Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an Anti-Feminist Text: Historical, Psychoanalytical and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

This article is an attempt to engage with the question ‘Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a feminist book?’ Arguments from historical, psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives are presented and discussed. By summarizing and engaging with both sides of the debate, this article detects the source of the unresolved conflicts surrounding whether Carroll’s novel is a feminist text to be the different sides’ distinctive interpretations of Alice’s social identification. The pro-Alice-as-feminist-icon camp simply identifies her as an active and potentially subversive female role model for women, and thus subsumes Alice under the general category of women by assumption, whereas the iconoclastic camp, including the author of this article, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an anti-feminist text, purports to differentiate the role of little girls and the role of adult women in the Victorian period. It argues that Alice’s supposedly unconventionally unfeminine characteristics do not necessarily imply Carroll’s enthusiasm for women’s liberation from marginality and domesticity, and instead they reveal his misogynistic fear of adult women and his pessimistic and nostalgic mourning for the loss of girlhood innocence and the inevitable corruption that ensues. The fictional character’s conformist ideologies are also detected in her participation in the oppressive system and mindset of British imperialism, which paradoxically further confines her in the oppressed domain of female inferiority and domesticity.