"'Everything is Queer To-day': Lewis Carroll's
Alice Through the
Jungian Looking-Glass," Clifton Snider
Clifton Snider
English Department, Emeritus
California State University, Long Beach
Lewis Carroll, self-portrait, 1882
"Everything is Queer To-day":
Lewis Carroll’s
Alice Through the Jungian Looking-Glass
I
Of all Victorian children’s stories that are
enjoyed equally by children and adults, none is more popular than Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through
the Looking-Glass (1872).1 More than any other piece of
literature written for children during the Victorian period, Alice
in Wonderland (as the tales together are generally called) has
spawned a seemingly never-ending academic industry; and, although
Carroll also wrote other children’s books (The Hunting of the Snark
(1876) and the Sylvie and Bruno books (1889 and 1893) are the
most notable), the interest in the Alice books far outweighs the
interest in the other books. Alice in Wonderland has been
analyzed from virtually all critical points of view.2 The
Freudian approach has been applied many times, starting at least as
early as 1933 with a piece by A. M. E. Goldschmidt (see Phillips, Aspects
of Alice 279-82). Carroll himself receives the Freudian treatment
in Phyllis Greenacre’s Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Two Lives (1955). The Jungian approach, too, has been tried on
Alice in an article called “Alice as Anima : The Image of Woman
in Carroll’s Classic,” published in Aspects of Alice .
Although much that Judith Bloomingdale says is on the mark, she is not
convincing in making Alice the anima. Alice may be, for Carroll, an
incipient image of the anima, but she is far more, as Bloomingdale
herself demonstrates and as I hope my own analysis will
show.3
One Freudian critic goes so far as to declare:
“It is impossible to gain conscious understanding of the life of Lewis
Carroll or of the meaning of his written fantasy unless a
psychoanalytic approach is used” (Skinner 293). Although much nonsense
has been written using the psychoanalytic approach, the approach itself
is valid. At the same time, it leaves many psychological issues
unexplored. In “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” Jung writes: “If
anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and
perishes--so runs the law--there arises a compensation in the
unconscious” (86). Jungian criticism attempts to account for the
collective appeal of a classic like Alice in Wonderland. It
asks, For what that is lacking in the contemporary collective psyche
does the work compensate? An account for such appeal or compensation
cannot be entirely provided by an examination of the author’s life,
however provocative and interesting that life is--and Carroll’s life is
certainly an interesting case study. First generation Jungians like
Marie-Louise von Franz (in Puer Aeternus ) and Barbara Hannah
(in Striving Towards Wholeness ) do examine in tandem the lives
and works of literary artists, but Jung himself warned against the
“reduction of art to personal factors.” Such a reduction “deflects our
attention from the psychology of the work of art and focuses it on the
psychology of the artist . . . the work of art exists in its own right
and cannot be got rid of by changing it into a personal complex”
(“Psychology and Literature” 93). In other words, the work of art is
independent of and greater than its creator. It may tell us much about
the artist, but ultimately, if it is to endure, its appeal must be
collective--“visionary,” to use Jung’s term (ibid. 89).
Having said this, I must add that a brief
examination of Carroll’s life can provide clues as to how he was
uniquely suited to produce his classic. Like Edward Lear, Carroll
in some respects fits the profile of the puer aeternus as
outlined by von Franz in Puer Aeternus. He seems to have had a
mother complex; further, as one Carroll scholar states, he had a
“reluctance to commit himself, to become in any way tied down”
(Gattégno 215), and this is another puer trait. As a puer
aeternus, Carroll had “a certain kind of spirituality which comes
from a relatively close contact with the collective unconscious” (von
Franz 4); Carroll was ordained a deacon, albeit he never became a
priest.
Stephen Prickett points out some surface
similarities between Lear and Carroll:
Both were
shy and sensitive bachelors; both were afraid of dogs;
both were of
an ‘analytic state of mind’--Carroll indexed his
entire
correspondence, which, by his death had 98,000 cross-
references.
Both were marginal kinds of men, if in very different
senses. (130)
Like many of the authors whose work I have examined, both
Lear and Carroll are social outsiders. Although both shared some of the
same friends (among them some of the Pre-Raphaelites and the
Tennysons), no one has found any record of either man referring to the
other, though both pioneered the nonsense genre.4 Both were
visual artists. Carroll’s photography and drawing were avocations,
whereas Lear’s paintings provided his livelihood and he illustrated his
own books, as Carroll did not. Unlike Lear and the typical puer,
Carroll hardly ever traveled abroad (he made one trip to the Continent
in his lifetime). And he was different from the typical puer as
described by von Franz in that he was neither a homosexual, so far as
we know, nor a Don Juan.
Lear was a homosexual. Carroll, on the
other hand, was a heterosexual pedophile who “collected” little girls
like so many dolls and who lost his stammer in their presence. A famous
photographer, Carroll abruptly gave up photography in 1880 after having
practiced the art for some twenty-four years. He gave no explanation,
but one reason may have been gossip about and resistance to his
photographing pre-pubescent girls in the nude. After 1880 he continued
drawing them in the nude (Clark 208). His nephew and first biographer,
Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, records that Carroll “always took about
with him a stock of puzzles when he travelled, to amuse any little
[female] companions [he detested little boys] whom chance might send
him” (407). To pretend that Carroll’s predilections were not in part
sexual is extremely naïve (see Gattégno 82 and Greenacre
245-46).
Carroll’s sexual orientation provided a powerful
motive for his creative work. His remaining child-like as an adult also
gave him entrée into the psyche of the child. Moreover, he had,
like Lear, a nature somewhat akin to the Native American berdache. In
his inventions of puzzles, riddles, and games, in his visual art, in
his appeal to children, and indeed in his name-giving function (both
for himself and for such characters as Jabberwocky and the
Bandersnatch), Carroll fulfilled the role of the berdache. The adult
Carroll disapproved of “transvestite parts [in the theater], though
only when it involved a man’s being dressed as a woman”
(Gattégno 226), but at about the age of seventeen or eighteen he
drew a curious picture as the frontispiece to a family magazine called The
Rectory. The Rectory Umbrella shows a bearded man with an
almost Cheshire-cat grin lying down on one elbow. He is dressed, as
Greenacre points out, as “a little girl, the skirt suggesting the
appearance of a closed umbrella” (131). He’s holding an umbrella on
which are the words “Tales, Poetry, Fun, Riddles, Jokes.” Overhead, six
little sexless imps are trying to rain down chunks of “Woe, Spite,
Ennui, Gloom, Crossness, and Alloverishness.” Rushing through the air
and to the safety under the umbrella are seven female fairies bringing
“Liveliness, Knowledge, Good Humour, Taste, Cheerfulness, Content, and
Mirth” (Greenacre 130-31). The cross-dressed man’s resemblance to the
berdache in this drawing is striking, all the more so because it is no
doubt unconscious.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's drawing for The Rectory Umbrella (c. 1849-50).
In physical appearance Carroll resembled a
berdache far more than did Lear, who wore glasses and had a great
Victorian beard. Not only was Carroll clean-shaven, but also, Greenacre
writes, “As he grew older, his face became more feminine in cast, an
effect possibly enhanced by his wearing his hair rather long. His
effeminacy was sufficiently obvious that some of his less sympathetic
students once wrote a parody of his parodies and signed it ‘Louisa
Caroline’” (166) Although Greenacre believes “there is no expression of
frustrated paternity in” Carroll, as a child “there was something of a
motherly or older sisterly quality in his care for and entertainment of
the young children” in his family. Furthermore,
there was a
slightly feminine cast to his charming thoughtfulness
--his interest
in tiny things, his patient arrangements of puppet
theatricals,
and his protectiveness toward small animals as well
as small
sisters. (222)
It is possible the young Lewis Carroll exhibited so-called feminine
traits even earlier, like the famous Zuni berdache We’Wha (Roscoe 33).
Greenacre believes “Charles . . . had much in his nature that suggests
the Victorian woman” (222-23). And Camille Paglia declares: “Carroll’s
spiritual identity was thoroughly feminine” (547). Furthermore, Paglia
says, “Carroll’s Alice books introduced an epicene element into
English discourse that . . . flourishes to this day” (549). It seems
clear that in his personal appearance, in his personality and psyche,
in his persona as a writer of nonsense books, and in the books
themselves, Carroll fits the archetype of the berdache.
Carroll also fits the archetype of the Trickster,
which I’ve discussed at length in my article on Lear. Karl Kerényi writes in his
commentary on Paul Radin’s study of the Winnebago Trickster cycle that
the Trickster “could be defined as the timeless root of all picaresque
creations of world literature” (176), and what are the Alice
books if not picaresque?
There is another figure in the myths of some
Pueblo Indians that resembles Lewis Carroll--Thinking Woman. In his Pueblo
Gods and Myths , Hamilton A. Tyler quotes nineteenth-century
anthropologist John M. Gunn, who wrote a book about the Acoma and
Laguna Pueblos, on Thinking-Woman: “Their theory is that reason
(personified) is the supreme power, a master mind that has always
existed, which they call Sitch-tche-na-ko. This is the feminine form
for thought or reason” (qtd. by Tyler 90-91). Another anthropologist,
L. A. White, reports that at the Santa Ana Pueblo Thinking Woman’s
“function was to scheme or plan,” and that an Acoma Indian said, “She
must have been quite small, for she sat on Iatiku’s [the Corn-Mother’s]
right shoulder during her contests with her sister and told her what to
do” (qtd. by Tyler 91). The form she takes is that of a spider. One
cannot help but be reminded of the Gnat in Through The Looking-Glass,
which William Empson believes “gives a touching picture of Dodgson”
himself (274). The Gnat tries to help Alice develop a sense of humor:
“‘That’s a joke. I wish you had made it,’” he tells her (Oxford
Alice 155; all references to the Alice books are to this
edition). Here the Gnat exhibits a Trickster trait--an attempt to bring
humor to the serious little girl. Like Thinking Woman, Carroll excelled
in reason, even as he spun out so-called nonsense tales for children.
Significantly, in Western culture thinking has been designated a
“masculine” function, yet here it is embodied in a rather androgynous
storyteller, the protagonist of whose tale is a little girl.
Then there is the matter of the storyteller’s
name. Many critics and scholars make the point that there were really
two men.5 One was named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was the
oldest son (and third child) in a family of eleven (seven girls, four
boys), whose father was himself a clergyman. Born in Daresbury (in
Cheshire) on 27 January 1832, Dodgson had a happy childhood until he
was sent to Rugby. There, although he did well in his studies, he was
bullied and miserable. His experience at Rugby probably began his
hatred of little boys, which got worse as he grew into middle age.
Shortly after he entered Christ Church, Oxford, at the age of nineteen,
his mother died. One biographer remarks that Dodgson “was profoundly
affected by his mother’s death,” although he tended to hide his
feelings (Clark 66; another scholar, I should note, disagrees. Humphrey
Carpenter declares: “it is very striking how little impression
Dodgson’s mother’s death seems to have made on him,” 47). He lived at
Oxford the remainder of his life (till, that is, 14 January 1898),
becoming a “Student” (the Christ Church term for “Fellow”) and a
lecturer in mathematics (until 1881). Under the name of Dodgson he
published works on mathematics and logic.
In 1856 Edmund Yates, editor of The Train,
a small magazine in which Dodgson had published some poetry, chose
the pseudonym Lewis Carroll from a list of four submitted by Dodgson.
The name is a reversal and variation of Charles Lutwidge
(Gattégno 229). It was, of course, as Lewis Carroll that the
shy, stammering Oxford lecturer became famous as the author of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and other stories for children. Had Lewis
Carroll not possessed the unique psyche I’ve outlined, had he not
become friends with the four Liddell children (Harry, Lorina, Alice,
and Edith, children of the Dean of Christ Church), had he not fallen in
love with Alice, and had Alice not urged him to write down the stories
he told the children, the world probably would never have become
acquainted with Alice in Wonderland . All artists who produce
visionary work--work stemming from the collective unconscious--have a
particular psychological makeup or complex that allows them to produce
such work. Only a person with the Dodgson/Carroll psyche writing in the
Victorian age could have produced the Alice books. I quite agree with
Derek Hudson that “Alice in Wonderland owes its unique place in
our literature to the fact that it was the work of a unique genius,
that of a mathematician and logician who was also a humorist and a
poet” (128). What accounts for its wide and lasting collective appeal
is what I intend to examine in the following pages.
II
William Empson comments: “Wonderland is a
dream, but the Looking-Glass is self-conscious” (257). While I
agree, nevertheless, both are cast as dreams, and indeed the question
of dreams, who’s dreaming what, is Alice only “a sort of thing” in the
Red King’s dreams (Oxford Alice 168), is important to both
books. At the end of Looking-Glass, Alice shakes the Red
Queen into her own kitten. She questions the kitten:
“Now,
Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all.
. . . You see,
Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King.
He was part of
my dream, of course--but then I was part of his
dream, too! Was
it the Red King, Kitty?” (ibid. 244)
And the first-person narrator--far more prominent in Looking-Glass
than in Wonderland --leaves the answer up to the reader: “Which
do you think it was?” The book ends with the same dream motif
in an acrostic poem based on Alice Liddell’s name: Alice Pleasance
Liddell. I quote the last three stanzas:
Children
yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and
willing ear,
Lovingly shall
nestle near.
In a
Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as
the days go by,
Dreaming as
the summers die:
Ever drifting
down the stream--
Lingering in
the golden gleam--
Life, what is
it but a dream?6 (Ibid. 245)
One is reminded here of Poe’s poetic question “Is all that
we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” (10). Jung himself
observes:
A typical
infantile motif is the dream of growing infinitely small
or infinitely
big, or being transformed from one to the other--as
you find it,
for instance, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
But he emphasizes that the motifs he’s been discussing “must be
considered in the context of the dream itself, not as self-explanatory
ciphers” (Man and His Symbols 53).
As I have noted in my book, The Stuff That
Dreams Are Made On,
whenever an
imbalance in the psyche is struck . . . [an] individual may . . .
have
archetypal (as opposed to merely personal) dreams and fantasies that
are trying to
compensate for the imbalance. The same applies to communities
(which always
have a collective consciousness). If a large group of people have
an imbalance
in their collective consciousness or their collective unconscious, then
archetypal
images will appear in myths, in folk tales, and in more formal
literature. (3)
The questions to ask about Alice in Wonderland, then, are What
are the archetypal images it contains? and For what collective
imbalance do they compensate?
The story about how Alice’s Adventures under
Ground (as the story was first called) was first spontaneously
composed on a boating excursion with the Liddell sisters suggests that
the initial version of the story arose directly from unconscious
sources (Gardner, Alice’s Adventures under Ground v). Later, of
course, the story went through several revisions, revisions that added
much conscious material and included conscious shaping. The fact that
both Alice books became so popular and have remained so suggest,
further, that the images in them are indeed archetypal.
As I’ve already conceded, Alice may be an image of the anima for
Carroll himself, and perhaps for the Victorian age at a very elemental
level--a question I shall return to. More importantly, Alice represents
the archetype of the child.
Photo of Alice Liddell as a beggar
girl, by Lewis Carroll, date unknown.
Jungian analyst James Hillman writes: “Puer figures often have a
special relationship with the Great Mother, who is in love with them as
carriers of the spirit” (“Senex and Puer” 24-25). The puer, the
archetype of the child, became extremely popular during mid-nineteenth
century England, even as lower-class children were victims of horrible
labor conditions and middle- and upper-class children victims of
repressive and sexist education. “Victorian concepts of the child,”
writes Nina Auerbach, “tended to swing back and forth between extremes
of original innocence and original sin; Rousseau and Calvin stood side
by side in the nursery” (42). Furthermore, Victorians “saw little girls
as the purest members of a species of questionable origin, combining as
they did the inherent spirituality of child and woman” (ibid. 32).
Tracing the “cult of childhood” in his book by that name, George Boas
claims “by the nineteenth century the identification of the child with
primitive man was complete” (102). He finds the cult of childhood
especially strong in “the mores of North American societies”:
“If adults are urged to retain their youth, to ‘think young’, to act
and dress like youngsters, it is because the Child has been held up to
them as a paradigm of the ideal man” (9). These attitudes outlined by
Auerbach and Boas account in part for Alice’s appeal in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. (Empson’s comment that “Dodgson envied the
child because it was sexless” (260) seems not only pointless but also
false.)
Harold Bloom comments: “It is a truism of criticism
to remark that the child Alice is considerably more mature than any of
the inhabitants of Wonderland” (3), but that does not mean the Alice
books are not stories of initiation or that Alice does not learn from
the other characters. On the conscious level, Alice in Wonderland
, like the nonsense poetry of Lear, was a refreshing contrast to the
“improving” children’s literature of the time.7 Although in
general Carroll is far more conscious, more concerned with cognition
than is Lear, both nonsense writers compensate for Victorian
hyperrationalism. As a child, Alice is closer to the archetypes of the
collective unconscious than adults are. “The child motif,” Jung writes,
“represents the preconscious, childhood aspect of the collective
psyche” (The Archetypes 161). Furthermore, the child is “a
symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that
is, one who makes whole” (ibid. 164). There are plenty of opposites in Alice
in Wonderland , from the red and white roses to the black and white
kittens to the Red Queen and the White Queen, whom Queen Alice
symbolically unites as they fall asleep on her lap (Oxford Alice
230-31). The laughter of nonsense itself is healing, as I show in my
Lear article. It is as if Carroll is unconsciously telling his adult
readers that they have much to gain from becoming child-like.8
The fact that Alice is indeed more mature than the other characters and
that she is able to use the thinking function (traditionally a male
function in Western culture) is another indication she is a symbol of
wholeness, or at least potential wholeness, what Jung calls the Self.
Jean Gattégno observes: “There is no mention
of God in either of the Alice books. . . . there is no
justification for any, even indirect, ‘Christian’ interpretation of
Alice’s adventures . . . [yet] Carroll had an extraordinary sensitivity
about all things religious” (232). However, since the Alice
books are visionary in Jung’s use of the word, since they are drawn
from the collective unconscious, they are numinous. They are a kind of
myth for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jung writes:
It is a
striking paradox in all child myths that the ‘child’ is
on the one
hand delivered helpless into the power of terrible
enemies and in
continual danger of extinction, while on the
other he
possesses powers far exceeding those of ordinary
humanity. This
is closely related to the psychological fact
that though
the child may be ‘insignificant,’ unknown, ‘a mere
child,’ he is
also divine.
Furthermore, “Myth . . . emphasizes . . . that the ‘child’ is endowed
with superior powers and, despite all dangers, will unexpectedly pull
through. . . . [The child] is a personification of vital forces quite
outside the limited range of our conscious mind . . .” (The
Archetypes 170). Clearly, Jung’s comments could have been made
about Alice in Wonderland.9
Alice’s tasks are to build her ego, to expand
her consciousness, to realize her Self, her personal myth. The child,
Jung says, “represents the strongest, the most ineluctable urge in
every being, namely the urge to realize itself” (ibid.). The opposite
sides of her divided personality (symbolized by her conversations with
herself) need to be united. Her nearly drowning in her own tears is an
obvious symbol of baptism, of death and rebirth; but her crying shows
that she’s developed the feeling function, a traditionally “feminine”
function in Western culture. As I’ve suggested, she is also developing
the traditionally “masculine” thinking function: “‘Maybe it’s always
pepper that makes people hot-tempered,’ she went on, very much pleased
at having found out a new kind of rule” (Oxford Alice 79). She
also exercises the intuition function (traditionally “feminine”), as
for example when, exasperated, she realizes during the Knave’s trial
that the King and Queen of Hearts and their court are “‘nothing but a
pack of cards’” (ibid. 109). The sensation function she uses as much as
any typical girl of seven or seven and a half. The “very ugly”
Duchess’s chin is “uncomfortably sharp” on her shoulder (ibid. 79-80);
she readily eats and drinks things that change her size; she plays
croquet, dances, and so on. Alice’s development of what Jung calls the
functions of consciousness (see Snider, Stuff 12-13) demonstrates the
growth
of her conscious self and her androgynous wholeness. It is important
that Alice is female because she thus compensates for the innumerable
male child heroes in Western tradition. The child-hero or child-god is,
archetypally, hermaphroditic (see The Archetypes 173-77), but
Western myth and literature have one-sidedly emphasized the masculine
at the expense of the feminine and Alice helps to compensate for this
one-sidedness.
However, she is not, except in the broadest (or
paradoxically the narrowest) sense, the anima, for she does not
function as the anima for anyone in the stories. Collectively, she
embodies the Eros principle, and in that broad sense a case could be
made for Alice as anima. If she is merely an anima-image for Carroll,
that has no relevance for this study. The important point is that, as
I’ve indicated, she helps compensate for patriarchal one-sidedness.
When the Duchess repeats the old saw, “‘Oh, ‘tis
love, ‘tis love, that makes the world go round!’” Alice replies,
“‘Someone said . . . that it’s done by everybody minding their own
business!’” Her logical nature further illustrates her wholeness. She
combines what Jung calls the “feminine” Eros principle with the
“masculine” Logos principle. Writing about the anima and the animus,
Jung explains:
I use Eros and
Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact
that woman’s
consciousness is characterized more by the connective
quality of
Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated
with Logos. In
men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less
developed than
Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression
of their true
nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident. (Aion
14)
If the Logos principle is more highly developed in Alice than in most
Victorian girls, it may be a reflection of Carroll’s own identification
with his heroine. On a collective level, however, Alice in
Wonderland demonstrates that the same Victorian girls had greater
potential than they were generally given credit for. If they did not
grasp this consciously, no doubt they understood on a subconscious,
“spiritual” level.
As I show in my article on Lear, the Trickster
manifests himself in the form of several animals, and animals abound in
Alice in Wonderland . The White Rabbit is one of the more
important symbols. Although a male, the White Rabbit further
illustrates the androgynous nature of the archetypal symbols in Alice
, for, as J. E. Cirlot notes, the hare has a “feminine character” as
its “fundamental symbolization; hence it is not surprising to find that
it was the second of the twelve emblems of the emperor of China,
symbolic of the Yin force in the life of the monarch” (139).
Carroll’s rabbit, of course, is most famous for its anxiety about being
late, as he frantically consults his watch. (One of my own most vivid
childhood memories of the Alice story is the little jingle about being
late for a “very important date” from the Disney version.) If the
rabbit or hare is a feminine symbol, his watch, a modern product of
ordered civilization, must be more rational, more “masculine.”
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel.
The White Rabbit is the one who starts Alice on her
journey down the rabbit hole. A psychoanalytic critic describes this as
“perhaps the best-known symbol of coitus” (Goldschmidt 280), a comment
that reduces the symbolism to the absurd. What actually has happened
(the same happens when Alice steps through the looking-glass) is that
Alice has fallen into the realm of the unconscious, the collective
unconscious. The fact she is dreaming is further corroboration that
she’s in the symbolic world of the unconscious. As James Hillman
writes: “The Underworld is converse to dayworld, and so its behavior
will be obverse, perverse” (The Dream and the Underworld 39).
What could better describe the settings and actions of the Alice
stories?10 As Alice herself exclaims, “everything is queer
to-day” (Oxford Alice 21).
As she continues falling down the rabbit hole, Alice
says, “‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time? . . . I must
be getting near the centre of the earth’” (Oxford Alice 10).
She then tries to figure out how many miles that would be (a parody of
school knowledge-- “this was not a very good opportunity for
showing off her knowledge” (ibid. 11) but also an illustration of her
use of the thinking function). Again Carroll’s stories roughly parallel
Native American mythology. According to Frank Waters, the Pueblo and
Navajo Indians believe in “four successive underworlds” (177). Will
Roscoe notes that in most versions of the Zuni myth, the original Zunis
“live four worlds beneath the surface of the earth, in the womb of the
Earth Mother, undeveloped and undifferentiated” (218). They seek “the
Middle of the World, that place where the natural, social, and
spiritual elements of life are synchronized” (ibid. 219). This is the
place where they can become “cooked” or differentiated as individuals.
Alice in the underworld temporarily has her own
identity crisis. Like Jack in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest , she wants to know who she really is. Because she’s
changed size so incredibly, she wonders: “But if I’m not the same, the
next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great
puzzle!” (Oxford Alice 18). She wonders if she could be Mabel,
a girl who, unlike herself, knows very little. Yet Alice can’t get her
multiplication table or her geography right. When she tries to recite a
poem from memory, the words come out wrong. Clearly, her ego identity
is confused at this point--undifferentiated, if you will. She fears the
loss of her ego identity, a genuine fear for a child under such
circumstances. In the Garden of Live Flowers, the Red Queen advises
Alice to “remember who you are!” (ibid. 147). Yet when she reaches the
woods with the Looking-Glass insects, Alice temporarily forgets her own
name (ibid. 156), symbolic of who she is.
In Zuni myth, she would be described as “uncooked”
(see Roscoe 219). Interestingly, Rumi, the Persian mystical poet, uses,
in a patriarchal context, the same trope in one of his mystical poems:
“There is a spiritual fire for the sake of cooking you. . . . If you do
not flee from the fire, and become wholly cooked like well-baked bread,
you will be a master and lord of the table” (Jalal al-Din al-Rumi 144).
Alice’s journeys through Wonderland and in the Looking-Glass world are
efforts to become “cooked,” that is to affirm her ego identity, to
develop the functions of consciousness, to become as far as possible an
integrated, whole person. As an archetypal symbol (as opposed to a
flesh and blood child), she is able to become whole, to become what
Jung would call individuated, to an extent impossible to flesh and
blood children. Like the clown Newe:kwe in Zuni myth who aids the
people when crises arise by “talking backwards, speaking nonsense, and
saying the opposite of what he means” (Roscoe 222) and like the
Koyemshis (the “mud-heads”), trickster figures who parody Zuni
prayers--just as Carroll parodies well-known poems--and otherwise
provide levity during sacred ceremonials (Tyler 194-201),--like these
figures from Zuni myth the nonsensical characters in Alice
--the Duchess, the March Hare, the Hatter, the Dormouse, the Gryphon,
the Mock Turtle, the live flowers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty
Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, and all the others--contribute to
Alice’s own individuation process. For society at large, they provide
the healing laughter Native American tricksters provide.
Tyler observes that “the emergence of mankind is not
a creation, but a bringing forth of people who already existed, though
sometimes in an imperfect state” (103). The people emerge from, in
Waters’ words, the “canyon-womb, the kiva sipapu, the Place of
Emergence . . . from the four preceding worlds” (209). In Navajo myth
Turquoise Boy and White Shell Girl, the first berdaches, the “changing
twins,” not only helped the people out of a great flood (reminiscent of
the pool of tears in Alice ) into the fifth world, the
present-day world, but also helped the people learn to make pottery,
baskets, and various useful tools (Williams, The Spirit and the
Flesh 19). Carroll’s underworld, where patriarchal values are
reversed and the most powerful characters are female, where, like the
berdache, Alice learns to develop both “male” and “female” functions,
resembles the world of Pueblo and Navajo myth. Just as the Indian
peoples emerged from the underworld, so does Alice emerge from
Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world a wiser, more integrated
personality than she had been. No wonder she becomes a queen--a
supraordinate personality, symbolizing wholeness for her Victorian
readers.
III
Of the other talking animals and characters, some
of the most important are the Caterpillar, the King and Queen of
Hearts, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, and
the Red and White Queens. The dance is another important symbol; so is
language itself, the garden, and eating and drinking. But perhaps the
most prominent symbol is the cat in its various forms. The Caterpillar,
like the pool of tears, requires little explanation. They are both
elements of the archetype of transformation. Alice has a symbolic
baptism in the tears, a symbolic death. The caterpillar also symbolizes
death and rebirth. Judith Bloomingdale is correct to compare the
Duchess and the Queen of Hearts with Kali, the Hindu goddess in her
terrible aspect (Bloomingdale 386). Alice herself has the potential for
being destructive (her shadow side); she must learn to recognize this
potential and accommodate it. While the King of Hearts presides over
the trial of the Knave of Hearts, the Queen has the real power (or,
better, surreal power--for in this nonsense world she never
exercises her power). Her continual commands, “Off with his head,” “Off
with her head,” “Off with their heads,” show her lack of Eros and
threaten Alice’s new consciousness shown in the development of the
Logos principle in her.
In Tweedledum and Tweedledee the twin motif found
in most mythologies is represented (see Cirlot 355-56 and Roscoe 218).
In their ritualized, crazy personal combat, they are a parody of the
hostile brothers motif--another attack on patriarchal mythological
tradition. The amusing sub-standard dialect they use suggests their
primal roots:
“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum;
“but it isn’t
so, nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so,
it
might be; and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t.
That’s logic.”
(Oxford Alice 160)
Alice is more interested in finding her way out of the woods and to
the garden than in talking logic with the twin brothers. But she must
learn from them before she can continue. The first lesson is how to
begin a visit: by saying “‘How d’ye do?’” (ibid.).
More importantly, she participates in a dance
with them, “dancing round in a ring” under a tree (ibid. 161). Whereas
in Wonderland Alice had merely watched the Lobster-Quadrille
(ibid. 90), in Looking-Glass she participates in the dance--an
indication of her psychic growth. Even though Carroll consciously keeps
religion out of the Alice stories, here he includes one of the most
ancient of humankind’s sacred rites. The dance symbolizes, among many
things, “a series of dissolutions and rebirths . . . the ‘Great Change’
[of creation] . . . the measure of man’s achievement is his adjustment,
without fear, to the universal circumstance of change” (Wosien, Sacred
Dance 10). One of Alice’s tasks in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass
world is to adjust to radical change. “The earliest view of time,”
writes Maria-Gabriele Wosien, “was cyclic, not linear. . . . Life, from
the very first, is bound up with transformation” (ibid.). Time in
Carroll’s world is hardly linear (the Red Queen teaches Alice that “here
. . . it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same
place,” Oxford Alice 145); and transformation is one of the key
archetypes.11 It is no accident that the dance Alice
participates in takes the circular shape of the mandala, a supreme
symbol of wholeness. In the dance there is an order lacking in the
anarchy of the mad tea-party, the Queen of Heart’s croquet-ground, and
her court.12
Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, the Red and
White Queens,--all are instructors, helpers, or guides to the
heroine--Wise Old Men and Women, as it were. Except in this nonsense
underworld everything is turned around, so that, for instance, Alice
ends up helping the White Knight as he keeps falling down, head first.
(He does teach Alice, albeit by negative example.) Although
Cirlot notes that the alchemists believed the egg “was the container
for matter and for thought” (94), Humpty Dumpty is a parody of
masculine pride in his intellectual powers. For all his humorous
arrogance about knowing the meanings of words, the Eros principle of
relatedness is almost totally lacking in him--he doubts he would
recognize Alice if he saw her again. He illustrates what Jung refers to
as “the law of independence inherent in the thinking function and . . .
its emancipation from the concretism of sensuous perceptions” (“Psychic
Conflicts in a Child” 34). Still, he is egg-shaped and has
grown from an egg into a real character, so he also symbolizes the
possibility of psychic growth. The Red and White Queens are like two
haughty but harmless children who talk “dreadful nonsense” with Alice
(Oxford Alice 227). They show, by contrast, Alice’s new
self-confidence and maturity. Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, the Red
and White Queens,--each is in fact a parody of the Wise Old Man or the
Wise Old Woman.
Language itself is symbolic in Alice in
Wonderland. W. H. Auden goes so far as to maintain that “one of the
most important and powerful characters [in the Alice books] is not a
person but the English language” (9). The Word, the Logos, is prominent
in so many ways--among them puns, riddles, the concern with
meaning--that it would take another essay to discuss them all. Alice,
the heroine as opposed to the hero, as I’ve indicated, develops a more
complete psyche through her appropriation of the Logos principle.
The garden is another symbol that seems hardly to
require analysis. For Bloomingdale, “The garden is . . . a positive
mother symbol, no longer wild nature, but cultivated, tended,
fostered--in short, the Garden of Live Flowers” (387). Instead of the
Edenic garden of innocence, Alice seeks the “civilized,” ordered garden
of the familiar world above ground. Ironically, she must go through a
hero’s journey (another of the many archetypal motifs in the Alice
books) to get there.13 The garden itself stands for
wholeness--the uniting of untamed nature with the conscious,
controlling hand of human beings.
Also symbolic are eating and drinking--from the
bottle with the label that says “DRINK ME” and the little cake that
says “EAT ME” in Wonderland to Queen Alice’s banquet at the end
of Looking-Glass. Erich Neumann makes the point that “Hunger
and food are the prime movers of mankind. . . . Life=power=food, the
earliest formula for obtaining power over anything, appears in the
oldest of the Pyramid Texts” (27). That eating is power for Alice is
clear when she eats the Caterpillar’s mushroom to control her size. She
is whole (her right size) when she’s able to ascertain the right amount
to eat.
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel.
The cat is perhaps the most pervasive archetypal
symbol apart from Alice herself in both books. She appears as Dinah,
Alice’s cat, as the black and white kittens (again with Dinah) in Looking-Glass
; she appears as a lion (with the unicorn) and as a Gryphon. “The
gryphon, or griffin,” as Gardner notes, “is a fabulous monster with the
head and wings of an eagle and the lower body of a lion” (Annotated
Alice 124, n. 6). Like Lear’s Owl and Pussy-Cat, the Gryphon stands
for the uniting of opposites--the fowl with the feline.
The most famous cat in Alice in Wonderland,
of course, is the Cheshire Cat with its mysterious grin. Carroll shares
with Lear a love of the cat, and others have pointed out the conscious,
personal reasons for the many cats in Alice . Here I am
concerned more with the archetypal meanings of the cat in the context
of Carroll’s classic.
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel.
That the cat is traditionally feminine is clearly
relevant in these stories which compensate for patriarchal
one-sidedness. Bloomingdale comments on the Cheshire Cat:
The mad grin
of the appearing and disappearing gargoyle,
which
literally ‘hangs over’ the heads of the participants in
the game of
life, is an insane version of the enigmatic smile
of the ‘Mona
Lisa,’ the mask of the Sphinx--supreme
embodiment of
the riddle of the universe. (385-86)
The smile thus symbolizes superior, hidden, psychic knowledge. Like
Merlin’s laugh, the grin “is the result of . . . more profound
knowledge of invisible connections” (E. Jung, The Grail Legend
363). “We’re all mad here,” the Cat tells Alice (Oxford Alice
58). Everyone seems mad because they are in the realm of the collective
unconscious where everything seems crazy to the rational, conscious
mind. Empson is correct to say the Cat stands for “intellectual
detachment . . . it is the amused observer” (273). The Cat’s ability to
appear and disappear at will demonstrates the autonomy of the
archetype--one can not produce an archetypal image at will. The
different forms the cat takes in Alice and the Cheshire Cat’s
different shapes as it appears and disappears are manifestations of
what Nicholas J. Saunders refers to as “the magical shape-shifting that
has always been associated with cats, both large and small” (29).
Hence, like Merlin, the cat is also a trickster.
In her biographical memoir of Jung, Barbara Hannah,
who was closely associated with Jung professionally and personally for
over thirty years, describes four deficiencies in the Church and in
Western culture which Jung cited and for which Alice in Wonderland
compensates. The first is the exclusion of nature from the Church and
Western culture. The modern ecology movement is a reaction against this
exclusion. So is Alice in Wonderland in the way plants are
personified and given value equal to human beings. Alice’s goal to
reach the garden is itself an honoring of nature.
Hannah continues:
The second
point Jung made was that the Church increasingly
excluded
animals. . . . This attitude of the Church has, more than
anything else,
alienated man from his own as well as from the larger
impersonal
instincts and has since produced a deplorable state of
affairs all
over the world. (Jung: His Life and Work 151)
Alice in Wonderland contains many animals, more than I have
mentioned. Those I have mentioned, however, make clear the fact that Alice
honors the animals by endowing them with consciousness equal to that of
humans. Her interaction with animals and nature are manifestations of
what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique, a quality
Alice shares with aboriginal peoples and one which adults with their
ego-consciousness have lost.
“The third exclusion,” Hannah writes, “is perhaps
the worst from the psychological point of view, because it has
prevented man from recognizing his own shadow. It consists in the
exclusion of the inferior man.” It is Eros, “relationship,” that “the
Church condemned as sinful” (ibid. 151). The sadistic cruelty shown,
for example, in the poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in which the
title characters befriend, then eat, the Oysters, reveals the shadow
archetype which Western civilization needs to accommodate. The Freudian
interpretations of Alice, in so far as they are valid,
compensate for the Church’s denial of sexuality and the relatedness
(the “Eros”) it needs. I agree with Bloomingdale that it is Alice’s
“capacity for compassion that distinguishes Alice the Queen. . . . Love
is the golden crown that makes Alice the true Queen of Hearts” (390).
The last exclusion or “repression” Hannah cites is
of “creative fantasy . . . [which] if . . . given full freedom . . .
will probably lead the individual to find a divine spark in himself.”
Although the Church, Hannah notes, has “apparently little influence
nowadays,” it certainly had more influence in the last century (and
Church here means Christianity in general, not Christ himself or any
one denomination). Its negative influence today can be observed in the
efforts by some to write discrimination against the marriage rights of
gays and lesbians into the Constitution. Writing for children, Carroll
was able to abandon
his own prudery and give free reign to what was actually a new genre he
and Edward Lear were creating simultaneously.
Hannah reports that Jung, referring to his own Symbols
of Transformation, described two kinds of thinking: “intellectual
or directed thinking and fantastic thinking” (100). These are exactly
the kinds of thinking that went into the writing of Alice in
Wonderland. The happy balance of the two make it a classic which
continues to appeal to collective needs in Western culture. Hannah
further notes the fact that Jung liked to quote Schopenhauer, who said:
“A sense of humor is the only divine quality of man” (40), and in that
sense Alice in Wonderland is truly divine.
Notes
1A fairly recent example of the
popularity I refer to is an article in National Geographic:
“The Wonderland of Lewis Carroll” (June 1991). More recently, yet
another film version of the Alice stories (Alice in Wonderland)
appeared on the 28th of February 1999 on NBC. Brian Lowry, in the
Los Angeles Times, reports: “the three-hour production sank the
premiere of Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’ coming through the looking
glass with this season’s highest rating for a single-part TV movie . .
.” (F11). An exhibit running through 24 May 2006 at the Doheny
Memorial Library of the University of Southern California, "The Curious
World of Lewis Carroll," coincides with a symposium, "Lewis Carroll and
the Idea of Childhood," at the Doheny and at the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California, on 31 March and 1 April respectively.
Morton N. Cohen deftly summarizes the popularity of the Alice
books. He makes the following startling statement: “Along with the
Bible and Shakespeare’s works, they [the Alice books] are the most
widely quoted books in the Western world” (xxii).
2Three anthologies published within
the last thirty or so years illustrate the variety of studies: Robert
Phillips’ Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as seen
through the Critics’ Looking-Glasses, 1865-1971 (1971), Edward
Guiliano’s Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, Essays on the Occasion of
the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1982),
and Harold Bloom’s Lewis Carroll (1987), published as part of
the Modern Critical Views series. In the Introduction to his 1995
biography, Cohen summarizes the “eccentric readings” of the Alice
books, which, according to Cohen, include seeing Alice as “a
transvestite Christ,” regarding “Carroll himself as the first
‘acidhead.’ . . . [and] explaining “that the story is about toilet
training and bowel movements” (xxiii).
3Jeffrey Stern also views Alice as
the anima for Carroll, but he confines his comments to a few paragraphs
in the context of his essay, "Lewis Carroll the Pre-Raphaelite"
(165-166).
4Although Carroll’s Alice stories are
usually described as nonsense, unlike Lear’s verse, the issue of genre
is more complex for Carroll. Carroll more than once referred to Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland as a “fairy-tale” (see Selected
Letters 29 and Diaries 185). The complexity of the issue
Nina Demurova deftly illustrates in her article: “Toward a Definition
of Alice 's Genre: The Folktale and Fairy-tale Connections.”
She concludes:
The
scientific, the nonsensical, the linguistic--one thing is perfectly
clear about
these two
books [Wonderland and Looking-Glass], with their
unexpected
twists and
depths: Carroll’s fairy tales realize in most original and unexpected
forms both
literary and scientific types of perception. And that is why
philosophers,
logicians,
mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, folklorists, politicians, as
well as
literary
critics and armchair readers, all find material for thought and
interpretation in
the Alices.
(86)
Without discounting the other possibilities, I would here classify
the Alice books as visionary nonsense--a modern myth.
5Virginia Woolf, in her review of the
Nonesuch Press “complete” Lewis Carroll, declares that after reading Alice
in Wonderland “we wake to find--is it the Rev. C. L. Dodgson? Is it
Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined?” (83). Greenacre quotes a
letter, dated 15 December 1875, “the only letter signed with both names
[Lewis Carroll and C. L. Dodgson]. More frequently,” Greenacre adds,
“Mr. Dodgson preferred to keep his identity separate from that of Lewis
Carroll” (120-21). It was only in the last two months of his life,
however, that Dodgson refused to accept mail addressed to Lewis Carroll
(Gattégno 231).
6Martin Gardner, in The Annotated
Alice, notes: “In this terminal poem, one of Carroll’s best, he
recalls that July 4 [1862] boating expedition up the Thames on which he
first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the
three Liddell girls” (345, n. 1).
7Ironically, Carroll seems to have
been as prudish as the stereotypical Victorian--despite or perhaps
because of his forbidden sexual proclivities (to be sure no one can
prove precisely what he did with those proclivities on the
genital level). While he found nothing wrong with photographs and
drawings of nude children, he would, in Woolf’s words, “produce an
extra-Bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for the use of British
maidens” (83).
8Bloomingdale finds the fact that
Alice is a girl significant because “it affirms the androgynous nature
of the presexual self” (383); however, the same is true for any
child who is an archetypal symbol. The fact that Alice is female is
important but for other reasons, as we shall see.
9In Secret Gardens, Humphrey
Carpenter makes a strong argument that Alice in Wonderland is
actually a “parody of religion” (65). The parody here and Carroll’s
later “anguished piety,” Carpenter believes, “spring from the same
thing, the fact that Dodgson’s religious beliefs were utterly insecure”
(64). I submit that in the Alice books Carroll has in fact
compensated for that insecure belief by creating a new myth, one which,
as I show below, compensates in a variety of ways for conventional
Christianity.
10Hillman cautions against the type
of criticism psychoanalysts are prone to: “. . . to consider the dream
as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural
loses psyche. We cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream
images in terms of drives or desires” (43).
11Apart from the basic transformation
in Alice herself, other examples of the archetype are the baby that
turns into a pig and the White Queen who turns into a sheep.
12W. H. Auden sees games, too, as an
organizing principle against “anarchy and incompetence” (9). The
Looking-Glass world, of course, is actually a huge chess board.
13Alice’s train ride and the chess
board moves give a modern context to Alice’s journey.
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--Copyright © Clifton Snider, 2006. All rights reserved.
This article was first given in a
different version as a lecture at Ph.D. seminars at Pacifica Graduate
Institute, Carpinteria, California, December 1992.
Top.
Read about my book of literary criticism, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made
On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature.
See also:
Queer Persona and the Gay Gaze in Brokeback Mountain, Story and Film.
Synchronicity
and the Trickster in The
Importance of Being Earnest.
Oscar
Wilde, Queer Addict.
The Vampire
Archetype in the Brontës.
Psychic
Integration in Christina
Rossetti.
Shamanism
in Emily Dickinson.
Edward Lear: Victorian
Trickster
Eros
and Logos in Oscar Wilde's
Fairy Tales.
To read more about my work as a poet, go to Clifton
Snider, Poet, The Age of the Mother,
The
Alchemy of Opposites, and Aspens
in the Wind.
Read about my novels, Wrestling
with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers, Bare
Roots, and Loud Whisper.
Read my short story, "Hilda."
Home.
Page last revised: 23 August 2009