The Sheila Variations

Lewis Carroll

In light of the post below, here's a couple excerpts from the fantastic biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodson (Lewis Carroll) I read a while back by Morton Cohen - great book. Great book not only because you get to know every teeny detail of Carroll's life, but you also get literary analysis. Yum!!

First of all - Dodson/Carroll himself describes where "the Alice books" came from. So that's a big ol' raspberry to the jackass in the post below. Here are Dodson's words:

Many a day we had rowed together on that quiet stream - the three little maidens and I - and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit - whether it were at times when the writer was "i' the vein" and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say - yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards ... In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication. Full many a year has slipped away, since that "golden afternoon" that gave thee birth, but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday - the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said "nay" to: from whose lips "Tell us a story, please," had all the stern immutability of Fate!

Beautiful, eh?

And below I've excerpted part of Cohen's in-depth analysis of the Alice books. He analyses the content, but he also analyzes their unprecedented appeal:

…Neither Alice book has ever gone out of print; both are, in fact, firm bulwarks of society, both in the English-speaking world and everywhere else. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, they are the books most widely and most frequently translated and quoted. Over 75 editions and versions of the Alice books were available in 1993, including play texts, parodies, read-along cassettes, teachers’ guides, audio-language studies, coloring books, “New Method” readers, abridgements, learn-to-read story books, single-syllable texts, coloring books, pop-up books, musical renderings, casebooks, and a deluxe edition selling for 175 pounds. They have been translated into over 70 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish; and they exits in Braille… Critics have pondered the books’ magic and tried to explain it. What are they all about, they ask, and why so universally successful? What is the key to their enchantment, why are they so entertaining and yet so enigmatic? What charm enables them to transcend languages as well as national and temporal differences and win their way into the hearts of young and old everywhere and always?

Commenting on Alice, Charles himself wrote: “The ‘Why’ of this book cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child’s smile, would read such words in vain … No deed … I suppose… is really unselfish. Yet if one can put forth all one’s powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child’s whispered thanks and the airy touch of a little child’s pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.”

Charming as that comment is, it does not help us grasp the meaning of the books. We must go beyond Charles’ reflections. The critiques, commentaries, exegeses, and analyses that have appeared during the past hundred years and more – some profound and interesting, some absurd – offer many bewildering theories. Recalling a few simple facts, however, helps.

To begin with, Charles wrote both books with Alice Liddell and, to a lesser degree, her sisters and Robinson Duckworth in mind. All the occupants of the boat who first heard the tale of Alice are characters in the first book. The Dodo is Charles, the Duck is Duckworth, the Lory is Lorina, the Eaglet Edith. But they play hardly more than walk-on parts. The book is about Alice, the middle sister; it is she, and she alone, who stands at center stage throughout.

The actors in both Alice books are transplants from real life, as are the episodes, and those who sat in the gliding boat recognized them as Charles related them, just as they would later experience flashes of memory reading Looking Glass. The landmarks, the language, the puns, the puffery – it was all rooted in the circumscribed enclave of their Victorian lives. Oxford provided the landscape, its architecture, its history, its select society, its conventions. In Under Ground and in the additions that Charles later made to the tale and in the sequel, his listeners (and readers) would have instantly picked up on the references, to the Sheep Shop on St. Aldate’s, the treacle well at Binsey, the lilies of the Botanic Gardens, the deer in Magdalen Grove, the lion and the unicorn from the royal crests, the leopards from Cardinal Wolsey’s coat of arms that graces the fabric of Christ Church and are known as “Ch Ch Cats”. Charles parodied familiar verse and songs, some of which they sang together as they rowed up or down the river: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat”; “Salmon come up” in “The Lobster Quadrille”; “Turtle Soup”; “How doth the little crocodile” and more. They would readily penetrate the thin disguises of John Ruskin as the conger eel, Bartholomew Price as the Bat, Humpty Dumpty as some egghead don pontificating, the Caterpillar as another conducting a viva. The Mad Tea-Party as a parody of Alice’s birthday party would have elicited howls of laughter. A good many of the references are lost to us, so localized they were.

Underlying the characters, however distorted and exaggerated, is the cast-iron foundation of Victorian society, its shibboleths, class hierarchy, manners, conventions, proprieties, taboos, and, perhaps most of all, its foibles and follies. The Victorian idea – or, in Charles’ terms, the misconception – of the child is at the heart of both stories, as are the child’s observations of the adult world and the adult world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child. We also have a running commentary on the human condition and especially a catalog of human weaknesses – sliding away from rectitude, succumbing to frailties, escaping responsibilities, imagining infirmities.

Although the heroine is still young and learning, she is old enough both to reflect her training and to criticize it. She mirrors her society by showing that her sensitivity has already been blunted and that she has learned to mimic the haughty stance, the rude rebuke common in her social milieu. Her indelicate treatment of the Mouse and the birds in the early chapters of Wonderland are a mere prelude to the insolence and arrogance she herself encounters and criticizes. Almost everyone she meets mistreats her: the rabbit mistakes her for his housemaid and shouts orders at her, the caterpillar cross-examines her, the Duchess berates her, the Hatter criticizes the length of her locks, the March Hare lectures her on her use of language, the Gryphon chides her and tells her to hold her tongue, the Queen of Hearts shouts, “Off with her head!”

Bad behavior is one thing, but violence is something else, and it too occurs in these books, some of it initiated by our heroine. Alice’s fall dwon the rabbit hole is in itself not violent, but it certainly carries with it the fear of a violent crash. When Alice is jammed into the Rabbit’s house, she kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney like a skyrocket. In Looking-Glass, there’s the Jabberwock with jaws that bite and claws that catch, the oysters are all eaten, the Lion and the Unicorn engage in battle, and the red chess pieces are threatening.

The books reflect England’s rigid social scale more than they criticize it. Charles has a good ear and captures the speech and manners of several social grades.

The characters behave according to their stations, but a good many Victorian bromides transcend class, and Charles deals them out mercilessly. “I’m older than you, and must know better,” says the Lory to Alice. When Alice asks exactly how old the Lory is, she vainly refuses to tell. Group games are the target in the Caucus-race, with its solemn prize-giving ceremony. When the Mouse goes off in a huff after reciting its tale, the old Crab admonishes her daughter: “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you to never lose your temper!” Then the Caterpillar orders Alice to “keep your temper”. Similar rebuffs and platitudes occur throughout.

What, then, does it all add up to besides art? The answer surely is a double-layered metaphor. The more obvious one, not much disguised, is the child’s plight in Victorian upper-class society, which the Liddell sisters would easily recognize. But that same metaphor goes far beyond Charles’ original purpose: it reaches beyond Victorian Oxford into the wide world. For Charles, intentionally or not, got at the universal essence of childhood and captured the disappointments, fears, and bewilderment that all children encounter in the course of daily living. He wove fear, condescension, rejection, and violence into the tales, and the children who read them feel their hearts beat faster and their skin tingle, not so much with excitement as with an uncanny recognition of themselves, of the hurdles they have confronted and had to overcome. Repelled by Alice’s encounters, they are also drawn to them because they recognize them as their own. These painful and damaging experiences are the price children pay in all societies in all times when passing through the dark corridors of their young lives, and Charles miraculously captures their truth.

The second metaphor lives in Charles’ own life. He could not have written about Alice’s adventures had he not himself experienced the indignities that Alice suffers and the fears she feels. The Alice books become, in this metaphor, a record of Charles’ childhood, the shocks dealt him by parents, teachers, all his elders. Bad manners and violence were commonplace in Victorian days, but their emphasis and frequency in these books, while capturing the ethos of the age, also tell us that Charlese must have stored up an amount of hostility as he grew up, at home, at school, and at Oxford. At home and at school, he very likely smarted under innumerable commands from above, unreasoning and unreasonable, and as a sensitive observer, he saw and deplored society’s artificial and meaningless minuets. The spare-the-rod philosophy was still dominant; whippings and beatings at school were customary. The bullying he witnessed, the knockabout games on the sporting fields, surely weighed on him. Accumulated resentment seeks outlets, and Charles took this opportunity to get even with the past.

In the end, however, the books are not mainly about fear and bewilderment. Once readers have associated with Alice and wandered with her through Wonderland, they are together on a survival course. They are thrown back upon their own inner resources, determining whether their resources are strong enough to get them through. Does Alice have the wit necessary to master the maze of childhood and emerge a tried and tested teenager? Charles’ answer is affirmative. He endows his heroine, and by extension all children, with the means of dealing with a hostile, unpredictable environment. At the close of both books, we have a catharsis, an affirmation of life after Wonderland and life on this side of the looking-glass. Although unconventional, the endings are happy, as fairy-tale endings should be. In both cases, Alice should meet a strong male rescuer, a Prince Charming, and they should fall in love and live happily ever after. But she does not. She succeeds, but not through the formula of grand romance. Instead of honeyed happiness, she gains confidence, a way of dealing with the world; instead of love, she finds advancement, recognition, acceptance. It is a reasonably happy ending for Charles himself, for he is at the heart of the tales.

The Alice books affect all children of all places at all times in a similar way. They tell the child that someone does understand; they offer encouragement, a feeling that the author is sharing their miseries and is holding out a hand, a hope for their survival as they pass from childhood into adulthood.

But this discussion sounds too serious, really, because Charles’ most successful device is laughter. Anyone who abhors a pun does not appreciate its usefulness as a tool to exercise the mind, to urge the growing child to wed sense to sound … When, in reading the Alice books, the child sees and gets the pun or some other joke all on his or her own, the child suddenly senses an awakened pride in his or her ability and, at least for a moment, laughter replaces a troubled emotion.

Many of the critiques of the Alice books seem to have been written by people who seldom laugh.

Children’s books had existed for centuries before Charles came along. He did not invent the genre. But he did something significant. He broke with tradition. Many of the earlier children’s books written for the upper classes had lofty purposes: they had to teach and preach. Primers taught children religious principles alongside multiplication tables. Children recited rhymed couplets as aids to memorizing the alphabet – A: “In Adam’s fall we sinned all”, F: “The idle Fool is whipped at school.” Children learned their catechism, learned to fear sin – and their books were means to aid and abet the process. They were often frightened by warnings and threats, their waking hours burdened with homilies. Much of the literature of Charles’ day, the books he himself read as a boy, were purposeful and dour. They instilled discipline and compliance.

The Alice books fly in the face of that tradition, destroy it, and give the Victorian child something lighter and brighter. Above all, these books have no moral. About a year after Wonderland appeared, when Charles sent a more conventional book to a young friend, he wrote (January 1867): “The book is intended for you to look at the outside, and then put it away in the bookcase: the inside is not meant to be read. The book has got a moral – so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll.”

Perhaps the most important difference between the Alice books and more conventional children’s stories of mid-Victorian Britain is a difference in the author’s attitude towards his audience. For a middle and upper class child, growing up in Victorian times may have been something less than a happy experience. It was an age of the nanny and the governess; children were shunted off to the nursery, brought out to spend an hour with their mothers in the late afternoon, and then whisked off again. When they reached school age, they were packed off to preparatory and then public schools, where they learned to fear schoolmasters and mistresses, and even more, one another. School was too often the arena of the bully: violence was rampant. To survive at the English boarding school, one had to be strong and resourceful enough to outwit one’s classmates.

By a magical combination of memory and intuition, Charles keenly appreciated what it was like to be a child in a grown-up society, what it means to be scolded, rejected, ordered about. The Alice books are antidotes to the child’s degradation. Like Dickens, Charles knew that when harsh reality becomes unbearable, the child seeks escape through fantasy. Charles also knew how to make the adult reader sympathize with the child Alice, the victim of the unpredictable, undependable world of adults into which she has accidentally fallen. Charles champions the child in the child’s confrontation with the adult world, and in that, too, his book differs from most others. He treats children, both in his book and in real life, as equals. He has a way of seeing into their minds and hearts, and he knows how to train their minds painlessly and move their hearts constructively.

The theme of survival echoes all through Charles’ work, just as it is a major concern in his life. If the Alice books are symbols of his own struggle to survive, they are also formulae for every child’s survival: they offer encouragement to push on, messages of hope in the wilderness of adult society. Time and again, Charles articulates that message, through his works and in his personal relationships. Ethel Rowell, a child friend, recorded her debt to him for teaching her logic and compelling her “to that arduous business of thinking.” And she added: “He gave me a sense of my own personal dignity. He was so punctilious, so courteous, so considerate, so scrupulous not to embarrass or offend, that he made me feel I counted.”

The element of respect and the absence of condescension are crucial, and Charles’ acceptance of the child as an equal makes all the difference, for it is these components that render the books timeless. Despite the Victorian furniture built into the tales, they do today for young people what they did for Ethel Rowell and other Victorian children. A 17 year old student of mine confirmed this notion, writing in a paper on 19th century fantasy: “Lewis Carroll gives equal time to the child’s point of view. He makes fun of the adult world and understands all the hurt feelings that most children suffer while they are caught in the condition of growing up but are still small. I find myself constantly identifying with Alice as I move through this bewildering world of ours. The Alice books help the child develop self-awareness and assure her that she is not the only one feeling what she feels. Maybe they even show adults how to be more aware of the child and the needs of children. They really made it easier for me to grow up.”

Charles does not play jokes on children – he shares jokes with them and, in doing so, gives them the self-confidence they need, the extra boost to make them take another step forward in the often precarious process of leaving childhood and entering adulthood. Along the road he makes them laugh without requiring them to pay for their laughter.

Even today the formula works: Charles helps children see themselves anew and to like what they see. That is why the Alice books have been translated into practically every language that children speak and why Charles commands an audience in every new generation.

Posted by sheila