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The Age
Thursday March 11, 2010
WE IMAGINE Victorian Britain as a historical repository of prudery. How curious then that the most recent cinematic take on Lewis Carroll's literary tour-de-force seems more conservative.Tim Burton's Alice is symbolic of a culture that has a problem with its girls.The purpose of early English children's literature was to impart moral lessons, a tradition which Carroll played no small part in transforming. In the pages of books, boys and girls met an array of horrid deaths and noble demises, giving children minimal pleasure but maximum instruction.Carroll's Alice herself had read "several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them".Alice, however, learns nothing from her underground odyssey. She adventures for its own sake and does not return home the wiser for it. This joyful sidestepping of moral instruction and blunt attempts to socialise readers is the reason why we recall Alice and not the stories of didactic children's writers. Hands up, who can name any of the once-popular Victorian tales of Dinah Mulock Craik or Mrs Molesworth?There is no purpose for Alice's journey down the rabbit hole. She is not working through her fear of singing in public, as in the made-for-TV special in which Whoopi Goldberg made an infamously disturbing turn as the Cheshire Cat, nor her reluctance to marry a weak-chinned aristocrat as in Burton's framing plot.Disney's animated psychedelic trip from 1951 does not attempt to inject sense into Wonderland, instead allowing Alice to experience a cavalcade of lunacy. Unusually for a Disney film, Alice's journey is not a means to discovering the humanist cliche of her "true self".Leave that to the studio's next adaptation in the 21st century, in which Alice can't be imagined as a child.In Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, John Tenniel's iconic woodcut illustrations (such as that pictured right) depict a girl who is only about eight years old. In the same way, America's most famous literary girl, Dorothy, aged substantially from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to the MGM film. The mature Judy Garland bound her breasts to appear less womanly to play a 12-year-old heroine. Girls end up transforming into women on the screen.Burton's Alice is scripted as a 19-year-old who defies late-19th-century marriage expectations by rejecting her wealthy but pompous suitor. Her journey in "Underland" allows her to fulfil the fiction of discovering her identity. The "self" she finds wishes to continue her deceased father's imperial trade. To achieve this, she assumes a boyish role as sword-wielding slayer of the Jabberwocky. Women's abilities are sidelined to elevate traditionally masculine qualities just in case boys might have been losing interest in a girl's story.Not only can't we accept a girl adventuring without reason or progression, but we are also insecure about childhood to a degree that puts the Victorians to shame.Behind the pseudonym, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a logician, mathematician and proficient photographer. Many of his subjects were little girls. The most famous was Alice Liddell, for whom he laboured on the painstakingly handwritten and illustrated manuscript of the first Alice story. Dark-haired Alice was photographed among theatrical props dressed as a beggar maid, in a sleeping pose and in individual and family portraits.If he were alive today, Dodgson would have his hard-drive seized and become subject to media scrutiny far worse than the Queen of Hearts' trial because of his photographs of naked girls. The misguided paedophilic readings of Bill Henson's photographs scratch away at the surface of a different cultural idea of girlhood. Children emerged from their status as miniature adults to become idealised figures of innocence and purity in Victorian Britain. Images of naked children were not created in a sexualised context. Dodgson's art was not interpreted as a sign that he was the historical equivalent of the stranger luring unwary children with sweets.Our reaction to a photo of a naked girl as paedophilic fodder signals our own culture's sexualisation of girls. Our need to give playfulness a purpose, as in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, despite its reverent appreciation of "madness", reveals our desire to see rationality in everything. Its plot suggests that girls need only discover that they can break out of restrictive gender roles, yet contradictorily elevates masculine qualities. Sometimes there is more sense to be found in nonsense.Read Dr Michelle Smith's blog at girlsliterature.com
© 2010 The Age
