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Alice's Invasion of Wonderland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

James R. Kincaid
James R. Kincaid*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus
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Abstract

By rejecting Wonderland and the world behind the Looking-Glass, Alice is rejecting not only the horrifying chaos of meaninglessness but the liberating chaos of comedy as well. Thus, the tone of the Alice books is ambivalent in relation to the protagonist. Insofar as Alice suggests a child taking a well-earned revenge on adult silliness or defeating the anarchy of the subconscious, she is supported. But she just as often appears either as an insensitive child, rudely attacking the gentle and the kindly, or simply as a human being, deeply corrupted by her obsession with nothingness, predation, and death. The presence of almost uncontrolled hostility in the Alice books has been noted, but the fact that this malice is often directed at Alice has not. And it is just this tonal ambivalence which makes these books so baffling and complex.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 92 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 All quotations from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are from The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1963). Further references will be cited in the text by chapter only.

2 “Alice's Journey to the End of Night,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 314, 313, 325.

3 The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952). She says the aim of nonsense is “to defeat disorder with disorder's own weapons” (p. 122).

4 This assumption is particularly important in the arguments of Rackin (see n. 2); Martin Grotjahn, “Alice in Wonderland and the Joy of Regression,” in Beyond Laughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 238–39; Harry Levin, “Wonderland Revisited,” Kenyon Review, 27 (1965), 595; and even William Empson, “Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swain,” in Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950), who says that Alice functions as a judge and that Carroll identifies with her (p. 254). A good many analyses use this assumption as a starting point for a reading which sees Alice as the representative of a child attacking the officious and pedagogic adult, e.g., Doris Benardete, “Alice among the Professors,” Western Humanities Review, 5 (1951), 239–47. The same point is often made by contrasting the Alice books to other stuffy and moralistic children's books of the period : Elsie Leach, “ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in Perspective,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 25 (1964), pp. 9–11, and Donald Rackin, “Corrective Laughter: Carroll's Alice and Popular Children's Literature of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1 (1967), 243–55.

5 William Empson, who provides the best treatment of this theme, also mentions the ambivalence implied in endings which “clearly stand for becoming grown-up and yet in part are a revolt against grown-up behaviour” (Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 270), but he does not treat the more pervasive ambivalence marking the general attitude to Alice.

6 “Alice on the Stage,” The Theatre, 9 (1887), 182.

7 Here are the last four lines :

When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,

Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:

While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,

And concluded the banquet by