Study Notes on Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland

Useful Background Information on Historical Context:

Carrolls novel was published in 1865, during the English Victorian era. The age of Victoria was a long and rich historical era full of contradictions. While the age is often thought of as one of extreme stricturesin terms of womens roles and social etiquette for polite society, for exampleit was also a turbulent age of development and reform. Some of the general events and features of the Victorian era (that may be relevant as extra-textual" context for Carrolls novel) include:

(1) A great expansion of British wealth and empire, the likes of which the nation hadnt experienced since the Renaissance. By the Victorian age, England was well-established as the worlds leading superpower and it controlled much of the new global economy.

(2) In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovations: feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism and other modern movements all took shape by Carrolls adulthood.

a. Victorian feminism emerged from the matrix of the eras general interest in social reform. Many women served at the front of the struggles to improve education (womens and childrens especially); to decrease the gap between rich and poor through political as well as charitable works; and to obtain suffrage for women.

b. In terms of socio-economic development, the Victorian age was immensely important to modern history. This age had already seen the eruption and dissipation of the French Revolution on the continent, which challenged the right of royalty and nobility to govern the people. In England, however, where no such revolution occurred, more subtle (but equally significant) changes were taking place in terms of economic class structures. The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce and the rise of industry, evolved into an "upper class" which tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process. The increasingly powerful middle classes, however, undertook organized agitation to remedy this situation. The working classes, however, remained shut out from the political process, and became increasingly hostile not only to the aristocracy but to the middle classes as well.

c. Marx had published most of his writings on communism (including his manifesto) by the time of Alices publication in 1865. Marxs writings responded to the socio-economic problem in European culturethe growing division between the upper, bourgeois (middle), and laboring classes due to industrialism and capitalism. He posited ideas about the alienation from human nature that subjects under capitalism experience, and about the class consciousness that inevitably results from an intensely stratified and divided system.

ENGLISH N1A/2

SUMMER 2010

d. Child labor was also a fruitful area of reform in the era, and it is a category that goes hand-in-hand with changes to social and economic structures, since children (as well as women) were the subject of the eras most zealous movements. By the mid nineteenth century, industrial growth and the rise of factories also amounted to labor exploitationin which the disenfranchised and poor were solicited for the arduous and menial labor required to sustain new economic developments. The disenfranchised often included children of poor families or orphans. It was not until 1901 that England passed a law requiring all children to attend school, and it took until the end of the Victorian era to establish protections against child labor.

(3) During the Victorian era, a new species of childrens literatureincluding and thanks to Carrolls workemerged. This was a brand of literature that differed from the preceding centurys didactic experiments, in which children were delivered straightforwardoften Christianmoral messages in the literature developed for their education. In the Victorian Age, less straightforward practices of education became acceptable. For instance, fairy tales and other works rose to prominence as educational childrens literature. There were a considerable number of novels published in the Victorian age with children as protagonistsas subject rather than object (an unprecedented motif in the history of arts and literature). From Carrolls Alice to Dickens Pip, Victorian writers seemed especially concerned with the idea of children as developing identities; as something alien fromand perhaps even superior toadults in their innocence, moral certainty, and vitality.

(4) In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic (early 19th-century) emphases on self, emotion, and imagination with views about the public role of the artist and his/her social responsibility. The Victorian era also saw the parallel rise of two modern artistic modesthat of fantasy and that of realism. It is remarkable (and interesting) to note that Carroll and other fantastic and utopian novelists were as important to the ages literary character as were the works of realist novelists like George Eliot and dramatists like George Bernard Shaw, for example. Realism is a movement in novel writing in the nineteenth century that includes Balzac in France, George Eliot in England, and William Dean Howells in America, among others. Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction. The romance is said to present life as we would have it bemore picturesque, fantastic, adventurous or heroic than actuality; realism, on the other hand, is said to represent life as it really is. Realistic fiction is written to give the effect that it represents the life and social world of the common reader, evoking the sense that its characters might in fact exist, and that such things may well happen. To this effect, most realist writers prefer the commonplace and the everyday, represented in minute detail, over rarer aspects of life. Also connected to the realist project in this sense (especially in 19th-c deployments) is an interest in bourgeois subjects, domestic spaces, and ordinary family or romantic relations.

ENGLISH N1A/2

SUMMER 2010

What does all of this have to do with Alices Adventures in Wonderland?

Perhaps nothing at least directly! In describing these features of Alices historical context, I do not mean to suggest that you should look for these elements embedded in the novel in some special code, or that any of these historical facts illuminate the novels meaning, in and of themselves. Reading with historical context in mind does not mean that we should say episode x = historical event y. That is neither useful as discovery nor is it particularly interestingfor, if this were the primary goal of reading, why wouldnt we simply read the history books instead, and be done with it? Rather, it is important that we take note of the intellectual as well as political climate in which Carrolls work developed, so that we can determine the larger motivations that shape his choice of genre and subject matter. Writers and artists dont simply mimic or report historical issues (that is the work of the journalist); they reflect on those issues and test their ages values by positioning them against other often conflicting elements and points of view. But, nonetheless, writers choices inevitably engage the ideas of their day, even if indirectly. Thus, a responsible extra-textual analysis would consider the historical particulars as the meansand not the endof analysis.

Remaining Big Questions for Monday and Wednesday discussions (versions of these questions will appear as suggested essay prompts for Essay #2 which is why Im providing them ahead of time for our discussion purposesbut blog posts for this week should not replicate these questions in any direct way!):

1. In what ways is Carrolls novel a Victorian text? How is Alice a particularly Victorian figure? What interventions do you think Carroll makes on Victorian values, if any? Do you think his presentation of Alice is subversive in any wayin relation to any of the specific Victorian ideologies described above? Is it orthodox in other ways?

2. Using Alice as your basis, can you postulate a definition of fantasy literature? What are its commonplaces and values? Also, is it anti-realism or is it another side of realism?

3. Why do you think the novel ends in a courtroom? How and why is Alice able to escape Wonderland? Is this merely a parable of overcoming adult authority, or is something else involved in Alices transformation?

4. BIG QUESTION, perhaps not relevant for a little while yet: On which bases do the rise of detective fiction and fantasy literature coincide, if any? Is this literary historical development a case of the poet vs. the mathematician (to quote Poes story), or is there a less than neat division between the two genres? Do both genres (as far as you have read of them) represent the implicit tension between imagination and logic/ rationality?

ENGLISH N1A/2

SUMMER 2010