Alice Our Contemporary

In his discussion of the fairy tale, W. H. Auden nicely sums up the stereotypical view of children's literature. The world of the fairy tale, he says, is an unambiguous, unproblematic place where appearance reflects reality. It is a world of being, not becoming, where typical, one-dimensional characters (either good or bad) behave strictly in accordance with their natures, and always receive the appropriate rewards or punishments. It is a predictable world where events occur in fixed numerical and geometrical patterns. And above all, it is a world without intense emotion or awareness where even the most violent acts are viewed by characters and readers with detachment, as not horrible but somehow fun, playful.¹ But children's books are written by adults, not children, and one need not be a frequent contributor to American Imago to see that they reflect not only the author's ideals of what children ought to like and be, but his own fears and fantasies. The sense of freedom many writers feel when they are addressing an audience that they consider to be more imaginative and more innocent than any other often leads to works which are strange distorting-mirror images of social problems and upheavals, personal compulsions, and philosophical dilemmas. The fanciful is also the uninhibited and the unrepressed.

The limitations of the stereotype of children's fiction become clear when one applies them to the greatest of such works—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In them we find not only the typical characteristics, but negations and parodies of them as well. Alice is at once simple and complex, predictable and unpredictable, sentimental and toughminded, escapist and realistic, humorous and satirical, melodramatic and tragic. Carroll took the problems children face while growing up—their dreams, their imaginary worlds, and their games—and combined them with the problems of adult life: the labyrinths of conflicting values, the struggle to meet the demands of society and self, the coming to terms with mortality. All these he fused in an imagination heated by intense pressures within him—his sexual longings, his seizures of "unholy thoughts", and his despair. In Alice (written for the little girls he was so attracted to) Carroll embodied both the quest of modern man for meaning in what seems to be a grotesque nightmare and his personal quest for the still, quiet center.

The success the Alice books have had with children grew out of Carroll's profound understanding of children and their problems. On those innumerable afternoons of tale-telling and games with his young friends, he learned just how to delight them, how to frighten them and then provide release in laughter, and how to warp or exaggerate life until it became ridiculous or wonderful. To children, who have constantly to adjust to the new, Carroll often presents a world of wish-fulfillment where the heroine is skillful enough to adjust to any situation, or powerful enough to shape it to suit herself. If the spectre of School becomes too much, let it be transformed (as it all too often is) into reeling, writhing, ambition, distraction, uglification, derision, mystery, seaography, drawling, stretching, fainting in coils, laughing, and grief (p. 129).² If books with no pictures or dialogue bore us, or a winter's afternoon makes us lonely, let us chase a rabbit down his hole or walk through a mirror into another world. Let all those dull poems with morals at the end be re-written. Let them tell us how crocodiles eat the little fishes rather than how the industrious bees demonstrate that idle hands are the devil's tools (p. 38). Let our poems tell us that old people are, among other things, crazy, fat, ugly, slack-jawed, not just that if you are careful of your health and remember God you will have a golden old age (p. 68). Let them tell us that the prudent "lobster" speaks contemptuously of the "sharks" only in their absence, not that sloth is a thing to be abhorred (p. 139). Let adults recall how it feels to...