Alice to Extent Alice Considered Role-Model Young

Alice To extent Alice considered role-model young women? According 2 Alice novels: Alice's adventures Wonderland through Looking Glass Lloyd contends that "the 145-year-old story by Lewis Carroll and the story's heroine, a seven-year-old girl, has much to teach twenty-first century young women." According to Lloyd "Alice's direct, candid approach to life is something to which today's college-aged women relate. They understand the story of a young woman who has the world before her, ready to embark on life, who changes herself, primarily by eating and drinking, to fit in.

She encounters all types, tests herself, tastes life around her, and once she learns the right combination to fit in and be comfortable with her, she's welcomed into a beautiful world where she possesses wisdom, power, and prestige." Among children literature, two books by Carroll known as Alice books were received by the public as simple children's literature. While they did not garner critical acclaim, they were popular enough among the young to be a commercial success and to remain continuously in print.

Almost immediately following publication, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland found itself placed as an icon of children's literature and it spawned a whole genre of children's tales. The first adaptation of Alice appeared even before the sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What.

In this essay the author aims to assess to what extent Alice may be considered as a role model for young women in the context of Alice two novels; Alice's adventures Wonderland and Through Looking Glass Role of Alice in "Alice in wonderland" and "through Looking Glass" Young Women characteristics as presented in the Literature In this book Alice has been presented as an innocent girl and an ideal girl with the characteristics people want to see in young women.

Historian Deborah Gorham (1982) asserts that, if the ideal Victorian woman was expected to be "dependent on men and submissive to them […], innocent, pure, gentle, and self-sacrificing," then the ideal Victorian girl could fulfill the feminine role even more thoroughly, since the emphasis on innocence and passivity was clearly contradicted by the active parenting and sexual experience of the adult married woman: "Much more successfully than her mother, a young girl could represent the quintessential angel in the house.

Unlike an adult woman, a girl could be perceived as a wholly unambiguous model of feminine dependence, childlike simplicity and sexual purity"(Kincaid, 1992). Far from being blank slates waiting to be inscribed, however, the girl-children in Alice's Adventures quest for identity and experience. As figures for writers, storytellers, readers, lovers of texts, these girls are seduced by and seduce through the pharmakon, the metaphor Derrida chooses to represent writing, due to the dangerous pleasures its doubled definition ("cure" and "poison") suggests.

The pharmakon in these texts appears as a drug-figure that entices the girls to stray from conventional femininity into a land of textual uncertainty and linguistic play. Because of their place as both female and children, though -- and because their stories are about the growth of a girl into a woman or "self" -- the problem of who or what controls their bodies becomes of significant interest in the texts; Alice's famously rapid size changes reveal a fascination with the connections and disruptions between the body and the imagination.

The girls in Alice's Adventures behave naughtily -- straying from their families, exploring the world sensually, ignoring good advice, and generally resisting the logic presented to them.

Yet the drug as cover for bad behavior, while important, is not the only reason to pair the figure of the opiate with the figure of the girl; after all, until they are domesticated into womanhood One of the many reasons Alice stands out as a fictional character, enduring as an icon even now in the twenty-first century, lies in the way the text depicts her as exhibiting a surprising amount of freedom, courage, and tenacity, even as it constructs her within girlhood (and future womanhood).

Alice defies the typical standards for Victorian heroines in her own way. The lack of mastery that characterizes Alice's adventures does not preclude agency.

Though at times petulant, frustrated, and even whiney, Alice never laments her decision to follow the White Rabbit and never makes it her goal to return home, though she does eventually end up there.(Carrol, 2000) Though she sometimes seeks direction and seems more interested in arriving at destinations than in the journey that leads to them, she is also clearly motivated by a desire to something interesting, as evidenced in her request for directions from the Cheshire Cat: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where," said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you walk," said the Cat. " -- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure enough to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk far enough!" Alice felt this could not be denied […] (Slick, 1967) Alice's lack of preference for where she goes confirms her as a wanderer, "burning with curiosity," moving indiscriminately from place to place, moment to moment, as one leads to another (Richard, 1995).

Her one passion seems to be new sights and experiences; after leaving the Cheshire Cat, she decides between visiting the Mad Hatter and the March Hare by choosing which one seems more unusual: "I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; 'the March Hare will be much the most interesting'" (Auerbach, 1973. P. 66). Of course, her decision makes no difference, as they both end up at the tea party, but her desire to see the more interesting" of the two is one of the few consistencies in the text.

Alice's curiosity, her tendency to be, as Robert Hornback (1993) calls her, "game for anything," lends her a larger than-life iconic status that seeps well beyond the pages of her narrative; an icon for female exploration and courage, Alice has been cheekily called by one critic "the hippest girl in Victorian England, the first postmodern heroine" (Moore back matter, 2006. P. 10).

Curiosity itself requires a paradoxical tendency toward both passivity and activity: the curious person at once actively seeks knowledge, but also passively follows the lead of the text rather than somehow overpowering, mastering, or succeeding at it. Though the curious often end up acquiring the sought-after knowledge, success is not necessarily the result or even the intention of the curious, as the curious often seek and question for the very sake of perpetuating curiosity.

Curiosity can also be a dangerous activity, particularly for women; Hilary Schor (2005) writes, "From at least Milton onwards female curiosity has been a powerful and rather terrifying force; and in the nineteenth century, […] stories of female curiosity carry with them an equally terrifying prohibition" (238). This terrifying power derives from the fear of a woman acquiring knowledge -- particularly as a threat to patriarchy -- but an additionally terrifying aspect of Alice is her willing subjection to Wonderland.

Schor's argument about curiosity hinges on the double-meaning of the word "curious," as both "inquisitive" and "strange," a double meaning Carroll certain plays on numerous times when he calls Alice a "curious child." In one such passage, the text intimates Alice's doubleness and the incoherence of her above-ground identity, describing how she is given both to punishing and playing tricks on herself: "once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people" (18).

Thus Alice occupies a doubled, sometimes even paradoxical state: she is active and passive, punisher and punished, trickster and dupe, child and woman, inquisitive and strange, subject and subjected. Auerbach (1973) writes that "Alice is simultaneously Wonderland's slave and its queen, its creator and destroyer as well as its victim" (49). There is something paradoxically freeing and confining in this doubled, uniquely feminine position -- and both its freedom and its confinement carries terrifying possibilities.

It is difficult to imagine Alice as a male character, not only because of Carroll's professed adoration of girls and dislike for boys, but also because one imagines a male character would generally be seeking some purpose, some conquering mission, or at the very least a battle. For all of its danger and sexual connotation, wandering through Wonderland is a distinctly feminine activity, one that both complies with certain assumptions about femininity and, under the cover of those assumptions, subverts them.

Alice's (often misguided) attempts at politeness, combined with social assumptions about the passivity of girls, allow Alice to submit to dreams and drugs and writing, which in turn provide an alibi for her active but not goal-driven explorations.

In his Derridean reading of the Alice books, Julian Wolfreys (1997) conceptualizes identity as a kind of external structure, as architecture, and posits that Alice understands herself in relation to domestic structures: "The narratives of both texts [Alice's Adventures and Through the Looking Glass] are a result of Alice entering and emerging from houses, domestic and internal spaces.

Yet we read in the textual use of such supposedly familiar figures a constant delegitimizing mockery of our knowledge of the architectural, that knowledge of the domestic space by which we orient our identities" (36). Wolfreys argues that the Alice books de-stabilize the notion of identity, revealing the repressive nature of "structures" (rules, systems, laws) that attempt to stabilize identity.

As Alice measures herself against architecture (always finding herself to be the wrong size), the strange versions of the domestic she encounters force her to recognize this repressive stabilization, and she "is freed from repressive know ledges and identities" in the process (60).

Yet while he deftly discusses how the text makes clear that external structures and forces have constructed Alice's identity, and furthermore that this identity is neither coherent nor stable, Wolfreys never explicitly addresses the idea that, as a girl, Alice has a particular relationship to the domestic, given it was the realm of the woman in Victorian England. Another characteristics of Alice is her tendency to do experiments.

The desire to break out of the domestic constraints of the nursery in search of one's own identity, this desire also results in profound alienation from a changing body, which Alice at one point expresses by worrying she has grown so estranged from her feet that, if she is not kind to them, "perhaps they won't walk the way I want to go" -- a serious problem for a girl fond of wandering (Richard Feldstein, 1995).

Alice's confrontations with suddenly estranged domestic structures announce the beginning of that transition from child to caretaker. Victorian girl-children may have been encouraged in polite feminine behaviors and play that mimicked adult women's activities, but they were also permitted to engage in the less restrained play more commonly associated with boys.

Gillian Brown (1999) remarks that while nineteenth century "[t]oys, games, and activities designed for girls stressed domestic concerns," girls nevertheless "often played just like boys": "Even as gendered play aims to direct children, it is first and foremost an imaginary occupation, subject to the interest and whims of different children" (89-90). Thus Alice, in her pursuit of the "interesting," breaks from the conventional behavior of the ideal gentle girl, but lively, imaginative play in girls was tentatively accepted as part of their temporary pre-adult behavior.

Therefore, part of the queerness of Alice's adventures also relies on the distinction between temporarily acceptable girl behavior and more permanently acceptable woman behavior; the drug substances reveal to Alice the difficulties she may encounter in making this transition While drug-like substances do not accompany each of Alice's ontological experiments, they generally correspond with her biggest questions about her own identity.

One such scene, in which the instability of Alice's status (or stature) as a "little girl" also raises questions of the female relationship to authorship, authority, and the domestic sphere, occurs when the White Rabbit mistakes Alice for his housemaid and orders her to retrieve a pair of gloves and a fan from his house. Accepting this domestic duty while privately believing the White Rabbit will be surprised to find out she's not the housemaid, Alice runs off on her mission.

At this point in the story, Alice is smaller than her original size, but she is not particularly engaged in looking for a cure for this malady. Having found the gloves and fan and on her way out of the house -- that is, while on one of the few clear paths in the tale, almost having completed an actual cause-effect task -- her eyes fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking glass.

There was no label this time with the words "DRINK ME," but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. 'I know something interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself, 'whenever I eat or drink anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does.

(38) Once on a path, Alice easily becomes tempted by the drug contained within the already drug-like text; she cannot resist the lure of the drug which will produce "something interesting." This bottle is not marked with an injunctive as the first one was.

Indeed, though she hopes the substance will make her grow again (which it does), there is certainly no reason, aside from wish fulfillment, for her to think it will produce this effect, especially since the first time she swallowed something from a bottle, it produced the opposite effect by making her smaller. Thus Alice reveals herself once again to be motivated by experimentation rather than goals.

In the Rabbit's house, when Alice opts for "something interesting" rather than completing her task, she promptly becomes monstrous, growing far too large for the house to hold her; after taking on the role of housemaid, she veers off her assigned course and, for no reason other than curiosity, indulges in an activity that reveals the limitations of the domestic sphere. On her search for "something interesting," that interesting something, the pharmakon, at once exposes Alice's general entrapment by the domestic sphere: her large size, which causes.