Looking Back: Posthumanism and Sympathy in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

When young Alice meets a rabbit and a caterpillar in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), she does not meet metaphorical or racialized humans but encounters posthumanist characters who challenge Victorians' humanist notions, especially when it comes to sympathetic engagement. Audrey Jaffe and Rae Greiner propose that Victorians deployed sympathy to construct the imaginary self, suggesting that sympathy became a mode of representation that mirrored liberalism's ideals. As a result, their work focuses on how Victorians represented themselves and other beings. Yet their scholarship has not been deployed in more posthumanist conversations and so does not fully articulate the consequences of how sympathy, for Victorians, can make one human. The implications of this mechanism then suggest that sympathetic representations truncate the possibilities for other ways of being in the world. In this essay, I argue that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland can be used as a case study of posthumanist possibilities, especially as they pertain to critiquing sympathetic engagement and signalling Victorians' nascent frustrations with humanist constructs.