Alice contrariwise: constructing the child and its image from 1865 to the present

© 2015 Madeleine Ashleigh HunterThis thesis considers the remarkable longevity of the figure of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and argues that her persistence is the result of the acquisition of a transtextual life. In the writing of others, in images, film and pop cultural movements, Alice has acquired a second life. Detached from her text, Alice remains nevertheless recognisable and, as I will argue, has come to function as an index of the child. This thesis argues that Alice’s transtextual life is a consequence of her embodiment of the nineteenth century Romantic ideology of childhood. Beginning by placing Alice and her text in their social and historical context, I consider the changing attitudes toward the figure of the child that came to dominate the nineteenth century and the challenges posed to its ideology of childhood by actually existing children, particularly those of the working classes. The thesis then turns to Carroll’s Alice texts themselves, arguing that both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (1872) provide a portrait of the child in which the complex interaction between innocence and experience lying at the heart of Romantic childhood is played out, as the text tries and fails to contain Alice within a fantasy of endless childhood. My third chapter examines Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and its invocations of Alice’s image. Lolita highlights the importance sexuality has come to occupy in our contemporary definitions of innocence and experience, as well as prefiguring anxieties about images of children that have been visited upon Carroll’s own photographic work. The thesis concludes by examining a selection of adaptations of Alice and her image from the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century and how these translations of Alice’s figure reflect and respond to changing attitudes and understandings of childhood