Alice Among the Modernists: A Reader's Guide

Juliet Dusinberre's Alice to the Lighthouse is "a study in interaction between children's books and adult books, between children and adults, between theories and images." If the book can be said to have a central assertion, it is that "Radical experiments in the arts in the early modern period began in the books which Lewis Carroll and his successors wrote for children." (The successors she has in mind include Grahame, Nesbit, Stevenson, Molesworth, Burnett, Twain, and Kipling.) Her suggestion is "that cultural change was both reflected and pioneered" in such books.

Dusinberre sees in Carroll's work a revolutionary aesthetic which insists that words are to the writer as paint to the artist, a sensibility which expects that literary form will be dominated by pattern and that it must provide appropriate space for both reader and writer. She agrees with Roger Fry that Carroll's books initiated a new vision in which the literal replaced the literary, and she contends that this development set free from "the burdens of spiritual significance writers as different as Woolf and Willa Cather, Nesbit and Laura Ingalls Wilder," and involved these writers in the "disinheriting" of Bunyan and the tradition he represented. On the whole, Dusinberre's demonstration of the continuity she asserts between late nineteenth-century children's literature and early modern experimental fiction is persuasive, and, if her book gets the attention it deserves, her determination to treat children's literature on the same plane as the literature of "high culture" should set a useful example to other mainstream critics.

This bold and rather unconventional book is something of a free-form meditation on the author's own wide and intelligent reading. Dusinberre's method sets passages from children's books and from modernist fiction side by side, providing startling and informative juxtapositions. Her practice is not to advance the usual linear arguments of academic criticism, but to weave a lacy web of allusion and cross-reference. The reader is invited to play the game along with the author, looking for all kinds of surprising connections and "anticipations." The book is undergirded with a wonderful set of precise and informative footnotes which add yet another dimension to the cross references of the text and invite scholarly browsing and speculation.

If all of this makes Dusinberre's book sound like fascinating reading for anyone interested in children's literature, well, I think it is. But I should add that the book is not easy to read. Dusinberre thinks nothing of tossing the reader ten or fifteen wide-ranging quotations or allusions at a time. And she often seems to move from point to point by a sort of free association which can be especially frustrating to academic readers used to more structured and sustained argument.

I must admit that I felt the need to re-read Alice to the Lighthouse partly because I found that it just didn't "stay with me" the way most critical books do, and partly because I didn't trust Dusinberre's critical method. Her main points, it seemed to me, had been amply demonstrated through massive citation, but I was not so sure about some of her incidental assertions. Some of her claims for the influence of Alice seemed far-fetched to me (and still do), and though I was rather taken with her treatment of the author-reader relationship and found the concept of "making space for the child" in the book interesting, I suspected she was not being quite fair to writers of an earlier didactic tradition whose practice was perhaps more varied than she thought.

On a second reading I spent a good deal of time trying to provide for myself the generalizations and rational links Dusinberre had omitted. I was right to be a little suspicious: there are slack spots in the book where her text becomes a mannered and almost obsessive mosaic of quotation, and the few generalizations she is willing to make remain unproved. But when...