Lewis in Wonderland: The Looking Glass World of Sylvie and Bruno

Since their publication in 1889 and 1893, Lewis Carroll's two Sylvie andBruno books have perplexed and disappointed both critics and casual readers, who have faulted them for bearing only a slight resemblance to their famous predecessors, the two Alice books. Walter Crane, who declined to illustrate Sylvie and Bruno, articulated what quickly became a common attitude toward the books when he noted that Carroll's new project "was of a very different character from Alice—a story with religious and moral purpose, with only an occasional touch of the ingenuity and humor of Alice, so that it was not nearly so inspiring or amusing" (qtd. in Green, 148). Many Carroll critics concur, judging Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded"disastrous" if "interesting" failures (Hudson, 287).¹ Even critics who admire the novels insist that they should be viewed not as successors to Alice, but "in [their] proper context" as Victorian romances (Miller), Menippean satire (Miller again), proto-Modernist experiments (Gattégno, Atherton, Wilson, Purdy), or post-structuralist meditations on textuality (Gordon, Deleuze).² Thus, to justify his claim that Sylvie and Bruno is an underappreciated"masterpiece," Deleuze notes that "in comparison with Alice and Through the Looking-Glass, [it] displays a set of entirely new techniques" (43).

The claim that Sylvie and Bruno's adventures bear only "minor similarities" to Alice's seems at first unassailable, given the many stylistic and structural differences between the two projects (Gattégno, 168). Eschewing the brilliantly eccentric economy of the Alice books, Carroll constructs a convoluted double plot in Sylvie and Bruno. One strand chronicles a political uprising in an imaginary country called Outland, which is aimed at depriving the fairy children Sylvie and Bruno of their rightful rule. The other involves a romance between two real-life residents of England, Arthur Forrester and Lady Muriel Orme. The books are narrated by an elderly bachelor who falls in and out of reveries that enable him to shift from one world to the other. Subject matter, size, and tone all suggest that these novels do not constitute another contribution to the genre of children's fantasy. Not only does Carroll choose to focus on political and romantic maneuverings, he also has his adult characters engage in endless dialogues about serious religious and philosophical issues, which bloat the books out to twice the length of Alice. Moreover, the saccharine sentimentality that hovers around the edges of Alice invades the main text of Sylvie and Bruno; the novels feature many scenes like the treacly one in which Bruno bestows a kiss on his sister, lisping, "'I ca'n't give oo nuffin but this!'" (282).³

Despite all this evidence, however, I will argue that the two projects are intimately connected, and that Carroll himself was aware of the many parallels between them and determined to downplay them. His second two-volume fantasy in effect constitutes a looking-glass reversal of his first: instead of sending a child into a dream world in which she suffers various indignities, he inflicts the disorienting vision of an alternative reality on himself. The narrator of Sylvie and Bruno, who baldly announces "My name's Lewis Carroll" in his first fictional appearance, supplies us with a first-person account of the strange ordeal of traveling through Wonderland ("Bruno's Revenge," 78). Carroll puts himself in place of Alice, I suggest, because he was aware of the aggression inherent in the kinds of games he wanted to play with children, and anxious to make amends for it. Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded repeatedly attest to his concern that adult and child cannot be partners in play, because their uneasy alliance inevitably degenerates into a cruel game of cat and mouse.

Critics like Jacqueline Rose, Carolyn Steedman, James Kincaid, and Catherine Robson have evinced anxiety about the ways in which authors like Carroll and J. M. Barrie use the figure of the child for their own psychic purposes, whether to reclaim a past self or to revel in the pleasure of the child's "erotic Otherness" (Kincaid, 275). Such "child...