Appunti "Alice in Wonderland"

CHILDHOOD AND ADULTHOOD

Carroll had lot of child friends, one of them, Alice Pleasance Liddel has been the

inspiration for the character of Alice. In the book she never grows up but we know that the

true Alice: by the time that “Looking Glass” had written, she has grown up so for Carroll

she had become impure and of no interest. That is the reason why the second novel is so

difficult to analyze. Every time that his child friends grew up, Carroll was very sad because

that meant for him lose them (Episode of the White Knight). The growth of Alice is visible

in the ending of “Looking glass”: she is so hungry that she is prepared to kill in order to eat.

This is the embodiment of the aggressive “vagina dentata”. Alice becomes as aggressive

as the Red Queen in the moment in which she herself is crowned queen. So there is a sort

of similitude between the in-coronation and adulthood, which are both negative moments.

The White Knight is also seen as the personification of Carroll inside the novel (in the

second novel).

JOURNEY

“Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found here” = journey of Alice through the

chessboard. Chessboard is the lifetime.

Crossing the text board represents the change from PAWN to QUEEN. Alice turning From

CHILD to ADULT.

Garland stresses the fact that the character of Alice have been frequently misplaced and

misunderstood. Alice is NOT an active heroine, but a passive, idealized character

subjected to the male gaze.

Lewis Carroll’s texts are about “malice”, that is the often spiteful attempts of the male

author to suppress and control Alice’s agency so that Carroll can desire and own her. This

control, and the anxieties Carroll has surrounding female sexuality and agency, are

expressed via representation of food and appetite within the text and the relationship of

these to the feminine. Alice’s books portrait the experience of growing up and the

construction of agency and identity. The shift between the two Alice texts is crucial: female

sexuality is in both represented as a frightening and destructive force. Basically,

Wonderland is about possession whereas the Looking Glass is about loss. The little girl is

controlled and manipulated by the male author.

The first well-intentioned interpretations trying to read Alice as a subversive and active

heroine have been misplaced ignoring the place of the women in the text as well as the

desiring nature of the man gaze. Karoline Leach, by studying the author biography tried to

rescue him from being labeled as asexual or repressed child-lover: she thinks he is an

innocent man who enjoyed the company of children over adults. So there is a resistance in

Alice theory to any study that paints Carroll as a creepy, pseudo-pedophile unable to

maintain adult relationships.

In closely reading Alice texts in terms of desire and sexuality, the positioning of female

figures and their relationships with food can best be understood by referring to the Barbara

Creed’s theory “vagina dentata”. It is about a sexuality possessed by the feminine that

threatens to destroy the masculine, a vagina with teeth violently devouring the penis. The

vagina dentate is present in both Carroll’s books and there are examples also in his real

life. (He once asked a young female friend not to visit him if she were to wear a red dress;

this color is being one that is strongly associated with a rampant female sexuality so he

preferred girls in lighter shades.

Female characters are quite small number and are humans and the male characters are

outnumber the female and mostly animals). The adult female characters are generally

presented in very similar ways, Alice is the only female child character and she is adored

by Carroll in the text and also in the real life (Eros/Thanatos) so women are posited as the

natural enemy of the little girls.

Referring to food, Carroll was notoriously thrifty when it came to eating in his own life,

often consuming a biscuit and some sherry for his main meal and never eating lunch.

Carroll had odd eating habits for both himself and his child guests surviving himself on

simple food and small portions”, meticulously planning the times and the quantities his

child guests food consumption, including treats like coca, jam, and sweets when

entertaining children. Carroll was also notably disgusted by a ravenous appetite in his

female children friends. It wasn’t unusual for him present gift and attention on little girls,

enjoying many friendships. He once sent a small knife as a birthday present to a child

friend and instructed her to use it to cut her dinner, as this way she will be safe from eating

too much. Here, the repulsive female appetite can be stopped by using a phallic object. In

much the same way, the hero of “Jabberwocky” uses the masculine prowess and his

sword (representing the phallus) to kill the dragon, which represents the female sexual

desire. He had the willing of his female child friends to stay young and small and there is

no concrete romantic interest or proven sexual relationships with a mature female was

ever present in his life. The relationships Carroll presents between sexual females, desire,

fear and death is contrasted strongly with the female children, innocence, joy and life. For

Carroll, food and appetite are corrupting extravagant forces. Hunger, which is

representative of desire, expressed by young girls made them impure and undesirable

from his perspective. Carroll was exercising his own desire though Alice’s hunger and his

feeding of her. He liked young girls to be modest in every way, unless they were controlled

by him (in his photography, they could use extravagant costumes or pose seductively).

Many of Wonderland’s most memorable moments concerns the consumption of food: Alice

is told to “Eat me” and “Drink Me” by mysterious food that changes her body in ways she

cannot predict, without expressing any hunger.

In contrast, Carroll has Alice voice her hunger many times but he denies her any

opportunity to satisfy it. For example, Alice desires the tarts and, realizing she isn’t able to

eat them, represses this hunger by looking at everything about her. The Queen of Hearts

is associated with food and her tendency to scream “Off with his head” can be read as a

castration desire. The King of Hearts is portrayed as a weak, meek creature who is

frightened of his own life. In terms of traditional gender roles and language, the King

occupies the feminine space and the Queen becomes the more dominant. Most of

Carroll’s characters are somehow weak or threatened by the monstrous feminine, the

vagina dentata. The Duchess is another bad kind of woman: she is a neglectful mother,

brash and crude and constantly associated with food. She is unnecessarily focusing on

food in conversations and she has the theory that food affect people’s personalities, which

connects strongly to the idea that satisfying hunger is fulfillment of a sexual desire. She

comments further on using food to manipulate personality and making children sweeter

with more sweet food and it could be Carroll advocating an adult control over what it is that

children consume. The Queen of Heart is quite mad but the extent of her insanity and lust

for castration and power is only realized when her food (her tarts) is stolen. Her lack of

food turns her into a most monstrous being. In Looking Glass Alice behaves in a similarly

vicious way during the feast to celebrate her move from child to woman, which is the

ultimate scene in her alternative world. While the female child is idealized, the female adult

is a disgusting creature in Carroll’s world. Alice Pleasance Liddell was, by the time

Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there, sexually mature women and no

longer the little girl Carroll was so enchanted by, in fact, the second book is full of sadness.

Alice shows she is an active woman possessing a violent (and hungry) and that implies

Alice’s imminent move from childhood to adulthood.

In the second book food is personified in a strange way: in the poem “the Walrus and the

Carpenter” recited to Alice by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the male Walrus befriends

the female child Oysters and then proceeds to eat them showing remorse. This book is a

journey from childhood to adulthood for the female as Alice makes her way across the

chessboard, progressing from Pawn to Queen, the final reality that Carroll’s friend is gone

forever. Alice finds herself very hungry and overwhelms her to the point where is prepared

to kill in order to eat: this attitude coincides with her move into Queedom (adulthood). A

crucial moment is when Alice is thirsty and the Red Queen offers her a biscuit: the food

doesn’t satisfy Alice but only leaves her desiring something else (in this case a drink).

Alice is a passive heroine who is denied her own feelings of hunger in order to satisfy a

desiring male gaze.

Alice's invasion of Wonderland James R. Kincaid

This is a critical essay from James Kincaid. Lewis Carol studies joys and dangers of

human innocence from which he wrote two main books: “Alice in Wonderland” And

“Through the Looking Glass”. One thing that these books have in common is that all the

similes are not only ornamental but have a critical and subversive point of view. Some of

those points of view in this novel are for example:

Irony

• : in the book Alice’s neck starts to grow until her head is above the trees and

she looks like a serpent. The irony is brought by a pigeon that blames her to be a

serpent and is afraid about its eggs safety and the pigeon says to her “I suppose

you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!” and Alice response: “I have

tasted an egg certainly but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you

know”. The pigeon: “I don’t believe it, but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of

serpent: that’s all I can say”. This happens because the pigeon ignores Alice’s

values and emotions and that’s the difference between a little girl and a serpent. To

the pigeon it doesn’t matter if Alice is driven by innocence or malignity. Alice so now

represents not only the little girl but also the serpent, so the fear.

Alice in Wonderland is a rejection of chaos, represents the affirmation of the idea of

the “same ordinary madness”, that means that we all live in madness even if we

don’t realize it. But James Kinkey thinks that rejecting chaos means not only to

reject the terrifying underside of human consciousness but also our liberating

imagination. Furthermore he underlines that Carroll supports madness.

Innocence

• is another really important point of view. In fact, Alice sometimes

appears as a child taking a well-earned revenge for adult silliness (stupidità). For

example we can see when Alice is talking with the Lory. It insists “I’m older than