The essay below was completed in my final year of Univerisity. It examines the absurdism in Lewis Caroll’s most famous work which, I argue, is a reactionary work challenging the idea that literature can provide clear-cut messages about right and wrong.
Consider the significance of fictiveness in relation to one or more texts. Possible responses might look at issues and degrees of realism, verisimilitude, vraisemblance, referentiality, etc.
The way that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (hereafter: AAW) combines absurdist elements with generic forms such as the travelogue, the epic and the folklore tale mark it as a work of escapism without precedent.[1] It enables imaginative escape to its readers in a way that anticipates the wave of popular children’s literature to come in the twentieth century. The text’s influence on popular culture is immeasurable. Vain as it would be to chart AAW’s literary and cultural impact in such a short space, instead I would like to examine some of the formal elements of its proto-fantasy. It is a perplexing narrative which rearranges recognisable elements of Victorian life into an inscrutable jumble, often bordering on the hallucinatory. Disorienting its readers, the text’s meandering form positions it against the overly moralising children’s literature of the mid-nineteenth century. The focus of this essay will be AAW’s dreamlike structure – the central, organising element of its anti-didacticism. By examining the surreal, destabilising narrative form employed by Carroll, the text can be seen as a precedent not only to twentieth century fantasy or children’s writing, but to modernist literature as a whole.
To start, I want to define some of the inconsistencies that mark the text-world of AAW. The defining feature of Wonderland is its lack of logical coherence, but this incoherence can be analysed on multiple textual levels. On an obvious temporal and spatial level, there are blatant inconsistencies when, in the first sense, time is stopped during Alice’s tea party with the Hatter and, in the second, when Alice passes through the door of a tree to emerge inexplicably in a location she visited earlier.[2] These erroneous details are reminiscent of modern fantasy and its readiness to manipulate time and space, with the latter example particularly resembling the iconic passage into Narnia in C.S Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.[3] Although Caroll certainly seems to delight in this kind of metaphysical tampering, Wonderland is incoherent in a more structured manner than the fantasy worlds of Lewis or his successors. Alice herself is consistent in her good-natured temperament and her rationality, but her surroundings and the sequence of events she finds herself in after arriving in Wonderland are disconnected from each other both causally and thematically. In this sense particularly, AAW distances itself from the didacticism of contemporary children’s literature. Jennifer Lee Geer’s work on Victorian fairy tales describes how ‘by the time Wonderland was published in 1865, a liking for fantastic children’s literature was already well-established’.[4] Geer also writes that fairy tales had a well-documented association with prescribing good characteristics in their readers and were increasingly becoming considered to be an important part of a middle-class child’s development.[5] Her essay poignantly suggests a connection between this idealised perception of children’s literature and Carroll’s literary style; however, I disagree with Geer’s claim that the text is ‘deeply implicated in the adult world of competition and power plays that it ostensibly rejects’.[6] By using features typical of the moralistic Victorian fairy-tale, for example, the cautionary tale with embedded threats of violence, and presenting them in a text-world that is contradictory, chaotic, and immoral, Carroll seems to disavow, even mock, the notion that his fiction reflects any kind of coherent reality.
Let me provide an example of the way this anti-moralism functions in the text. In chapter 2, Alice, disoriented by her abrupt changes in size, tries to recite the poem ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’ by Isaac Watts.[7] By reciting a familiar poem, she hopes to regain some sense of identity, but Alice accidentally rearranges the words into a parody of the original. Watts’ poem is a typically moralistic Victorian appeal to the virtues of hard work, centred around the image of the worker bee toiling to the collective benefit of its hive. Alice shifts the meaning of the poem by replacing its central symbol with a crocodile who ‘welcomes little fishes in / With gently smiling jaws!’[8] This new configuration promotes guile instead of honesty, but the fact that Alice laments her changes to the poem as accidental, becoming newly anxious about her self-perceived wickedness, indicates that the text is criticising precisely this kind of simplistic moral prescription, at least when directed at children. However, the key to this episode is not merely a parody of didactic literature, but a total distortion of it. While Alice is attempting to re-identify with herself, the wide array of animals accompanying her argue amongst themselves in a way that conjures up images of contemporary religious crisis. Among others, this is a sequence in the text that appears to engage with Darwinism: the image of mis-matched animals who, without any sense of hierarchy, shout over one another to be heard emulates the spiritual chaos left in the wake of evolutionary theory. Just as Alice misremembers Watts’ poem seemingly without intent, the animals’ conflict has no resolution – In this way, AAW portrays, rather than directly engaging with, aspects of Victorian society. By blurring these aspects into a chaotic distortion that its young protagonist must navigate, the text’s structure becomes akin to a child’s hallucination of Victorian society. The structure I have described is inherently anti-didactic because it does not directly respond to, but instead simulates, growing moral uncertainty felt during the late nineteenth century; a feeling that Caroll intimately connects with the uncertainty of pre-adolescence.
The distortion I have described is one of the only consistent features of the narrative; it is what gives AAW its dreamlike qualities. Much has already been made of the way of the way that the text defamiliarises everyday objects and concepts by putting them in natural contexts.[9] Alice’s entry into wonderland, when she spirals past cupboards and bookcases on her descent down the rabbit-hole, marks the distortion of her middle-class girlhood into the unintelligibility of a daydream. I agree with Parson’s claim that ‘one of the dangers of reading the Alice books philosophically is losing sight of their fictionality’.[10] The concerns of Victorian middle-class existence (punctuality, commerce, spirituality) are present, but are best analysed in a similar vein to the white rabbit’s pocket-watch – significations of the everyday which are blurred into the realm of the subconscious. On a textual level, it is already heavily implied that Alice’s adventures are a dream, but it is the text’s meandering structure that lends credence to AAW’s hermeneutic status as a dream narrative. Despite its vague references to real-world concepts, the narrative appears to borrow heavily from the Victorian nonsense genre; a genre that, according to T.S Eliot ‘is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it’.[11] Eliot’s comment, which describes the work of nonsense illustrator Edward Lear, implies that the abstraction achieved in the genre was intended to bring the real world into relief as well as to entertain. In this sense, the disorder of Wonderland gives Alice’s Adventure’s the power of pure escapism: instead of prescribing moral values, it simulates the chaos of moral conflicts as a negative example of adult life, thus foregrounding imagination over interpretive coherence.
Another piece of evidence that suggests AAW ought to be read in the context of dreams is the dreamer herself – Alice. The young protagonist spends much of her time trying to make sense of the world around her, usually to no avail. She is unsuccessful not because her faculties of reason are impaired, but because the world around her is unreasonable and resists interpretation. Her frustrations are bound up in youthful inexperience; Alice recalls ‘the several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them’.[12] AAW, however, appears to side with children, and the dynamics of innocence and experience are reversed. Alice is frequently bemused by the rudeness shown to her by other characters who are, in many cases, unreasonable and unkind. Her rationalism and politeness run as an opposing thread to the behaviour of Wonderland’s inhabitants – one of the only consistent features of these interactions. The final sequence of the Wonderland section is particularly revealing when Alice grows to her full size and dismisses the previously threatening Queen of Hearts as ‘nothing but a pack of cards’.[13] That the protagonist acknowledges the fictiveness of her adversary just moments before awakening back in the real world highlights the dream-like hermeneutics at work in AAW. Just as soon as Alice becomes aware that she is dreaming, she wakes up. As such, Wonderland simulates the illogical world of adults as perceived by children, and Alice’s conquest of it allows her to reawaken wiser than she was before, just as Nonsense literature promises with its incoherence a greater appreciation of coherence in reality.
So far, I have suggested that AAW simulates the experience of dreaming, and that this dreamlike structure ultimately upholds imagination and open-mindedness over any moral framework. I want to conclude by examining the texts’ treatment of fictiveness and interpretation. As my earlier discussion of Alice implies, the protagonist’s bemused responses to what is going on around her become key to unpacking the interpretive mechanisms at play. Luciano Vitacolonia’s essay ‘Aspects of Coherence in Alice’ foregrounds the significance of Alice’s remark after hearing the White Rabbit’s poem: ‘I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it’.[14] Her use of the pronoun ‘I’, as well as the contrasted response from the King of Hearts ‘I seem to see some meaning in [it] after all’, are taken by Vitacolonia as evidence that Carroll understood the flexible, subjective nature of textual interpretation, and that he purposefully enacts this process in AAW.[15] Alice’s rationality admittedly implies that her response bears more weight than the King’s, however, her inward focus when she finds the White Rabbit’s poem to be meaningless suggests a commentary on semiotics that, in many ways, anticipates modernist fiction. Rather than authorial intention, it is the reader’s response which attributes meaning to the poem and, in making this point, AAW appears, once again, to disclaim moral authority over its readers. To whatever extent the text was intended as unserious children’s literature is beside the point because, intentionally or not, that unseriousness allows Carroll to develop a framework for modernist semiotics. In a text-world with the coherence of a dream-state, he portrays contradictory elements of Victorian society in a way that promotes a limitless number of subjective responses. As such, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is anti-didactic not merely in the sense that it opposes the moralism of Carroll’s era, but in its very essence. By restructuring the children’s fairy-tale in a way that resists singular interpretation, the text becomes a timeless ode to the imaginative powers of youth; a feeling it connects to the tumult and confusion of Victorian civilisation.
Bibliography
Primary Works:
Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (London: Macmillan and Co, 1866).
Lewis, C.S, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, (New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1978).
Watts, Isaac, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’, Divine Songs: attempted in easy language for the use of children, (London: printed for J. Buckland; J. F. and C. Rivington; T. Longman; W. Fenner; T. Field; and E. and C).
Secondary Works:
Eliot, T.S, The Music of Poetry, (Folcroft: The Folcroft Press, 1969).
Geer, Jeniffer Lee, ‘The Fantasy of Home: Victorian Children’s Fantasy Fiction and the Domestic’, Doctoral Dissertation, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2002).
Mendelson, Michael, ‘The Phenomenology of Deep Surprise in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, Connotations, Vol. 17, No. 2-3, (2007), pp. 287-301.
Parsons, Marnie, Review: ‘Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature by Jean-Jacques Lecercle’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer, 1995), pp. 621-623.
Vitacolonia, Luciano, ‘Aspects of Coherence in Alice’, Semiotics and Linguistics in Alice’s Worlds, ed. by Rachel Fordyce and Carla Marello (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 1994), pp. 93-101.
[1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (London: Macmillan and Co, 1866). All further references are to this edition.
[2] Carroll, p. 104; p. 111.
[3] C.S Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, (New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1978).
[4] Jennifer Lee Geer, ‘The Fantasy of Home: Victorian Children’s Fantasy Fiction and the Domestic’, Doctoral Dissertation, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2002), p. 9.
[5] Geer, p. 9.
[6] Geer, p. 8.
[7] Isaac Watts, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’, Divine Songs: attempted in easy language for the use of children, (London: printed for J. Buckland; J. F. and C. Rivington; T. Longman; W. Fenner; T. Field; and E. and C). Dilly, 1777).
[8] Carroll, p. 20.
[9] Michael Mendelson, ‘The Phenomenology of Deep Surprise in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, Connotations, Vol. 17, No. 2-3, (2007), p. 290.
[10] Marnie Parsons, Review: ‘Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature by Jean-Jacques Lecercle’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer, 1995), p. 622.
[11] T. S Eliot, The Music of Poetry, (Folcroft: The Folcroft Press, 1969), p. 14.
[12] Carroll, p. 10.
[13] Carroll, p. 187.
[14] Luciano Vitacolonia, ‘Aspects of Coherence in Alice’, Semiotics and Linguistics in Alice’s Worlds, ed. by Rachel Fordyce and Carla Marello (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 1994), p. 94.
[15] Vitacolonia, p. 95.
Kasper Mcleish 
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