Through the Critical Lenses

1. Through the Critical Lenses HUM 3085: Britain Through the Looking Glass Spring 2010 Professors Perdigao and Ruane January 29, 2010

2. Alice through the Ages • http://matttrailer.com/alice_in_wonderland_1951 • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_McGee's_Alice • http://video.syfy.com/movies_events/alice/behind_the_scenes_4/through-the-looking-glass/v1182152#///movies_events/alice/promos_trailers_7/alice/v1148642 • http://video.syfy.com/movies_events/alice/behind_the_scenes_4/through-the-looking-glass/v1182152 • http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi9503769/

3. The Purpose of Fairy Tales Avery’s 1965 essays “Fairy Tales with a Purpose” Problems with fairy tales—ability to discern fiction from reality and no educational value First English collection—Popular Fairy Tales; or, a Lilliputian Library (1818), moralistic (authenticity as original stories challenged in 1890) 1840-1850 literary fairy tale emerges but still reformation of protagonist “Fairy Tales for Pleasure” Influence of Brothers Grimm, interest in folklore and mythology on rise, placement of Alice “Escape” Childhood, adult consciousness, continuity Place of adolescence? Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens—child as romanticized Shift in late 19th century to create gap—nostalgia of adults, tension Child as means of escape, means of “regression towards the irresponsibility of youth, childhood, infancy and ultimately nescience itself” (328)

4. Regression and Repression Rather than growth and integration, detachment and retreat from adult world “cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan” Alice as “romantic pastoral child” (330) Rather than conserving the “fresh innocence of the child,” nourishing the adult, it is reminder of loss and source of regret Psychic death, grotesque (waking to dead leaves) New Alice at end—in sister’s imaginings—Alice Liddell “Alice in Wonderland: A Curious Child”—two domestic myths of Victorian period—“Wordsworth’s ‘seer blessed,’ the child fresh from the Imperial Palace and still washed by his continuing contact with ‘that immortal sea’ and the pure woman Alice will become, preserving an oasis for God and order in a dim and tangled world” (Auerbach 335). Question “who dreamed it?” as central to Carroll’s works, “part of a pervasive Victorian quest for the origins of the self that culminates in the controlled regression of Freudian analysis” (335). As “dream child,” brunette like Alice Liddell in Carroll’s drawings, blonde in Tenniel’s (based on model Mary Hilton Badcock), in others, both

5. Rage Against the Machine “Blessed Rage: Lewis Carroll and the Modern Quest for Order” Darwin’s Origin of Species published less than two years before Dodgson tells the story to Alice Liddell “The religious and metaphysical assumptions that once answered the basic human need for orderly and permanent explanations and reasons beyond the reach of reason had thinned out and vanished for many Victorians during their very lifetimes, destroyed by a natural childlike curiosity like Darwin’s—and like Alice’s. The resulting void was terrifying” (Rackin 399). But no “telos,” no “final goal or ultimate ‘meaning’” will be found (400) Mad tea tables, caucus race metaphors for “nature’s instinctual, unthinking, amoral, and endless round of self-preservation of the permanent schism between the workings of nature and the human mind’s need for final meaning” (400). “In order to survive, Alice—like the orderly Charles Dodgson—must create a meaningful world out of the morally unintelligible void, and often in opposition to clear evidence from the natural world of which we are an inseparable part” (401). As a result, she makes “sense out of nonsense” and meaning out of the void (likening this work to modern existentialism) Need at end to return to civilized “order” and cast away nightmares, sentimentalized endings like those we create

6. Alice in Key West and through the Ages Not a “Victorian compromise” between a “horror vision of nature’s moral disorder and a consoling assertion of some traditional moral order within nature” (403) at end but a move toward the modern—here, rejection of that other vision, the Wonderland world Wallace Steven’s poem http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172206 Her order, shape, and meaning