Contextualizing Alice HUM 2250: Film Adaptation

Summer 2011Dr. PerdigaoMay 19, 2011

Adapting Alice • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o-19MnWlUc

• http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2011/04/21/alice-madness-returns-preview/1

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU31ejq3uSk&feature=related

Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars (2006)• Oxford England. July 1863.

• Everyone thought she had made it up, and she had tolerated more taunting and teasing from other children, more lectures and punishments from grown-ups, than any eleven-year-old should have to bear. But now, after four years, it had arrived: her last, best chance to prove to them all that she had been telling the truth. A college scholar had thought enough of her history to write it up as a book. (Beddor 1)

• “Oh!” Alice’s Adventures Underground? What sort of title was that? And why was her name misspelled? She had told Dodgson how to correctly spell her name, had even written it out for him. “By Lewis Carroll?” she read with growing concern. (2)

• She skipped ahead, turning page after page. The Pool of Tears, the caterpillar, her aunt Redd: It had all been twisted into nonsense. (3)

The Looking Glass Wars (2006)• “Erase it all. I will no longer be Odd Alice. Odd Alice must die. . . Give up her

so-called ridiculous, fantastical delusions and enter wholeheartedly into the world around her. Become just like everyone else” (149).

• “they might have thought him mad—a man in search of a fictional character” (154)

• “Her name was misspelled, but . . . Wonderland? Surely, it was his Alyss. How could it be anyone else? The girl in the illustrations looked nothing like her, and yet it could not be coincidence. Hatter’s future path became clear: To find Alyss, he would first have to find the book’s author, Lewis Carroll” (156).

• “She didn’t bother trying to understand it all; it was history—boring boring boring” (14).

• “you can’t imagine everything because you don’t know everything there is to imagine. That’s precisely where the lessons come in.” (23)

Postmodern Play• “Aural novel”

• http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/SeaRedd.htm

• http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/ThruLookingGlass.htm

• http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/Shattered.htm

Source Material• Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), born 1832 (five years before Victoria ascends

throne), dies in 1898 at age 65 (three years before the queen)

• As “model Victorian”

• Dodgson as author, mathematician, teacher, photographer; books read in relation to linguistics, semiotics, game theory, and philosophy

• Born in Cheshire, oldest of eleven children; family moved to Yorkshire; 1850 entered Christ Church College, Oxford, intending to follow his father into the clergy

• 1854 awarded bachelor of arts degree; 1857 master’s

• Became Revered Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1861 as deacon of the Church of England but not a practicing minister; fellow at Christ Church College

• Lutwidge Charles (first and middle transposed)=Ludovicus Carolus (Latin)=Lewis Carroll (anglicized)

Illustrating Alice• July 4, 1862, Dodgson and friend Robinson Duckworth take daughters of Christ

Church’s Dean Liddell—Lorina, Alice, and Edith—on a boating trip on the Isis (Thames River, near Oxford). Alice was ten.

• Girls ask Dodgson to tell them a story and, after he creates the Alice story, Alice asks him to write it out. He gives her the story in November of 1864 as a Christmas gift—that text is titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

• Encouraged to publish it by those at the deanery; Dodgson adds chapters and works with John Tenniel as the illustrator; changes title to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

• Published in 1865 by Clarendon Press—Dodgson recalls two thousand copies after Tenniel states reservations about the illustrations; printing is redone. Through the Looking-Glass follows in 1871.

• http://people.virginia.edu/~ds8s/carroll/dodgson.html

The Purpose of Fairy Tales• Gillian Avery’s 1965 essays

• “Fairy Tales with a Purpose”

• Problems with fairy tales—ability to discern fiction from reality and no educational value

• First English collection—Popular Fairy Tales; or, a Lilliputian Library (1818), moralistic

• 1840-1850 literary fairy tale emerges but still reformation of protagonist

The Pleasure of Fairy Tales• “Fairy Tales for Pleasure”

• Influence of Brothers Grimm, interest in folklore and mythology on rise, placement of Alice

• Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens—child as romanticized

• Shift in late 19th century to create gap—nostalgia of adults, tension

• Child as means of escape, means of “regression towards the irresponsibility of youth, childhood, infancy and ultimately nescience itself” (328)

Placing Children’s and Adolescent Literature• Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that in children’s literature “much of the action

focuses on one child who learns to feel more secure in the confines of her or his immediate environment, usually represented by family and home. Children’s literature often affirms the child’s sense of Self and her or his personal power” (2-3), but, in the adolescent novel, protagonists must “learn about the social forces that have made them what they are” and “learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function, including family; school; the church; government; social constructions of sexuality, gender, race, class” (3).

• Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that “As during those adolescent years one endlessly re-created oneself, trying out in one’s head—sometimes even tentatively in the real world—different possible roles, so now one re-invents those past selves, converting the shifting shapes of adolescence into images that make retrospective sense” (4).

“and what is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?”

• Didactic literature

• “Golden Age” of children’s literature

• Place of fairy tales—Brothers Grimm and Anderson

• Girls’ development—through reading—notions of girlhood

• Authorial crisis: Carroll not the real author (Shakespeare theory); Queen Victoria as author (based on her diaries); Mark Twain as author

Clark, Beverly Lyon. “Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books: The Wonder of Wonderland.” Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 44-

52.

“and what is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?”

• Religious allegories; psychoanalytic readings; representations of historical contexts (Alice as Queen Elizabeth I)

• Relation to Romanticism (freedom, independence, nature), critique of Victorian attitudes or substantiates them (court system, educational system [memorizing poems])

• Modern as well as postmodern characteristics: “associative, non-sequential plotting”; self-consciousness (metafiction), if self is a fiction, reality as subjective

Clark, Beverly Lyon. “Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books: The Wonder of Wonderland.” Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 44-

52.

“Well! What are you?”• “One critic has conclusively proved that Alice was not written by Lewis Carroll

and that the real author was Queen Victoria. An earlier writer toys with the notion that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an allegory of the Oxford Movement, another an allegory of Darwinian evolution. Still another tells us that the story of Alice represents Dodgson’s own birth trauma in the isolated Cheshire rectory where he was born. Other psychoanalysts tell us that the book is about a woman in labor, that falling down the rabbit hole is a hidden expression of Dodgson’s secret wish for coitus, that Alice is a phallus (that one, at least, rhymes), or that she’s a fetus. Or, if we prefer, we can take the view that she is a transvestite Christ. A more recent essay claims that Dodgson was the first ‘acidhead,’ while Kenneth Burke tells us that the story is about toilet training and bowel movements. . . .”

Cohen, Morton N. “Lewis Carroll and Victorian Morality.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Marie C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004.

3- 19. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Florida Institute of Technology. 19. Jan. 2010

http://go.galegroup.com/exproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.

Applied Alice-isms• Alice in Wonderland Syndrome:

A syndrome of distorted space, time and body image. The patient with the Alice in Wonderland syndrome has a feeling that their entire body or parts of it have been altered in shape and size. The syndrome is usually associated with visual hallucinations. The majority of patients with the syndrome have a family history of migraine headache or have overt migraine themselves. The syndrome was first described in 1955 by the English psychiatrist John Todd (1914-1987). Todd named it, of course, for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lewis Carroll suffered from severe migraine. Also known as a Lilliputian hallucination.(http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=24174)

• Alice and Pop Psychology• Context of dreams—frame narrative• Freud, Jung, Campbell• Infantile psyche• Pastoral daydream/“escapist fantasy”• Children’s literature

reassertion of unified self• Victorian constructions of gender

Alice’s world and her role within it, even within Wonderland

Rackin, Donald. “Through the Looking Glass: Alice Becomes an I.” Children’s Literature

Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 68-87.

Alice in Crisis• Applied rules and logic: mouse, caterpillar, pigeon

• Language games

• Identity crisis

• “Who are you?”; “What are you?”

• Redefining the self

• Body reconfiguration

• “Civilization” and “propriety”

Dividing Alice• Characteristics of the Victorian (Victorianisms)

• Notions of education (memorization, standardized forms)

• Uses of storytelling (didacticism, metafiction)

• Identity construction (girl, woman)

• Language (conventions, language games)

Layering• Realism, moral didacticism vs. fairy tale (as Victorian conventions)

• Victorian children’s book—representing “girl angels fated for an early death” or “impossibly virtuous little ladies,” or “naughty girls who eventually reform in response to heavy adult pressure” (qtd. in Kelly 13).

• Moralizing

Duchess’ example

• Dream vision (form dating back to middle ages) but this is episodic, third person point of view

• Dream within a dream

Garden

Symbolic Patterns• Romanticism of the garden—changes

• Red roses

• Romanticism in Alice’s emotions

• Drowning in her tears (uncontrollable emotions)

• Language games

• Duchess, baby, pig

• Instability of identity, forms

• Cheshire-Cat’s role—question about the baby

• Relative definitions of madness—Cheshire-Cat’s answer

Stuff and Nonsense• Curtseying and falling

• “Curiouser and curiouser” (13)

• “Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking” (14)

• “I wonder if I’ve changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (15)

• “However, the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify!” (16); “I’m sure those are not the right words” (16)

Deconstructive Turns• “There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!” (29).

• “Keep your temper” (36).

• “It is wrong from beginning to end” (41).

• “Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something” (45).

Structuring• Chapter I: Down the Rabbit Hole

(Rabbit, shrinks)

• Chapter II: The Pool of Tears

(grows, Rabbit, fan, shrinks, Mouse)

• Chapter III: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

(Dodo, Mouse)

• Chapter IV: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill

(Rabbit, Mary Ann, grows, house, Lizard Bill, shrinks, puppy)

• Chapter V: Advice from a Caterpillar

(Caterpillar, grows, Pigeon, shrinks)

• Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper

(Fish-Footman, Frog-Footman, Duchess, Cook, baby, pig, Cheshire-Cat)

• Chapter VII: A Mad Tea-Party

(March Hare, Hatter, Dormouse)

• Chapter VIII: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground

(Cards, King and Queen of Hearts, croquet, Cheshire-Cat)

• Chapter IX: The Mock Turtle’s Story

(Duchess, Gryphon, Mock Turtle)

Structuring• Chapter X: The Lobster-Quadrille

(Mock Turtle, Gryphon)

• Chapter XI: Who Stole the Tarts?

(King and Queen of Hearts, Knave of Hearts, White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse, guinea-pigs, Duchess’ cook)

• Chapter XII: Alice’s Evidence

(goldfish, Lizard, White Rabbit, Knave, King, Queen, sister)

Revisions • “How doth the little—” (16)

• Mouse’s tale (25)

• Book written about Alice (29)

• “You are old, Father William” (36-40)

• “Speak roughly” song (48-49)

• “Twinkle, twinkle little bat” (57)

• Dormouse’s story of three sisters, Elsie, Lacie, Tillie (58)

• Mock Turtle’s education (76-77)

• Chapter X: “Lobster-Quadrille”; “‘Tis the voice of the sluggard”; “Turtle Soup”

Lessons• Alice’s education (lobster story)

• “I mean what I say” (81).

• “No, no! The adventures first… explanations take such a dreadful time” (82).

• “it sounds uncommon nonsense” (83)

• “What is the use of repeating all that stuff. . . If you don’t explain it as you go on?” (84).

• “Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there” (86); “very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it all” (86).

More Lessons• “this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate” (87).

• “Don’t talk nonsense. . . You know you’re growing too” (88).

• “I’m glad I’ve seen that done. . . I’ve so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, ‘There was some attempt at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court,’ and I never understood what it meant till now” (90).

Verdicts• “Begin at the beginning. . . And go on till you come to the end: then stop” (92).

• “Then the words don’t fit you” (96).

• “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” (96).

• “Stuff and nonsense” (96)

• “Who cares for you? . . . You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (97).

• “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” (98).

• “the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (99)

Stranger than Fiction?• “The strategy of Wonderland is to defeat different systems of logic, to keep details

from culminating into some meaningful order” (Kelly 23).

• “Carroll thus draws a significant parallel between the strangeness of life and that of fiction. Life mirrors fiction; both are fabrications that create the illusion of purpose and meaning. Alice’s adventures, however, ultimately reveal no such purpose and meaning, and her experiences in Wonderland are fundamentally different from those of children in fairy tales. She achieves no particular goal in her adventures nor does she learn a morally uplifting lesson. Indeed, the reader discovers in her dream the terrifying vision of the void that underlies the comfortable structures of the rational world.” (Kelly 24)

• “Without stable points of reference, reason is helpless to defend one against disorder” (Kelly 27).

Kelly, Richard. Introduction. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. By Lewis Carroll. Broadview: Ontario, Canada, 2000. 9-40.

Gender Play• Victorian girl/woman

• Queen/Duchess/sister

• Dichotomies, tensions

• Breakdown of distinctions of “public and private, masculine and feminine, child and adult, nonsense rhymes and edifying poems” (Geer).

• “The Wonderland frames suggest that the tale of Alice’s dream fosters the happy, loving childhood that will enable her development into a good woman and mother, while the Looking-Glass frames anticipate that the tale will create a domestic space powerful enough to keep the stormy world at bay” (Geer).

Rewriting Feminine Space• Upsets codes and conventions

• “Domestic order thus disappears in Wonderland: traditionally feminine spaces such as kitchens, croquet grounds, gardens, and tea-tables are infused with the contentious, competitive values that Victorian domestic ideology ostensibly relegates to the public sphere. In such a world, Alice can gain happiness only by being rebellious and calculating” (Geer).

• Alice as Duchess and Queen of Hearts, shared attributes—not “Self-denying love and service, but individualism and a will to power.” “She does emulate these figures, but the result is conflict rather than harmony” (Geer).

Madness• At trial, Alice as “Screaming, domineering woman” and “For an instant, Alice

assumes a position directly contrary to those prescribed by domestic ideology or ideals of girlhood” (Geer).

• Queen’s own tensions within role—public position as monarch, private role as wife and mother

Reconciling Identity• In the final shift and waking from the dream suggests that “Wonderland’s

anarchy is less an outright reversal of contemporary idealizations of girlhood and domesticity than an exaggeration of tendencies already present within those ideals” (Geer).

• Ultimately intensifies desire for idealized vision of childhood and domesticity so that they remain conventional ideals, reconciling tensions within the period

• Poem at the end of Looking-Glass—validates storytelling as the “best way to satisfy the desires behind mid-Victorian idealizations of childhood” (Geer).

Geer, Jennifer. “All Sorts of Pitfalls and Surprises’: Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 1-24. http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.fit.edu/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=melb26933.

Regression and Repression• Rather than growth and integration, detachment and retreat from adult world

• “cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan”

• Rather than conserving the “fresh innocence of the child,” nourishing the adult, it is reminder of loss and source of regret

• Modern anxiety—connection to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce

• Psychic death, grotesque (waking to dead leaves)

• New Alice at end—in sister’s imaginings—Alice Liddell

Rage Against the Machine• “Blessed Rage: Lewis Carroll and the Modern Quest for Order”

• Darwin’s Origin of Species published less than two years before Dodgson tells the story to Alice Liddell

• Mad tea tables, caucus race metaphors for “nature’s instinctual, unthinking, amoral, and endless round of self-preservation of the permanent schism between the workings of nature and the human mind’s need for final meaning” (Rackin 400).

• “In order to survive, Alice—like the orderly Charles Dodgson—must create a meaningful world out of the morally unintelligible void, and often in opposition to clear evidence from the natural world of which we are an inseparable part” (401).

• As a result, she makes “sense out of nonsense” and meaning out of the void (likening this work to modern existentialism)

• Need at end to return to civilized “order” and cast away nightmares, sentimentalized endings like those we create