The Books: Vamps & Tramps; “Alice as Epic Hero,” by Camille Paglia

NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:

Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, by Camille Paglia.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has been more picked apart and obsessed over than Tolkien’s Ring trilogy. It has been analyzed as political metaphor, cultural/social Victorian-era commentary, a critique of the 19th-century’s authoritarian treatment of children, and more. It has been seen through the lens of Carroll’s gift for mathematics, as well as his ability for invention and inspiration, startling in so sedentary and shy and childlike a man. It has been seen through the lens of his supposed pedophilia. And on. And on. And on.

Let the scholars have their fun, but none of that matters to a 9-year-old who picks up the book. What matters there, and maybe it’s all that matters (certainly all that matters in terms of the book’s reputation as a classic, which has now persisted for over 150 years. Insane), is the story, a strange and scary and irresistible story, the reader led on by the White Rabbit too. The book has not dated at all. Someone may say, “It’s a fantasy story, how could it date?” Well, a lot of Victorian-era fictional children (in fact, most of them, except for the ones created by Dickens and a couple of others) have dated very badly. Childhood was treated in such a cloyingly sentimental way that the stories haven’t a chance at traveling through the ages. Also, there is an irresistible drive towards providing a moral or a pious lesson in Victorian literature for children. It’s tremendously boring and didactic (and probably was to the kids in the 19th century too). But what’s the “lesson” in Alice? If I had to boil it down it would be “Be open to adventure. You’re young. Go forth into uncharted territories. See what’s there.” Not exactly a Sunday School lesson for proper upper-class little girls.

And so Alice is a horse of a different color.

She is curious and brave. She is impulsive (when a label says “Eat Me” or “Drink Me” she obeys.) She is both “act-or” and “act-ee” She can be hoity-toity when she feels disrespected. Hell, she is often downright cranky. She is annoyed by insanity, absurdity and chaos. She DEMANDS to be treated with respect. She stalks forward, engaging with the strange creatures who surround her, and all kinds of terrible things happen to her, things from out of a nightmare. Her size, for example. Her size, her body, fluctuates wildly. She is enormous (and sometimes with an elongated neck, an image that haunted me as a child), she is miniscule. She has no control over it. Or, she does. She’s the one who chose to eat/drink according to the labels. She is an adventurer. “Fine, let me eat this, and just see what happens.” She is a little girl, but becomes so physically huge that she is cramped when enclosed in a house, her arms and legs busting out of the windows. Terrible … and yet empowering. The world she enters is ruthless. Tenderness and care-taking and mercy does not exist. People/things bark at her rudely, and she draws herself up sharply in offended dignity at being treated so.

In other words, along with Harriet the Spy, she is one of the toughest tough-cookies in all children’s literature, especially for girls. Alice is a BAD. ASS.

And it’s all counteracted/undercut/intensified by her classically “little girl” appearance, with stockings, and Mary Janes, and pinafore, and long blonde hair. She is the girliest of girly-girls (unlike Harriet, who was so definitive in her tomboyishness that she actually helped create my personality and aesthetic style, not to mention writing work-ethic.) Despite her girlish appearance, Alice is very very brave, even when she is being violently acted-upon.

She is a role model. Especially for little girls, who may be socialized out of speaking up for themselves, sticking up for themselves, insisting on the fact that they are allowed to take up space (even a HUGE space), that they have a voice, that they have worth.

Camille Paglia wrote this introduction to Lewis Carroll’s book (Alice as well as Through the Looking Glass, looping in her beloved Greek myths, as well as pot-shots at mainstream feminism. She can’t help herself. She discusses the famous genesis of the book, and the inspiration for Alice herself, one of the Liddell sisters whom Carroll befriended.

Paglia says of Alice: “On her travels over the meadows and through the woods, Alice never turns into Huck Finn, a smudged vagabond scamp. She remains the well-bred young lady … After Bloomsbury, we have been too ready to see male oppression in the nineteenth century. Alice’s resilient femininity shows the power of Victorian womanhood. Rarely fearful and never frail or hysterical, Alice reflects Carroll’s real-life adulation of little girls as superior to boys, whom he loathed and avoided.”

Excerpt from Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, by Camille Paglia. From “Alice as Epic Hero”

Games the Liddell sisters were learning – first croquet, then chess – shape the two books. Carroll’s vivid characters are often game pieces come to life – the furious, stentorian Queen of Hearts and her playing-card children, trembling gardeners, and loyal soldiers, who bend double to serve as croquet arches, or the pursed, dictatorial Red Queen and kindly, untidy White Queen, whom Alice, in her female rites of passage, encounters on the testing grounds of a vast geographical chessboard. Game motifs are also present in the Dodo bird’s tumultuous, circular Caucus-race and in the fierce ritual combats of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and Unicorn, and the Red Knight and maladroit White Knight. We know that Carroll, a workaholic, obsessive-compulsive organizer and chronic insomniac, used puzzles, math problems, and quirky mental inventions to get himself through the night and to drive away irreverent or impure thoughts. He was an early speculator in symbolic logic: one of his academic books is called The Game of Logic.

But beyond this, Carroll sees all of life as a game, whole rules we must learn by comic trial and error. Despite our best intentions, reality often proves refractory or rebellious, as when Alice, earnestly trying to play croquet, finds her mallet, a live flamingo, twisting itself upward to stare her in the face. Many Freudian interpretations of the Alice books treat them in distressingly reductive terms as neurotic manifestations of a social misfit. But it is equally possible to see Carroll’s maimed isolation and detachment as the inspiration for his coolly scientific view of society as a webwork of conventions. The best examples are his tea-party and courtroom scenes, with their elaborate ceremonial formalism. Critics have rightly noted Carroll’s prefiguration of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, modernist portraits of amoral, arbitrary authority.

There are analogies to the then-developing discipline of anthropology: Alice visits culture after culture, meeting their despotic rulers, learning their foods, customs, and languages, and inadvertently violating their surprising taboos. For instance, she finds herself in a Cyclops-like cave, the dusky shop of the curt, taciturn knitting Sheep, with its porous shelving and uncooperative floating curios and magic transformation into a stream lined with scented rushes. There may also be influences from Darwin’s natural history: Alice confronts a host of familiar and exotic animals, insects, and plants, who deem themselves quite equal and even superior to mere humans. Each being has its own story, poem, or song, lengthy spiritual autobiographies or genealogies which Alice listens to with polite patience that wears thin as the day goes on.

Carroll’s anthropomorphism is never coy or sentimental, in the standard Victorian way. The Alice books have the uncanny animism of primitive religion: these daunting creatures are bold, brash, and sharp-tongued. Even a pudding comes alive and indignantly berates Alice (“What impertinence!”) for cutting a slice of it. Tooth-and-nail Darwinian themes of violence and carnivorousness abound: Alice is always catching herself as she carelessly or, as Freud would say, perversely mentions a predator (cats, humans) to its prey (mice, birds, fish). And she herself has a quite un-Wordsworthian spirit of sadistic mischief, as when she frightens her old nurse by shouting in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyena, and you’re a bone !” Carroll systematically subverts Victorian moralism by making didacticism synonymous with humorlessness and sterility.