Many readers will probably wonder about the queer words that are all coming differently in the poems that Alice repeats, and this is particularly true for Carroll’s Victorian contemporaries who are already familiar with their original metrical lines and can recite them from memory at any time. “Most of the poems in the two Alice books,” Martin Gardner notes,
“are parodies of poems or popular songs that were well known to Carroll’s contemporary readers” (23). It is likely for Victorians to comment on Alice’ queer recitation of their nursery
rhymes or didactic songs like the Mock Turtle or the Gryphon: “Well, I never heard it before. . . .” “That’s different from what I used to say when I was a child” (AW 83, 82). The oral or verbal aggressiveness in Carroll’s nonsense verse in Wonderland diverges from its original didactic target in nursery rhymes or didactic songs in Victorian England. The new direction is the source of terror, whereas the divergence between new and original directions gives us a sense of humor. Any deviation in fiction from original nursery rhymes or didactic songs in reality is driven by Carroll’s desire to bring into light what has been left unsaid.
What is implicitly embedded in these Victorian nursery rhymes or didactic songs is this era’s expectation of each Victorian to assume his or her social role in order to continue the proud story of the British Empire. When this paranoiac power of homogenization comes down upon its citizens, it is exerted through a network of education.
It would be an underestimate to see Carroll’s far-off fantasy land as a haven for his romantic escapism or melancholy seclusion because such reading is to ignore the rich historical implications in Alice books. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, as Donald Rackin observes, are both a-historical and historical.
Their continuous popularity among large and varied audiences for the past 120 years [148 years now from 1865 to 2012] shows how accessible they are: lay readers seeking to experience and understand their power need not acquire a vocabulary of outdated words and unfamiliar historical facts, of obsolete concepts and attitudes. This does not mean, however, that the Alices are unrelated to their original cultural matrix: like all other artifacts, they are products of their era, bearing inscriptions of numerous transactions with the material and ideological contexts from which they first emerged. So while the
Alices provide readers with what often seems a glorious escape from time and
space—from historical context itself—some of their most memorable effects67
depend on tangible connections to their specific historical milieu. (NSM 3)
Such specific historical milieu can be illustrated by the following passages: the White Rabbit clad in a Victorian gentleman’s outfit who neurotically adheres to his schedules (AW 7), the Victorian domestic space decorated with cupboards, book-shelves, maps, and pictures through which Alice is falling (AW 8), a common scene of bathing machines in the sea and a railway station behind a row of lodging-houses (AW 17-18), John Tenniel’s drawing of Alice’s acceptance of a thimble from Dodo in front of a crowd of birds and animals, among which a Darwinian ape is also present (AW 24), the exotic hookah-smoking practice originated in one of Britain’s colonial countries (AW 34-36, 41), the tea-party reminiscent of Victorian afternoon tea (AW 54-61), Alice’s unexpected railway journey during which the voices of other passengers sing (or think) in chorus “. . . his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute! . . . The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch! . . . the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff! . . . Language is worth a thousand pounds a word” (TLG 129-30), the Sheep’s shop in fiction which was actually a shop across from the Christ Church in Oxford where young Alice Liddell often bought her candies (TLG 153-58), the club battle between White and Red Knights like the violent Victorian Punch and Judy hand puppet show (TLG 180), not to mention so many allusions to education in Victorian era. Our reading of Wonderland poetry rests on the premise that Carroll synchronically resists the capture of Victorian educational institution by the vertiginous madness of his nonsense intuition, and the reason that Carroll’s parodies in Alice in Wonderland are so rife with the aggressive verbal and physical violence is not because Carroll experiences some kind of sexual frustration, but because his “[s]tyle as disruption” that is so essential to “Modernist experimental writing”
(Rieke 3) takes language to its limit in order to counter-effectuate our institutionalized understanding to intuitive palpation.
Richard D. Altick, in Victorian People and Ideas, gives us an authentic picture of the
Victorian England. Right before what Rackin calls “Lewis Carroll’s world of the 1860s”
(NSM 3), the fermentation of Victorian England’s proud industrial capitalism finally attained its acme of prosperity in mid-century, which was epitomized in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, or more famously the Crystal Palace, that took place in 1851—the same year when “the adjective ‘Victorian’ was coined” (VPI 73). “Housed in the first prefabricated public building in history, a vast construction of iron and glass set in London’s Hyde Park, the exhibition was intended to demonstrate Britain’s supremacy in design and manufacture. . . . Over half the exhibitors were from Britain and the Empire” (VPI 11). In this era, trains rode through beautiful countryside where there used to be many enclosures, against the far backdrop of factory chimneys puffing out great dark clouds of smoke; barriers between regions, like hedges or fences that once separated different lands, were dissolving. The railroads “and the cities they helped build meant the end of the regional cultures and economies into which Britain had been divided so long as bad roads discouraged all but the most determined travel and the most essential communication. . . . Within a generation, provincialism gave way to national cohesion” (VPI 79). Meanwhile, the axiomatic locomotion of industrial capitalism incessantly ripped through any obstacle on its way. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Eugene Holland elaborates on the double rhythm of such a capitalist society as Victorian England:
The process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization accompany the fundamental mechanism of capital, “axiomatization”: it operates by conjoining deterritorialized resources and appropriating the surplus arising from their reterritorializing conjunction. The original capitalist axiom, for example,
conjoined deterritorialized wealth—i.e. monetary wealth no longer embodied in landed property—with deterritorialized labor-power bereft of any means of subsistence: the axiomatization of these deterritorialized flows linked liquid
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wealth invested in means of production with “free” workers with nothing to sell but their labor-power. (20)
On the social scale, the commercial middle class—below the gentry, but above the manual laborers—became the reverse of being negligible. “Since the middle class regarded itself as the moral heart of Victorian society, a conviction assisted by the shift of the economic center of gravity in its direction, it took the understandable position that what was good for it was
ipso facto good for the nation” (VPI 29). In other words, the generating of the Victorian moral
didacticism bore directly on the commercial middle class. Whatever this class took to be good defined the Victorian morality.The snobbishness of the commercial middle class was significant in “His” allotment of roles at two levels. Here, “He” means the middle-class men who wanted to prevail over working-class laborers and “His” inferiors of the other “weaker sex.” “His” morality naturally aimed at making these two objects docile bodies. First of all, education for future factory and farm hands was not meant to be inspiring, but useful and improving pedagogy:
Few people in a position of authority . . . showed the slightest interest in
providing . . . . encouragement . . . to the exercise of the mind or the feelings. . . . the textbooks and classroom exercises were designed to avoid such liberating, humanizing elements, which, it was widely agreed, were inappropriate for children destined to become factory and farm hands. The essence of pedagogy was committing ‘useful’ and ‘improving’ facts to memory; reading for sheer pleasure was not to be thought of. (VPI 251)
On the second, and more complex, level, education for middle-class Victorian women, “the weaker sex,” resided morally on two “facts”: one was biological, and the other religious.
According to Thomas Henry Huxley, girls were educated “to be either drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angel above him” (qtd. in Altick 54-55). The purpose of their ruse
was to keep women’s hands out of men’s business. Biological fact devalued women by the wider implication that woman was inferior to man in all ways except the unique one that counted most (to man): her femininity. Her place was in the home, on a veritable pedestal if one could be afforded, and emphatically not in the world of affairs. . . . [because] the female brain was not equal to the demands of commerce or the professions, and women, simply by virtue of their sex, had no business mingling with men in a man’s world. . . . Accordingly, the education which girls of the upper and upper-middle classes received from governesses and from visiting language and music teachers was devoid of intellectual content, let alone intellectual challenge. (VPI 54)
On the other hand, this “doll in the doll’s house” (a term that derives from Charles Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend) or the “Angel in the House” (Coventry Patmore’s verse title)
32 resulted from Victorian men’s religious fantasy that a woman was a caring Angel for man. “Woman’s serfdom was sanctified by the Victorian conception of the female as a priestess dedicated to preserving the home as a refuge from the abrasive outside world” (VPI 53). Whether it is biological or religious “fact,” it is intriguing to see Victorian men paradoxically look down upon and look up to their “weak but angelic sex” at the same time. The typical image of a middle-class woman was a dependant who “was to cultivate fragility, leaning always on the arm of the gentleman who walked with her in a country lane or escorted her in to dinner”(VPI 53). She led a ghostly life:
Theirs were lives of elaborate idleness; they worked harder at being decoratively futile than any productive occupation would have required. They passed their days indulging desultorily in the ‘female accomplishments’ learned in girlhood, needlework, making boxes from shells collected at the seaside, sketching and
32 See Altick 54, 53.
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watercolor painting, flower arrangement, strumming at the piano or harp. Their only faintly constructive deeds, apart from supervising the household staff, involved charity. . . . (VPI 51-52)
Two images of weaker sex were morally acceptable to Victorian men: decoratively futile doll in the doll house and a caring angel in the house. Such a productive profession as a nurse, schoolmistress, or governess was socially acceptable (VPI 55) because each of them relatively conformed to the image of an angel who took care of her patient, student or tutee.
From girlhood to womanhood, “the weaker sex” in Victorian times must calibrate her role against her morally ideal image as a point of reference. Any trespassing was considered inappropriate, and as a result invited moral rebuke.
A middle-class girl as she is, the fictional Alice is intellectually snobbish in many examples. As Donald Gray notes, “[s]he is seven in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is set in May; and seven and a half in Through the Looking-Glass, which is set in November”
(3). Henceforth, Alice, judged from today’s education system, is a first-grader in primary school. For Alice at such an age, latitude and longitude are grand words to say, but difficult geographical terms to understand. No wonder she makes an amusing mistake of malapropism when she says “antipathies” to mean “Antipodes” (AW 8). Alice’s plan of sending presents to her own feet (like England sending presents to her colonial Antipodes Australia and New Zealand)—when she opens out like the largest telescope after finishing off the cake—probably demonstrates her knowledge, into which the “imperialist project” insinuates by joining the efforts of family and school (Roberts 363), of a colonialist geography. The didactic education started bottom up from family, school, capitalist society and finally to an imperialist world of British Empire to cultivate in a child, especially a muscular Christian one, a seamless coherence of self, world, and God. Not surprisingly, “during the latter half of the century,” Altick suggests, “the public schools were more concerned with prowess on the
playing field and with shaping the morality of prospective Christian gentlemen than with brainwork” (253) because what the British Empire needed in her imperialist expansion was athletic, chivalric and moral teamwork good for colonial expansion instead of some kind of intellectual individualism that might backfire. In “Children’s Fiction,” Lewis Roberts argues that “[t]he school was thought of as a world in miniature, an enclosed society in which boys could test themselves and learn to become part of the larger world outside the school’s walls”
(363). Victorian children were prepared for their leadership overseas. The continuation of imperialist glory abroad depended on the vigorous industrial capitalist economy at home. As the economy’s major propulsive force, the commercial middle class laid special emphasis on the masculine industriousness of the self, feminine caring love of the world and evangelical scenic beauty of God to build Victorian morality.
Alice likes to show off the lessons she learns from the school-room. Among her lessons, she is especially fond of repeating poetry with her hands crossed on her lap (AW 16) or hands folded (AW 36). In this respect, Selwyn Goodacre gives an interesting comment on Alice’s posture when she repeats poetry:
I discussed these passages with a retired primary school headmaster . . . and he confirmed to me that that is exactly how children were taught—i.e., they had to repeat their lessons . . . this means learning by rote; she would have been expected to know the lessons by heart—and to cross her hands if sitting, to fold them if standing, both systems intended to concentrate the mind and prevent fidgeting. (qtd. in Gardner 49)
From Goodacre’s discussion, we realize that rote learning must resort to hand-crossing (sitting) or hand-folding (standing) to concentrate one’s mind in order to redraw one’s exact recollection. She repeats to reproduce the same. This effect is essential to didactic education.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze discusses learning in the case of a swimmer who learns
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swimming not by reproducing on the sand the movements of the swimming instructor:
We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do”. Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. . . . When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other—involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and
carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted. (DR 23)
“Do as I do” learning is the reproduction of “the Same” (a cadence or bare repetition) whereas “do with me” is the repetition of “the Other” (a rhythm or covered repetition). For Deleuze, education has nothing to do with the static representation of homogeneous elements.
This explanation of motor repetition tells us a good deal about Alice’s verbal repetition.
Nursery poems or didactic songs are a perfect means of passing down moral knowledge because people tend to unconsciously follow the metrical pattern without thinking too much about the meaning behind the words. For example, on hearing Haigha’s name,33 Alice acts on her impulse to start a popular parlor game. When she hesitates for a town’s name that begins with H, the King unconsciously joins the game.
“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with—with—with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives—”
“He lives on the Hill,” the King remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a town beginning with H. (TLG 170)
33 The mad Hatter and March Hare in Wonderland become the White King’s two messengers Hatta and Haigha in Looking-Glass.
Unlike nonsense verse whose formal order and referential order run in different directions, didactic poetry hypnotizes us into repeating its metrical pattern, closely accompanied by its didactic meaning. It seems quite natural for Alice to remember her poetic lessons uncritically because the metrical part has put her critical thought under anesthesia. Industriousness of the self, caring love of the world and scenic beauty of God are characteristic of many didactic poems Alice would have repeated (but Wonderland has deflected their original didactic meaning to a new direction).
As far as industriousness is concerned, Isaac Watts spares no efforts to instill its moral value unobtrusively into nursery rhymes and popular songs to plant a seed in the younger generation. In his 1715 poem “Against Idleness and Mischief,”34 he advises and encourages the youth to model on an industrious little busy bee to go about its work cheerfully every minute of its life lest the devil makes work for idle hands. All the hard work is for “Some