison, and Little Nell hides behind trees and walls, silently observing
clandestine meetings. Finally the seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a
Wonderland, the dreamspace of her own psyche.
Of these images, none can be more embedded in our cultural imagination than the child Alice dropping into the subterranean well of Wonderland. Indeed, of the many celebrated scenes in the Alice narratives, the most memorable, most potent, most quoted is Alice's initial descent to the bottom of the rabbit-hole. The lastingness of this scene seems even greater when we realize that, although neither Carroll in Alice's Adventures Underground nor Tenniel in the first edition of Wonderland illustrated the moment with a picture, it still became (along with the Mad Hatter's tea party) one of the signature images of the Alice stories. Why, we must ask, did the Victorians retain, with a powerful tenacity, this vision of a little girl moving through a tight space toward the hidden world of Wonderland?
The answer to this question is not--at least not wholly--that the scene simply represents a child's metaphorical progress through the [End Page 1] birth canal (1) and that this, in turn, symbolizes some kind of rite of passage, a movement towards some deeper knowledge. For then how do we explain Alice's conspicuous lack of internal development in both stories? Indeed, for a narrative that thematizes motion, Alice's psychical growth remains disturbingly static. Throughout both narratives, Alice displays little emotional variation, for when she is not frustrated or anxious, she is, for the most part, vapid or expressionless. In fact, one is immediately struck by her coolness and indifference as she drops through the rabbit-hole. (2) Thus, because scene changes in Wonderland and Looking-Glass rarely betoken any emotional or intellectual modulations, Alice's falling into Wonderland signals no internal transition.
But the image does relocate her body and within this fictive world, location is everything. The scene gestures Alice's departure, her separation, her movement towards an autonomy of which every child dreams when, in play, retreating to a hidden space. A child's impulse to hide, to create a secret space, is one of the most compelling of all human wishes, the wish for autonomy and autarchy--"to be cut off from the word and yet owner of the world." (3) Throughout Victorian literature, the fantasy of autonomy sets children dreaming of far-away worlds and hidden gardens. The young Cathy and Heathcliff flee to the isolated moors, filling the open, empty space with dreams of unrestricted freedom. Little Dorrit envisages the locked garden behind the Marshalsea as an alternative world to the foul prison atmosphere. And what are the Bront걧s Angria and Gondol but disconnected, self-governing realms imagined from the standpoint of childhood powerlessness? The image, then, of Alice's fall begins to fulfill this powerful wish for autonomy, which culminates, finally, in Alice's self-coronation at the end of Looking-Glass. Yet it is only within the child's willing imagination that a secret space can encroach so closely upon autonomy, for as we shall see, secrecy and autonomy are irreconcilable not only in the demanding world of realism, but even in the more elastic world of Carrollian fantasy.
I
Alice's descent into Wonderland and her entrance into the Looking-Glass kingdom would seem like ripe metaphors for Carroll to explore the thoughts and fantasies of Alice's psyche. What could be more oneiric than an underground world or a secret realm beyond a mirror? Further, the construction of the dream frame in nineteenth- and [End Page 2] twentieth-century literature usually signals an author's undertaking of psychological realism. Much has been written on the Freudian thematics of the Alice stories, (4) but if, as many have argued, Alice falls down into the dreamland of her own unconscious, she meets there not identification and revelation, but rather frustration and deferral. Recall that in both works Alice awakens not as from a wish fulfilled, but as from a desire thwarted. If Wonderland really represents the underground of her own psyche, it is a psyche not entirely her own, more different than mysterious, more foreign than obscure. This becomes most apparent when we realize that the emotional and cognitive dissonance between Alice and her dream creatures reflects a larger disunion of energies that marks the narratives. Throughout both stories Carroll works hard to illustrate the incongruousness of sensibilities that estranges Alice from the other figures. The scene in Looking-Glass in which the Queen offers Alice a dry biscuit, unfittingly, to quell her thirst is a paradigm of the sharp discordance between characters. Inappropriate and irrelevant responses such as the Queen's fill both Alice stories and reveal an atmosphere depleted of psychical recognition and sympathetic reaction. To read a text as an exposition of a subject's inner world is to assume that it is through the lens of that subject's psyche that we identify symbols and organize meaning. However, the psychological dissociation between Alice and the Wonderland and Looking-Glass figures disallows this genre of interpretation.
The dream frame does open up the possibility for psychological realism, but Carroll closes it off just as quickly. One way of apprehending this is by comparing Wonderland with The Wizard of Oz--a narrative similar in structure and content. Both are stories of a young girl's dream of a passage through, and return from, a kind of fairy-tale land. But the dream frame in Baum's text shapes itself into a psychoanalytic examination of Dorothy's psyche. The parallels between the waking world and the dream world inform one another, and we begin to see how Dorothy's unconscious translates her lived experience into the metaphors of dreamwork. In Carroll's text, however, the connection between Alice's waking reality and her dreamscape is radically tenuous; the two worlds are almost autonomous. How can we say that Alice's dream is an exposition of her unconscious when Carroll paints her and her world in only the broadest strokes? Further, Alice's desire to reach the garden never equals the pitch and urgency of Dorothy's longing to return to Kansas. In the simplest terms, Alice lacks the passion and commitment to her own destiny that advances Dorothy's journey [End Page 3] through Oz. As Alice encounters the creatures of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world, Carroll creates not a quest for identity, or a solitary journey into the self, but rather a sequence of spectacles for childhood voyeurism.
The inhabitants of her dreamworld are hollow signifiers that repel interpretation, not layered symbols that lure penetration. The Mad Hatter's madness, after all, forms no pattern, generates no repetition. When Alice asks him what happens when he has returned, full circle, to the head of the table, he has no answer and can only redirect the subject of their conversation. The Mad Hatter's inability to answer reflects a larger tendency in the narratives to skim surfaces and deflect inquiry. Throughout both stories Alice continually asks "What will happen next?" but Carroll always accelerates his narrative and whisks us to a new scene before Alice's question can be answered.
In much Victorian fiction the movement into secret enclosures begins as a retreat from the urban world but develops, ultimately, into an act of self-exploration. But this is not true of Carroll's fiction. Indeed, the many instances in the Alice stories of characters positioned with their heads facing downwards betokens repellence, not introspection.
The spatial imagery and objects that fill Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world are similarly misleading. Hidden doors, dark tunnels, ungraspable keys and dense woods all create an architecture crowded with secret spaces and hence suggest an atmosphere of concealment and discovery. Upon closer inspection, however, we see that Alice's dreamworlds and secrecy are strangely incompatible. This is a crucial insight, for as we shall see, the Alice narratives lack precisely what other narratives must have in order to hatch a fictive world that contains secrets. In apprehending the reasons for this absence of secrecy in Carroll, we will establish a grammar of terms that can aid us in the project of exploring hidden spaces in other fiction.
Let us first examine the terms of Wonderland's complex spatial dynamics. (5) One notices immediately the fantastic elasticity of space and size that Alice experiences as she travels to the garden. Space is created as she moves through it and closes up behind her as she exits. It is as if space does not exist unless she inhabits it; the hole deepens as she falls through it; doors, keys, and corridors materialize as she needs them.
Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key. . . . However on [End Page 4] the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door. . . . There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table . . . this time she found a little bottle on it. . . . (pp. 29-30) (6)
This kind of ad-hoc spatiality differs radically from the spatial imperatives that we find in, say, Hardy, who continually reminds us that physical structures outlive their human makers. For instance, the amphitheater in The Mayor of Casterbridge has existed for centuries past and will remain long after Henchard dies. Similarly Tess's fate at Stonehenge is but one moment in the long history of the ancient structure. Thus Hardy establishes a setting and then animates it with characters and events. In Carroll, however, place and character cannot be detached, for one immediately generates the other.
That space dissolves as Alice departs from it explains why there is no backward motion in Wonderland, no possibility to return to an established place. Thus Alice must never climb back up the rabbit-hole in order to escape. If we say that there is no reverse motion or return in Wonderland then we have made a crucial discovery: There can be no secrecy or secret spaces in Wonderland for such secrecy demands stability, a constancy that permits return. To hide an object, a person, a story, a memory, implies that there is a constant, an unwavering signifier that can be hidden, which is to say, a floating signifier eludes concealment. Conversely, if there is only backward motion (as in most of Through the Looking-Glass), then there can be no secret places either, for secrecy also requires the forward motion of a sequacious, progressive logic: A must exist before B can hide it.
But location is not the only instability that disallows secrecy in Wonderland and Looking-Glass. If space and motion are irregular, so then is time. Carroll at once creates and undermines the continuous narrative trajectory of traditional fiction. True, both narratives advance in sequent linearity, one scene following logically from another, with Alice's progress to the garden (and the eighth square in Looking-Glass) as the shaping structure and her dream as the outermost frame. But there is a kind of fragmentation--an abrupt skittishness that terminates the scenes--that compromises this linearity and that becomes more prominent in Looking-Glass. Although, as we have noted, Alice continually asks, "What will happen next," she is answered with only the most evasive responses or, more commonly, with sudden changes of scene and location, making the narrative more like a series of dashes than an [End Page 5] unbroken linear path. (7) The scenes in both texts are almost autonomous moments, a succession of vignettes, thus preventing the narratives from accumulating a history from which to form secrets and establish locations. Hence we can see that stability--some kind of continuity of time and permanence of location--is requisite for a narrative to produce secret spaces.
What we have been saying, essentially, is that secrecy demands contextualization, a surrounding set of variables towards which it can stand in relation and in which it can find a location. Secrecy and, more specifically, secret spaces are ensconced within a larger sphere--both spatial and temporal--that a narrative must create. This suggests, further, that autonomy deflects secrecy. Its essence, its status as independence, disconnectedness, disallows the incorporation that is requisite for secret spaces.
In Dickens's Little Dorrit, Amy narrates a short story that illustrates exquisitely this point that secrecy requires contextualization. The story goes as follows: A poor tiny woman who lives alone in a cottage is seen through her window by a beautiful princess who has the power of knowing secrets. One day the princess enters the cottage and, without provocation or prelude, asks the tiny woman, "Why do you keep it there?" Her question reveals to the woman that the princess knows of her secret "box of shadows" which she then removes from a "very secret place." She tells the princess that she lives alone in order to protect her secret box which, she claims, will sink into her grave when she dies. The princess continues to pass the cottage almost every day, whereupon the two would exchange knowing glances. One day the princess learns that the tiny woman has died and, upon inspecting her cottage, realizes that the woman had been correct: her "treasured shadow" has accompanied her to the grave.
The story reveals Dorrit's wish for silence and noninvolvement, and also echoes Dickens's larger narrative in several places. But for our purposes we need only note the details as outlined. To begin, the tale is striking for its absence of conflict; not only is the secret never revealed, but it is, moreover, never threatened with exposure. For this reason, the princess may seem extraneous to the story, for she poses no threat and alters nothing of the fate of the tiny woman or her secret. The princess, at first, seems to be but a narrative object, lacking agency or interest, but she is essential to the story. She is the tale's most indispensable element. Without her, the tiny woman with her box of shadows is an [End Page 6] autonomous life, not the site of secrecy. By riding past the cottage every day, the princess locates the secret within a spatial, temporal, and communal field. She is the context without which the box would not be a secret.
Thus secrets cannot, if you will, float around in emptiness. They emerge out of an already existent presence, for they are derivative, ineluctably secondary. Further, a secret, in order to remain a secret, cannot break off from its conceiver; it is always owned, never autonomous.
We can see also that what Carroll and his critics call the nonsense jargon of the Alice stories is a kind of autonomy of signifiers. For nonsense claims autonomy--detachment from any signifieds. How then can there be secrecy where there is no stable meaning and hence nothing to hide? But this interpretation that meaning is absent from the Alice texts relies upon the reader believing Carroll's insistence that the narratives are hollow of meaning, that they house no secrets, only surfaces. As critics, we have developed a vast collection of essays and articles arguing that the so-called nonsense jargon is itself a concealer of meaning and a shunting of our interpreting glances. Indeed, pure nonsense cannot produce a narrative, and, while the narratives are unusual, they are narratives nevertheless.
The Alice stories, then, articulate a double message: on the one hand, they create the illusion of secrecy, they entice us with answerless riddles and imagery of hidden doors, unseen passages and ungraspable objects; on the other hand, however, they avert our scrutiny with the characters' nonsense jargon and absurd logic. It is as if the stories draw us towards them and then teasingly turn away. There may be no secrecy, as we have seen, but there is no straightforwardness either.
Evasiveness governs the semiotic structure of both narratives. Throughout the Alice stories, there is an implicit decorum to speak indirectly, to refer, not address, to allude, not define. We continually hear the characters use the demonstrative that (always italicized), instead of directly describing their subjects:
"Why, because there's nobody with me!" cried Humpty Dumpty. "Did you think I didn't know the answer to that? Ask another." (p. 263)
"Do you call that a whisper?" cried the poor king, jumping up and shaking himself. "If you do such a thing again, I'll have you buttered." (p. 282) [End Page 7]
It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. (p. 31)
To state unequivocally threatens the fictive spell. In Wonderland, Alice awakens from her dream at the moment when she unambiguously addresses and defines the King and Queen:
"Who cares for you?" said Alice . . ."You're nothing but a pack of cards!" At this the whole pack rose up in the air, and came flying down on her: she gave a little scream . . . and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister . . . . (pp. 161-62)
Similarly, in Looking-Glass, the fawn darts from Alice's embrace at the moment that it can precisely define her:
"What do you call yourself?" the Fawn said at last . . . . "I wish I knew!" thought poor Alice. She answered rather sadly, "Nothing, just now." . . . So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And, dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. (pp. 226-27)
Speech that defines subverts entrancement, agitates the mesmeric spell. It is essential to see that this endorsing of indirectness is evasion, not secrecy, and dispersal, not definition. The fawn's fear of capture can be seen as a metaphor for the narrative's rejection of definition, of linguistic capture. That is to say that Carroll's text prohibits the articulation of meaning, which it here metaphorizes as a kind of seizure. Just as the fawn detaches from Alice's hold, so too the signified disconnects from the signifier. But secrecy, as we have seen, presumes stable meaning, a secure connection of signifier and signified. Thus by terminating the link between signifier and signified, Carroll terminates the possibility of secrecy. In other words, the autonomy of the signifier precludes secrecy. Autonomy and secrecy, I am suggesting, are rival imperatives.
What, then, is the difference between these two conditions? Clearly [End Page 8] both intimate a kind of solitude that is their deepest connection. But secrecy, as I have earlier shown, implies a pocket of solitude within a subsuming sphere; moreover, it implies, as its etymology makes clear, separation which, in turn, implies severed contact. To be secret is to have once been connected; contact, connection is secrecy's most subtle distinction. Autonomy, however, suggests self-containment, not connection.
Secrecy and, now we can add, contact, are almost entirely absent from Carroll's vision. Wonderland and Looking-Glass are worlds of cruel autonomy, symbolized most powerfully by the Cheshire cat's head that can live detached from its body, and still grin. Scenes of failed contact imbue both narratives. Alice follows the White Rabbit down the hole, but she can never fully reach him. In Looking-Glass, objects are similarly unattainable: The goat's beard "seemed to melt away as she touched it" (p. 221), and the rushes also "melted away almost like snow" (p. 257). The absence of physical touch here plainly represents the scarcity of emotional connection, and even love, in Wonderland and Looking-Glass. And whatever else we may say about the humor and sophistication of Carroll's nonsense jargon, the conversations that lead nowhere illustrate, at bottom, the hollowness of relationships in Alice's dreamworlds.
This failure of contact may be a kind of fear of contact deriving from what psychoanalysis has named Alice's oral aggression and what Nina Auerbach has called Alice's "subtly cannibalistic hunger." (8) In both narratives, Alice's presence portends potential danger. Can Alice really be so unwitting of Dinah's threat to the Wonderland animals? And in Looking-Glass when Alice threatens to pick the daisies, one begins to wonder whether her "curiosity" is not childhood innocence, but rather fallen aggression. One cannot help but notice a schism between Alice's popular image as an artless child of nature and her actual representation as a demure yet fearless little wanderer.
But how, we must ask, did this myth of Alice emerge from Carroll's original portrayal of her as the dark-haired, bewitching-eyed child of Alice's Adventures Underground? The evolution of Carroll's dreamchild is a curious phenomenon indeed and beckons our critical attention. When one reads the text of Underground, one notices a dramatic difference between Carroll's and Tenniel's illustrations. Alice's progression from the dark lady-child of Underground to the saccharine, blonde ingenue of Wonderland is visible to even the most cursory glance and is only one symptom of the larger transformation of the Alice myth. (9) [End Page 9] Carroll's representations of her, especially when she changes size, are more offbeat, somewhat surreal and certainly more disturbing. In a particularly vivid picture, Alice is portrayed as an oversized head, no neck or body, only feet and hands extending from beneath her chin. On the next page, she is depicted as a long neck with a head on top, no body or feet below, like a human lollipop. This kind of eccentricity is muted in Tenniel's drawings, which are, for the most part, flat and insipid. For instance, most of Tenniel's illustrations are single caricatures, departing far from Carroll's more populated and detailed sketches.
Tenniel's illustrations established a tendency, continuing even now, to imagine Alice as a paragon of childhood innocence. Films, cartoons, theater productions and modern illustrations all recreate, in some way, this idea of Alice as a symbol of unwitting purity and wide-eyed curiosity. Clearly Carroll's readers have revealed a desire to read the Alice stories according to Tenniel's illustrations.
Although Tenniel's interpretation diverges from Carroll's representation, there must be in Carroll's texts something, some moment, some scene or theme, to stimulate this popular construction of Alice. Surely our acceptance and affirmation of Tenniel's representation finds some provocation in Carroll's writing. Is there, beneath the texts' portrayal of Alice’s predatory nature, a wish for childhood innocence--a longing for Alice to be what she plainly is not--an uncorruptible essence of humanity? Both narratives, as we shall see, emit a subtle message saying just this: that solitude and autonomy are afflictions of the soul; and human contact and love, our most precious remedy. The deepest tension of the works, then, is the lure between perfect autonomy and human contact--a conflict which crystallizes the problem of secrecy in Wonderland and Looking-Glass.
II
In his introduction to the Modern Critical Interpretations volume on Lewis Carroll, Harold Bloom intimates that Wordsworth is the precursor poet standing behind and shaping much of the Alice narratives. Locating Wordsworth's strongest presence in "The White-Knight's Ballad"--what he calls a "superb and loving parody of Wordsworth's great crisis-poem "Resolution and Independence" (10) --Bloom argues that the White Knight is Alice's/Carroll's Leech Gatherer--"a man from some far region sent, / To give me human strength." The [End Page 10] alternative to human contact for Wordsworth, Bloom further suggests, is misery and madness, but for Carroll it is Wonderland, that is, play and nonsense.
Bloom's observation summons our knowledge of Wordsworthian Romanticism and we quickly find ourselves filling out the corners of his evocative suggestion. To begin, the White Knight's constant positioning with his head downwards and his headlong fall into the ditch symbolize his Romantic self-absorption, as do his absurd inventions that make sense only to him. His repeated declaration "It's my own invention" reflects his narcissism and self-deception, his conviction that he has created all that surrounds him. That he is sated by the imagining of pudding, and not the actual tasting of it, further represents his retreat into his own subjectivity.
If the White Knight functions as a Wordsworthian solitary, awakening the dormant well of human sympathy, then Alice’s soul must require arousal, inspiriting. And indeed it does, for Carroll twice reminds us that Alice does not cry in response to the White Knight's song. But her encounter with him does become her "memory recollected in tranquillity," a significant moment, the remembering of which in theory brings her to a deeper sympathy with nature and the outer world. With a Wordsworthian sentimentality, Carroll describes Alice's experience:
Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday--the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight--the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her--the horse quietly moving about, with the reigns hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet--and the black shadows of the forest behind--all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song. (p. 307)
The absence of irony in this passage stands in sharp relief to the other scenes in the narrative, which are almost all governed by parody and satire. Carroll's sincerity here is striking, and the scene derives much of its power from this unique earnestness of tone. Indeed, the popular misrepresentation of Alice as an innocent dreamchild issues, in part, from our misremembering the tenor of the whole story to be similar in tone and content to this passage. Like Alice, we remember this scene as [End Page 11] a representative moment, not as the anomaly that it is. Thus Carroll masterfully orchestrates layers of revisionary remembering, reconstructive imagining.
This impulse towards revisionary remembering too emanates from a Romantic sensibility. Throughout Wordsworth's poetry, human memory does not simply duplicate in thought the past, but it moreover emendates reality, reconstructs a vision that resembles, but does not perfectly reproduce, the original event. In "I wandered lonely as a cloud," Wordsworth describes the difference between the primary experience and the retrospective contemplation of it.
The waves beside them danced, but they
outdid the sparkling waves in glee: --
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company: I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood.
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then the heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
During the actual experience the poet can luxuriate in the vision before him, but he cannot perceive its full purport until the time of retrospection. To remember the daffodils is not to replicate in thought an exact picture, but rather to alter a past moment, to assign emotions, designate associations, reappraise significance, re-edit temporal boundaries. Thus no memory is free of imagination, and no imagining is free of memory. When we remember we reimagine and when we imagine we pluck from our well of memories, for we can create only out of that which we know. Hence memory and imagination each construct the other.
Fittingly, the chapter that contains the interaction between the White Knight and Alice, "It's my own invention," displays beautifully this Romantic bonding of memory with imagination. Just as in this scene Alice acts as a repository of memory, positioning the moment in the foreground of her Wonderland recollections, the Knight, with all his [End Page 12] nonsense inventions, represents the agency of imagination that accompanies the act of remembering. I have until now been arguing that Carroll disunites any psychical connection between Alice and her dream creatures, but this scene clearly poses an exception. Here the White Knight and Alice function as concomitant mental processes. Because the two work synchronistically, it follows that the White Knight requires Alice's guidance as he departs from her sight: "I sha'n't be long. You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll encourage, you see" (p. 314). "Encourage" may seem peculiar at first, but its root meaning "to give heart" expresses accurately the unusual intimacy between them--their psychical integration of one another.
Alice's and the reader's revisionary remembering reflects a Wordsworthian consciousness in still another sense. Like Wordsworth's, Carroll's reconstructive imagination manifests itself primarily as an elision of conflict and tension. If Alice and the reader locate this scene as exemplative of her Wonderland and Looking-Glass experience, then memory has been acutely selective. As we have noted, Alice's primary emotion has been frustration and anxiety, not the love and entrancement she feels as the White Knight's song dreamily lulls her. The scene is an anomaly, not a representative moment. This tendency to delete pain Carroll confesses in the opening poem to Looking-Glass.
And though the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story,
For "happy summer days" gone by,
And vanish'd summer glory --
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale. (p. 174)
We see this inclination to omit conflict throughout Wordsworth's poetry. In his narrative poem "Michael," for instance, Wordsworth describes Luke's moral descent--the tragic event of the story--in only five and one-half lines (the poem is 491 lines in total). Notice the vagueness with which Wordsworth relates this core episode:
Meantime Luke began
To slacken in his duty, and at length
He in dissolute city gave himself
To evil courses: ignominy and shame [End Page 13]
Fell on him, so that he was driven at last
To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas.
(ll. 451-56)
A hurried glance and nothing more for the tragic turn in Michael's life, the very impetus for narration. In a more stunning example of elision, "A slumber did my spirit seal," the poet expresses in two stanzas the shock of Lucy's premature death. In the first stanza, Lucy still lives and the poet remembers his deluded disbelief of her mortality--the happy ignorance that is past. In the second stanza, Lucy has died and the poet imagines the difficult concept of nonexistence and a world that is absent of her being.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
Swift and terse to be sure, but no less elegant and eloquent for that. In less than fifty words the lyric speaks profusely and articulates succinctly the human reaction to what always seems the suddenness of death. But between the two stanzas—between his love for her when she lived and his grief in the aftermath of her death--sits a blank space, an elision of the very moment of death itself. This absent stanza seems even more striking when we realize that Wordsworth was writing within an elegiac tradition that almost always recounts a death scene. As in "Michael," Wordsworth excludes the moment of discontinuity, the very event that stimulated the act of writing.
For both Carroll and Wordsworth, then, the imaginative effort of writing is a kind of memory freed from pain. But memory for Wordsworth also heals pain and binds the human community. It is memory in this sense that bears most upon the Alice books and that will deliver us, ultimately, back to the subject of secrecy.
The ending of Wonderland bears an uncanny resemblance to the final fifty lines of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," in which the poet addresses his sister, who has stood by his side during his meditation that [End Page 14] comprises the body of the poem. At the close of both texts, the authors momentarily rechannel the narratives through the consciousness of the protagonist's sister, and thus unfold an alternative vision on the scene--one that perceives from the vista of a different standpoint in time. Just as Wordsworth envisages his sister's impression of the landscape, Carroll imagines Alice's dreamscape as seen through the eyes of her older sister. In Wordsworth's poem, Dorothy's presence binds the rift between the poet's original visit to Tintern Abbey and that of his present one. Robert Langbaum explains: "Now he sees in her what he once was, and sees in the difference between them what she shall be. He has a transforming vision of her as a child of nature blessed in all stages of her life; and by identifying her future memory of this visit with his own and his present memory of his last visit, he sees in the different stages of their development along the same line the rhythm and harmony of things." (11)
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once . . .
This gesture of uniting fragments of time into a coherent formulation is, among other things, part of the process of narrativization, of transforming experience into story. Its position at the end affirms its formal significance. Further, Dorothy's function of uniting disparate moments of time diverges from the autonomous vignettes that construct the Alice books.
But time is not all that Wordsworth joins. By linking past, present, and future, he also bonds himself to Dorothy, whose presence in "Tintern Abbey" has been criticized as unnecessary, an autonomous fragment dangling from the core of the poem. Contrarily, as Wordsworth weaves her into the thread of his experience the message becomes clear: the memory of the abbey means little without its significance to another. In other words, memory is meaningful only insofar as it weds us to the experience of others and hence integrates us into the human landscape. The psychological desideratum of the poem is not a heightened perception of the abbey, but rather a deeper union with his sister. Memory, Wordsworth implies, releases sympathetic communion [End Page 15] .
Similarly, at the conclusion of Wonderland, Alice recalls her dream to her older sister, who functions much like Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey," mediating the central action of the poem--the fall down the rabbit-hole and the journey to the garden—through the lens of an alternate perspective, one that differs in age from the protagonist's. Like Wordsworth, Carroll stages layers of temporal perspectives:
But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:--First she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers--she could hear the very tones of her voice . . . and as she listened, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister's dream . . . 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 of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. (pp. 162-64)
Alice's memory of her dream generates a psychical intimacy between her and her sister that is expressly absent in the book's opening, where her attention quickly recedes from her sister's voice. The recollection of her dream, then, yokes Alice's and her sister's hitherto disconnected psyches.
If we say that memory cultivates human contact, then we begin to see shades of our subject rising back into view, for contact, as we have seen, is secrecy's most subtle distinction. To remember a person, an experience, a place, a moment in the past is to reject autonomy, to reconnect to what once was. Memory thus merges autonomous subjects and also knits fragments of time into narrative. That is to say that memory repels dissociation, or in Carrollian terms, nonsense. As memory contextualizes, meaning emerges and nonsense dissolves into abstraction. Finally, secrecy takes shape out of the continuity and contextualization created by memory. Hence, where there is memory, there is secrecy. The closing scene in Wonderland, as well as the White Knight scene in Looking-Glass, [End Page 16] then, by celebrating memory, advance the possibility of secrecy, which we have seen to be strangely absent in Alice's dreamworlds.
Because remembering broods a secrecy that Carroll disallows, we see in Wonderland and Looking-Glass, fittingly, the precarious status of memory.
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 ? . . . . I'll try if I know all the things I used to. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is--oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at this rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography. London is the capitol of Paris, and Paris is the capitol of Rome--no, that's all wrong . . . . (pp. 37-38)
Indeed, Alice is by no means amnestic, but her faculty of recollection is clearly compromised. After this scene, Alice almost never considers, even in passing, her waking life, her reflections on Dinah posing the only exception. (12) Memory’s deficiency signifies, again, autonomy's supremacy and hence secrecy's absence.
Let us now return to the White Knight scene in Looking-Glass--the scene that most overtly figures memory as a mode of human connection. The scene moves on several planes: The knight's poem about his encounter with the "aged-aged man" alludes to Wordsworth's confrontation with the Leechgatherer which, in turn, parallels the White Knight's meeting with Alice, which finally represents Dodgeson's relationship with Alice Liddell. By staging these multiple gestures of interaction, Carroll rejects, and reveals a disgust for, the autonomy and solitude he has thematized all along. It is as if Carroll here renounces his philosophy of nonsense in favor of a Wordsworthian faith in the human spirit. Like Wordsworth, Carroll affirms the redemptive force of love and sympathy.
Carroll's optimism, however, is a fleeting, momentary indulgence--an intellectual slip. The scene, like all of Carroll's, is a self-contained imaginative flash. Thus Alice's interaction with the White Knight does not alter her or bring her any deeper knowledge. Although the scene does initiate her movement to the eighth square and hence her queening, Alice's internality hardly even flutters. Her crowning, like so many of Carroll's metaphors, seems hollow of meaning, a symbol without a referent, a facade that conceals nothing. [End Page 17]
The pull between the desire for memory and the compulsion towards autonomy represents the deepest tension of the Alice narratives--a tension neither resolved nor cathartically worked through, but rather left taut and unchanged. The drive to suppress memory and contact, meaning and context, however, necessarily subverts secrecy. For secrecy presupposes an existence of meaning, a renunciation of nonsense and jabberwocky. To hide something is to affirm that some truth, some signified, exists. But there is, finally, only nonsense in Wonderland and Looking-Glass, nothing, and therefore nothing to hide. Secrecy can find no place within a created world such as Carroll's, for it is, in its naked essence, a confirmation of truth, an admission of faith.
University of Virginia
Notes
1. In "Symbolization of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Martin Grotjahn states that Alice's fall represents "a trip back into the mother's womb." See American Imago 4 (1947): 37; reprinted in Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild as seen through the Critics Looking-Glass, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1971), pp. 308-15. In "Alice in
Wonderland Psychoanalyzed," A. M. E. Goldschmidt argues that Alice's fall is "what is perhaps the best known symbol of coitus, "Aspects of Alice, pp. 69-72.
2. In "The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood," Jan Gordon suggests that Alice's dull unresponsiveness is actually a "mask of boredom," concealing an acute anxiety about her "metaquest" to the garden. See Aspects of Alice, pp. 93-114.
3. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), p. 17. Barthes brilliantly argues that the Eiffel Tower's profound cultural significance emanates from its self-sufficient status: "The Tower can live on itself: One can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there." The Tower's polyphony of functions, Barthes concludes, fulfills this most heroic of all human wishes to be autonomous and autarchical.
4. In "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," Donald Rackin argues that Alice's adventure is "a grimly comic trip through the lawless underground that lies just beneath the surface of our constructed universe." Rackin goes on to discuss the delicate form of Carroll's narrative under the pressure of such lawlessness. See PMLA 81 (1966): 313-26; reprinted in Aspects of Alice, pp. 391-416.
5. For a thorough discussion of the distortions of space and the loss of the third dimension in Wonderland, see Paul Schilder's "Psychoanalytic Remarks on Alice in Wonderland," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 87 (1938): 159-68; reprinted in Aspects of Alice, pp. 283-92.
6. All Carroll quotations, The Annotated Alice with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner (New York: Meridian, 1960).
7. This restlessness may be what Carroll, in the opening poem to Looking-Glass, calls the "moody madness" of his narrative. Also, Alice's compulsive questioning reveals her desire for a continuity that Wonderland does not provide.
8. Nina Auerbach, "Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child," Victorian Studies 18 (1973): 36; reprinted in Lewis Carroll, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 31-44.
9. Nina Auerbach also comments on the disparity between Carroll's drawings of Alice and those of Tenniel's: "But a bit of research can dissolve what has been in some ways a misleading identification of Tenniel's Alice with Carroll's, obscuring some of the darker shadings of the latter. Carroll himself initiated the shift from the subtly disturbing Alice Liddell to the blonde and stolid Mary Badcock as Underground became the jollier-sounding Wonderland, and the undiscovered country in his dream became a nursery classic." See Lewis Carroll, p. 34. In "Love and Death in Carroll's Alices," Donald Rackin notes Tenniel's general tempering of the Alice books; see Lewis Carroll, pp. 111-27.
10. Lewis Carroll, p. 8
11. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 44.
12. Alice's failing memory also represents Dodgeson's anxiety that Alice Liddell might forget the story of Wonderland and, even more importantly, the dedicated love of its author. Conversely, we can also interpret Alice's obscured memory as a kind of punishment or assault made on her by a love-sick and fixated Dodgeson. By stripping Alice of memory and stranding her in the Wonderland and the Looking-Glass realms, Carroll isolates her and hence guarantees her accessibility. Her lack of memory is also an absence of personal history which would suggest that she is, as warned, but an object in the King's dream and not the subject of her own.
