Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [22]
Despite this, Alice, who starts out as a pawn in the game, ‘would like to be a Queen best’. These Queens are not like the idealized stereotypes envisaged by Ruskin in his tract on women’s education, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, but studies in power and powerlessness. However well-mannered Alice may be, she aspires to be a Queen too, and a powerful one, and as the story draws towards a close, she aspires towards an impressive vision of feminine autonomy in the face of the bullying she faces on all sides.
When Tweedledum says she is only part of the Red King’s dream and isn’t real, Alice retorts ‘“I am real!”’ and begins to cry. Though she succumbs to tears, she is able to argue her corner (‘“If I wasn’t real… I shouldn’t be able to cry” ’) and attempts to dismiss the disconcerting Berkleyan idealism of the Tweedles as ‘nonsense’. Still, faced by the dark wood, the battling philosophical twins and the monstrous crow, she keeps her composure as best she can. When she meets that arrogant egghead Humpty Dumpty, who murderously advises her to ‘Leave off at seven’, she comes out with one of the great defiant lines of nineteenth-century childhood literature (not unlike Oliver Twist’s ‘I want some more’): ‘“I never ask advice about growing”’. After the battle between the Lion and Unicorn, she says, ‘“I do hope it’s my dream”’, ‘“I don’t like belonging to another person’s.”’ Later, after the shambolic battle between the two knights which the White Knight calls a ‘glorious victory’, she affirms her freedom with characteristic defiance, ‘“I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner. I want to be a Queen.” ’ Having shown admirable kindness and good humour towards the absent-minded quixotic Knight, she eventually gets her crown, but this isn’t the end of her subjection to the bossiness endemic in Carrollian nonsense. She immediately finds herself peppered with regal advice by the other Looking-Glass Queens and finds she really doesn’t like ‘being found fault with so much’. Eventually, when she rises to give a speech at her coronation banquet, and the tediously formal dinner-party breaks up into pandemonium, she cries out with her most powerful blast of self-assertion, ‘“I can’t stand this any longer!”’ – thus freeing herself from the game, the dream and the mirror. Though she ‘wins’ her crown and the game, it seems she outgrows both at the very moment when the dream of being a Queen is realized and found to be as nightmarish as her time as a child and pawn.
Though Dodgson inherits the first generation of Romantic poets’ sense of childhood (Humpty Dumpty’s ‘glory’ recalls Wordsworth’s as does the opening poem of Looking-Glass) and the second generation’s interest in romance and dreams, his own ‘dream-child’ pursues her quest through a world which is as profoundly social as that of Jane Austen. In the frame poems of each book, and in the account he gives in ‘“Alice” on the Stage’, the author writes as if Alice travels to some fairyland of pastoral childish innocence. As Isa Bowman noticed, however, Dodgson himself ‘cared for neither flowers nor animals’,104 and the language of Wonderland is a product of culture, not nature. In it Alice is confronted by grave travesties of most of the institutions which govern her and her author’s life – the monarchy, the rule of law, education, grammar and social etiquette. So, after the fall and bodily metamorphoses of the opening chapters of Wonderland, Alice is caught up first with a Caucus Race with wild animals (a parody of competitive ‘natural selection’ and democratic procedure), then the fussy domestic life of a fastidious bachelor rabbit (complete with maid and gardener). Having discussed growth and reproduction with a caterpillar and pigeon, and madness with a brainy disembodied cat, Alice finds herself in the more complex rituals of Wonderland society – first the endlessly