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"Which is to be master?": Language as Power in <i>Alice in Wonderland</i> and <i>Through the Looking-Glass</i>

2010; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2010.0005

1553-1201

Beatrice Turner,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

"Which is to be master?":Language as Power in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass Beatrice Turner (bio) In her introduction to The Case of Peter Pan, Or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, Jacqueline Rose observes that, "[i]f children's fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp" (2). Subsequent critics such as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Roderick McGillis, and, more recently, Perry Nodelman, quite rightly warn us to be wary of attempts both fictional and critical to "secure" and fix the "real" child. We should be wary, but we should also look closely at these maneuvers to fix and to define. Under examination, such moves not only reveal the inherent inequality in the power relationship between the adult and the child, but they also draw attention to the gap itself—the space between the child described in the text and the child outside it who cannot be described. The Case of Peter Pan claims that children's literature, produced out of the desires, fears, and morals of adult authority, speaks only to an adult conception of what the child is. In this way, Rose argues, children's literature, literature that claims to speak to and of the child, is impossible: there is no child, no coherent, innocent, extra-linguistic entity that literature can speak to and of. Rose states that "[c]hildren's fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state" (8). In order to display the child as something outside and free from the taint of language, as Rousseau used Emile to claim, children's fiction works hard to suppress the traces of experience, ambiguity, and deception that are attendant on language (Rose 15–17). Peter Pan, says Rose, was "worked into a spectacle which gleamed with the overbright innocence characteristic of any act of repression proclaiming its purity to the world" (72). But in order for the play to function in that way, she argues, it had to be extracted from a text [End Page 243] intended for adults (The Little White Bird, 1902) and cleansed of any troubling questions about the power inherent in "the act of narration itself" (72). The Case of Peter Pan claims that these acts of repression and suppression, of keeping at bay that which most threatens the concept of the innocent child underpinning children's fiction, will inevitably fail at certain moments in the text, at which point the critic will uncover it. Peter Pan is cast as a text that actively tries to hide its troublesome elements: "what is important about Peter Pan is the very partial nature of the success with which it removes this problem [of our relationship to childhood and language] from our view" (41). And yet these troubling aspects are not necessarily deliberately concealed by children's fiction; in fact, quite the opposite happens for at least two crucial "Golden Age" texts: the Alice books. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), far from requiring the recovery of structural oppositions "between the child and the adult, between oral and written culture, between innocence and decay," place them very clearly on the surface of the narrative (Rose 50).1 Rose argues that it is through close attention to the language of the narration that the critic discovers the repressed halves of these binaries; yet, in the Alice texts, it is the plot or story that acts out and draws attention to what happens when an adult wields language. Carroll's narratives, I will argue, are knowingly engaged in a debate about authority and definition and deliberately direct the reader's gaze to the gap between the fictional child within the book and the "real" child outside the book. The Alice texts enact the relationships between subject and object, fiction and reality, through language. To wield language in these texts, be it intelligible, "normal," or otherwise...