Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860-1901 by Kiera Vaclavik

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860-1901 by Kiera Vaclavik Bonnie Tulloch (bio) Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860-1901, by Kiera Vaclavik. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. In Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860-1901, Kiera Vaclavik draws attention to an important but often-overlooked area of Alice scholarship: her dress. This lack of critical attention, she points out, is somewhat surprising given the character's current status as a fashion icon. The questions of how and why the girl from Wonderland came to acquire this status reside at the center of the book and prompt a series of practical what, where, when, and who follow-up inquiries related to her different depictions. Aligning her investigation with other fashion-oriented research within the humanities, Vaclavik's contribution to the substantial corpus of Carroll studies takes the form [End Page 270] of an in-depth, multimodal analysis of the authorized and unauthorized iterations of Alice that appeared during the last decades of the nineteenth century. While Vaclavik draws on previous scholarship concerning Alice's visual identity, she ultimately seeks to expand it through her dress-based approach, which includes a detailed study of various material representations (e.g., prints, paintings, photographs, products, etc.) and cultural practices (e.g., amateur and professional theatrical performances, as well as fancy dress) that contributed to the heroine's reimagining. Through this examination, she convincingly makes the case that clothes can make and remake a character. When it comes to the perennial questions of identity related to Carroll's heroine, attention to her apparel offers important insight into "how old and how feminine" she appeared to initial audiences (8). The remarkable finding is that, for the first decades of her career, Alice's alterations were made chiefly in an effort to keep her unremarkable and thereby relatable to her readers. This fashion-focused investigation, however, is not without its challenges. Tracing the inspiration for Alice's different looks is, in its own way, a trip down the rabbit hole. The evidence is neither complete nor straightforward, but it is suggestive. Vaclavik is careful to qualify her suggestions by balancing the unknown with the known facts pertaining to Alice's history, beginning with Carroll himself. Chapter one, "Carroll, Dress and the 'Original' Tenniel Alice," makes the argument that the significance of Alice's dress was of great concern to her creator. While Carroll does not devote many descriptions to Alice's clothing in Wonderland or Looking Glass, Vaclavik notes that this "should in no way be seen as a sign of disinterest" (11). Drawing on a variety of source materials, including diary entries and letters, she examines how Carroll's views on childhood, religion, cultures, society, and the arts manifested in his opinions on dress, which, her research sample indicates, he shared quite freely with the people of his acquaintance. Style, she concludes, forms an important part of Carroll's artistic sensibility and aesthetic pursuits, as expressed through his writing, photography, and involvement in the theater. The author's interest in and awareness of the significance of different fashions add another layer of depth to his own portrayals of his character as well as Tenniel's. While Vaclavik's examination tends to focus outward, that is, on Carroll's view of how others (particularly little girls) should dress, it would be interesting to extend some of this critical attention to the author himself. Jackie Wullschläger notes that the young Carroll "was [End Page 271] precocious, adored mathematics and drawing, built a toy theatre and marionettes, and liked dressing up in a white gown and brown wig to perform conjuring tricks and puppet shows for his sisters" (31). Understanding where and when Carroll might have developed his ideas about the functionality and aesthetic purposes of different kinds of children's dress would move the conversation beyond his much-discussed fascination with little girls and the controversies implied therein. In doing so, it would further contextualize Carroll's fashion-related opinions and the ideological implications they carry for his female character. It also might help clarify some of the apparent contradictions in his attitudes concerning...