first-person subject, and focuses on her childhood victimization and her progress from an abused girl to an assertive, vocationally competent, erotic, and successful adult. This governess manqué and creative genius doesn't sentimentalize children in her fiction, doesn't even seem particularly to like them, but renders childhood experience and trauma as crucial in forming character and fate.
Her sister Emily, in the early chapters of Wuthering Heights (1848), imagines in the childhoods of Cathy and Heathcliff the turbulent passion, polymorphous perversity, and determining effects of infantile sexuality that psychoanalysts, shocking propriety, would later claim to be natural-even normal. Like her sister, she breaks through conventional decorum, ridicules notions about little angels-in-the-house, and gets at the violence of childhood and its spawning of obsessions. But she does represent the second Cathy as the moral redeemer of the novel's world. George Eliot makes the girl-child of Silas Marner the figure that upholds civilization and leads to moral progress, but in The Mill on the Floss (1860) she addresses the issue of the gendered, sugar-and-spice stereotypes and the damage they can cause. Maggie Tulliver's long childhood is a depiction of how the girl is mother to the woman, but it is also a relentless narrative of steady, restrained, feminist anger and -596- resentment about the horrors of abstracting girls and boys and making them conform to conventional, rigid gender roles.
As do the Alice books, the fiction of these novelists who seized upon childhood as a major subject revealingly renders tension between a passionate, sometimes sentimental will to identify with the child, together with a sense of the irrecoverability of childhood and alienation from the myth of the sanctified girl. The child who is seen as part and parent of the adult consciousness and point of view has already lost its being in the very act of that reflection. Edmond de Goncourt, using the documentary procedures of French realism and aiming exclusively at an adult audience, wrote the novel Cherie (1884), featuring a child protagonist, because he thought his role as novelist was to be 'un historien des gens qui n'ont pas d'histoire': children before the novelists got at them, in other words, were people without history; but then, with the coming of novelistic retrospection, they tended to become part of the history of adults, rather than 'people.' The unself-conscious nature, special innocence, and uncurbed potential of the child are time-doomed, as Blake, singing of experience, knew. Moreover there is a serious psychological flaw in putting faith in the saintly child, because people, especially the introspective, remembering that they have been children, usually know somehow that-no matter how they want and try to deceive themselves- they were never pure, never angelic; an innocent child, in some dark recess of the psyche, is a falsehood and a moral reproach. Still, the Victorian writers of fiction, led by Dickens, moved people to identify with children, to take the child's part; and Carroll's subversion of the adult world-his identification of the self with a child rather than an adult-marks a revolution of sensibility and outlook.
Lewis Carroll actually loved and wanted to be the girl-child, the other, the not-self in a way that his distinguished older contemporaries in fiction did not. Dickens and George Eliot], writing of the child in
Fantasy indicates the secularization of wonder, and Carroll, through the emergent child, is its prophet. Dreams for him sanction fantasy. Creating fantasy is, like dreaming, a way of internalizing miracles; but, of course, it is consciously done and historical. One reason he links dream vision and fantasy to childhood is that empirically, as psychology has since shown, the way people revisit their childhoods and the mental nurseries of their fantasy lives-and the way the child intrudes on the adult with its continuing presence-is often through dreams. Like dream work, fantasies, according to Freud and his followers, grow out of childhood experiences, words, and imaginings. They, too, are animated images of repressed hopes and stifled wishes set free.
Animation, the breath of life, motivates Carroll's comic dream and fantasy world: he animates fantastic images. Nursery rhymes, words, thoughts, poems, animals, chess pieces, and flowers all come alive, take visual shape, move and talk. As everything in a dream is part of the dreamer, so everything in wonderland and through the looking-glass is part of the fantasist's personality. Carroll animates new forms of life on every page. The cinematic movement of dreams in Carroll is the movement of animation. Tenniel's illustrations in the Alice books (Carroll's fussiness about them nearly drove the artist out of his mind) are as important to the text as those in any book I know. Repressed thought turns to visual images, and such images move and live in Carroll's fantasy of childhood. Try to think of Humpty Dumpty without benefit of the Carroll-Tenniel image and you can see the force of Carroll's animation. If you could combine his fantastic literary animation with his photographic interest, you would get 'motion pictures'; and he is spiritual father, as sure as any technological innovator, to that revealing progeny of the twentieth century, animated cartoons. In these visions, whose main audience is supposedly children, horrendous falls, accidents, fights, murderous intentions, and carnivorous frenzies seem not only harmless but funny. Animation by definition excludes death, and -598- these visual fantasies-classic examples of comic regression-present a world where infantile wishes predominate and mortality has no sway. It may be that one of greatest sources of pleasure in animation is that it seems to take us back to a time in childhood when we felt ourselves to be the center of life and made no distinction between the self and the other-when everything we knew was alive and personal, and we had no need to care about the alien. The animation of all, which we find in Carroll, the personalizing of objects, may express a craving to be all, to ingest all, and to eliminate boundaries-between people and things, between stories and life, between kinds of animal life, between differentiated physical drives and the different body parts signifying the oral, anal, and genital modes of sexuality, between mother and child.
In Carroll's hands fantasy becomes a comic mode to ponder and enjoy; it can purge contradictions and hard realities from the mind or at least turn them to play and jest. His comic fantasy depicts a world so outlandish that it never could be and therefore provides some relief from social pressures and moral responsibility; but his imagination very often gives us exactly the sort of silliness that goes on all the time in the real world. 'We're all mad here,' the Cheshire Cat insists; 'Sentence first, verdict after,' proclaims the King of Hearts; 'I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,' says the White Queen to Alice, and 'The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam to-day': fantastic and funny lines, but also true to life.
The way to grow up and participate in experience in wonderland is to grow little, and the way to go forward in looking-glass land is to go backward-back to origins, early years, first principles, early pleasures, early fears, early desires-in order to see with fresh clarity what, through habit and personal and social repression, you have come to accept as the real and true and to find in a place of make-believe, in a world of fiction, that make-believe-fiction-is reality. The way to freedom and curious wonder is to recognize and comprehend the arbitrary, predetermined, and artificial structures of your life. The way to knowledge of culture and society is to explore your inner fantasy life. The way to honor intelligence is to know and laugh at its limitations. The way to celebrate creation is to play with its silly mysteries. The intention-conscious or not-that comes through in the Alice texts is, in effect, one meaning of humanity's comic capacity and literary capability: I will play with and make ridiculous fear, loneliness, smallness, ignorance, authority, chaos, nihilism, and death; I will transform, for a time, woe to joy. -599-
Carroll offers a metaphorical, metonymical compendium of the obsessions and urgencies of the modern world of collective individualism, and the rhetoric of his fiction, persuading people that they can read and find reverberating significance in the child and her dream-life, makes him a major writer. The child, as psychology would show, just would not stay in a bracketed-off area, remote from serious adult life and history. Like the transmitters of myths, legends, sacred writings, and folklore, Lewis Carroll and such modern writers as Kafka and Beckett give people open-ended metaphors-word images that have the suggestive quality of their own dreams and eschew directly stated meanings. Carroll allows us to read our own stories, desires, fears, and to make fun of them. Through two very short and very funny books, Carroll shows us the frightful self-consciousness of modern times ('Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!'), the fantastic shapes of the inward journey (objects come alive; physical being becomes unstable; Alice never quite knows just where she is), the quest for innocence and withdrawal from a rude, jostling, intrusive society (''No room! No room!'; 'At this the whole pack… came flying down upon her'). He conveys loneliness (''Only it is so very lonely here!'Alice said… and, at the thought of her loneliness, two large tears came rolling down… 'Oh, don't go on like that! cried the poor Queen…: 'Consider what a
