“Wrecked at the critical point where the stream and river meet”? Lewis Carroll and the deconstruction of Childhood

Abstract

“Wrecked at the critical point where the stream and river meet”?: Lewis Carroll and the deconstruction of Childhood.This paper will investigate the “form” and “reform” of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – to change within the form of the text and through the form of Alice the character. Although Carroll may have fetishized childhood and commodified the child in print, the child was not passive in this process. In the Alice books Carroll takes us beyond conventional practice, activating the child from centuries of dormancy. Carroll rather unconventionally rendered the child active, as an agent of reform rather than passive amidst the process of change. For the first time since childhood was constructed in the eighteenth-century, Carroll fostered the child’s ability not to merely accept didacticism but to question social morality. He creates characters and texts which are active agents in change who reflect and examine themselves and others. Alice, therefore, provides a refreshing alternative to didactic texts such as Sherwood’s The Fair child Family (1818), Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young People (1805), Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1862) and MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872). As a result, I believe that Carroll is truer to the spirit of educational reformers such as Rousseau and Locke, than Sherwood, Edgeworth and others who repressed rather than freed children to think beyond the parameters of convention and occupy narrative spaces to imagine and reflect.Carroll destabilises and deconstructs childhood, rather than adhering to convention by consolidating, stabilising and sentimentalising it. At the time Carroll was writing, changes to the conceptualisation of childhood were occurring in debates about the age of consent, innocence and censorship and Carroll was engaged in these.The Alice books are not religious but can be regarded as theodical since they explore conflicts such as fear of time, death and meaninglessness. Indeed I believe the Alice books express Dodgson’s crisis of faith in his questioning of didacticism and divine omnipotence, the latter through staging a radical disappearance of the narrator. The absence of an explicit moralising agent does not mean, however, that the Alice books lack a moral framework. Carroll transcends the category of didactic narrator and rather blasphemously assumes the role of omnipotent narrator. In this respect, his texts can be regarded retrospectively as postmodern. Indeed, it could be said that Humpty Dumpty is fragmented even before his fall. Carroll’s preoccupation with the organisation of time and space is evident in his work, which has been influenced by social changes from local to Greenwich Mean Time or Standard Time and in his creation of the “delayed timing” device used in his photography. Knoepflmacher believes that Alice is the embodiment of many of Carroll’s child friends, “the Alices and Gertrudes and Ethels [which were] so important to his psychological well-being” (Knoepflmacher, 1998, pp 214-215). This photographic approach is transferred to Wonderland where not one, but several Alices are depicted, exposed as snapshots of her development over time. In “collecting” children, Carroll extended the Victorian pastime and obsession of preserving birds’ eggs, catching and preserving butterflies and organising them by category, flower-pressing, philately and compilations of scrapbooks.It is interesting that the term “adolescence” was only introduced at the end of the nineteenth-century and I believe Carroll’s Alice books were pioneering in signifying the transition and preparing the way for this change in psychological interest. His text is liminal and in flux, allowing him to explore issues relating to development and challenging the grounds on which progression is necessarily linear. The form of the text itself and its characterisation symbolise process – Alice herself is described as a “teetotum” (spinning top) – and transition, not surprising since the tale was conceived in motion, told on a boat and written on a train. It is reflexive with no clear beginning or end and as such it comments on the reflexivity of child and adult states. Alice represents the child reader undergoing the process of development. I argue that the death of childhood as represented in Alice is figurative, viewed as a mode of development. The form of this text represents both the process of construction and deconstruction and offers scope for reconstruction, reform and development.