As soon as Alice enters this psychedelic fantasy world, her human form summons curiosity, and sometimes disquiet, from the inhabitants who themselves manifest in all manner of bizarre embodiments. But while these creatures engage in spectacles mesmerizing to young readers, Carroll’s narrator fastens his sights on the little girl stumbling through this dizzyingly monochromatic world: it is her unruly body that concerns him and that, consequently, propels the narrative. As author, Carroll asserts his authority predominantly by regulating his muse’s size fluctuations; however, the rapidity of said fluctuations betrays apprehension, stemming from Carroll’s conception of female maturity as uncontainable and chaotic—that is to say, fundamentally too much. If a little girl’s body could not be made to behave—that is to say, to submit to perennial youth—what else might she do? What churned beneath that learned veneer of docility, behind those eyes, reverently downcast? Perhaps even the most pliable little girls would prefer to be otherwise.
Setting aside garden-variety Victorian agitation, it’s not especially surprising that Dodgson would concoct a narrative so manically concerned with a little girl’s behaviors and bodily changes. He cultivated friendships with children—“child-friends,” he called them—and even took up the hobby of photographing them in the nude, which, while never documented as foul play during his lifetime, certainly registers squeamishly now. Dodgson’s child-friend Alice Liddell, probably his favorite of the bunch, inspired the character that would come to define his career. She was twelve years old when she received as a gift Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, bound and lettered by Dodgson himself and, most significantly, containing a photograph11 of seven-year-old Alice at the end. Critic U. C. Knoepflmacher remarks that the picture is “mirror-like,” a laden, if embedded, message to its recipient, for “this mirror reflects a face that cannot age.” It’s difficult to locate many pictures of Liddell during the early years of pubescence when she received this gift from Dodgson—and when, to his consternation, her body would have experienced the first quakes of maturation. The photograph tucked inside Liddell’s book is the gift of her former self, memorialized by Dodgson as an impossible fantasy: the female body, unfettered, fledgling, in perpetuity.
Yet Dodgson is not merely privileging a prepubescent moment that he regards as less chaotic; he also yearns for Liddell to join him in this nostalgia, even as she inevitably propels toward adulthood. For, when Liddell receives her copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, she embodies the reality resisted by Carroll in his narratives. The photograph is a plea: “Mourn with me, Alice,” it beseeches. “Tell me that your new, mature body, which is too much for me to bear, is too much for you, too.”
When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, Dodgson and Liddell no longer shared the intimacy that had accompanied the latter’s childhood.12 Dodgson’s diary indicates that the two were still in contact with each other; however, Liddell’s appearance—she would now be about thirteen years old—had begun to repel him. He writes on May 11, 1865, “Alice seems changed a good deal, and hardly for the better—probably going through the usual awkward age of transition.”13 Nowadays this “usual awkward age of transition” is designated as its own era, adolescence—those blistering years that roil with infamous physical and emotional tribulations. But the Victorians possessed no such category, at least not until the turn of the century,14 and thus the space between girl and woman presented as vexingly ill-defined. Dodgson refers to the transition as “usual,” but certainly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland bodily change is presented as poignantly unusual and, thus, confined to a parallel world that parodies our own in the most haywire ways. The pleasure of the story turns on the fish-out-of-water narrative: one young, human girl collides with a legion of kooky persons, like the exasperatingly helter-skelter Mad Hatter, condemned to temporal imprisonment—after offending the Queen of Hearts, he must endure a perpetual tea party or else lose his head—and, of course, the variously neurotic, anthropomorphic creatures she encounters across her haphazard adventures. Alice is befuddled, sometimes even incensed, by Wonderland’s nonsense, and yet, Carroll insinuates that a growing girl is better suited to a mercurial parallel universe of amoral absurdity—that her own, maturing body designates her as such—rather than to the Victorian world, where puberty is abject.
Charles Dodgson, like any other person, ultimately had no choice but to accept the fact of Liddell’s developing body regardless of the displeasure it provoked. But the authorial persona of Lewis Carroll—fictitious and, thus, free—enabled the meek clergyman to imagine himself master of a magical domain and, more to the point, master of his heroine: he could “write” Alice’s body in the manner of his choice and subject it to his whims—even punish it, in some cases. As he watched Liddell grow, with what he seemingly perceived as wretched inevitability, Dodgson imagined a female body that is always precariously close to changing, but whose changes were impermanent and always fell within his jurisdiction.
But for all his aversion to bodily transformation, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a very fleshy novel, with narrative elements belying Dodgson’s sensitivity to feminine rhythms. It wears its anxiety on its sleeve: little girls grow and harbor voracious appetites and sob buckets of tears, and as their size and confidence burgeon they become more difficult to control. In fact, in Carroll’s psychedelic dream, bodies are always in peril—particularly Alice’s body as she encounters the decapitation-inclined Queen of Hearts. But beyond demonstrating their terrible mortality through a monarch’s incessant murderous threats, Carroll reminds us, insistently, of what a body can do—particularly ones with gestational capability. The rabbit hole that transports Alice to Wonderland might as well be a birth canal concealed within the vast corpus of the earth. Alice’s bodily changes produce a cyclical trajectory characteristic of women’s biological experiences. And while no actual bloodshed mars the desexualized text, it is nonetheless awash in Alice’s fluids. At Wonderland’s threshold, suddenly turned nine feet high after consuming some unattended snacks, Alice—disoriented and frightened—begins to weep. The vestibule fills with her prodigious tears, signaling Alice as a sort of “leaky vessel,”15 a term that, in Renaissance England, implicated women as unable to control their bodies precisely because of emissions like tears, menstrual blood, and amniotic fluid. Alice’s hearty sobs are treated similarly—unseemly in their excessiveness, a sign that she is an unpredictable, troublesome organism. And once she is shrunk, she realizes that her transgression will be duly punished:
Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea…However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high…“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice…“I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!”16
The text treats it as a matter of course, despite the fact that death by drowning in one’s own tears is uniquely sadistic. It is a penalty precisely designed to fit the crime: too much noisy, wet sobbing. Perhaps the narration’s equanimity is a form of tonal reassurance: Alice will, ultimately, survive this predicament. But first, she must do penance for her body’s too muchness—too many emotions, tears, secretions. In Wonderland, the stakes are high for a female body in flux; but then, that has always been the case, everywhere.
* * *
The twentieth century gave rise to children’s films and books that celebrated imagination and subversion—kids suddenly were invited to explore the pleasures and excitement of rule breaking. And yet, this was a privilege reserved for boys; girls were, for the most part, excluded from the narrative—and frolicking beyond the spokes of decorum remained a punishable offense. Dr. Seuss’s books, the most famous of which were written in the 1950s, are chock-full of little boys dreaming up wild schemes and adventures. But in contrast, the little sister in The Cat in the Hat sits passively by in the midst of the pandemonium. We find a female protagonist in Gertrude McFuzz, but in a well-traveled context: she serves as an e
xplicit warning against excess. This “girl-bird,” Gertrude, is distraught that she only possesses a stump of a tail feather, unlike one of her companions, who boasts two luxuriously long plumes. As directed, she eats “pill-berries” in order to grow an extra feather or two. But, delighted by the effect of two pill-berries, she gorges until her plumage multiplies to exorbitant lengths, incapacitating her in the process. At last, her uncle remedies the predicament, and Gertrude learns to squelch both vanity and jealousy and thus the desire for more vibrant feathers.
While Dr. Seuss penned these frolicking rhymes, Disney released films like Cinderella (1950) and Snow White (1937) where desire is punished by near-death, and disobedience—attending a glamorous ball without permission—becomes a last resort in pursuit of heteronormative romance. As it happens, Disney also released their adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1951), which demonstrates fidelity to the story and, accordingly, condemns Alice to the usual gamut of size-shifting and bodily peril. On Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny donned drag and wreaked havoc across his animated universe—which, like Seuss’s domain, was overwhelmingly male, and included within its ranks Pepé Le Pew, a skunk for whom rules of romantic consent were at best negligible guidelines.
Plucky heroines abound across Anglo and American children’s literature, yet their own struggles with gendered strictures and the trajectories of their comings-of-age often present conflicting narratives. Perhaps one of the most uncompromising—and uncompromised—children’s heroines from the twentieth century is Pippi Longstocking, literary creation of Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. Disgusted by the ways in which adults “browbeat”17 and “trampled on” their children, she dreamed up Pippi, “the strongest girl in the world,” in the winter of 1941. Her daughter, Karin, seven years old at the time, was confined to her bed with pneumonia, and yearning for entertainment. By 1945, the first book, named for the titular character, was published to great acclaim, although one reviewer, aghast, referred to Pippi as “psychotic.”18
Certainly Lindgren’s character would have been unconventional in any case, but she is all the more extraordinary for her femaleness. Like Anne Shirley of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, her plaited hair blazes a combustible red—though, unlike Anne, she is perfectly content with her appearance. She wears her freckles proudly and is offended by beauty products vowing to eliminate them. And she wields wild, magical strength—she can easily lift a horse—although she adheres to a code of pacifism. The child of a mother who died when she was a baby and a ship captain father who is lost at sea, Pippi lives alone with a pet monkey, and she resists with vivacity adults’ attempts to corral her into conventional childhood activities. For instance, she refuses to attend school, eludes those who would toss her into foster care, and she goes to bed whenever she pleases (she also drinks coffee). It’s a staggeringly solitary life for a nine-year-old, but Pippi isn’t frightened: “Don’t you worry about me,” she assures everyone who indicates solicitude. “I’ll always come out on top.” Although Lindgren never referred to herself as a feminist19 per se, Pippi’s staunch independence, and her gusto for life, one lived entirely according to her own calibrations, reveals a progressive interpretation of gender that remains relatively conspicuous even today. Pippi’s disinclination toward conformity and her disinterest in yielding to the crush of adult authority posits a little girl’s entitlement to disrupt—not because she harbors some precocious agenda, but because she demands the right to be fully herself, fully too much.
In 1955, Ramona Quimby, a near American cousin of Pippi Longstocking, tumbled into the picture, all scraped knees and exuberant doodles. She and her creator, author Beverly Cleary, united with Pippi and Lindgren in literary confederation, bright beacons for little girls who have been variously told they are too much: too loud or pesky or hyperactive. Upon a cursory read, it might be tempting to describe Ramona as mischievous, but Cleary herself has protested against this accusation,20 and with good reason. Ramona loves the world with ferocity; she does not so much want to disturb it as she yearns to discover, to turn it over, examine every piece and crook and marvel at why each creature, commodity, and substance exists the way it does. “She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next,” explains Cleary in Ramona the Pest. But when put in practice, Ramona’s philosophy stirs controversy, and all too frequently the intrepid heroine contends with indictments of her disposition. Her demure, long-suffering older sister, Beatrice—dubbed “Beezus” by Ramona when she is learning to speak—lobs them at her regularly. “Beezus felt that the biggest trouble with four-year-old Ramona was that she was just plain exasperating,” writes Cleary at the start of the series’ first book, Beezus and Ramona. “If Ramona drank lemonade through a straw, she blew into the straw as hard as she could to see what would happen. If she played with her finger paints in the front yard, she wiped her hands on the neighbors’ cat.”21 But as we quickly understand, Beezus is not the enemy. Focalizing Beezus and Ramona through Beezus’s perspective—when Ramona is still in preschool—prompts us to empathize with the aggrieved older sister, the girl who is steadied by rules and orderliness and placid afternoons stitching potholders. Beezus struggles to comprehend how Ramona, whom she dearly loves, could be so defiantly opposed to convention.
And yet, Ramona, whose family lives in the working-class Pacific Northwest, does not eschew gender and behavioral norms out of calculated defiance, but rather out of disbelief that metrics of femininity and propriety could matter in the grand scheme of things. It would be vastly oversimplifying to refer to Ramona as a tomboy; she nurtures crushes on classmates and wants a pair of gleaming red galoshes that match the ones worn by other girls in her kindergarten class. But most crucially, Ramona is dissatisfied by the template for any childhood that doesn’t accommodate her brash exuberance, or that would compel her to assimilate into the status quo. Two of Ramona’s most prickling fears are impossibly intertwined: first, that her affection for all those most important to her goes unrequited, and second, that she cannot be loved for precisely who she is—impetuous, temperamental, profoundly sensitive, and, yes, a little bit of a show-off. Her fondness, once coaxed, thumps ardently from her staunch and earnest heart. However irksome her family might be, she is both fiercely proud and protective of them. She intuits threads of kindness stitched inside the grimy cheeks of playground boys—the infamous “yard apes.” She idolizes her kindergarten and third grade teachers, Miss Binney and Miss Whaley, respectively, and registers their mentorship as maternity—the schema she knows best. But teachers, Ramona learns, cannot love with the exclusivity of a parent. Miss Binney in particular breaks Ramona’s heart again and again when she lavishes praise on other students, especially those whose personalities contrast sharply with Ramona’s own rough-and-tumble demeanor—the prim, smug Susan, for instance, who lacks the bona fide sweetness of her similarly aggravating forebear, Simple Susan, but who also knows the benefits to performing docility. Even if Ramona were capable of such a masquerade, she would reject it on principle. And she is disconsolate when beloved Miss Binney resorts to harsher methods of discipline in an effort to teach Ramona the necessity of boundaries (is it really her fault if Simple Susan 2.0 has “boing boing curls” that are every moment pleading to be pulled?).
It’s in the atmosphere, our disdain for too muchness, and Ramona absorbs it, recognizing in her quivering little bones that this quality propels her and that sometimes it leads her astray. But if Ramona senses that her impulses are not always compatible with suburban niceties, she refuses to diminish herself. Her character is not a problem to be solved. She demands that those who comprise her universe bear witness to her tangled, wild yearnings—and, what’s more, that they embrace her for them.
She cried harder than she ever had cried in her life. She cried until she was limp and exhausted.
Then Ramona felt her mother’s hand on her back. “Ramona,” she said gently, “what are we going to do with you?”
With red ey
es, a swollen face, and a streaming nose, Ramona sat up and glared at her mother. “Love me!” Her voice was fierce with hurt. Shocked at her own words, she buried her face in the pillow. She had no tears left.22
Ramona is devastated by her first grade progress report, in which her well-meaning but aseptic teacher notates her lack of self-control, and her mother’s subsequent remark that she “must try to grow up.” She interprets these criticisms as a larger condemnation of her person. And we can easily understand her position. Although readers are meant to empathize with those who are baffled by Ramona—like her teacher, the pedestrian Mrs. Griggs—and although Ramona, like most children, neglects to consider the impact of her every action, Cleary never leaves us in doubt of Ramona’s singularly queasy fit within a society that can oftentimes feel tight and chafing. With the same instinct that directs her antics, Ramona understands that the world does not anticipate her full-throttle vivacity and that, as such, it does not always appreciate her.
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