When describing a book, I am careful to avoid calling it a “fantasy” story because of the assumptions people make about the genre. If the series is Lord of the Rings, it’s difficult to avoid the subject, but if I can introduce someone to an “alternative history novel” (The Golden Compass comes to mind) or an “exploration of dualism” I’ll do that instead. In fact, the assumptions people make about fantasy are probably mostly informed by Disney’s aggressive marketing; in the minds of Americans, at least, Fantasy literature and Children’s literature occupy the same oppressively negative space. But that doesn’t do either genre justice.
Fantasy literature, Children’s literature and Fiction in general all serve the same purpose: to challenge and explore the assumptions of the audience in some form (of course, they also entertain us; perhaps that’s why it’s popular in spite of the stigma). That’s what all good literature does, regardless of classification. In many cases, of course, it is difficult for audiences to allow Fantasy or Children’s literature, or Children’s Fantasy Literature to also be “good” literature, and this is in part because of the way that Disney has pre-packaged so many great works as explicit morality tales. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is no exception to this rule, as the original text is quite rebellious yet the Disney version removes the startling imagination in favor of overt didacticism. Carroll’s habit of creating imaginative landscapes populated with challenging puzzles and characters is a feature of all good literature, and by creating a challenging world he transcends the boundaries of “mere” fantasy.
As an anecdotal aside about “all good literature” challenging expectations, I watched an episode of House, M.D. nearly a year ago, back when I was still shocked by the realization that House and Wilson were modern day Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Because it was a season finale, it was a two-part episode, and once again the camera dove into the subconscious of the good doctor, probing his psyche for strange delights. That wasn’t the interesting part; as House episodes go, it was pretty standard, and I’m sure you’re waiting for the part of this story where he did something silly with his cane/made a sexually charged remark at a female colleague/did something illegal.
The interesting part (and the point of this anecdote) was that the hallucination that had plagued him for the last half of the season made a fascinating point: “We all tell ourselves stories. What story did you make up for yourself this time?”
House does it. I just did it (told a story, that is. The season 5 finale really was about House hallucinating an alternate series of events). Lewis Carroll did it, maybe without even realizing it. Everybody tells stories about their lives to each other, and to themselves, either to reassure themselves or to convince others of a point, or maybe just to pass the time with an entertaining tale. Our lives are set adrift in the sea of uncertainty, and we collect sticks of narrative driftwood in some hope of ensuring floatability.
While episodes of House, M.D. aren’t exactly fantasy epics, there is a tendency of the season finales to delve into House’s subconscious in a way startlingly reminiscent of fantasy stories. Lori Campbell explores this psychological echo in her book “Portals of Power,” explaining how the world created is often a reflection of the main character’s mind. She says:
These ‘Other-worlds’ are generally accessed through the use of magical passageways or conveyances that allow exploration of the complexities of the secondary space, most often implied to be externalizations of the hero’s inner workings (Campbell 6)
and she also argues that
In marking these “in-between” spaces, the portal connotes a myriad of power associations and imbalances, centralizing and making transparent the ways in which literary fantasy attacks real-world problems (6).
Campbell is arguing that the purpose of fantastical fiction is to explore complex real-world dynamics in the context of another world. This same logic can be applied to all literature; when a writer talks about a mythical doctor who can solve all ailments with his powerful brain yet suffers from a God complex and an addiction to pain medication, what the writer is really doing is setting up a fantasy world to explore power dynamics. Doctor Gregory House is merely the product of this exploration of the psyche, revealing to the audience certain truths about themselves or life in general. Of course, where writers are concerned, the truth is always subjective…
This raises the somewhat disturbing question of what stories in general, and children’s stories in particular, are trying to accomplish. Is J. M. Barrie merely entertaining us with a diverting tale of a small boy trapped forever in a fairy tale of his own devising? Or is there a deeper message? Is it even realistic to think that an adult can write a story for children, or that an author can avoid being didactic on some level?
When speaking of children’s stories, the Victorian period is a fascinating example of didacticism run rampant. Tess Lewis, in an article titled “Defending Children Against Fairy Tales” makes the statement that
Victorian writers are primarily responsible for bringing fairy tales into the nursery. Driven by their overriding concern for productive activity and proper behavior, Victorians found fairy tales to be ideal instruments of education and socialization and perfected the art of didactic fiction (403).
This approach to Victorian children’s literature is not an uncommon one. Carole Rother refers to Victorian children’s literature as “oppressive didacticism” (89) and Gillian Brown goes into the history of using books as moral instruction, describing John Locke’s affection for picture books as the ideal medium of education, going on to say that “Newbery’s best-selling juvenile books . . . are both didactic tales about the rewards of diligently pursuing one’s studies” (356).
The thought that children’s literature (and to be fair, children’s cinema as well) is used as an introduction or a reinforcement of a moral and social lesson is hardly difficult to accept. This is true even after the Victorian era; most children since Disney’s Bambi (my father’s generation for sure) are aware of the extremely didactic nature of “children’s” cartoons. Deborah Ross laments the Disneyfication of stories, saying that “By the time our eight-year-olds have developed the vocabulary and syntactical sophistication to appreciate the humor and style of Milne or Grahame or Carroll they reject their work as ‘baby stuff’” (222). This is in reference to the simplification of theme and moral, the pre-packaging of kid’s films that introduce classic works to a young audience in the form of easy-to-swallow parables.
Obviously there is a tradition in literature to use the story as a vessel, teaching a moral lesson even as it entertains the child (à la Newbery). This is especially true of Victorian literature, where even the stories for adults were often cautionary or didactic. Though it pains me to do so, I must extend this criticism to Lewis Carroll, but with a few reservations.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a didactic work, in that it teaches children some very specific lessons about the world. What those lessons are varies from critic to critic. Rother explains how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is meant to allay children’s fears of personal destruction:
Alice’s adventures involve continual perils, emotional pitfalls, and an underlying sense of anxiety, these are balanced throughout by a mood of playfulness and fun, reinforced by the optimistic tone of the narrative voice, as the intrepid Alice learns to cope with each new challenge (90).
Brown, on the other hand, believes that not only the story, but the actions and conversations Alice performs “[coordinate] associations she has learned, heard, remembered, read elsewhere, or just put together, intermittently accompanied by an adult voice” (354). Brown’s position throughout “The Metamorphic Book” is that the medium of a children’s book is itself ideally suited to education.
But the most fascinating position taken by nearly all writers who speak of the didactic or educational value of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is also the most ironic one: the lesson of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is to question everything. The strength of Carroll’s Alice is her constant challenging of the world around her, which is a significant departure from the moralizing works of his contemporaries.
Tess Lewis writes that “Fairy tales and children’s fiction did not emerge from the stifling hold of didacticism until the revolutionary amoralism of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books” (403), and Carole Rother notes that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “If rules are not acknowledged . . . they lose their power” (94). These are somewhat paradoxical statements on the order of a Zen koan: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is didactic because the lesson it teaches is to reject (or at the very least question) the moralizing of stories.
In addition to questioning the status quo, the qualities Carroll imbues Alice with are far from “proper.” Alice is rude (though unintentionally) as in the scene where she cannot stop talking about cats and dogs to the mice and birds. She becomes angry and frustrated and is not afraid to show it, as we see in the scene with the smoking caterpillar. Alice rejects her role as a caregiver; not particularly interested in caring for the Duchess’s baby/pig. Even when faced with unconscionable rudeness, she perseveres (when arriving at the mad tea party, she sits down despite the March Hare’s cries of “No room! No room!”)
In short, Alice is constantly beset with rudeness, contrariness and tangled logic, yet she perseveres. Carroll provides a space in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that allows children (and particularly female children) to explore an oppressive world and gives them an example of a hard-headed, rebellious young woman to look up to.
And then Walt Disney had to go and louse it up.
In her article “Home by Tea-Time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland” Deborah Ross discusses this extensively. Her main point is that though the original text was imaginative and liberating for young women, Disney strategically removed or rewrote important scenes, turning the text into a bland shadow of Carroll’s vision. The problem, Ross asserts, is that the “supposedly decorous original . . . is ‘anarchic’ or surrealistic – in its substitution of dream logic for waking logic” and “therefore even a faithful or ‘realistic’ rendering of Carroll’s prose will seem imaginative” (221). “The overall effect” she writes, “is to make Alice less a subject than an excuse for presenting images to the audience” (220).
The tendency of Walt Disney to gentrify texts to fit a somewhat conservative mindset (“conservative” in this case referring to extolling traditional family values) takes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and makes it into a series of spectacle shots, with little or no connectedness in theme. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it wouldn’t be uncommon to watch as Alice encountered a situation, jumped into the middle of it, was reprimanded, but persevered anyway (the mad tea party comes to mind, and so does the trial at the end). Disney’s Alice in Wonderland appears to have removed all the adventure from our heroine along with removing it from the title, and we have situations where “Alice” instead will encounter a situation, try to politely avoid it, become entrapped, and eventually run away (think of the white rabbit ordering her about to fetch his gloves).
Despite the failure of Disney to accurately translate the spirit of rebellion to the silver screen, this is still the image that most people associate with Alice. But the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was attempting to do so much more with itself, and fantasy stories of this type in general try to answer basic questions that we have about our lives.
Fantasy stories are, in that respect, not merely didactic tales for children. Lori Campbell talks about the way fantasy stories, when well-written, act as testing grounds for children and adults to explore moral and social conundrums. Challenging and exploring concepts is a large part of fantasy stories “Because the writer can never completely detach from the Primary world . . . [The] Secondary cannot help but absorb the questions, relationships and troubles of that [Primary] world” ( Campbell 4).
Carroll, whether he realized it or not, was performing a very similar task. While on the surface he was mocking the establishment and creating a very anti-didactic tale of a small girl in a fantasy world, he was actually prompting his readers to use imagination, a controversial stance in an age when girls were put in their place early on (and in the Victorian Age, it wasn’t a very creative place). The purpose of fiction is to challenge our assumptions about life in general, to provide us with a framework that we constantly modify and adapt to our surroundings. Lewis Carroll does this throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and his ability to write a “children’s book” that still appeals to adults. The question is not whether the book is really for children, or if “adult” fantasy can really be for kids; real fantasy literature is truly for all ages, because a good story can be told over and over without losing any of the flavor. The real question is:
How can we show the world that fantasy is just as relevant as every other genre? If there’s anything I took away from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it’s that a story about a little girl in a pinafore is just as insightful as a television show about a cranky genius with a cane, if not more.
Works Cited
Brown, Gillian. “The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39:3 (Spring 2006): 351-362. Web. 5 December 2010.
Campbell, Lori M. Portals of Power. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 1-15. Print.
Carroll, Lewis, and Richard Michael Kelly. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula. "Imaginary Friends: Tales of Talking Animals and Fantastical Adventure Aren't Just for Children, Argues Ursula Le Guin--we Can and Should Return to Them Throughout Our Lives." New Statesman (1996), 135.4823-4825 (2006): 86.
Lewis, Tess. “Defending Children Against Fairy Tales.” The Hudson Review 46:2 (Summer 1993): 403-408. Web. 5 December 2010.
Ross, Deborah. “Home by Tea-time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.” Classics in Film and Fiction. Ed. Deborah Cartmell et al, Film/Fiction Volume 5. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000. 207-227.
Rother, Carole. “Lewis Carroll’s Lesson: Coping with Fears of Personal Destruction.” Pacific Coast Philosophy 19:1/2 (November 1984: 89-94. Web. 5 December 2010.
BRAVO!!!
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