A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in theAliceBooks andPeter Pan

Friederike Frenzel

doi:10.1515/culture-2020-0141

Abstract

AbstractLewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.

Highlights

It traces the intersection between the literary processing of both deliberate and unconscious real-life influences and the distorting nature of satirical and storytelling exaggeration as a metalevel, where author and audience meet. What brought these books into being is outlined: Carroll and Barrie both took incentive and inspiration from a very specific audience, consisting of the children of friends. Both the Alice books and Peter Pan originated from oral storytelling in a most familiar circle
Kincaid sees its otherness in close connection with the otherness of another cipher: the Victorian “child-lover” or the “pedophile.” As today’s society and research reaffirms the pure, empty role of the childish other, the supposed “child-lovers,” like Carroll and Barrie, become its negative, its counterpart others [4,5,6,7]
The text itself points out this gender difference – and its own hybrid structure with it: fairy tales for the girls, adventure stories for the boys – when Peter, after bursting into the sheltered Darling nursery, lures Wendy to Neverland with the promise to see mermaids and her brother John with the mention of pirates (PP 34–38)

Summary

Used here is the novelization published in 1995 in Penguin Popular Classics

“Looking at adult visions of childhood, and adult desires for their children, provides a mirror for adult desires and longings for themselves,” and in the context of a British “culture of imperialism” in both the Victorian and Edwardian Era, the colonial sneaks into the texts produced for a child audience as an underlying theme (Kutzer XV–XVI), making the act of othering by adult storytellers a double act. What brought these books into being is outlined: Carroll and Barrie both took incentive and inspiration from a very specific audience, consisting of the children of friends Both the Alice books and Peter Pan originated from oral storytelling in a most familiar circle. Kincaid sees its otherness in close connection with the otherness of another cipher: the Victorian “child-lover” or the “pedophile.” As today’s society and research reaffirms the pure, empty role of the childish other, the supposed “child-lovers,” like Carroll and Barrie, become its negative, its counterpart others [4,5,6,7]

Curious Commissions

The Vicious Cycle of Narration

Gardner identifies the inventive White Knight as Carroll’s self-insert

Introduction