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The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring their Parallel Worlds

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.58.1.0211

1528-4212

Maria Truglio,

Gender Studies in Language

The engaging title accurately describes this extensively researched and accessible book. Laura Tosi (with contributions by Peter Hunt: the short story in the Appendix, “gendered books” in chapter 2, and “the Blue Fairy” in chapter 4) explores the many intersections between the journeys undertaken by Alice and Pinocchio, both the characters and the books. The “parallel worlds” include primarily the texts themselves: Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883) and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) (mostly taken as a unit), but also the lives of their authors, which evince uncanny similarities (37–45), the political, social, and economic landscapes of Italy and Britain in the late nineteenth century (46–58), the generic traditions that each text often subverts or stretches to new limits (61–142), and the fruitful afterlives of the two texts in the form of creative works that they inspired (145–66). Tosi concludes her study by comparing sets of British and Italian contemporary works in other genres: the school boy novels by Thomas Hughes and Edmondo De Amicis, and the adventure novels by George Henty and Emilio Salgari (167–94).In spite of Alice and Pinocchio's contemporaneity and shared status as “infinitely productive books” (9), very few comparative studies have been undertaken and have been more limited in scope (Glauco Cambon, 1973, and Ann Lawson Lucas, 1997, notably). To provide thematic coherence to her much more extensive exploration, Tosi situates her inquiry around the paradox of the simultaneously “universal” and “local” qualities of the two “classics” (4). Alice and Pinocchio are deeply rooted in their cultures of origin, and yet both have “transcended the boundaries of genre, nation and language” (24): while their protagonists have been recognized as icons of their respective nations, “quintessentially” English and Italian (4), they have also become “shorthand for insincerity or general topsy-turvyness” (3) and indeed for childhood itself: “universal human character[s]” (19).To account for this seeming paradox, Tosi addresses the question of national stereotypes by deftly summarizing the claims of the field of “imagology,” citing among others Emer O'Sullivan and Joep Leerssen. Following these scholars, Tosi affirms that national self-images and stereotypes of other countries that are disseminated by texts should not be read as reliable reflections of a preexisting reality but rather as “discursive conventions” and as “possible identifications” that subjects assimilate over time (13). Thus “Pinocchio's Italianness and Alice's Englishness are constructions and projections” (14). Tosi points out how such national “imagemes” contribute to broader schemata, particularly the dichotomy of the North and the South, where the “North” is perceived as the geographical space that favors “democracy, rationality, and composure,” while the South breeds “anarchy, gregariousness, and sensualism” (15–16). Comparing Alice and Pinocchio, then, potentially illuminates the mechanisms that reinscribe both the imagemes of national characters and these larger geographic “blueprints.” In her essay “Imagology Meets Children's Literature" (IRCL 4.1 [2011]), O'Sullivan calls for research that is guided by “diachronic studies of extensive corpora,” and underscores the limitations of “snapshot” analyses of individual texts (9). Tosi's analyses of adaptations and translations (she discusses, e.g., the role that Disney played in globalizing these characters, and how English translators have domesticated Collodi's Italian) and her final chapters do widen her lens along the lines urged by O'Sullivan. However, the focus of this study remains on the core texts. In a similar vein, while imagology stresses reader reception, Tosi's own survey among members of the British Lewis Carroll Society, while yielding interesting insights, remains too delimited to sustain the kind of broad claims about reception to which imagologists aspire (19). Thus while the issues that Tosi explores illuminate key concerns of imagology, her approach goes beyond this methodology, and is more broadly defined as a “parallel reading.”Through this reading, Tosi suggests that it is precisely by means of, rather than in spite of, each book's deeply local character that both have attained their timeless vitality. Her historically grounded examination shows how each writer made concretely legible a set of enduring human questions. Indeed the questions of “legibility” and of “the human” themselves emerge as fundamental to both texts, refracted differently given the unique circumstances of each book's milieu. In Alice's world, with its very high literacy rates, the signs that the protagonist must learn to read are social: proper manners, the conventions that structure polite relationships and the codes of social hierarchies. Pinocchio, “born” into an Italy where the 1877 Coppino Law had not managed to remedy the high rates of illiteracy (52), and who represents modernity's “dangerous boy in danger” (34, here Tosi and Hunt point to Carl Ipsen's important study), must learn to read civic rules. His illiteracy manifests not only in his inability to read the puppet theater sign but also in his misinterpretation of the painting on Geppetto's wall. His harsh world of scarcity requires that he sees through such false signs of illusory abundance and accept the rule of work (76–77).Playing with the expectations of readers, as conditioned by generic conventions, emerges as a key way in which these authors profoundly shifted the landscape of children's literature. Some of the most compelling pages of this study are those which position the two classics within the various genre traditions, which they engage but also subvert: the fable, the folk tale, the fairy tale, fantasy, and the bildungsroman. In her section on “talking animals,” for example, Tosi reminds us that there are at least five-hundred references to animals in Pinocchio, and twenty-two speaking animals in Alice. Tosi also points out that the early illustrators of both books, Enrico Mazzanti and John Tenniel, were inspired by the works of Jean Grandville, the French caricaturist known for his Les Fleurs Animées (1867) and illustrations of La Fontaine's fables (78). Reading Collodi and Carroll in light of the fable tradition and through the lens of this caricaturist makes clearer how they subvert the moralizing lessons often voiced by animal characters. At the same time, this comparison brings into focus how both texts confront a central philosophical question through these embodied figures: what is the nature of humanity and how does it differ from the animal world? Such questions are probed when Alice asserts that, unlike a serpent for which she has been mistaken, she eats only cooked and not raw eggs. The same question is dramatized when Pinocchio encounters his friend Lucignolo, still in the form of a donkey. As Lucignolo dies from overwork, he elicits a tear of empathy from his friend. For Tosi, these are moments when the characters (and the reader) confront basic questions of human identity, questions made legible by the specificities of their cultural circumstances (82).Ultimately for Tosi, it is their ability to probe the darkness of human nature that makes these books “universal and popular patterns of childhood,” even if it is precisely this quality that adult readers often deny: “it is this powerful darkness, rather than any comfortable closure, that both overrides and feeds off local and national characteristics” (111). The analysis of the revisions penned by Angela Carter and Robert Coover carries forward this claim. Tosi discloses how these more recent works turn to Pinocchio and Alice to dramatize the disquieting transformations and cruelties of aging and its ways of making one's “own” body seem alien.Tosi offers a wealth of stimulating observations and takes into account the staggering body of criticism on these two seminal works. In treating so many topics, the study at times broaches but leaves open certain questions. In some cases, Tosi acknowledges the work of previous scholars, but does not stake her own claim on the matter. For example, she mentions the important contributions of both Alberto Asor Rosa and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, but does not engage how Stewart-Steinberg fundamentally critiques Asor Rosa's analysis: for Stewart-Steinberg, Pinocchio does not offer a metaphor of a national developmental process, rather, the stringless puppet represents the liberal subject who is always modern. In other cases, thematic sections conclude by suggesting paths of inquiry not pursued by the study. For example, Tosi ends her rich discussion of both authors' lives by musing “are Collodi and Carroll, in their own peculiar ways, men who did not want to grow up, men who could not see themselves in a father's role?” (45). While implying the potential fruitfulness of biographical analysis, Tosi's study neither commits to this approach nor critiques it. More generally, the study does not define the parameters of the problematic category of “universality” as rigorously as it merits. Various moments emerge when the discussion seems to embrace an essentialism without fully claiming it, as when Hunt remarks “it is tempting to interpret these characters also in essentialist terms—as representatives of ‘everyboy' and ‘everygirl'” (36). While more terminological precision would have benefitted the study, the wealth of insights offered by this fabulous journey will appeal to a wide range of readers in Italian Studies, English, Comparative Literature, and Children's Literature Studies.