Lecture Notes
English 133E (Children's Literature), The University of Western Ontario
We Are But Older Children, Dear" (Lewis Carroll to Alice)
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
n lecture, we discussed Lewis Carroll's biographical background; the specific
circumstances in which these texts were written-namely, for Alice Pleasance Liddell; the
significant influence of these texts in all children's and adult literature since (namely,
that it resists didacticism and celebrates the entertainment of nonsense); examined some
main kinds of interpretations (Freudian, Marxist, drug-related 1960s etc.); examined the
relation of the books to central issues in Victorian England (inventions, industrial
capitalism, evolution, religious doubt and fear of meaninglessness, Queen Victoria, rigid
establishment values in law, religion, social manners, and education.
We began to explore Alice's character (as a prim, Victorian 7-year-old who can also be
rude, spoiled, and unfeeling) and to ask whether she is believable as a character or
whether that is even an appropriate question to be asking of this text. Does she grow,
change, develop in any way? Is she in the middle of a dream or a nightmare? Is she an
imperialist invader and disruptor of Wonderland?
We explored how these books are essentially about questions of identity and existence as
explored through the (il)logic of language. Who is dreaming whom in these books? Also, how
central issues of growing up are: all that growing and shrinking in Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and that progression from pawn to queen in Through the Looking Glass.
Curiously, though, while fairy tales we study later are largely about rites of passage
from childhood into adulthood, there is something voyeuristically anti-growing up in
Carroll, something that attempts to freeze Alice in time and to prevent her from growing
up.
For Carroll, the real Alice's arrival at puberty, sexuality, and marriage spells death (if
not to her at least to him):
Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden.
Alice Liddell is in her late teens when Lewis Carroll writes Through the Looking Glass; in
Through the Looking Glass, she is still seven and a half.
We also explored how other characters (the Queen of Hearts and the Knave of Hearts) are
opposites in their unbridled passion to the staid, respectable, outwardly conformist
Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Caroll). How animals are friendly to Alice when she is small
but opposed to her when she is big (i.e. adult). How Lewis Carroll himself appears as the
Gnat (dejected, rejected insect) and especially as the White Knight (cerebral, gentle,
sad, in love with Alice, failed suitor whose gift is the Alice books).
As we should be aware with most children's literature, but especially with nursery rhymes,
fairy tales, and picture books, we always need to examine how illustrations and text work
together in children's literature. The famous Sir John Tenniel illustrations add and
change this text. (For example, Lewis Carroll left it up to his illustrator whether to
make the second character in "The Walrus and the Carpenter" a carpenter, a
baronet, or a butterfly-all three of these scanned fine for Lewis Carroll's poem and he
wasn't concerned which of the three it turned out to be. Tenniel rejected the challenge of
drawing a "wasp in a wig" so Lewis Carroll abandoned that chapter.) Other
illustrators who have illustrated the Alice books include Arthur Rackham, Max Ernst, even
Salvador Dali-now there's a match made in Heaven!
Some additional things to consider in more depth:
ALICE BOOKS AS GAMES
- croquet
- Alice - card came
- Through - chess game
you can map out the whole book with chess moves (brooks & _____; Alice only talks with
characters in adjacent squares; Alice changes from pawn to become Queen; whole dramatic
structure of book is determined by game of chess-rigid yet ingenious)
LANGUAGE
puns
literal use of language vs. metaphoric use
ISSUE
Is this a children's book?
frightening
confusing
plotless
philosophical, mathematical
no moral
humour?
20th century children react differently from Victorian children?
NONSENSE
nonsensical acts - Alice sending present to foot
hand on head - which way am I going?
Meaning depends on external point of reference; but nonsense doesn't point outside-it is a
self-contained game
false logic
Alice is a serpent because Alice eats eggs and serpents eat eggs
Humpty Dumpty
tyrannical relationship of words and meanings-arbitrary
language is totally arbitrary: you make words have meanings you want them to have
names having meanings
Mad Hatter's Tea Party
say what you mean / mean what you say
words don't act simply as placeholders
TIME
children discover language and time
Alice beats time in music lesson
jam every other day-this isn't every other day; yesterday or tomorrow
Inference problems
rules of battle
ORAL FIXATION
mouths
Cheshire cat-all mouth
eating and drinking
SOME POEM PARODIES IN THE ALICE BOOKS
Speak roughly to your little boy (Speak gently)
Watts poem re: How doth the little busy bee becomes Lewis Carroll's "How doth the
little crocodile"
Carroll: crocodile-violent, nasty, completely without moral; political? Criticism of
industrial, capitalistic Victorian society; sound over sense
Mock Turtle-originally The Spider and the Fly (devouring entrapment); lobsters dancing;
insanity, yet harmony
Watts' "The Sluggard" Alice "Tis the Voice of the Lobster"
Beautiful Star becomes Beautiful Soup
Wordsworth's Leech Gatherer
ALICE'S RELATIONS TO VIOLENCE IN WONDERLAND
baby into pig (Alice takes in stride, abandons pig)
Alice is one who tells the violent poems vs. animals
Alice is the greatest disturbance in Wonderland
Alice sympathetic with Walrus or Carpenter, not oysters
Alice feline-likes fish
violent characters-but mostly threats and language; ineffectual violence; none beheaded
Alice as imperialist
growing sense of security
disobeys King
dismisses court
LANGUAGE
language play-assault on our understanding-language itself destabilized
relationship between language and identity
words split from meaning
failure of reference-marmalade jar is empty, so are words
how does one use words in Wonderland & Looking Glass World
say what mean or mean what say
puns, inversions, non-sequitur, riddles, jokes
funny, but anarchy of language is also confusing
Humpty Dumpty
name must mean something
Insects Scene
Looking Glass insects play off names of existing insect names
Entymology / Etymology (Lear's Nonsense Botany)
Humpty Dumpty
arbitrary nature of language: unbirthdays, words personified; word means anything user
wants it to
HD not the master of language but a "pawn" of language-broken man
Puns-2 or more meanings
Alliteration
Haigha & Hatta (Hare and Hatter from first book)
Non-sequitur
Condensation, displacement, simultaneity-Freud re: dreams
At the end of Wonderland, Alice reflects on her wonderful dream (vs. nightmare)
a book for children with a specific audience
CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO BOOKS
1872, Through the Looking Glass - Carroll was 40, resigned to his unhappiness
not written to child but out of his own needs and longings
more lyrical and contemplative
pure poetry: Jabberwocky
wistful
characters are gentler, more thoughtful, but terribly sad
Roger Sale: softer, sadder; the sharp, jabbing nasty quality of Wonderland is almost gone
TEACH NOTHING?
disastrous attempt to write Christian book for children: Sylvie and Bruno books
"The Mad Gardener" but Lewis Carroll preferred
"For I think itis Love
For I feel it is Love
For I'm sure it is nothing but Love!"
Victorian switch to fascination with little boys: Peter Pan
more class-bound (ideology) than Lear's more classless verse
ENDINGS
Ending of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
typically cloying Victorian sentimental domestic melodrama
challenge conventional?
reinscribe status quo?
it was all a (bad?) dream
Ending of Through the Looking Glass
Which dreamed it?
Berkeley: We are figments of God's dream
TO CONSIDER
ROGER SALE:
Alice doesn't grow. She is idealized because she is free of the passions that rage in
other characters . . . but all she can do is nothing but escape from each situation. She
is never able to connect with anyone, never gives, never takes, so that she seems odd,
alone, unyielding rather than brave.
. . . these classics, filled with memorable phrases and incidents, are not read or reread
with much genuine enthusiasm. . .. What we remember is bits and pieces
. . . the generalizations made about Lewis Carroll's books do not hold:
Alice doesn not "grow up" in either book
The events in neither book are consistently narrated as if taking place in a dream
Time, space, and chess are not consistently handled in Through the Looking Glass
What Alice meets is not always fantastic, topsy-turvy, frightening, or nonsense.
The two books are different from each other, but some episodes are interchangeable
Alice is not always priggish, or concerned with rules or manners, or a symbol or a type of
anything or anyone.
Static world:
battles are obscure and pointless, fatalistic (Lion & Unicorn, Red & White Knight,
even Jabberwocky not a sucessful castration story)
the books offer no sense of continuity of past or future
