Going into Dreamland: From Lewis Carroll’s <em>Alice in Wonderland</em> to Patrick White’s <em>The Aunt’s Story</em>

Abstract

My chief purpose in this essay is to discuss influences that helped shape patrick White's thought as he wrote the most individual of his novels, The Aunt's Story (1948). also seek to place The Aunt's Story in historical context in its theme of the exploration of the psyche through the analysis of dreaming. that important theme was propelled into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature by Lewis Carroll's two stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll's stories were a powerful inf luence upon White's novel, but the connection has escaped notice in the years that have elapsed since the publication of The Aunt's Story: the two authors are simply not thought of together. Because of their wide popularity, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (i use the shortened, common form of the title) and Through the Looking-Glass have usually been considered imaginative, playful children's stories, whereas The Aunt's Story is a deeply serious adult novel throughout. some modern psychological analyses have found disturbing undercurrents within Carroll's stories, but they are often prone to impose modern attitudes upon the Victorians. in his thoroughly researched study of Lewis Carroll, Will Brooker maintains, as would, i do not believe Lewis Carroll was a 'paedophile' in the modern sense, and [. . .] feel his behaviour and attitudes toward young girls should be judged within his own context rather than ours (preface x). there are strong links between Carroll and White in both theme and technique. White, like almost everyone else of his time, certainly knew Alice in Wonderland well. to david Marr, he recalled being dressed up as the Mad Hatter when he was five years old (880).There are two other important influences besides Carroll's on The Aunt's Story that have also not been recognized. they are olive schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Henry Miller's Black Spring (1936), both of which White quotes from as epigraphs to the three parts of The Aunt's Story. two of the three epigraphs come from schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, often considered one of the great english-language novels, and the other comes from Miller's Black Spring. Miller's novels aroused much attention in the 1930s for their sexual frankness, but what impressed White about Black Spring was its dreamlike, surrealistic writing. He would probably have obtained a copy of the book when on vacation in France during his residence in england in the 1930s.1 By linking himself with the south African olive schreiner and the American Henry Miller, White was endorsing and promoting the notion of an english-language literature in which other countries were equally important. He was becoming increasingly ambitious as he began the series of his greatest works, from The Aunt's Story through The Tree of Man and Voss to Riders in the Chariot. My book Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition (2010) stresses the fact that White always saw himself as associated with a broader literature than that of Australia.The theme that runs through The Aunt's Story of a woman troubled since childhood seeking refuge in a dreamland takes its origin in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but White's treatment of the subject is much more comprehensive than Carroll's. the subject became of increasing interest to the late Victorians and underwent considerable development, contributing to the emergence of Freud and, later, Jung, both of whom contributed to it in return.Carroll's works do not show Alice within her family to suggest where her problems start, but the non-tranquil quality of her dreams suggests insecurities. the assumption of the author is that Alice's problems are caused exclusively by the make-up of her Victorian society. Carroll deals only with Alice's childhood, leaving her at a point in both stories where she appears to have a reasonable ability to handle life's difficulties. …