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"Which is to be master?": Language as Power in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Beatrice Turner

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 243-254 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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243“Which is to be master?”

“Which is to be master?”: Language as Power in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Beatrice Turner

In her introduction to The Case of Peter Pan, Or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose observes that, “[i]f children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp” (2). Subsequent critics such as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Roderick McGillis, and, more recently, Perry Nodelman, quite rightly warn us to be wary of attempts both fictional and critical to “secure” and fix the “real” child. We should be wary, but we should also look closely at these maneuvers to fix and to define. Under examination, such moves not only reveal the inherent inequality in the power relationship between the adult and the child, but they also draw attention to the gap itself—the space between the child described in the text and the child outside it who cannot be described.

The Case of Peter Pan claims that children’s literature, produced out of the desires, fears, and morals of adult authority, speaks only to an adult conception of what the child is. In this way, Rose argues, children’s literature, literature that claims to speak to and of the child, is impossible: there is no child, no coherent, innocent, extra-linguistic entity that literature can speak to and of. Rose states that “[c]hildren’s fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state” (8). In order to display the child as something outside and free from the taint of language, as Rousseau used Emile to claim, children’s fiction works hard to suppress the traces of experience, ambiguity, and deception that are attendant on language (Rose 15–17). Peter Pan, says Rose, was “worked into a spectacle which gleamed with the overbright innocence characteristic of any act of repression proclaiming its purity to the world” (72). But in order for the play to function in that way, she argues, it had to be extracted from a text

Beatrice Turner recently completed her master’s degree at Victoria University of Wellington. Her thesis focused on Victorian children’s fantasy literature and the problem of writing of and to the child.

© 2010 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 243–254.

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intended for adults (The Little White Bird, 1902) and cleansed of any troubling questions about the power inherent in “the act of narration itself” (72).

The Case of Peter Pan claims that these acts of repression and suppression, of keeping at bay that which most threatens the concept of the innocent child underpinning children’s fiction, will inevitably fail at certain moments in the text, at which point the critic will uncover it. Peter Pan is cast as a text that actively tries to hide its troublesome elements: “what is important about Peter Pan is the very partial nature of the success with which it removes this problem [of our relationship to childhood and language] from our view” (41). And yet these troubling aspects are not necessarily deliberately concealed by children’s fiction; in fact, quite the opposite happens for at least two crucial “Golden Age” texts: the Alice books. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), far from requiring the recovery of structural oppositions “between the child and the adult, between oral and written culture, between innocence and decay,” place them very clearly on the surface of the narrative (Rose 50).1

Rose argues that it is through close attention to the language of the narration that the critic discovers the repressed halves of these binaries; yet, in the Alice texts, it is the plot or story that acts out and draws attention to what happens when an adult wields language. Carroll’s narratives, I will argue, are knowingly engaged in a debate about authority and definition and deliberately direct the reader’s gaze to the gap between the fictional child within the book and the “real” child outside the book. The Alice texts enact the relationships between subject and object, fiction and reality, through language. To wield language in these texts, be it intelligible, “normal,” or otherwise, is to have the power to define, to create, and to destroy. When language ceases, so does existence.

An adult author, Carroll writes a child who, as we shall see, ceases when the narrative ends. The child only exists in an intelligible way through language, which is rule-bound and, above all, the province of the adult. I read the Alice texts as exposing and engaging with precisely those problems that The Case of Peter Pan identified, and that subsequent critics have expanded upon. Lesnik-Oberstein has observed that, in viewing childhood through the sort of focus Rose is interested in, children “are seen primarily as being constituted by, and constituting, sets of meanings in language” (“Childhood” 2). McGillis warns that “[l]anguage does not simply state truths; it creates them. We forget this when we blithely assume that we know what is best for children, that we know what literature they should and should not read” (19). Lastly, Nodel- man has recently stated that “[c]hildhood, and a childlike point of view are . . . constructs of adult minds that adults work to impose on children, in part by means of children’s literature” (The Hidden Adult 193). That the observations of The Case of Peter Pan seem to require a sort of constant restating indicates how tremendously difficult Western culture, and much of children’s literature criticism, still finds them to accept. Lesnik-Oberstein raised this point when she commented that nearly twenty years after the publication of The Case of

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Peter Pan, critics did not seem able to divorce themselves from the notion of a “real” and innocent child who is somehow free from adult intervention and creation, and this dependence seems to persist (Introduction 18–19). To ques- tion the innocence of the child runs counter to persistent myths of childhood upon which we rely, and yet, as the Alice texts demonstrate, the ontological status of the child and the possibility of its existence independent of the adult had already been put up for debate at the very commencement of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature.

When Alice climbs through the drawing room looking-glass and into what she calls “Looking-glass House,” one of the first things she finds is a book that seems to be, she thinks, “all in some language I don’t know” (Looking-Glass 101), but she realizes that “it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again” (102). However, when she does so, the poem that she reads seems hardly more intelligible. It is, of course, “Jabberwocky,” a poem that has (like several other poems, characters, and quotations in the two Alice texts) taken on a sort of metatextual life outside the context of the narrative it is part of.

Just over a quarter of the entire poem consists of “nonsense” words made up by Carroll; making the words “go the right way,” though, does not initially appear to be of much use in deciphering the text, which famously begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe. (102)

Alice struggles to make some kind of meaning from this, objecting that “it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!” before concluding for the time being that “somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate” (103). However, later on she has an encounter with Humpty Dumpty, who provides her with a set of meanings that Alice is content to accept in the absence of any others. Her dialogue with Humpty Dumpty is a famous episode in the text—famous, at least, among academics of the philosophy of language, since it is “often cited as defining an extreme limit in semantic theory” (Hancher 49).

While he is happy to help Alice with the “hard words” of “Jabberwocky,” Humpty Dumpty is also a linguistic outlaw, assigning his own private meanings arbitrarily and “reduc[ing] to absurdity the nominalist and subjectivist proposal that words derive their meanings from the intentions of the persons who utter them” (Hancher 49). The following much-quoted passage illustrates this:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all” (142).

While this exchange is terribly puzzling for poor Alice, she does not seem to question in any way Humpty Dumpty’s right or ability to bend language to his will; in fact, she accepts him as a sort of semantic guide and requests that, since “[y]ou seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” he explain “Jabber- wocky” (143). This he proceeds to do, and while the meanings he ascribes to the “nonsense” words may seem just as arbitrary as the meanings he attributes to existing words, they do in fact conform to the basic rules of grammar that inform “Jabberwocky” and that prevent it from being completely unintelligible. Thus, he informs Alice that “‘[b]rillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon— the time when you begin broiling things for dinner”; “‘toves’ are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews”; and “[t]o ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To ‘gimble’ is to make holes like a gimlet” (143–44).

His definitions may be completely random, or they may be based on loose sound and word associations, but Humpty Dumpty is still submissive to the rules that govern syntax: he observes, for example, that “gyre” and “gimble” must be verbs given that their association with the “slithy toves,” as something they “did,” suggests that they are actions carried out by the toves. His defini- tions, to borrow from Ferdinand de Saussure, play with parole whilst adhering to the rules of langue. Alice accepts his definitions as originating from someone who has the power to wield language in a way that she does not, subordinating herself to Humpty Dumpty even though earlier she had objected to his use of the word “glory” to mean “a nice knock-down argument.”

What this exchange points to is Alice’s recognition that, even while he em- ploys a confusing, secretive, and entirely personal system of generating mean- ing that bears no resemblance to the language she knows and uses, Humpty Dumpty appears to Alice to have some right to do so. He is an adult figure, and it is to his status as adult, and the authority that status confers, that she submits. Humpty Dumpty, in turn, does not attempt to dispute or open up the syntactic rules of the language game that establishes the limits of meaning. As an individual who generates individual meanings, he remains submissive to the dominant culture and its institutional branches, which govern the extent to which he can control language.

Alice’s exchange with Humpty Dumpty, and in fact most of her exchanges with the inhabitants of Wonderland and the Looking-glass world, are marked by this power imbalance, an imbalance that is worked out at the level of language. When the Dormouse tells his story about the sisters who lived in the treacle-well, his conflation of the different meanings of “well” results in a

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complete breakdown in understanding between Alice and the other members of the tea party:

“Where did they draw the treacle from?” “You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?” “But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark. “Of course they were,” said the Dormouse: “well in” (55).

Alice’s attempts to apply what she understands as sense to the tea party con- versation (“I’ve had nothing yet . . . so I can’t take more”) only seem to lead her into logical quicksand (52).

The Alice texts are littered with utterances like that of the Hatter, which “seemed to have no meaning in it, and yet . . . was certainly English” (52), and the entire narrative may be considered a complex linguistic joke at the expense of Alice and the reader, neither of whom possesses the requisite knowledge to make sense. Whatever rules are being adhered to here, they are ones to which Alice is denied access, and as such she almost always comes out second best in the debates in which she is engaged. Alice herself, recognizing her powerlessness when it comes to playing the language games of Wonderland and Looking- glass world, identifies and desires the source of power as deriving from being a grown-up. When she does win an argument, it is because she quite literally “grows up.”

In the courtroom scene near the end of Wonderland, the King of Hearts orders her out on the grounds that Rule Forty-two states “[a]ll persons more than a mile high to leave the court,” claiming that it is the “oldest rule in the book” (83). “‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice. The King turned pale and shut his note-book hastily” (83). Alice is right, of course, but she is also now much, much larger than everyone else in the courtroom. Until this point, her attempts to point out logical inconsistencies have been ignored or shouted down. It is only when she possesses an advantage in size, much as an adult does over a child, that she confidently believes that Wonderland’s logic is faulty. Alice appears to carry the memory of this power with her into the Looking-glass world, too. When she is invited to participate in the chess game, for example, she confides to the Red Queen that “of course I should like to be a Queen, best” (108).

My concern here is not so much to unravel the games played, or the seman- tic theories critics have attributed various episodes as mocking, but rather to examine how power is distributed through the ability to play such games with language. In one sense, Humpty Dumpty is right when he states that the only question, when it comes to the creation of meaning, is “which is to be master.” Alice’s correct belief that he is forcing words into bearing meanings they cannot carry is ultimately of no consequence in Wonderland: she is powerless as both outsider and child. The adult creatures of the Alice texts demonstrate, through

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their mastery of an alien language game and their ability to define Alice at will, that it is the adult who governs and oversees the struggle to generate meaning. The child becomes defined through a language that adults have the power to use, but that child not possess a reciprocal power to define the adult or the surrounding world according to a corresponding “childish” language. Nonsense language, parody and, crucially, fantasy, may, according to Linda Shires,

be considered similar in one respect: they explode or transgress the frame of the “real” and thus open up a space of uncertainty. Pushing towards the realm of non- signification where nothing is stable, these forms open a gap between signifier and signified which makes a definite meaning or absolute reality impossible to attain. (267)

The Alice texts, rich in all three of these modes, certainly resist definite meaning for the reader or critic; they also resist definition by Alice. However, they are not meaning-less, in the same way that nonsense language is not a language of a literal lack of sense. To arrive at a fixed meaning for “Jabberwocky” is not possible, but neither can we claim that it is “without sense,” since it can be read. Something truly without sense could not be read: it would be an arbitrary col- lection of words or letters; it would not be language. Perhaps what we can say instead is that parody, fantasy, and nonsense, in transgressing the frame of “the real,” establish new relationships between signifier and signified that readers, and adventurers from the “real” world, like Alice, cannot comprehend.

Alice, a child who finds herself to be within a dream of a surreal and anarchic world (and the question of who it is who does the dreaming is an important one here, a point I will return to later), finds that even in the wildest lands of fantasy, certain rules must be adhered to. In order for the narrative to retain some sort of meaning, however open-ended or nonsensical that meaning might appear, it must be constructed according to known rules of syntax. Leila May, commenting on Wittgenstein’s theory of “language games,” notes that “a lan- guage whose rules cannot be followed or can be broken at whim is an impos- sible language,” which creates “an impossible life” or “a form of madness” (82). Certainly there is much that Alice experiences that suggests that Wonderland and the Looking-glass world are places of madness, but as May points out, the Cheshire Cat uses a logical argument to prove his assertion that everyone is mad in Wonderland (82). So, while there is madness, there is also logic, and there are rules governing the language games: they are merely rules that are so alien to Alice and to readers accustomed to the “normal” rules of the English language that neither can participate in the game.

But to follow the logical arguments of those who live in the two Alice “worlds” can be an alienating exercise, and in fact an appeal to logic usually signifies a point at which Alice’s understanding of the world is about to confront a disconcertingly different one. The Cheshire Cat demonstrates this with his rigorous, yet faulty, application of logic to prove his own insanity:

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“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?” “I suppose so,” said Alice. “Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.” (48)

By the same logic, he tells Alice, she too is mad, because only mad people come to Wonderland, and the Pigeon uses a similar logic to prove that Alice is a serpent. As Tweedledee puts it, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic” (120). That is not, of course, logic as Alice understands it, or as readers outside the text understand it. It is, however, what logic is in the worlds Alice finds herself in: a secret system that appears meaningless to those outside it. Knowledge of the game’s rules is a signifier of power, and Alice, ignorant of how this logic works, is powerless. Those who do know the rules can tell Alice what she is: she is variously a snake, mad, a “fabulous monster” (the Unicorn’s definition) and Mary-Ann, the White Rabbit’s housemaid (153).

The texts grant linguistic control to those who inhabit Wonderland and the Looking-glass world and, in doing so, define them as adults. They use this control in a very adult way, too: they exercise the adult’s right to tell the child what she is. Perhaps the most obvious instance of an imposed definition occurs in Alice’s exchange with the Pigeon. Alice has just swallowed a portion of the Caterpillar’s mushroom, which has caused her neck to lengthen like a snake’s body, so she finds herself attacked by a Pigeon who insists that Alice is a “ser- pent” intent on stealing her eggs (40). Alice’s attempts to convince the Pigeon otherwise are unsuccessful, partly due to the fact that the physical and mental manipulations and changes wrought on her by Wonderland have rendered her ambivalent about her own identity:

“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—” “Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!” “I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through, that day. “A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. (41)

When Alice tries to prove her argument by telling the pigeon that “little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do,” the Pigeon merely expands her defini- tion of Alice as serpent to include all other little girls. “I don’t believe it,” the Pigeon replies, “but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say” (41). The Pigeon, a mother and an adult, reserves the right to define little girls, or children, by her own logic. Serpents eat eggs, so if little girls eat eggs, then they must be serpents too, just as the Cheshire Cat insists that Alice’s presence in Wonderland is enough to prove her madness.

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Far more serious for Alice and her sense of identity is the terrifying revela- tion of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. She is not real, they tell her; she is merely a part of the Red King’s dream:

“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?” Alice said “Nobody can guess that.” “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out— bang!—just like a candle!” “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of a thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?” “Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee (125).

Tweedledum and Tweedledee seem curiously complacent about their own precarious fictional existence, and indeed the existential status of the Looking- glass world itself, which, if those two “great schoolboys” live in it, must be as fictional as they are (120). When Alice tries to quiet the pair for fear they should wake the King, Tweedledum remarks,

“Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him . . . when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.” “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.” (125–26)

But Alice is not, by Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s definition, real, and nor are they, and nor is the Looking-glass world. Their existence all depends on the Red King continuing to dream them, and as Tweedledum points out, they have no reciprocal power to disrupt his dreaming.

This conversation embodies the problem of the adult writing the child into fiction: the child, or the idea of the child, only exists so long as the author “keeps dreaming.” Alice, the subject of the Red King’s dream, will “go out” when he “leaves off.” At the narrative’s end, it is suggested that, instead of going out she merely wakes up into the framing narrative of reality; but this also supposes that it is Alice who does the dreaming. She wonders out loud, “who it was that dreamed it all . . . it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!” (180). Nina Auerbach claims that the Looking-glass world is possibly the Red King’s dream, a mirroring of Wonderland about which there is “no equivocation” as to who dreamed it: “the dainty child carries the threatening world of Wonderland within her” (32).

While Alice does indeed seem to wake up, the Red King never does, as far as we know: I would suggest that he remains dreaming until the narrative’s end. With his tasseled red night-cap, snoring in a rumpled heap, he does not make

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for a kingly figure, but he does share a comic affinity with the other inventor in the narrative, the rather more hopeless White Knight. Both these absurd characters stand, in different ways, for the creative authority of the narrative, and Alice does indeed “go out” when that authority ceases the narrative. What Tweedledum and Tweedledee call to the attention of Alice and the implied reader is Alice’s fictional and subordinate status: she exists only as long as the narrative is sustained by the author who created it. The author is directly complicit in highlighting this problem, too, being at great pains to emphasize Alice’s existence in the future. When Tweedledum and Tweedledee are dressed for battle, the narrator remarks that “Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in her life,” and it is the White Knight’s song, we are told, that “[o]f all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass . . . was the one that she always remembered most clearly” (127, 163). This authorial insistence on a life that continues beyond the time span of the present adventures demonstrates that Alice, along with all the inhabitants of the story, is existentially at the mercy of the implied author. Within the narrative, Alice is permitted to look back on her adventures from a distant future in the story timeframe, but for a reality outside of the narra- tive, she is, as the concluding poem admits, a fictitious ghost who haunts the author “phantomwise” (181).

Even while these texts attempt to create for Alice a dreamscape in which the child, asleep and inexperienced, experiences freedom and a bizarre adven- ture that is permissible only in fantasy, they confirm that the child is defined through and in language and, as such, there are ordering limits on what she may dream. In order to retain any chance of intelligibility, language remains ultimately dependent on adult-imposed structures, and it is this language that describes the child in the text. The Pigeon’s definition of Alice as a serpent is considered viable in Wonderland logic, just as Humpty Dumpty’s linguistic contortions trump Alice’s knowledge of what words can mean, and the Mad Hatter’s “logic in excess” defeats her so utterly that the only thing to do is to get up and leave a conversation she cannot hope to participate in meaning- fully (May 83). These instances of the adult ability to control and define both language and the idea of what a child is point toward the Tweedledum and Tweedledee episode, wherein lies the problem. In stating that the child Alice is being dreamed by the adult Red King, and that she will cease to exist when he ceases to dream, the text articulates precisely the dilemma of children’s fiction that Rose identifies: that a child is a category written by the adult.

Adults, as the arbiters of language, create the child, and they also create the signs by which the child shall be described: innocence, inexperience, a lack of knowledge. The distribution of power between the adult and the child is un- equal: the adult has the power to write and to define the child, while the child remains a passive thing described within a text, and in doing so the experienced adult leaves this defined child with a trace of their adultness, their experience, and their knowledge of the world. The very notion of the innocent child, which

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Rose exposes as merely an adult desire, is revealed as an impossibility. In Wil- liam Blake’s Songs of Innocence, the narrator describes how he wrote the Songs: he “pluck’d a hollow reed . . . made a rural pen” and “stain’d the water clear” (“Introduction” Songs of Innocence, lines 16–18). The clear, pure water becomes “stain’d” or tainted with writing. Language, the province of the adult, has already infected the pure, Arcadian landscape of the child even as it invents the child, and to write the child is therefore to irreparably mark it with adulthood.

This is almost a paraphrase of Jacques Derrida’s famous declaration that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Grammatology 158, original emphasis). I take this to mean not that nothing literally exists outside of writing, or the text, but rather that we are unable to access the “outside,” to reach through writing and access a pure point of origin. Following this line of reasoning, the idea of the child as a free and truly innocent entity may exist as a potentiality, as a concept that could occur, but for the reader, for the text, and for the author, the practical outcome is that the “child” does not exist: there is no child “outside the text.” It is this lack of an outside that I read the Alice texts as demonstrating. The narratives shuttle her back and forth between dream, or fiction, and the waking, “real” world, but she never becomes anything other than an adult’s dream of a child.

What the Tweedledum and Tweedledee episode has put up for debate, through this exchange between a little girl and two little men dressed as schoolboys, is the status of fiction itself. In one sense, it may of course be ob- served that all characters “go out” when the authority governing their existence decides to end the narrative. But Alice is not only a child; she is also someone who doesn’t belong in Looking-glass world. She has crossed over from the “real world,” the world of the sitting room, the kittens, and the chess set that opens and closes the narrative. So while Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the other characters that Alice meets are all the natural and “right” inhabitants of the Looking-glass world, she is an outsider who has become trapped in the wrong place. She has become trapped inside fiction. From this point of view, it is interesting to consider that, while almost all the characters who inhabit both Wonderland and the Looking-glass world are, as discussed above, adults (whether humans or creatures), Tweedledum and Tweedledee occupy a more ambiguous role. They are men but also schoolboys, or at least men dressed as schoolboys. They are adults pretending to be children, and as such they may be seen to represent what Rose says a child in fiction really is: an adult hiding behind a representation of a child.

The only possible child about which we can know anything is one articulated by an adult. The “real” children, the ones whose existence we cannot deny, will always remain beyond the text, unreachable and unspeakable; in this sense they constitute Derrida’s absence, the “nothing” that is outside the text. Wholly imaginary, these children outside the text may be real but, for the purposes of children’s literature and criticism, they are only theoretical; an attempt to render them in language, however, would describe them as something else: the child as category, which is the child that Rose identifies.

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I turn again, here, to Derrida, who lies behind much of this discussion (he is writing about empiricism, and invokes his famous conception of the trace): “[i]t is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. . . .We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens (Writing 151). Thus, while the “dream” or thought of a pure child is possible, in practice it contains the trace of its other, the adult. As Nodelman explains, “the childlike can be constructed and explained only in relation to that which it is not,” or, to put it the other way round, we understand the term “child” because we can posit the term “adult” (206).

Alice, that theoretically “real” child who has strayed into fiction, finds that she cannot leave it, or more accurately, that her existence in the “real” world is just as fictional and just as vulnerable to the definitions of an adult authority. Through the Looking-Glass ends with the unresolved problem of who dreamed the dream and with a question addressed to the implied child reader: “Which do you think it was?” (180). However, although the cessation of the narrative marks the end of Alice, the issue of whose dream it is can be resolved only if we read the text as acting out that question, with the Red King being the creative authority of the Looking-glass world in the same way that an implied author called Lewis Carroll is responsible for the Alice texts. What the texts are therefore calling to our attention is the same point that Rose makes when she says “[t]here is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes” (10). Alice insists on her own reality as something separate from the Looking-glass world and the fiction it stands for. What the text works to show, however, is that even outside fiction, the child is still fictional.

Note 1. While this article will be limited to an investigation of how the troubled relationship between the child and language is played out in the Alice texts, other “Golden Age” texts also enact the structures of power inherent in the representation of the child and the difficulties in claiming to interpret the child. George MacDonald’s fantasies are explicitly concerned with these issues. At the Back of the North Wind (1870) is perhaps the best example, with its language brought back from the North Wind’s country, which is completely meaningless to adults but has “all the good in the world” to the children who hear and understand it. Similarly, The Princess and the Goblin (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) also engage with ideas about the irreducible gap between the adult and child, with the recurring motif of the child lying to the adult in order to be believed (126).

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child.” Victorian Studies 17.1

(1973): 31–47.

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Blake, William. Selected Poetry. Ed. W. H. Stevenson. London: Penguin, 1988.

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