ALICE IN MIRRORLAND
(by
Laura Green)
Every age finds its
own obsessions reflected in Lewis Carroll's fearless little girl.
FOR A 132-YEAR-OLD prim little
English girl, Alice in Wonderland is surprisingly alive and literarily
ubiquitous. Alice continues to preside, an often sinister muse, over modern
fictional wonderlands, from the anonymous 1970s teen-drugs-and-sex shocker
"Go Ask Alice" to A. M. Homes' recent attempt to represent the inner
life of a pedophile, "The End of Alice." So
up-to-date is Alice that you can even find her on the Web, in "gender-free
pronoun" English, a linguistic innovation as bizarre as any of Carroll's
own: "So ey was considering in eir own mind (as well as ey
could, for the hot day made em feel very sleepy and stupid)
whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of
getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes
ran close by em."
This strange, if politically
dutiful, attempt to liberate Alice from the bonds of gender paradoxically
suggests the basis of her continuing appeal: Like the Victorians, 20th century
readers thrill to the spectacle of imperiled
little-girlhood, the essence of vulnerability. If there has ever been a time
and a place more voyeuristically fascinated than Victorian England by the
doomed innocence represented by little girls, it would have to be the
contemporary U.S. Like the Victorians, we think of "innocence" as the
opposite of "sex." Like the Victorians, we believe that little girls
are asexual and therefore incarnate innocence. And like the Victorians, we are
both fascinated and appalled by the spectacle of little girls' inevitable
development into agents or objects of sexual desire. As testimony to our
obsession with the sexual vulnerability of little girls, we have JonBenet Ramsey and faces on milk cartons; the Victorians
had the "white slave trade" (the rumored
kidnapping and sale of little girls into prostitution abroad) and Lewis
Carroll.
True, there's no sex or
prurience apparent in "Alice in Wonderland." Alice is as determinedly
pre-pubescent as Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz," with her
bouncing braids and breasts bound flat. The grown-ups who menace Alice -- even
those who take human form, like the Queen of Hearts -- are easily destroyed.
"You're nothing but a pack of cards!" Alice screams triumphantly at
the end of the book before waking up, safe and sound, beside her sister. And
we, too, feel safe and sound with Alice: To celebrate her innocence is to
assure ourselves of our own; to cheer her adventures is to declare our
solidarity with the spontaneous anti-authoritarianism of the child.
Carroll himself, who sometimes
photographed little girls in the nude, revealing or imparting a disconcertingly
sexual shimmer, probably knew better -- that "girlish innocence" is a
grown-up fairy tale, and one we often seem to construct solely in order to
fantasize its destruction. To keep Alice's comic innocence from producing
tragic results, Carroll quarantines her in Wonderland, protected by the quick
reversals of dream-logic and her magical ability to overcome, as needed, one of
the major disadvantages of childhood -- small stature. Even so, sinister voices
do whisper throughout Alice's adventures. In "The Walrus and the Carpenter,"
the long, mock-tragic poem in "Through the Looking Glass," the young
oysters disregard one of the primary childhood cautions -- never talk to
strangers -- to walk with the walrus and the carpenter along the beech. The
oysters wind up eaten, every one, while the walrus and the carpenter weep
hypocritical tears over their dinner. ("'I weep for you,' the Walrus said:/'I deeply sympathize.'/With sobs and tears he sorted
out/those of the largest size.")
But Wonderland's most
dangerous specter is not the predatory stranger, or
even the reader who thrills guiltily to tales of predation, but the forthright
curiosity of Alice herself. Unlike the oysters, she knows the rules. Before
accepting the invitation of a bottle to "Drink Me," she makes sure
it's not marked "Poison." Having obtained this rather minimal
assurance, however, she goes on to partake eagerly of every size-altering
substance she is offered, not to mention taking advice from disappearing cats,
smoking caterpillars and cracked eggs. In fact, she enters into the
hallucinatory logic of Wonderland and its size-altering potions with the gusto
of a college freshman discovering the mind-bending possibilities of dope. The
faint menace of her foolhardiness and her surroundings prevent Alice from
developing the saccharine poisoning that can afflict icons of girlish innocence
(think Shirley Temple).
It was the saccharine, not the
acid, that inspired the best-known 20th century Alice
of all: the golden-haired, blue-frocked heroine of Walt Disney's 1951 animated
film "Alice in Wonderland." Disney launched Alice's career as an
emblem of perky innocence, an animated Doris Day for the elementary school set.
The Disney Alice is pert, but passive; an observer, not an adventurer. The
things we remember from her story -- the Cheshire Cat fading around his grin,
the Caterpillar seated on his mushroom smoking his hookah -- happen to, not
because of, her. This Alice is the feminine version of that icon of
all-American boyhood, Tom Sawyer. We remember Tom for his Yankee ingenuity
(getting his friends to whitewash the fence while he lolls about), Alice for
her dedication to the rules. "I don't think they play at all fairly,"
she complains of the Queen's croquet ground, as she tucks under her arm the
flamingo that serves as her mallet, "and they don't seem to have any rules
in particular." The Disney "Alice" reinforces a suspicion that
boys are truly American (laconic but ingenious), and girls are merely English
(verbally adept but conformist).
The Disney film was so square
that it could, with no sense of transgression, depict its Alice nibbling on a
"magic mushroom" and conversing with a hookah-toking
caterpillar -- a perfect emblem of the '50s later celebrated nostalgically (in
movies like "Grease") as the decade of Good Clean Fun. The culture of
the '60s, by contrast, provided do-it-yourself rabbit-holes and established
Wonderland as part of the psychedelic scenery. The Jefferson Airplane's Grace
Slick celebrated Alice as an intrepid pharmaceutical explorer, a drug culture
heroine: "One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small/And the
ones that mother gives you/Don't do anything at all/Go
ask Alice, when she's 10 feet tall."
This Alice had lost
her innocence but maintained her comic ability to mock the pretensions of the
grown-up -- now recast as the straight -- world. But retrospect, as Alice
would not have been surprised to learn, arrives faster and faster. By 1973, a
mere six years later, Slick's triumphantly transgressive
Alice had given way to the sensationalism of "Go Ask Alice," the
anonymous morality tale of a teenage girl's drug-induced demise, complete with
scenes of teen sex that thrilled generations of middle-school kids to whom (I
speak from experience) the moral was of secondary interest. As banal in her depravity
as Disney's golden-haired girl was in her innocence, this Alice fulfilled the
tragic threat always lurking in Wonderland: The next metamorphosis may be
irreversible.
So Alice has aged since she
emerged from the pen of her creator (Carroll, whose reversible metamorphoses
expressed his wish that little girls remain eternally little, would have been
horrified) and her repertoire of adventures is somewhat larger. But she
continues to inhabit simultaneously the comic and the tragic potentials of girlish
innocence -- escaping a dull suburban future (with the assistance of hash
brownies) in Alison Habens' hilarious 1985 novel
"Dreamhouse" and navigating the modern
wonderland of an eating-disorder clinic in Stephanie Grant's "Passion of
Alice" (1995).
The delicate balance these Alices maintain between innocence and transgression, comedy
and pathos, voyeur and victim collapses completely in A. M. Homes'
psychological thriller "The End of Alice" (1996). Homes gives us two
Alice heroines, one (so named) just pre- and one (anonymous) just
post-pubescent, along with a confessedly pedophilic
male narrator, telling his story from prison. Both heroines attempt to navigate
the wonderland of incipient sexuality on their own terms. The younger, who
courts the attention of the narrator, ends up dead; the elder, a college
freshman who indulges her own dubious infatuation with a 12-year-old boy and
develops an epistolary relationship with the narrator, ends up humiliated and
haunted.
In its own way, "The End
of Alice" is as moralistic as its square older cousin, "Go Ask
Alice." ("Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it," as
Carroll's tiresome duchess remarks.) We are all, Homes implies, both victim and
voyeur, courting, longing for and sharing the pedophile's
touch -- the reader impatient for the gory details of the narrator's story, as
well as the two heroines who think they can harness his desire. What passes for
innocence is merely a kind of corrupt boredom; comedy lies only in the abrupt
reversals of victimization. The anonymous college girl's conclusion could apply
to any one of the characters in the novel (as well as to the reader herself):
"Despite my best efforts, I am always the one who gets fucked."
Certainly this grim conclusion
is -- as Homes' title implies -- one logical outcome of the story of imperiled childhood, and particularly of imperiled girlhood. Luckily, we are not required to accept
it as the only one. The world is no more full of pedophiles than it is of golden-haired Alices.
And surely a little adult voyeurism is understandable. After all, children are
not only small and cute, but also, at least in our imaginations, larger than
life. They are bundles of potential -- physical as well as mental -- while we
ourselves have dwindled into the confines of the actual.
In "Through the Looking
Glass," Tweedledee shows Alice the sleeping Red
King and tells her: "You're only a sort of thing in his dream!" Upset
by the thought of not being "real," Alice afterwards tries to puzzle
it out: "He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his
dream, too!" Children dream adults, and adults dream children; like all
relationships based on fantasy and projection, this one has the potential for
both humor and horror. It's Alice's ability to
express the humor and the horror that accounts for
her long and successful career as a little girl.
Text written in July 30, 1997
by Laura Green (assistant professor of English at Yale)
Text
taken from http://www.salon.com/july97/alice970730.html
(last viewed in 3rd November 2008 at 19.00 pm)
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