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Read the papers and write response paper 1 page MLA format. Quick reading write about what you feel and about going on in the paprs.
“Which is to be master?”: Language as Power in Alice in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass
Beatrice Turner
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 35, Number
3, Fall 2010, pp. 243-254 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by The Library of California State University, Fullerton at 01/04/11 12:33AM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chq/summary/v035/35.3.turner.html
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243“Which is to be master?”
“Which is to be master?”: Language
as Power in Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass
Beatrice Turner
In her introduction to The Case of Peter Pan, Or The Impossibility of Children’s
Fiction, Jacqueline Rose observes that, “[i]f children’s fiction builds an image
of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is
outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp” (2).
Subsequent critics such as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Roderick McGillis, and,
more recently, Perry Nodelman, quite rightly warn us to be wary of attempts
both fictional and critical to “secure” and fix the “real” child. We should be wary,
but we should also look closely at these maneuvers to fix and to define. Under
examination, such moves not only reveal the inherent inequality in the power
relationship between the adult and the child, but they also draw attention to
the gap itself—the space between the child described in the text and the child
outside it who cannot be described.
The Case of Peter Pan claims that children’s literature, produced out of the
desires, fears, and morals of adult authority, speaks only to an adult conception
of what the child is. In this way, Rose argues, children’s literature, literature that
claims to speak to and of the child, is impossible: there is no child, no coherent,
innocent, extra-linguistic entity that literature can speak to and of. Rose states
that “[c]hildren’s fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy
which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality
and the state” (8). In order to display the child as something outside and free
from the taint of language, as Rousseau used Emile to claim, children’s fiction
works hard to suppress the traces of experience, ambiguity, and deception that
are attendant on language (Rose 15–17). Peter Pan, says Rose, was “worked into
a spectacle which gleamed with the overbright innocence characteristic of any
act of repression proclaiming its purity to the world” (72). But in order for
the play to function in that way, she argues, it had to be extracted from a text
Beatrice Turner recently completed her master’s degree at Victoria University of
Wellington. Her thesis focused on Victorian children’s fantasy literature and the problem
of writing of and to the child.
© 2010 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 243–254.
244 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
intended for adults (The Little White Bird, 1902) and cleansed of any troubling
questions about the power inherent in “the act of narration itself” (72).
The Case of Peter Pan claims that these acts of repression and suppression,
of keeping at bay that which most threatens the concept of the innocent child
underpinning children’s fiction, will inevitably fail at certain moments in the
text, at which point the critic will uncover it. Peter Pan is cast as a text that
actively tries to hide its troublesome elements: “what is important about Peter
Pan is the very partial nature of the success with which it removes this problem
[of our relationship to childhood and language] from our view” (41). And yet
these troubling aspects are not necessarily deliberately concealed by children’s
fiction; in fact, quite the opposite happens for at least two crucial “Golden Age”
texts: the Alice books. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through
the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), far from requiring the
recovery of structural oppositions “between the child and the adult, between
oral and written culture, between innocence and decay,” place them very clearly
on the surface of the narrative (Rose 50).1
Rose argues that it is through close attention to the language of the narration
that the critic discovers the repressed halves of these binaries; yet, in the Alice
texts, it is the plot or story that acts out and draws attention to what happens
when an adult wields language. Carroll’s narratives, I will argue, are knowingly
engaged in a debate about authority and definition and deliberately direct the
reader’s gaze to the gap between the fictional child within the book and the
“real” child outside the book. The Alice texts enact the relationships between
subject and object, fiction and reality, through language. To wield language in
these texts, be it intelligible, “normal,” or otherwise, is to have the power to
define, to create, and to destroy. When language ceases, so does existence.
An adult author, Carroll writes a child who, as we shall see, ceases when the
narrative ends. The child only exists in an intelligible way through language,
which is rule-bound and, above all, the province of the adult. I read the Alice
texts as exposing and engaging with precisely those problems that The Case
of Peter Pan identified, and that subsequent critics have expanded upon.
Lesnik-Oberstein has observed that, in viewing childhood through the sort of
focus Rose is interested in, children “are seen primarily as being constituted
by, and constituting, sets of meanings in language” (“Childhood” 2). McGillis
warns that “[l]anguage does not simply state truths; it creates them. We forget
this when we blithely assume that we know what is best for children, that we
know what literature they should and should not read” (19). Lastly, Nodel-
man has recently stated that “[c]hildhood, and a childlike point of view are . . .
constructs of adult minds that adults work to impose on children, in part by
means of children’s literature” (The Hidden Adult 193). That the observations
of The Case of Peter Pan seem to require a sort of constant restating indicates
how tremendously difficult Western culture, and much of children’s literature
criticism, still finds them to accept. Lesnik-Oberstein raised this point when
she commented that nearly twenty years after the publication of The Case of
245“Which is to be master?”
Peter Pan, critics did not seem able to divorce themselves from the notion of
a “real” and innocent child who is somehow free from adult intervention and
creation, and this dependence seems to persist (Introduction 18–19). To ques-
tion the innocence of the child runs counter to persistent myths of childhood
upon which we rely, and yet, as the Alice texts demonstrate, the ontological
status of the child and the possibility of its existence independent of the adult
had already been put up for debate at the very commencement of the “Golden
Age” of children’s literature.
When Alice climbs through the drawing room looking-glass and into what
she calls “Looking-glass House,” one of the first things she finds is a book that
seems to be, she thinks, “all in some language I don’t know” (Looking-Glass
101), but she realizes that “it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it
up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again” (102). However, when
she does so, the poem that she reads seems hardly more intelligible. It is, of
course, “Jabberwocky,” a poem that has (like several other poems, characters,
and quotations in the two Alice texts) taken on a sort of metatextual life outside
the context of the narrative it is part of.
Just over a quarter of the entire poem consists of “nonsense” words made
up by Carroll; making the words “go the right way,” though, does not initially
appear to be of much use in deciphering the text, which famously begins:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. (102)
Alice struggles to make some kind of meaning from this, objecting that “it
seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
before concluding for the time being that “somebody killed something: that’s
clear, at any rate” (103). However, later on she has an encounter with Humpty
Dumpty, who provides her with a set of meanings that Alice is content to accept
in the absence of any others. Her dialogue with Humpty Dumpty is a famous
episode in the text—famous, at least, among academics of the philosophy
of language, since it is “often cited as defining an extreme limit in semantic
theory” (Hancher 49).
While he is happy to help Alice with the “hard words” of “Jabberwocky,”
Humpty Dumpty is also a linguistic outlaw, assigning his own private meanings
arbitrarily and “reduc[ing] to absurdity the nominalist and subjectivist proposal
that words derive their meanings from the intentions of the persons who utter
them” (Hancher 49). The following much-quoted passage illustrates this:
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I
tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
246 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it
means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many
different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—
that’s all” (142).
While this exchange is terribly puzzling for poor Alice, she does not seem to
question in any way Humpty Dumpty’s right or ability to bend language to
his will; in fact, she accepts him as a sort of semantic guide and requests that,
since “[y]ou seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” he explain “Jabber-
wocky” (143). This he proceeds to do, and while the meanings he ascribes to
the “nonsense” words may seem just as arbitrary as the meanings he attributes
to existing words, they do in fact conform to the basic rules of grammar that
inform “Jabberwocky” and that prevent it from being completely unintelligible.
Thus, he informs Alice that “‘[b]rillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon—
the time when you begin broiling things for dinner”; “‘toves’ are something
like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like
corkscrews”; and “[t]o ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To
‘gimble’ is to make holes like a gimlet” (143–44).
His definitions may be completely random, or they may be based on loose
sound and word associations, but Humpty Dumpty is still submissive to the
rules that govern syntax: he observes, for example, that “gyre” and “gimble”
must be verbs given that their association with the “slithy toves,” as something
they “did,” suggests that they are actions carried out by the toves. His defini-
tions, to borrow from Ferdinand de Saussure, play with parole whilst adhering
to the rules of langue. Alice accepts his definitions as originating from someone
who has the power to wield language in a way that she does not, subordinating
herself to Humpty Dumpty even though earlier she had objected to his use of
the word “glory” to mean “a nice knock-down argument.”
What this exchange points to is Alice’s recognition that, even while he em-
ploys a confusing, secretive, and entirely personal system of generating mean-
ing that bears no resemblance to the language she knows and uses, Humpty
Dumpty appears to Alice to have some right to do so. He is an adult figure,
and it is to his status as adult, and the authority that status confers, that she
submits. Humpty Dumpty, in turn, does not attempt to dispute or open up the
syntactic rules of the language game that establishes the limits of meaning. As
an individual who generates individual meanings, he remains submissive to
the dominant culture and its institutional branches, which govern the extent
to which he can control language.
Alice’s exchange with Humpty Dumpty, and in fact most of her exchanges
with the inhabitants of Wonderland and the Looking-glass world, are marked
by this power imbalance, an imbalance that is worked out at the level of
language. When the Dormouse tells his story about the sisters who lived in
the treacle-well, his conflation of the different meanings of “well” results in a
247“Which is to be master?”
complete breakdown in understanding between Alice and the other members
of the tea party:
“Where did they draw the treacle from?”
“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should
think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”
“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice
this last remark.
“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse: “well in” (55).
Alice’s attempts to apply what she understands as sense to the tea party con-
versation (“I’ve had nothing yet . . . so I can’t take more”) only seem to lead
her into logical quicksand (52).
The Alice texts are littered with utterances like that of the Hatter, which
“seemed to have no meaning in it, and yet . . . was certainly English” (52), and
the entire narrative may be considered a complex linguistic joke at the expense
of Alice and the reader, neither of whom possesses the requisite knowledge to
make sense. Whatever rules are being adhered to here, they are ones to which
Alice is denied access, and as such she almost always comes out second best in
the debates in which she is engaged. Alice herself, recognizing her powerlessness
when it comes to playing the language games of Wonderland and Looking-
glass world, identifies and desires the source of power as deriving from being
a grown-up. When she does win an argument, it is because she quite literally
“grows up.”
In the courtroom scene near the end of Wonderland, the King of Hearts
orders her out on the grounds that Rule Forty-two states “[a]ll persons more
than a mile high to leave the court,” claiming that it is the “oldest rule in the
book” (83). “‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice. The King turned
pale and shut his note-book hastily” (83). Alice is right, of course, but she is
also now much, much larger than everyone else in the courtroom. Until this
point, her attempts to point out logical inconsistencies have been ignored or
shouted down. It is only when she possesses an advantage in size, much as an
adult does over a child, that she confidently believes that Wonderland’s logic
is faulty. Alice appears to carry the memory of this power with her into the
Looking-glass world, too. When she is invited to participate in the chess game,
for example, she confides to the Red Queen that “of course I should like to be
a Queen, best” (108).
My concern here is not so much to unravel the games played, or the seman-
tic theories critics have attributed various episodes as mocking, but rather to
examine how power is distributed through the ability to play such games with
language. In one sense, Humpty Dumpty is right when he states that the only
question, when it comes to the creation of meaning, is “which is to be master.”
Alice’s correct belief that he is forcing words into bearing meanings they cannot
carry is ultimately of no consequence in Wonderland: she is powerless as both
outsider and child. The adult creatures of the Alice texts demonstrate, through
248 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
their mastery of an alien language game and their ability to define Alice at will,
that it is the adult who governs and oversees the struggle to generate meaning.
The child becomes defined through a language that adults have the power to
use, but that child not possess a reciprocal power to define the adult or the
surrounding world according to a corresponding “childish” language. Nonsense
language, parody and, crucially, fantasy, may, according to Linda Shires,
be considered similar in one respect: they explode or transgress the frame of the
“real” and thus open up a space of uncertainty. Pushing towards the realm of non-
signification where nothing is stable, these forms open a gap between signifier
and signified which makes a definite meaning or absolute reality impossible to
attain. (267)
The Alice texts, rich in all three of these modes, certainly resist definite meaning
for the reader or critic; they also resist definition by Alice. However, they are
not meaning-less, in the same way that nonsense language is not a language
of a literal lack of sense. To arrive at a fixed meaning for “Jabberwocky” is not
possible, but neither can we claim that it is “without sense,” since it can be read.
Something truly without sense could not be read: it would be an arbitrary col-
lection of words or letters; it would not be language. Perhaps what we can say
instead is that parody, fantasy, and nonsense, in transgressing the frame of “the
real,” establish new relationships between signifier and signified that readers,
and adventurers from the “real” world, like Alice, cannot comprehend.
Alice, a child who finds herself to be within a dream of a surreal and anarchic
world (and the question of who it is who does the dreaming is an important
one here, a point I will return to later), finds that even in the wildest lands of
fantasy, certain rules must be adhered to. In order for the narrative to retain
some sort of meaning, however open-ended or nonsensical that meaning might
appear, it must be constructed according to known rules of syntax. Leila May,
commenting on Wittgenstein’s theory of “language games,” notes that “a lan-
guage whose rules cannot be followed or can be broken at whim is an impos-
sible language,” which creates “an impossible life” or “a form of madness” (82).
Certainly there is much that Alice experiences that suggests that Wonderland
and the Looking-glass world are places of madness, but as May points out, the
Cheshire Cat uses a logical argument to prove his assertion that everyone is
mad in Wonderland (82). So, while there is madness, there is also logic, and
there are rules governing the language games: they are merely rules that are so
alien to Alice and to readers accustomed to the “normal” rules of the English
language that neither can participate in the game.
But to follow the logical arguments of those who live in the two Alice
“worlds” can be an alienating exercise, and in fact an appeal to logic usually
signifies a point at which Alice’s understanding of the world is about to confront
a disconcertingly different one. The Cheshire Cat demonstrates this with his
rigorous, yet faulty, application of logic to prove his own insanity:
249“Which is to be master?”
“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry,
and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my
tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.” (48)
By the same logic, he tells Alice, she too is mad, because only mad people
come to Wonderland, and the Pigeon uses a similar logic to prove that Alice
is a serpent. As Tweedledee puts it, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so,
it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic” (120). That is not, of course,
logic as Alice understands it, or as readers outside the text understand it. It is,
however, what logic is in the worlds Alice finds herself in: a secret system that
appears meaningless to those outside it. Knowledge of the game’s rules is a
signifier of power, and Alice, ignorant of how this logic works, is powerless.
Those who do know the rules can tell Alice what she is: she is variously a snake,
mad, a “fabulous monster” (the Unicorn’s definition) and Mary-Ann, the White
Rabbit’s housemaid (153).
The texts grant linguistic control to those who inhabit Wonderland and
the Looking-glass world and, in doing so, define them as adults. They use this
control in a very adult way, too: they exercise the adult’s right to tell the child
what she is. Perhaps the most obvious instance of an imposed definition occurs
in Alice’s exchange with the Pigeon. Alice has just swallowed a portion of the
Caterpillar’s mushroom, which has caused her neck to lengthen like a snake’s
body, so she finds herself attacked by a Pigeon who insists that Alice is a “ser-
pent” intent on stealing her eggs (40). Alice’s attempts to convince the Pigeon
otherwise are unsuccessful, partly due to the fact that the physical and mental
manipulations and changes wrought on her by Wonderland have rendered her
ambivalent about her own identity:
“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying
to invent something!”
“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered
the number of changes she had gone through, that day.
“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest
contempt. (41)
When Alice tries to prove her argument by telling the pigeon that “little girls
eat eggs quite as much as serpents do,” the Pigeon merely expands her defini-
tion of Alice as serpent to include all other little girls. “I don’t believe it,” the
Pigeon replies, “but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I
can say” (41). The Pigeon, a mother and an adult, reserves the right to define
little girls, or children, by her own logic. Serpents eat eggs, so if little girls eat
eggs, then they must be serpents too, just as the Cheshire Cat insists that Alice’s
presence in Wonderland is enough to prove her madness.
250 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Far more serious for Alice and her sense of identity is the terrifying revela-
tion of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. She is not real, they tell her; she is merely
a part of the Red King’s dream:
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming
about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.
“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere.
Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—
bang!—just like a candle!”
“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of a
thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee (125).
Tweedledum and Tweedledee seem curiously complacent about their own
precarious fictional existence, and indeed the existential status of the Looking-
glass world itself, which, if those two “great schoolboys” live in it, must be as
fictional as they are (120). When Alice tries to quiet the pair for fear they should
wake the King, Tweedledum remarks,
“Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him . . . when you’re only one of the
things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”
“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.” (125–26)
But Alice is not, by Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s definition, real, and nor are
they, and nor is the Looking-glass world. Their existence all depends on the
Red King continuing to dream them, and as Tweedledum points out, they have
no reciprocal power to disrupt his dreaming.
This conversation embodies the problem of the adult writing the child into
fiction: the child, or the idea of the child, only exists so long as the author “keeps
dreaming.” Alice, the subject of the Red King’s dream, will “go out” when he
“leaves off.” At the narrative’s end, it is suggested that, instead of going out she
merely wakes up into the framing narrative of reality; but this also supposes that it
is Alice who does the dreaming. She wonders out loud, “who it was that dreamed
it all . . . it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream,
of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!” (180). Nina Auerbach claims
that the Looking-glass world is possibly the Red King’s dream, a mirroring of
Wonderland about which there is “no equivocation” as to who dreamed it: “the
dainty child carries the threatening world of Wonderland within her” (32).
While Alice does indeed seem to wake up, the Red King never does, as far as
we know: I would suggest that he remains dreaming until the narrative’s end.
With his tasseled red night-cap, snoring in a rumpled heap, he does not make
251“Which is to be master?”
for a kingly figure, but he does share a comic affinity with the other inventor
in the narrative, the rather more hopeless White Knight. Both these absurd
characters stand, in different ways, for the creative authority of the narrative,
and Alice does indeed “go out” when that authority ceases the narrative. What
Tweedledum and Tweedledee call to the attention of Alice and the implied
reader is Alice’s fictional and subordinate status: she exists only as long as
the narrative is sustained by the author who created it. The author is directly
complicit in highlighting this problem, too, being at great pains to emphasize
Alice’s existence in the future. When Tweedledum and Tweedledee are dressed
for battle, the narrator remarks that “Alice said afterwards she had never seen
such a fuss made about anything in her life,” and it is the White Knight’s song,
we are told, that “[o]f all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey
Through the Looking-Glass . . . was the one that she always remembered most
clearly” (127, 163). This authorial insistence on a life that continues beyond
the time span of the present adventures demonstrates that Alice, along with all
the inhabitants of the story, is existentially at the mercy of the implied author.
Within the narrative, Alice is permitted to look back on her adventures from
a distant future in the story timeframe, but for a reality outside of the narra-
tive, she is, as the concluding poem admits, a fictitious ghost who haunts the
author “phantomwise” (181).
Even while these texts attempt to create for Alice a dreamscape in which
the child, asleep and inexperienced, experiences freedom and a bizarre adven-
ture that is permissible only in fantasy, they confirm that the child is defined
through and in language and, as such, there are ordering limits on what she
may dream. In order to retain any chance of intelligibility, language remains
ultimately dependent on adult-imposed structures, and it is this language that
describes the child in the text. The Pigeon’s definition of Alice as a serpent is
considered viable in Wonderland logic, just as Humpty Dumpty’s linguistic
contortions trump Alice’s knowledge of what words can mean, and the Mad
Hatter’s “logic in excess” defeats her so utterly that the only thing to do is to
get up and leave a conversation she cannot hope to participate in meaning-
fully (May 83). These instances of the adult ability to control and define both
language and the idea of what a child is point toward the Tweedledum and
Tweedledee episode, wherein lies the problem. In stating that the child Alice is
being dreamed by the adult Red King, and that she will cease to exist when he
ceases to dream, the text articulates precisely the dilemma of children’s fiction
that Rose identifies: that a child is a category written by the adult.
Adults, as the arbiters of language, create the child, and they also create the
signs by which the child shall be described: innocence, inexperience, a lack of
knowledge. The distribution of power between the adult and the child is un-
equal: the adult has the power to write and to define the child, while the child
remains a passive thing described within a text, and in doing so the experienced
adult leaves this defined child with a trace of their adultness, their experience,
and their knowledge of the world. The very notion of the innocent child, which
252 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Rose exposes as merely an adult desire, is revealed as an impossibility. In Wil-
liam Blake’s Songs of Innocence, the narrator describes how he wrote the Songs:
he “pluck’d a hollow reed . . . made a rural pen” and “stain’d the water clear”
(“Introduction” Songs of Innocence, lines 16–18). The clear, pure water becomes
“stain’d” or tainted with writing. Language, the province of the adult, has already
infected the pure, Arcadian landscape of the child even as it invents the child,
and to write the child is therefore to irreparably mark it with adulthood.
This is almost a paraphrase of Jacques Derrida’s famous declaration that “il
n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Grammatology 158, original emphasis). I take this to
mean not that nothing literally exists outside of writing, or the text, but rather
that we are unable to access the “outside,” to reach through writing and access a
pure point of origin. Following this line of reasoning, the idea of the child as a
free and truly innocent entity may exist as a potentiality, as a concept that could
occur, but for the reader, for the text, and for the author, the practical outcome
is that the “child” does not exist: there is no child “outside the text.” It is this lack
of an outside that I read the Alice texts as demonstrating. The narratives shuttle
her back and forth between dream, or fiction, and the waking, “real” world, but
she never becomes anything other than an adult’s dream of a child.
What the Tweedledum and Tweedledee episode has put up for debate,
through this exchange between a little girl and two little men dressed as
schoolboys, is the status of fiction itself. In one sense, it may of course be ob-
served that all characters “go out” when the authority governing their existence
decides to end the narrative. But Alice is not only a child; she is also someone
who doesn’t belong in Looking-glass world. She has crossed over from the
“real world,” the world of the sitting room, the kittens, and the chess set that
opens and closes the narrative. So while Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the
other characters that Alice meets are all the natural and “right” inhabitants of
the Looking-glass world, she is an outsider who has become trapped in the
wrong place. She has become trapped inside fiction. From this point of view,
it is interesting to consider that, while almost all the characters who inhabit
both Wonderland and the Looking-glass world are, as discussed above, adults
(whether humans or creatures), Tweedledum and Tweedledee occupy a more
ambiguous role. They are men but also schoolboys, or at least men dressed as
schoolboys. They are adults pretending to be children, and as such they may
be seen to represent what Rose says a child in fiction really is: an adult hiding
behind a representation of a child.
The only possible child about which we can know anything is one articulated
by an adult. The “real” children, the ones whose existence we cannot deny, will
always remain beyond the text, unreachable and unspeakable; in this sense
they constitute Derrida’s absence, the “nothing” that is outside the text. Wholly
imaginary, these children outside the text may be real but, for the purposes
of children’s literature and criticism, they are only theoretical; an attempt to
render them in language, however, would describe them as something else: the
child as category, which is the child that Rose identifies.
253“Which is to be master?”
I turn again, here, to Derrida, who lies behind much of this discussion (he
is writing about empiricism, and invokes his famous conception of the trace):
“[i]t is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought
of pure difference. . . .We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as
soon as language awakens (Writing 151). Thus, while the “dream” or thought
of a pure child is possible, in practice it contains the trace of its other, the adult.
As Nodelman explains, “the childlike can be constructed and explained only in
relation to that which it is not,” or, to put it the other way round, we understand
the term “child” because we can posit the term “adult” (206).
Alice, that theoretically “real” child who has strayed into fiction, finds that
she cannot leave it, or more accurately, that her existence in the “real” world is
just as fictional and just as vulnerable to the definitions of an adult authority.
Through the Looking-Glass ends with the unresolved problem of who dreamed
the dream and with a question addressed to the implied child reader: “Which
do you think it was?” (180). However, although the cessation of the narrative
marks the end of Alice, the issue of whose dream it is can be resolved only if we
read the text as acting out that question, with the Red King being the creative
authority of the Looking-glass world in the same way that an implied author
called Lewis Carroll is responsible for the Alice texts. What the texts are therefore
calling to our attention is the same point that Rose makes when she says “[t]here
is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the
category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own
purposes” (10). Alice insists on her own reality as something separate from the
Looking-glass world and the fiction it stands for. What the text works to show,
however, is that even outside fiction, the child is still fictional.
Note
1. While this article will be limited to an investigation of how the troubled relationship
between the child and language is played out in the Alice texts, other “Golden Age”
texts also enact the structures of power inherent in the representation of the child and
the difficulties in claiming to interpret the child. George MacDonald’s fantasies are
explicitly concerned with these issues. At the Back of the North Wind (1870) is perhaps
the best example, with its language brought back from the North Wind’s country, which
is completely meaningless to adults but has “all the good in the world” to the children
who hear and understand it. Similarly, The Princess and the Goblin (1871) and The
Princess and Curdie (1882) also engage with ideas about the irreducible gap between
the adult and child, with the recurring motif of the child lying to the adult in order to
be believed (126).
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254 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
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