there may be a wild and brave child struggling to get out and mock the withering realities that govern life. Such is the hope of this comedy of regression.
Carroll's way is to begin and frame his text with mawkish, sentimental descriptions of childhood. It is as if, in his introductory poems and in the opening monologue of Looking-Glass featuring the girlchild, he is trying to represent the most morally unobjectionable being that he and his fellow Victorians could conceive of in order to smother his psychic censor in a well of treacle. Watch a child alone at play with its toys and dolls and after a while you may begin to hear and see these figures taking on roles that dramatize aspects of the child's life. Different tones and voices arise, words come out that reveal thoughts and visions neither you nor the child knew it possessed. Carroll's fiction is like that. In Looking-Glass, after Alice babbles, 'I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields that it kisses them so… and… says 'go to sleep, darlings'' and Dr. Dodgson appears to lull himself to sleep, Mr. Carroll suddenly bursts through the looking-glass and through the double wall of superego and sentimentality: he quotes Alice saying, 'Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!' That explodes the pious little-girl image and releases manic, unpredictable energy into the text and a typically resonant complexity into the character of Alice.
To show how significant the approach and the sudden move in portraying Alice here are and what is at stake with respect to both the fuller rendering of children's psychology in fiction and the relationship of Carroll and his heroine, I quote a passage from What Maisie Knew. Henry James is imagining his girl-child-about the same age as Alice-604- alone, confused in her feelings, and at odds with an awful adult world of arbitrary power and mysterious sexuality, and he begins to relate the subject of the child to fictional projections and transference: 'The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.' The developing child in the history of the novel means an inner life and psychological conflict-the psychodrama of alienation, conscious and unconscious repressions, contradictory motives, and imaginative identifications. Edmund Wilson says that 'the creatures that [Alice] meets the whole dream, are Alice's personality and her waking life,' but, of course, they are Carroll's personality and life too.
Not surprisingly, the character and function of Alice have become bones of critical contention. I have put her by and large in a favorable light, but some in the late twentieth century, focusing on problems of race, class, and gender, judge her more negatively. She has been seen as a quintessential figure of Victorian ethnocentrism for her continual attempts to bring her own standards, customs, mores, and manners to bear on the beings and circumstances she meets in her wonderlands. Carroll does sometimes betray his own upper-class biases, and he does render Alice's privileged-class assurance, especially in her occasional bouts of snobbery and patronization in the early chapters of Wonderland. She can also be seen as an example of essentialist gender stereotyping that makes the Victorian girl into a litany of virtues (and Alice surely displays most of humanity's good qualities). Such views have merit and interest, but they miss the dream psychology and the plurality of being Carroll imagines for her and also, I think, the main historical point: this writer moved one of history's most notoriously marginalized groups of beings, children, to the center of existence.
He could identify with the otherness of childhood, and its diversity; and in narrating the progress of Alice on her journeys he could reveal, as Freud would do in his famous essay 'A Child is Being Beaten,' one of the momentous secrets of childhood-and life: the imaginative processes of transposed and projected violence. Of course, Carroll is, among other things, a colonialist of childhood. He imposes upon a child and children his own dream of childhood, his sense and definition of a child. But this dream is fluid, and he is also a liberator of childhood. The Alice tales end with the question of whose dream this is, and here -605- Carroll touches upon the imperialism of desire. The question suggests a sense of fiction's mediation between author, audience, and cultural context, and, fittingly in a book about a child, it opens up the subject of custody. Henry James, writing in the preface to his prophetic novel What Maisie Knew about a child-custody battle, captures the feeling and the general conception that Carroll has for Alice and the child's role: '… the case being with Maisie to the end that she treats her friends to the rich little spectacle of objects embalmed in her wonder. She wonders, in other words, to the end.' James goes on to discuss his own faith in the imaginary girl:
Truly, I reflect, if the theme had had no other beauty it would still have had this rare and distinguished one of its so expressing the variety of the child's values. She is not only the extraordinary 'ironic centre' I have already noted; she has the wonderful importance of shedding a light far beyond any reach of her comprehension… I lose myself, truly, in appreciation of my theme on noting what she does by her «freshness» for appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough. They become, as she deals with them, the stuff of… art; she has simply to wonder, as I say, about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects, solidities, connexions-connexions with the 'universal!' — that they could scarce have hoped for.
No words better indicate the far-ranging significance that Lewis Carroll's Alice and the emergence of wonder and respect for the child that she represents have had for modern fiction, history, and culture.
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The Avoidance of Naturalism: Gissing, Moore, Grand, Bennett, and Others
BY the end of 1895, Emily Morse Symonds had published, as George Paston, three mildly advanced novels which, if not outstandingly successful, had at least been reviewed favorably by Arnold Bennett, then literary editor of Woman. They met in January 1896 and immediately recognized each other as fellow professionals, exchanging «tips» and talking «shop» for hours on end. On December 23, 1896, he took her out to dinner and the theater. 'Her book is going rather well, & she is half through her next (a tale of literary life) which she says will be her best.'
The tale of literary life, A Writer of Books (1898) is indeed her best. Like the novel Bennett himself had completed in May 1896, A Man from the North, it is about a writer from the provinces arriving in London to make a name. Cosima Chudleigh, left to fend for herself when her father dies, wants to 'get away from her present surroundings, begin a new existence, and lay the foundations of a career.' The career, not marriage, will provide the new existence. Writing, in her view, involves research. She decides that she must witness an operation, as the 'French realists' had done, in case any of her characters ends up on the operating table. She takes it for granted
