The Looking Glass Maze

1. The Looking Glass Maze HUM 3085: Britain Through the Looking Glass Spring 2010 Professors Perdigao and Ruane February 5-8, 2010

2. Postmodern Play Book Talk with story of genesis “Off with Beddor’s head!” “Alice’s Evidence” Commercial Claymation http://www.lookingglasswars.com/lgw_videos/lgw_video_fs.html “Aural novel” http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/SeaRedd.htm http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/ThruLookingGlass.htm http://www.lookingglasswars.com/music-folder/mp3-html/source/Shattered.htm

3. Revisionist History Card exhibit in British Museum in 1998: playing cards, Tarot cards, illuminated cards, cards Napoleon had had made to commemorate victories, incomplete deck reminiscent of Alice but “more mysterious and twisted, much more gothic”; antiquities dealer who owned rest of the deck, “real story” Historiographic metafiction versus historical fiction or historical novel, questions history/fiction divide

4. Redefining the Terms Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that in children’s literature “much of the action focuses on one child who learns to feel more secure in the confines of her or his immediate environment, usually represented by family and home. Children’s literature often affirms the child’s sense of Self and her or his personal power” (2-3), but, in the adolescent novel, protagonists must “learn about the social forces that have made them what they are” and “learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function, including family; school; the church; government; social constructions of sexuality, gender, race, class” (3). Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that “As during those adolescent years one endlessly re-created oneself, trying out in one’s head—sometimes even tentatively in the real world—different possible roles, so now one re-invents those past selves, converting the shifting shapes of adolescence into images that make retrospective sense” (4).

5. Back to Lacan (my apologies to you all) Jacques Lacan’s “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” “Is what thinks in my place then another I?” (82) Mirror stage as child experiences in play “the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates” (Lacan, “Mirror Stage” 1) Creates a fiction in which the subject forms a “succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality,” only to end with the “assumption of the armour of an alienating identity” (4). Fragmented body image reminder of incompletion: “the fragmented body . . . usually manifests itself in dreams” (“Mirror Stage” 4), “phantasies of what he might become” (Payne 32). For Roderick McGillis, this image is “a reversed image of the self that appears to be someone else and yet is discernibly the self” (42). Doppel and Ganger, two Alices—alternate versions of Alyss, thinking in her place as another I?

6. Mirror, Mirror “‘It’s all in your head… Whatever happens, it’s all in your head’” (15). “She could not escape being who and what she was” (40). “Off with their stinking, boring heads!” (50) “Tears had been wetting her cheeks from the beginning, but they’d seemed to belong to somebody else, not a part of her, as if her body were responding to the horrific scene before her brain could comprehend it” (62). “No matter what happens, I will always be near you, sweetheart. On the other side of the looking glass. And never forget who you are” (65). “But you cannot hide in fantasy, Alice. Accept what has happened to you and know that you are not alone in misfortune. Try to focus on the sights and sounds around you, because they are reality” (124). “Is it possible that every single person I meet is wrong and I’m right? A whole lot easier if I could just forget. . . . What if I dreamed it up while sick in bed?” (128).

7. Who is the Fairest? “Erase it all. I will no longer be Odd Alice. Odd Alice must die. . . Give up her so-called ridiculous, fantastical delusions and enter wholeheartedly into the world around her. Become just like everyone else” (149). “they might have thought him mad—a man in search of a fictional character” (154) “Her name was misspelled, but . . . Wonderland? Surely, it was his Alyss. How could it be anyone else? The girl in the illustrations looked nothing like her, and yet it could not be coincidence. Hatter’s future path became clear: To find Alyss, he would first have to find the book’s author, Lewis Carroll” (156). “You’ve turned into a legend. . . You and Princess Alyss” (186). Masking (191) “What more had she expected? For her hand to pass into the mirror? Ridiculous” (199).

8. Uncommon Commoner “The maze will release what’s inside you” (236) Redd, chaos: new order (138); “Perhaps she could still return to London and marry Leopold, to be the loving daughter of Dean and Mrs. Liddell and lose herself in that orderly and controlled life she had worked so hard to establish. . . It was pure fantasy, the idea that she could return to relatively innocent days in England” (213). “Alyss in Wonderland? Unacceptable!” (228) “Her years and experiences in that other world had severed the girl she was from the woman she was supposed to have become” (236). “Her reflection in the looking glass suddenly rippled and morphed into an image of Redd” (248). Smashing looking glasses Cohesion and unity versus fragmentation and multiplication

9. Lessons and Un-lessons “She didn’t bother trying to understand it all; it was history—boring boring boring” (14). “you can’t imaging everything because you don’t know everything there is to imagine. That’s precisely where the lessons come in.” (23) Alice’s library—picture books next to a “ten-volume chronicle of the civil war, written from various points of view” (25). “importance of class distinctions. . . abiding by what was considered proper” (30) “Lesson number 1b in Bibwit’s carefully planned curriculum: For most of the universe’s inhabitants, life is not all gummy wads and tarty tarts; it is a struggle against hardship, unfairness, corruption, abuse, and adversity in all its guises, where even to survive—let alone survive with dignity—is heroic” (102).

10. Lessons and Un-lessons “they were able to escape for a short while from the poverty and squalor and daily scrounging of their own lives” (111-112). . . “Nothing but bleeding nonsense” (112). In Queendom Speramus (138); Reddisms New education: “responsibility that came with Britain’s military power, the nature of commerce and industry under a monarchy, how to care for the poor and neglected, the sensationalist tendencies of the Fleet Street papers, and the convolutions of the legal system as exposed by the eminent author Charles Dickens” (163). Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (167)

11. Puzzling Platter, sword, crown (271) “Advice from a Caterpillar”: puzzle shop (285) “looking glass prison”; “but instead of hearing just her voice, she heard a chorus of voices, all of them hers”; “Odd, that looks like me and yet it doesn’t” (300); “Alyss had lost all sense of direction” (301) Parents, self, Redd: “She had become Redd” (309) Vortex, “featureless Nothing” (305) Two Hatters, “mirroring his moves” (311) “It was a lot like she used to feel before her seventh birthday, when she thought herself capable of anything and the world was a beautiful place” (312) “Is this real or a figment?” (315)

12. Constructs “these Alysses were specters, reflections come to life, conjurings from the real princess’ imagination that she had dispersed throughout the queendom to confuse Redd’s all-seeing eye” (323). “It’s a construct!” (329) Dodge as double Curious bomb, “one that didn’t’ destroy but create” (341) “I’ve been in Wonderland” (343); “‘Like in Carroll’s book?’” (344); “‘It’s nothing like the book!’” (344) “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s a construct! It isn’t real!” (344) “I’m not mad, I’m not, I’m not mad, yes I am!’” (345)

13. The “Other” Alice “I suggest you conjure an Alice Liddell of genuine flesh and blood and personality. Birth your twin with the fertility of [her] imagination and send her to live out the life that is no longer yours” (352). Ideal-I as fiction, rejected? Literature of replenishment vs. exhaustion

14. Works Cited Lacan, Jacques. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” Lodge 62-87. - - - . “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 1-7. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination. NY: Basic, 1982. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.