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CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Week Six: Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, edited by Hugh Haughton (Penguin, 1998).

1. 'In the early nineteenth century ... imagination emerged from the long imprisonment it had suffered in the name of reason' (John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature (Kestrel, 1974), p.90).
1.1 Rehabilitation of traditional fairy tales; new fairy tales (Hans Christian Anderson); fantasy.
1.2 Some definitions: 'Myths are about creation; why the earth and sea and sky are as they are; who runs the world, and how. Myths explain. Legends are about the achievements of real, half-real or imaginary heroes; about battles long ago. Fairy tales, ancient or modern, are stories of magic, set in the indefinite past and incorporating traditional themes and materials; they may be about giants, dwarfs, witches, talking animals, and a variety of other creatures, as well as good and bad fairies, princes, poor widows and youngest sons. Folk tales are the traditional tales of the people. They are often fairy tales, but they do not have to be; "folk" indicates the origin, "fairy" the nature of the story. Fantasy, for my purposes, is a modern form, belonging to the age of the novel. It is extremely various; it may involve the creation of new worlds, or it may require no more than a single derangement of physical possibility, such as a time shift, in the world we know. Drawing a line between modern fairy tale and fantasy can be difficult; I am inclined to look on a sustained piece of work as fantasy, even if it makes use of fairy-tale elements, because I think it is characteristic of the fairy tale that it is brief' (Townsend, p.90).
1.3 Fairy tales: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), first translated into English as German Popular Stories in 1823 (illustrated by George Crookshank); Hans Christian Andersen's modern fairy tales first translated into English in 1846.
1.4 Fantasy for children: tentative beginnings in late C18: Dorothy Kilner, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783), 'in which a mouse ... tells its story to a gathering of children' (Children's Books in English, p.253); Eleanor Sleath, Glenowen; or The Fairy Palace (1815), in which orphaned hero and heroine 'encounter a mysterious "Fairy Peribanou", a veritable underworld godmother, who fills their lives with delights' (Children's Literature, p.71); Sara Coleridge, Phantasmion (1837), a 'remarkable pioneering fantasy' (Children's Literature, p.92); Richard Henry Horne, Memoirs of a London Doll (1846), 'the best of [the] anthropomorphic forerunners of fantasy' (Children's Books in English, p.253); Robert Browning, 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' (1842); Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843); 'early works of fantasy, such as John Ruskin's King of the Golden River (written in 1841, published in 1851) ... and W.M. Thackeray's extravaganza, The Rose and the Ring (1855) may ... be said to arise out of the fairy-tale tradition' (Children's Books in English, p.253); Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market' (1862) - not meant for children but often appeared in editions for children; Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863): strange book about magical adventures of young chimney sweep transformed into water baby (frequently quotes Wordsworth and deals in amusing ways with political and intellectual issues of Victorian age).
1.5 Myth: Nathanial Hawthorne, Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853): first writer 'to adapt classical mythology in English for the young' (Children's Books in English, p.326).
1.6 Nonsense: Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846).

2. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865): 'Nothing ... prepares us for the shock of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), the most brilliant and original children's book of the century and perhaps of all time' (Children's Literature, p.140).
2.1 'instead of being a receptacle for adult wisdom, Alice is the wise child in a crazy world, opposing absurd logic with homely common sense. When, at the end of Wonderland, she confronts the assembled royalty and court of law with the words "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" the implication is subversive: is she perhaps putting the adult world in its place?' (Children's Books in English, p.253).
2.2 'Alice in Wonderland may be read as a profound scrutiny of systems, including those of social behaviour, logic, and language. ... [The] exchanges [between Alice and the creatures] reflect the contended-for and shifting dynamics of power between adult and child, controller and controlled. ... She is generally willing to take on adult responsibility (for example, for the pig-baby), resists intimidation, and gives as good as she gets conversationally, ... But she is also the child as victim, cross-questioned, bullied, and lectured by the Wonderland inhabitants' (Children's Literature, p.141); 'the arbitrary nature of social and linguistic rules is a theme common to both books; it is invoked, as in Dickens, through the defamiliarizing eyes of the child' (Children's Literature, p.142).
2.3 Haughton deals squarely with Dodgson's problematic relationships with Alice Liddell and other young girls; notes that Dodgson's interest not out of step with the period: 'It was fortunate for him, in this respect, that Victorian painting catered so generously for his particular tastes' (p.xxvi); Dodgson's photographs need to be set alongside those of other pioneer photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).
2.4 Does Dodgson's emotional (or sexual?) attraction to young girls appear in the Alice books? 'making a "dear child" puzzled was a central thread in Dodgson's puzzling relationships with children, and clearly this is central to the Alice stories' (p.lvi).
2.5 Fantasy, but also 'a "fairy tale" about a seven-year-old which is not only an adventure story but a philosophical joke-book, a mixture of genially grotesque pantomime and surreal Socratic dialogue' (p.lviii); also satire?
2.6 'Alice, even as a seven-year-old, emerges more than equal to her intellectual as well as social adventures, more than equal too to bullying interlocutors such as Humpty Dumpty, the first bona fide philosopher of nonsense' (pp.lvi-lvii); 'the problem of meaning' crucial to Alice and to text's readers (p.xi); 'The "Alice" books mean "many different things", as the huge critical literature they have inspired makes clear, but Alice's struggle for mastery and meaning is at their centre' (p.lvii).
2.7 'the Alice books have been taken to prefigure modernism at its most experimental as well as children's literature at its most elemental ... [and this dispute] represents a dispute about the meaning of children's literature (whatever that is), about childhood and literary representations of childhood, about the relation between books for children and books for adults' (p.xii).
2.8 John Tenniel (1820-1914): 'text and image were probably more closely allied during the Victorian period than at any time since the Middle Ages' (p.lxxviii); Tenniel's illustrations 'form an inescapable complement and counterpart to Carroll's dream text' (p.lxxix); are they interpretations rather than illustrations? (NB Alice's facial expressions throughout)

3. Story's occasion of composition becomes part of text in opening poem (pp.5-6).
3.1 Yet contrast opening of chapter 1 (pp.9-10); animals speaking in books since classical times, in fairy tales, and in children's books since middle of C18.
3.2 Falling? (pp.10, 11); underworld? parallel world/portal; separation from normal/adult world; but while she is virtually 'the only child in the books' (p.xiii), she enters a world of perverse creatures whose behaviour parodies that of Victorian adults.
3.3 Alice's quest to become small so she can enter 'the loveliest garden you ever saw' (p.12) = ? in the garden she's called a 'serpent' (pp.47-48); nonsense, or serious questions about identity? growing/shrinking = ?
3.4 Satirical fun against moralising children's literature - e.g., p.13 (plus Houghton's note) - about relationship between labels and content, words and things? (NB text's continual word-play); what is narrator's attitude towards Alice here? who is assumed reader?
3.5 'this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people' (p.14); curious: 1. eager to learn; inquisitive; 2. over inquisitive, prying; 3 interesting, strange, unexpected; 4 (rare) (of workmanship, etc) highly detailed, intricate, or subtle; 5. (obsolete) fastidious or hard to please.

4. Questions of personal identity (pp.17-18).
4.1 Alice pursues and is puzzled by such philosophical questions; distortion of her previous knowledge (multiplication tables, moralising songs) suggests discontinuity with past self, but also leads to comic parody (pp.18-19) - Watts' Divine Songs (pp.19, 91-93) and Southey (pp.42-45) (see Houghton's notes throughout).
4.2 As Houghton shows, all songs sung by other creatures are parodies of standard children's songs.
4.3 Carroll mocks 'the didactic element in so much writing for children through characters such as the Duchess, who [proffers] implausible morals for every occasion' (Children's Literature, p.143)
4.4 Self-reflexive playfulness (pp.32-33).
4.5 Satire: of polite conversation throughout; of aristocracy and royalty; of adults generally; of Victorian education, especially public schools (chapters 9-10).

5. Parody and satire? Intended reader? Alice Liddell? Children like her? Adults?
5.1 Parody: by end of C19 'Explicit moral lessons were rapidly becoming outmoded and the insistent moralizing of Victorian fiction for children had ... become a standing joke and an obvious target for parody. ... By the end of the century, the use of parody was common in writing for children ... [e.g.,] E. Nesbit in Nine Unlikely Tales for Children (1901); something approaching self-parody is also apparent in the elaborately self-conscious narrative voices of Kipling's Just So Stories (1902), or of Barrie's Peter and Wendy. One vital source for parody lay in the power of imaginative play which the late nineteenth century had located at the centre of nursery life' (Children's Literature, pp.172-3).
5.2 Satire? 'literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. ... Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly' (M.H. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms)

6. Menippean satire: 'modelled on a Greek form developed by the Cynic philosopher Menippus [C3 BCE]'; renamed by Northrop Frye as the anatomy (Anatomy of Criticism); 'Such satires are written in prose, usually with interpolations of verse, and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a loosely constructed narrative. A major feature is a series of extended dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge in their support' (Abrams); eg, Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564); Voltaire, Candide (1759); Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818); Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928); Frye calls the two Alice books 'perfect Menippean satires'.

7. A poetics of innocence? A text working on a double level?

8. Children's fantasy after Alice.
8.1 George MacDonald: At the Back of the North Wind (1871); The Princess and the Goblin (1872); The Princess and the Curdie (1883); important Scottish author of fantasy who encouraged Carroll to publish Alice in Wonderland and influenced C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
8.2 Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses (1874), a fantasy 'in the Alice style'; E. Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906); Kipling, especially Jungle Books (1894-95); Kenneth Graham, Wind in the Willows (1908); Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911); L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (1900); A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928); John Masefield, The Midnight Folk (1927); Alison Utterley, A Traveller in Time (1936); J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-5); C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia (1949-56); Alan Garner, The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973); Susan Cooper, the Dark is Rising quintet (1965-76); Ursula le Guin, The Earthsea Quartet (1968-1990); E.B. White, Charlotte's Web (1952); Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972); Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden (1958); Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kemp (1975); Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) and An Acceptable Time (1989); Melvin Burgess, An Angel for May (1992); David Almond, Skellig (1998); Philip Pullman, 'His Dark Materials Trilogy' (1995-2000): Sally Prue, Cold Tom (2001); J.K. Rowling, 'Harry Potter'; etc.

Seminar: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Working together in groups, identify those aspects that you find interesting or important in Chapter VII: 'A Mad Tea-Party'.

Pay attention to the prose text, the song, Tenniel's illustrations, and Haughton's endnotes.

Think about: narrative technique; characterisation; verbal technique; fantasy; (Menippean) satire; parody; the image of the child in the text; the implied or ideal reader; the possible responses of child readers in 1865 and in the twenty-first century; and any other issues you think relevant.

Be prepared to offer reasons for your decisions and to quote from the text (supplying page numbers).

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