Alice in Wonderland at 150: Why fantasy stories about girls transcend time

John Tenniel, The Nursery Alice

It’s 150 years since an Oxford mathematics don published the most important work of children’s literature and one of the most influential books of all time.

The origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a story that Charles Dodgson told 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while rowing along the Thames in 1862 are well known. What is less understood is why it has become such an enduring cultural touchstone across the globe.

Many popular stories can be distilled to the basic structure of a male hero undertaking a quest. In 1949, Joseph Campbell described the common features of the “monomyth” or hero’s journey that are evident in stories from those of Buddha and Jesus to Luke Skywalker.

In W.W. Denslow's illustrations and L. Frank Baum's
original text, Dorothy is a much younger girl (with 
silver shoes instead of ruby slippers).

Contrary to the dominance of heroic tales of men, there are several iconic narratives of pre-pubescent girls journeying through dream-like fantastic realms that have become enduring phenomena.

Like the ubiquitous Alice, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz has gained a life of her own beyond L. Frank Baum’s books. The Kansas orphan’s journey into Oz is, if anything, better known through the MGM film starring Judy Garland. The film transforms Dorothy’s journey into nothing but a dream— like Alice’s— inspired by a cyclone-induced blow to the head.

The stories of Alice, Dorothy and more recent girl protagonists in popular fantasies, such as Sarah’s encounters with the Goblin King in the 1986 film Labyrinth, are strongly inflected by fairy-tale tradition. Campbell himself later acknowledged that he “had to go to the fairy tales” in order to bring any semblance of female heroism into The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

As fairy tale scholar Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario explains throughout her work, fairy tales are most often about girls on the cusp of maturation and marriage.

Alice Liddell photographed as a
"beggar maid" by Carroll

In their original book incarnations, however, both Alice and Dorothy are very young girls: Alice is just seven and Dorothy is estimated to be eight. Carroll was notoriously fascinated by pre-pubescent girls, whom he often photographed in staged poses.

The young ages of Alice and Dorothy free them from involvement in a romance plot. In girls’ fiction from the early twentieth century, it was common for adventurous heroines become hastily engaged in the final pages of a novel.

Even more importantly, as girls, Alice and Dorothy occupy a transitional borderland between childhood and adulthood. This also seems to make them more attuned to crossing the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

Whether this capacity derives from the combination of negative assessments of children and females as less rational in comparison with adults and males, or marks girls out as more perceptive and empathetic, is debatable.

What is clear is that these girl heroines take different paths to characters on the typical male hero’s journey. Even within fantastic literature, where anything is possible, there are clear gendered distinctions for protagonists.

As my Deakin colleague Lenise Prater pointed out to me in an important scholarly dialogue on this topic (a Facebook chat thread), female hero quests in fantasy tend to encompass an internal quest that takes place in a dreamscape. In contrast, male heroes enter into literal fantasy worlds; their adventures are supposed to be “real” with the space of the story.

The dreamy adventures of Alice work through or play with some of her waking interests and anxieties. As in Carroll’s text, Tim Burton’s film adaptation explicitly signals that Wonderland is a purely imaginary place. Alice suffers from nightmares about Wonderland as a child, and her father reminds her that dreams cannot harm her and she can “always wake up”.

Judy Garland in a publicity still from 1939

The MGM Oz film changes Dorothy’s journey into a dream through its casting of the same actors in roles in both sepia-toned Kansas and Technicolor Oz. (Farmhands Hunk, Hickory and Zeke appear as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, while neighbour Almira Gulch proves all dog-haters must surely be green-skinned witches.)

As lone questers, girl characters are the most vulnerable and physically weak. Despite their powerlessness in conventional respects, heroines such as Alice and Dorothy are able to survive the dangers posed by people and supernatural beings who possess advantages that are not available to them (adult authority and magic chief among them).

The lives of both Alice and Dorothy beyond their original books by Carroll and Baum suggest a cultural investment in stories about the most vulnerable of people. Alice and Dorothy experience the most amazing of journeys, in which they triumph over the highest forms of authority and power, from queens to witches.

It is reassuring that these stories about girls, who are often overlooked because of their age and gender, are almost universally known. Nevertheless, imagine the possibilities if our most iconic girl characters did not always have to “wake up” at the end of their adventures.

Michelle Smith will be chairing the Making Public Histories seminar on “Melbourne’s Alice” at the State Library of Victoria on 26 November 2015.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Mad Hatter, The Goblin King and Mr Tumnus: Girls Desiring Men

After a return journey from hell, I'm now back from Canada and the girls' texts and cultures symposium in Winnipeg. As someone who studies inanimate texts that do not speak back, it was a real revelation to hear researchers who work with actual girls speaking.

One paper ended with a video edit of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a love song spliced over the top to suggest a kind of love plot between Lucy and Mr Tumnus. Immediately, I was reminded of the relationship between Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter and Alice in the recent Tim Burton film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. While the film made a connection between the Hatter and Alice's deceased father through their mutual fascination with things outside the "normal" range of thought, the tension generated when Alice must decide whether to remain in Underland or return home seems much greater than that of a girl who must leave a friend behind. On the part of both the Hatter and Alice, there seemed to be a romantic interest that made the decision all the more poignant.

On the long flight from Vancouver to Sydney, the paucity of movie choices gave me the opportunity to find another filmic girl who is placed within a romantic relationship with a man. In the 80s classic Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson), the fifteen-year-old heroine Sarah must rescue her baby brother from the goblin king, Jareth, who is disturbingly played by David Bowie, replete with backcombed hair and a codpiece. She must do this before the thirteenth hour or her brother will become a goblin, and she'll presumably be struck from babysitting club membership across the nation. As part of Jareth's attempts to prevent Sarah from reaching his castle by way of the labyrinth and rescuing her brother, he enters her hallucination of a masquerade ball (though both are unmasked). Sarah suddenly looks a lot older than she has throughout the film, with her hair elegantly styled and a face full of make-up. Jareth attempts to prevent Sarah from moving forward in her quest by dancing with her, and the scene again seems to show a girl desiring a man, or at least the idea of one, as she is temporarily transfixed by the spell of the ball and Jareth.

I'm not sure whether there are other examples, and the Lucy/Mr Tumnus one is a stretch (although I did feel a little uneasy with Mr Tumnus on first viewing the film as he seemed lecherous to me!), but with all the paranoia about paedophilia in contemporary culture it seems interesting to see at least a few very popular films that acknowledge the possibility of a girl desiring someone who is an inappropriate love interest. Perhaps it is a part of the demonstration of the girls acquiring maturity that they are shown as having the capacity for romantic interest in men, and the quick return to the normal world outside of fantasy lands leaves any conflict between social norms and the girls' feelings behind? I suppose it is an awkward reality that girls often experience sexual desires before boys their own age have matured and hence desires are projected on to much older pop culture idols, in what is usually only ever a fantasised relationship. Perhaps that's why these girl/man tensions turn up in fantasy films, as they'd be too awkward to contemplate in realist ones.