Alice as a Role Model for Young Women in Carroll's Two Novels

Introduction

Lloyd contends that the 145-year-old story by Lewis Carroll and its 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 can 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 herself, she is welcomed into a beautiful world where she possesses wisdom, power, and prestige.

Among works of children's literature, the two books by Carroll known as the Alice books were received by the public as simple children's stories. While they did not garner significant critical acclaim, they were popular enough among young readers to be a commercial success and to remain continuously in print. Almost immediately following publication, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was established as an icon of children's literature and spawned a whole genre of children's tales. The first adaptation of Alice appeared even before the sequel Through the Looking-Glass. This essay assesses the extent to which Alice may be considered a role model for young women, drawing on both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Young Women's Characteristics as Presented in the Literature

In these books, Alice is presented as an innocent and ideal girl embodying the characteristics many expect 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. As Gorham puts it: "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, and readers, these girls are seduced by — and in turn 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, and because their stories concern the growth of a girl into a woman, the question of who or what controls their bodies becomes of significant interest; 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. 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 her adventures does not preclude agency. Though at times petulant, frustrated, and even whiny, 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 (Carroll, 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 find something interesting, as evidenced in her request for directions from the Cheshire Cat:

Alice's Curiosity and Paradoxical Identity

"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 long enough!" (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 whichever 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). Her desire to seek out 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 extends 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 or mastering it. Though the curious often end up acquiring sought-after knowledge, success is not necessarily the result or even the intention, 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 partly from the fear of a woman acquiring knowledge as a threat to patriarchy. 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" — both inquisitive and strange — a double meaning Carroll certainly 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 to 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 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 carry 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, drugs, and writing, which in turn provide an alibi for her active but not goal-driven explorations.

Conclusion

Alice's story ends with a resolution that removes the child from the scene and projects her into the future, apparently softening the power of her storytelling by relegating it to the realm of the domestic and denying it the permanence or seriousness of publication. But at the same time, this sentimentalizing gesture — with its disruptively constructed ending — points to the constructedness of attempting to shut down the queer girlhood of these stories and to designate childhood and adulthood as distinct, clear-cut categories. Rather than domesticating the girls' wild adventures, perhaps the endings infuse the domestic with the covert but threatening danger of girls' and women's adventurousness. Rather than softening the power and danger of childhood by redeeming it with maternity, perhaps the texts reveal the covert power and danger — the potentially subversive threat — of a mother's storytelling.