FALLING DOWN IN ORDER TO GROW UP: TWO WOMEN’S JOURNEYS FROM UN-DOMESTICATION TO DOMESTICATION IN FANTASY FICTION

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, following the convention adopted in The annotated Alice (Gardner 2000), the authors refer to the combined volume of Lewis Carroll’s works – entitled Alice in Wonderland – which includes Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass – as ‘the Alice texts’. In the Alice texts, Alice is presented as a Victorian female protagonist who has to ‘fall down’ in order to ‘grow up’. This is also true of Yvaine in Neil Gaiman’s Victorian-based novel, Stardust (1999). Both protagonists experience ‘falling down’, which also carries the symbolic weight of being an act of submission – falling into a subordinate state. In looking at the significance of the opposing movements up and down as indicative of a specific process of female domestication, postmodern and poststructuralist theory explains how this binary opposition fulfils a specific didactic function in Victorian and Victorian-based fairy tale narratives. Historical approaches to Victorian society also demonstrate the submissive role assigned to women in Victorian society. While ‘un-domestication’ is rejected in favour of domestic submission in Carroll’s and Gaiman’s narratives, ‘un-domestication’ results in the liberation of their central female protagonists in the filmic revisionings, Alice in Wonderland (2010), directed by Tim Burton, and Stardust (2007), directed by Matthew Vaughn.