And in the novels of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, children are generally portrayed either as agents who reflect on the moral condition and worth of the other characters and their world (Oliver Twist [1837], Silas Marner [1861]) or, most significantly, who show the development and logical relationship between a character's childhood and his or her later life and consciousness (Great Expectations [1861], Jane Eyre [1847]) — 'the continuity, the unity of human experience,' as Peter Coveney puts it. Lewis Carroll's first intention would seem to have been to make his audience find him wonderful through his imaginative ingenuity and ability to delight, divert, and play seductively in language. What originally motivates the Alice tales, it seems, is a wish to break through to a new state, to go underground, to get through the -584- usual conventional reflections to a new site of reflection behind the traditional moralizing mirrors of art-to move into the wonderland of the unconscious and the «other» where the beloved not-self somehow mirrors the self.
Carroll imagines such literary mirroring in the form of a picture-almost a photograph-in the memory of a child whom he has imagined. This becomes clear in a passage from Through the Looking-Glass describing the White Knight-a virtual self-portrait by the writer:
Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey…, this was one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterward she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday-the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the knight-the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her-the horse quietly moving about… — and the black shadows of the forest behind-all this she took in like a picture.
It is the invented Alice who validates and preserves Dodgson/ Carroll's being and lets him make art out of the mirror stage, in which, according to Lacan, we take our image of ourselves early on from what we find another perceiving and desiring.
He particularized the audience for his fiction, writing both for a child-whom he was out to please, honor, and fascinate, not change, or use for moral propaganda, or show to be the parent of the adult the child would become- and for himself, a witty, repressed, curious intellectual with a brilliantly intuitive imagination and an obvious need to express safely the contents and fantasies of his complexly fissured mind. Because Charles Dodgson loved a real child, Lewis Carroll was moved to write fiction-a fiction that broke with realism, rejected a traditional marriage plot (staple of both the novel and the fairy tale), and mocked reality as 'dull.' The focus in Carroll is on the child itself, as in a portrait or photograph of a young girl, not on the state of childhood as a prelude to something else. His writing is for fun-the fun of Alice-but it also calls attention to a sense of life's alienation and to both the continuing presence and otherness of childhood for grownups.
Through the child, Carroll pushed the limits and conventions of fiction, expanded them, and made fantasy probing, speculative, radically comic, and intellectually rewarding. His libido drove him beyond memories and representations of realistic childhood experiences, such as -585- Dickens depicts, into the unconscious, where, for example, he finds and reflects through the mirror of his art an image of himself as a shy, jokemaking insect- Victorian ancestor of Kafka's Gregor Samsa-fluttering helplessly about the flame of a little girl (see 'Looking-Glass Insects,' chapter 3, Looking-Glass). He moved from conscious social or practical purpose to comic subversion and new perspectives. Carroll pointed toward specialized and diverse audiences developing for fiction-for instance, children, nostalgic adults, teachers, child-rearers, academics, logicians, and intellectuals-and also toward the complicated and various motives that bring one to read and write fiction. (One motive that became important in the developing countercultural tradition in art would be to turn outsiders into insiders, giving them the last laugh.) The motives and circumstances behind the making of Alice let us see how the the reading public was fragmenting into special groups and also into what we might call a collection of myriad-minded, private reading selves.
The child as subject and the literary transaction were for Carroll ends, rather than means. Paradoxically, therefore, this outwardly orthodox, but odd, little-girl-struck author of what may have been the favorite children's book of the century helped to rid fiction of its heavy load of Victorian moral baggage and move it toward something like sovereign play in and for itself-pleasure for pleasure's sake and art for art's sake too. Thus, strangely enough, it previews both popular culture and modernism's high art of fiction with its exalted, romantic notions of 'creative writing' and the writer. «Alice» was born out of the need to please some little girls and to turn the rational world upside down. A little child destined for the commercial stage, movies, cartoons, amusement-park rides, and TV-the whole money-making Alice industry whose history shows perfectly how the child has been commercialized in modern times-would lead the avant-garde.
The cult of the child flourished in Victorian times, and other authors, particularly Dickens, exploited to the last emotional pang the sympathy and identification that people had come to feel for children in print, especially orphans and lonely, misunderstood, victimized children. Of the major writers in the language, however, only Carroll and Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, used the child primarily for comic purposes. Natural symbols of regeneration, children-in modern times normally much closer in years to birth than to death-live rela-586- tively free of the fear of time and give themselves to play, games, and the pursuit of pleasure. And if you write for them, you can give way to fantasy, say things that in another context might be construed as wild or blasphemous, and claim you're doing nothing but amusing children. But before you can fully realize the comic potential of the child, you have to rebel against the powerful idea that adult life is somehow superior to child life. You must must really admire, even envy, want to be, the child, and choose the child over the parent-even the parent in yourself and the parent that you are in your imagination. Lewis Carroll did. This laureate of growing up absurd knew that a part of the self resents having to grow up, and he insisted that maturity, whatever else it may be, is somehow a sham and a joke.
Such a writer and such a vision can succeed only when there is a deep, if repressed, skepticism about the authority-and authoritarianism-of the past, both individually and collectively. (cf. Günter Grass's Little Oskar in The Tin Drum in post-Nazi Germany.) The intensive questioning of authority and power that the Alice texts render could take place only when people, feeling themselves to be children of an incomprehensible or disappearing God, of the state, of a ridiculous universe, or of some other sort of unfathomable, but oppressive authority, and consciously or unconsciously resentful, were ready to defy and mock the omnipotence, mystery, wisdom, and reason of a rigid adult order-the internal and external ancien régime.
Philippe Aries, the pioneer historian of childhood, and his followers, critics, and revisers have tried to chronicle the processes by which childhood began to be recognized as something more than a period when, as Kimberley Reynolds puts it, 'miniature adults were stuffed with food, information, and attitudes with which to become fully-developed adults'-when, in other words, children began to be perceived as different from adults. Whether this changing perception occurred in the early Renaissance, the seventeenth century, or, on a widespread scale in the early nineteenth century, by the late-Victorian period the child in art and literature reflected a concern for helping middle-class adults identify and resolve their problems by identifying with children. If we compare the nature of fiction through the Victorian era and the twentieth century with what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century we see how a mushrooming emphasis on the child has changed things and led novelists to the rendering of children's points of view (Dickens, Proust, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf), children as featured -587- characters (George Eliot, Christina Stead, Thomas Mann), children as magnets for twisted, dangerous eroticisms (Joyce, Nabokov, Toni Morrison), children as lovely, innocent figures whose well-being is the touchstone of the good (Henry James), and children as a targeted audience (Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, T. H. White). For the more privileged classes in the nineteenth century, home and family came to be idealized as sacred places. But, as Reynolds says in words that bear on Carroll, 'The image of the child was simultaneously sentimental, escapist, the repository of all that was good and pure, and also the domain of covert desires and fantasies.'
When Lewis Carroll began to write, there had been increasing public and private concern for more than a century about the condition of children. In the nineteenth century the state, mostly at the behest of the evangelical movement, had begun to take official notice and make some early efforts at regulating child labor, protecting child welfare, and mandating at least some schooling. Attitudes were changing. In the eighteenth century new interest and sentiment for children and new idealizations of family affection had appeared. Romanticization of childhood, though it had been slow to develop, went together with middle-class romanticization of women and motherhood. Historically, capitalism, the expansion of the empire, and the coming of industrialism had made a great many people richer and brought for the growing numbers of the privileged classes more leisure for their children and a longer period of childhood before beginning the work of the world. This led to growing emphasis on education and also on the aestheticizing of the child as people took pride in their progeny and wanted to show them off. The development
