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Child's Play Games and Fantasy in Carroll, Stevenson, and Gráname The Romantics may well have invented childhood, as Peter Coveney once argued,! but the dramatization of the child's creative life — as opposed either to its celebration or mere recognition — had to wait at least two generations for the appearance of the great Victorian fabulists whose experiments in fantasy helped to establish the modern "wonder-book" tradition. For Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Kenneth Grahame (the principal subjects of this paper) the primary expression of the child's creative energies is to be found in "play": games of word and world-making, games of magic and reverie, and finally games of growing up. For the wonder-book child, "play" is a privileged moment of uncertain duration, within which the claims of the grown-up world can be evaded, mocked, or turned inside out. But for the authors of these wonder-books , play is a precarious and ambivalent moment of extravagant invention, recollection, and most of all, impersonation: the child-man reenacting the fantastic banalities of the nursery. The great peril of child's play, so defined, is that the child-man tends to forget the pathos of distance, to forget, that is, that he is a mere "Olympian," and that his identification with the playing child is a transient fiction, endurable only so long as the wonder lasts.-' As several decades of commentators have noted, the games of the Alice books are both elaborate and revealing and at times quite obviously parodistic . Thus, we discover that Carroll's Alice is particularly fond of ritualizing, even to the extent of curtseying as she falls weightlessly down the rabbit hole. Nearly all of her encounters in Wonderland and behind the looking-glass turn out to be highly ceremonial games in disguise, and this is nowhere more emphatically so than in the final chapters of both books, where an absurd ritual (a mock-trial and a mock-banquet) quickly degenerates into an equally absurd riot. In each of these chapters we sense Alice's growing frustration with a pompous, quintessentially adult game of manners, a game in which protocol and fun seem completely antithetic — ritual gone stale, as it were. Her reactions to all this boredom, however, tend to be equally ritualized and to assume the form of disruptive though stylized play: "If those nasty cards and chess pieces won't behave themselves," she seems to say, "why then they deserve to get tossed in the air" — in short, a formal tantrum. More often than not it is the creatures, not Alice, who lose their tempers with her, but either way there is a certain decorum which governs even tantrum throwing, and as soon as a game is called on account of tears or pique, another game soon takes its place, Not even rudeness can interrupt the ritual of continuous play. The Caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts, the Sheep, the Red Chess-Queen are all frightful spoilsports, and each in its own way torments Alice with µnanswerable questions or cruelly exposes her ignorance of "proper" gamesmanship; yet, paradoxically, refusing to play along is seen as only one more variation upon the rules, and everytime the Queen of Hearts screams, "Off with her head!" the nominal (and largely uninteresting ) sport of croquet gives way before the vastly more amusing game of mollifying a harmless tyrant. The underlying principle here is a simple one: play transvalues everything . Nothing and no one can remain indifferent to the spirit of play. Or, "contrariwise," everyone and everything exists only to be played with. This may explain why play is so absorbing, and why the players are so intolerant . For the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse life is an endless, nonsensical Tea-Party and not simply a diversion. Alice is understandably bewildered by their etiquette and conversation and above all by their fanatical adherence to a fixed seating pattern, but that's all part of the game. So, for that matter, is stuffing the Dormouse into the teapot, and one can only suppose that the Dormouse would no sooner think of changing companions than the Lion would think of signing a treaty of...

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