society, history, and maturity into the fantasy of his own regressive mind, appears before us as a prophet of the twentieth-century romance with fantasy life and a father of the future in psychology, art, and literature.
Carroll represents his child in her dream visions, and he brings together in imagining her experience the literary convention of the dream, the mood and feeling of real dreams, and the full play of his fantasy-and he exploits their potential for comedy. Nobody before had done anything quite like that. In all that is comic, as in dreams and fantasy, there is something regressive that takes us back to the mental experience and the world of play that we first knew as children. Comedy, dreams, and fantasy all somehow involve regression, a word that may have frivolous, even pejorative connotations. But the regression in Lewis Carroll-comic or not-is the opening to progress. -580-
Carroll's Alice implies and affirms the tie-in of fiction and the child to the processes of regression and the unconscious. Henry James, describing his girl-heroine Maisie in What Maisie Knew (1897), alludes neatly to the intimate relationship between the child and fiction, between child psychology and novelistic practice: 'She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories.' One point on which Lewis Carroll, the novel, and psychoanalysis agree is that no matter how we age, we keep this fiction-loving child somewhere, literally, in mind.
Regression means a going or coming back; it can be defined as a reverting to earlier behavior patterns, perceptions, and experiences so as to change or escape from undesirable situations and mental states. It is both radical and conservative: radical in rejecting the present and in juxtaposing material from both conscious and unconscious processes; conservative in holding on to time past. In Freudian dream psychology, regression means the translation of thoughts and emotions into visual images and forms of language when something in the mind resists or blocks their path to normal consciousness. It is a way of expressing and elaborating suppressed conflicts, memories, and daring psychic formations from infancy and childhood and letting them play on present realities. Regression can thus be a means of seeing life anew-of seeing it in Wonderland, for instance, as a falling into unknown territory beneath the surface of things, a mad tea party, and a farcical trial; or in Through the Looking- Glass, as an involuntary game, a series of dialogues with strange beings, an exercise in interpreting puzzling language, and a living out of preexistent linguistic formulas. The child's fantasy can be the generator of the adult's changing perception and world.
In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, parodying the Holy Trinity, invents a Carrollian trinity that sums up the content and pattern of Carroll's creative regression: 'Dodgfather, Dodgson & Coo.' The words and syllables, in their order, suggest the Carrollian movement away from manly, rigid patriarchy, away from the fixed single self, and toward the child and its identity with some wondrous spirit of freedom and comic wordplay. That happy «Coo» can signify the coup by which the Holy Ghost, its symbol the gentle dove, and Carroll himself merge into the girl Alice; the company that makes up his metamorphosing plural selves; and the sound that, mocking sentimentality and pomposity, connotes skepticism and bespeaks the voice of the new turtle heard in the modern lands of the absurd and irrational. From out of his rabbit-hole -581- and looking-glass world we can see coming not only such figures as Joyce, Freud, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, Lacan, Borges, Bakhtin, and García Márquez, but also much of the character and mood of twentieth-century popular culture.
One of the main projects of the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been to give expression to the child and a plot to childhood, and in this collective effort Lewis Carroll played a crucial part. Carroll and Alice give us a chance to see what the term «child» could mean in their Victorian society. The 'child,' of course, is not a static, given entity but a social construct that develops and changes in history. Focusing on Carroll and the Alice books can show why they have lasted and also how his child heroine relates to the children and childhoods represented by other important makers of fiction. That writers have made children subjects and objects of their work in the last two centuries has helped definitively to form people's thoughts and feelings about children. Our whole conception of childhood and children derives, in some degree, from the imaginative power of such writers as Rousseau, Wordsworth, Dickens, George Eliot, Freud, and, not least, Lewis Carroll.
Like Dante's Beatrice, Carroll's Alice is named after a real person. It was Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, who inspired the Alice books, and who, with her sisters, made the first audience for the stories from which the book grew. The comparison is not as far-fetched as it might appear, for Dodgson loved the girl Alice as surely as Dante loved the girl Beatrice; and he found, like many others of his era, a genuine faith in his sense of devotion to his idea of the child. The personal circumstances of Dodgson's life that led to Alice in Wonderland are well known and need only be mentioned briefly. He was the third child and eldest son in a large family of eleven children (seven sisters); his father was a patriarchal cleric, his mother a sweet, loving, child-burdened woman who died before Charles turned nineteen. Though he grew up a stammerer, he seems to have had a happy childhood at Daresbury and Croft, where his father was rector. He loved to care for, amuse, and entertain his siblings-his sisters especially-with stories, games, and nonsense. Though he respected his father's forceful personality and intellect and held him in awe, he identified emotionally with his mother. At school at Rugby, he seems to have been rather a -582- misfit, but he did well in his studies and matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford. There he took a first in mathematics, won a scholarship, and eventually became a master and tutor in his subject. There also he lived out his life as a bachelor. Conventional, adult, genital sexuality and marriage were not for him; in fact, there is no evidence that he ever engaged in physical sex with anyone or wanted to. It was a sublimated libido that flowed compulsively, but with kindness and propriety, toward the figure of the child.
According to his biographer Derek Hudson, the psychological lesson of Dodgson's childhood above all others was that he could never, so long as he lived, be without the companionship of children, and by children he meant little girls. They were a necessity to him; 'They are three-fourths of my life,' he once said. In 1856 he befriended the Liddell children, offspring of the dean of his college, and fell in love with Alice just at the time when he took up photography (he became a leading amateur photographer and one of the century's outstanding photographers of children). On an afternoon boating excursion with the girls in 1862 he began diverting them with a tale of nonsense and wonder that he elaborated into Alice's Adventures Under Ground (a private book, which he illustrated, meant expressly as a gift for the «real» Alice) and, later, the two published Alice books. His art of fantasy is thus rooted in real occasions, aimed at particular people with their particular wants and needs, and created for very personal reasons. Many incidents in the history of his relationship with Alice and the other Liddells, such as getting caught and drenched in the rain on an outing, find their way into his texts. The genesis of Lewis Carroll's fiction is the wish to give pleasure to a child-to children-whom he adored and idealized, to make his specific audience happy, and to seduce its goodwill and affectionate regard for himself. His desire was to project himself into the life of a child, to bind that child to his imagination, to break down the social and psychological barriers between adult and child, and to re-create the child in his own fantasy life. Virginia Woolf wrote that 'childhood was not dispersed in Dodgson as it usually is in adults, but remained in him entire, so he could do what no one else has ever been able to do-he could return to that world; he could re-create it.'
As it happens, Carroll's desire and practice here-his intense subjectivity-signify a good deal about his originality and importance, and about fiction, literary transaction, and the emergence of the child in fiction. The child, according to Jacqueline Rose, in The Case of Peter Pan, — 583- or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, appears in literature when the relationship between adult and child becomes a concern, a problem, a cultural issue. For many reasons-the rise of the middle classes, the subtle assaults on supernaturalism, the growing emphasis on the moral value of the family, the changing world's need to stress formal education, for example-that relationship, by the mid-nineteenth century, was much in question. With Carroll, however, we are talking of an adult's desire for the child-the desire, specifically, to serve the child, to make the child an icon and fetish, to use it to distance and dissolve threatening erotic energy, to introject the child into his psyche, and to live vicariously through the child. Freudians have had grand times analyzing the kinks in Charles Dodgson's personality, but the striking irony is that psychoanalysis and its theories that stress the determining significance of childhood experience and the importance of language, fantasy, dreams, jokes, and puns in showing the workings of the unconscious and the mind's reflective games, seem to flow right out of Carroll's wonderland.
In the Alice books Carroll can be seen working in the developing, often overlapping nineteenth-century traditions of children's literature and the child protagonist in fiction, but the immediacy of his original audience and the conflation of his central character, his hearers, himself, and the imaginative recreation of experiences he has shared with Alice Liddell and other little girls led him to break with convention. The purpose of most children's literature had been mainly didactic and moral: it was supposed to educate and lead children to adapt certain kinds of behavior, become better, grow up to be good people-for example, obedient Christians and productive citizens.
