![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This article is an attempt to engage with the question ‘Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a feminist book?’ Arguments from historical, psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives are presented and discussed. By summarizing and engaging with both sides of the debate, this article detects the source of the unresolved conflicts surrounding whether Carroll’s novel is a feminist text to be the different sides’ distinctive interpretations of Alice’s social identification. The pro-Alice-as-feminist-icon camp simply identifies her as an active and potentially subversive female role model for women, and thus subsumes Alice under the general category of women by assumption, whereas the iconoclastic camp, including the author of this article, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an anti-feminist text, purports to differentiate the role of little girls and the role of adult women in the Victorian period. It argues that Alice’s supposedly unconventionally unfeminine characteristics do not necessarily imply Carroll’s enthusiasm for women’s liberation from marginality and domesticity, and instead they reveal his misogynistic fear of adult women and his pessimistic and nostalgic mourning for the loss of girlhood innocence and the inevitable corruption that ensues. The fictional character’s conformist ideologies are also detected in her participation in the oppressive system and mindset of British imperialism, which paradoxically further confines her in the oppressed domain of female inferiority and domesticity.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was submitted to the English Division at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo Campus as my Bachelor of Arts dissertation in 2014. I thank Professor Geoff Hall and Professor Matthew Beedham for their guidance during the writing of this article. I also express my sincerest gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of Women: A Cultural Review for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1I am aware that feminist criticism is compatible with a range of analytical methods, which may affect the perceived feminist qualities of a text. For example, scholars in reception studies may argue that a story's historical origin and its author's psychological motivations are all irrelevant to its feminist potentials as we should instead focus on the effects it has had on the readers and the wider society. The challenges these methods present are not specific to AAW but may significantly affect the feminist debate in this article. I therefore emphasize that this article is primarily situated in textual analysis.
3The five appearances of ‘curiosity’ are: ‘burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it [the White Rabbit]’ (10); ‘He [the Mad Hatter] had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity’ (60); ‘Alice had been looking over his [the Mad Hatter’s] shoulder with some curiosity’ (62); ‘the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the Cat's head with great curiosity’ (75); and ‘Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity’ (90).
4Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has also noted what he calls ‘Carroll's sensitivity to small things', which became ‘especially sharpened when he wrote to his child-friends'. As AAW alone ‘contains more than a hundred repetitions’ of the word ‘little’—in phrases such as ‘little golden key’, ‘little three legged table’ and ‘little door about fifteen inches high’—Alice as the ‘little’ girl is but a symptom of Carroll's deployment of the word, ‘as if casting a spell’ (see Douglas-Fairhurst Citation2016: 39).
5For example, the White Rabbit merely talks in soliloquies and does not guide Alice after she follows him to the hall; it takes a long time for Alice to intrigue the Mouse in the tear pool and to engage it in a helpful dialogue; the animals drag Alice into the chaotic Caucus Race without explaining the rules, force her to give out prizes, and then leave her alone, crying again, in the hall; after following the White Rabbit again to his house, she is trapped there; and after she manages to escape from there, she is intimidated and frightened by a supersized puppy. These incidents all generate confusion, fear and a sense of helplessness in Alice, who even has doubts about her own identity: ‘Who in the world am I?’ (Carroll Citation1898: 17–18).
6For example, after entering the Duchess's smoky house, she sees a cook randomly throwing everything around, almost hitting the crying baby the Duchess is holding; she hears the Duchess sing a song with violent lyrics—‘Speak roughly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes’ (Carroll Citation1898: 54); the Duchess, foreshadowing the upcoming appearance of Alice's ultimate adult antagonist the Queen, commands the cook to ‘chop off her [Alice's] head!’ (54); after Alice joins the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she is tricked into answering the Hatter's answerless riddles and she sees the Hatter and the Match Hare constantly pinching the Dormouse and violently pushing him into a teapot; and, finally, she reaches the Queen's croquet game and hears her shouting ‘Off with his/her/their head(s)!’ all the time (it is uttered eight times by the Queen in the text).
7This gradual growth of self-esteem in the face of the danger of being assimilated is evident in her different physical and mental reactions at various stages of her encounters. She makes her first secret complaint after she meets the semi-human Frog-Footman—‘she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!”’ (Carroll Citation1898: 52); she begins to deliver her own opinions in front of the haggish Duchess—‘“Which [referring to the Duchess's opinion that if everyone just minds their own business, the world will go round faster] would not be an advantage”, said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge’ (54); her first sharp judgement is uttered at the tea party, as she comments on the Queen's habit of ordering decapitations—‘“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice’ (64); and she is not afraid to confront directly such a scary figure when the Queen demands her to tell her about the three gardeners—‘“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It's no business of mine”’ (72).