From Odd Alice to Decadent Dorian

HUM 3085: Britain Through the Looking GlassSpring 2010

Professors Perdigao and RuaneApril 26, 2010

Frames• Charles Dodgson as “model Victorian,” born 1832, dies 1898

• Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1871)

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle born 1859, dies 1930

• A Study in Scarlet (1857), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (until 1927)

• Jack the Ripper (1888)

• Oscar Wilde born 1854, dies 1900

• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1889, 1891)

• J. M. Barrie born 1860, dies 1937

• 1902—The Little White Bird

• 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (final text in 1928), 1906 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens as stories from The Little White Bird, 1911 Peter and Wendy (what we know as Peter Pan)

• The Coming of the Fairies (1921)

• The Looking Glass Wars (2007)

• Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Photo-Bombing: The New Spirit Photography

From Victorian to Postmodern• Flights of fancy

• Otherworldly occurrences

• Murderous mayhem

• “feminist sexual politics” and “narratives of ‘sexual danger’” were “inseparable from representations of the city that sharply contrasted proper worlds with teeming underworlds; from the emergence of modern norms of sex and gender; and from the powerful discourses of law, science, and medicine that helped to forge these norms. . . (Stimpson, in Walkowitz x).

Good Fairy Trickery

Not So Good Fairy Trickery

(blame the vibrations)

From Victorian to (post)modern

• “Golden Age” of children’s literature

• Didactic literature

• Representations in Alice, Peter Pan, Dorian Gray?

• Book within the book—metafiction

• Developments in psychology, anticipations of Freud

• Alice as phallus, Dorian Gray, id/ego, superego, killing “conscience”

Trickery and Subterfuge!

More Spirit Photography

Not Real Fairies

What they captured outside the garden

Reality/Fiction• Escapism

• Wonderland, Neverland as fantastic places

• “cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan”

• Escapism, uses of literature

• “In order to survive, Alice—like the orderly Charles Dodgson—must create a meaningful world out of the morally unintelligible void, and often in opposition to clear evidence from the natural world of which we are an inseparable part” (Rackin 401).

• Rather than conserving the “fresh innocence of the child,” nourishing the adult, it is reminder of loss and source of regret

• Magical realism—fairies in “real” world, spiritualism, painting, Victorian England as “fantasy” in Beddor

• Reality in Holmes over supernatural explanations, Jack the Ripper and forensics—both framed as narrative

• Joyce’s argument on “literary crime”

Art for art’s sake?• Play within a play: Dorian Gray, function of art

• Identity play, mirroring

• Wonderland as mirror, Looking Glass Maze, painting as mirror

• Reality of death

“New Hedonism”

Carly was not impressed by how little everyone knew of England, especially

the reference to Queen What’s Her Face

Booted from England… first by Florida Tech, then by Epcot!

Like Wilde, exiled to France

Re-patriated

Classing it up• Class issues

• Alice as proper little girl

• Darlings—middle-class world in Bloomsbury; children’s role-playing; parents’ roles

• Hook as “dandy”

• Jack the Ripper’s identity

• Wilde/Lord Henry/Dorian

Photo-bomber alcoholic—Dorian?

Vulgar middle-class crime

Authentic British stuff

No more

Now… Sparkle Gingy!