The male chatterbox. By Lewis Carroll, feminist

It’s international women’s day, and I have just finished reading the complete works of Lewis Carroll. This Bible-like tome had been on my shelves for many years. Don’t worry: I also read works by women. But being an admirer of Alice in Wonderland, it was high time that I became familiar with the other novels, stories, poetry and popular articles of its author. Now, how suitable are his works for women’s day? Do they make any contribution?

Lewis Carroll did not completely escape the misogyny of his era. In his many stories and magazine articles there are a few snide remarks that echo his era’s prejudices. What to think, for instance, of his advice about letter writing:

don’t try to have the last word! […] N.B.—If you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this Rule is superfluous: you wo’n’t get the last word!

[Carroll loved to emphasise words typographically.]

Another example is the short story ‘The Blank Cheque’, which you can read for yourself if you like (first editions of this fable are sold online for 750 US dollars. That may not be quite what it’s worth).

Yet his great work itself, Alice in Wonderland, is quite memorable for containing a wide variety of female characters, among whom some of the most formidable in the book – the Queen, the Duchess, the Cook – as well as some of the more sympathetic characters – Alice herself, her cat Dinah, the Pigeon protecting her young against serpents, as well as the absent Mary Ann, the White Rabbit’s housemaid. They don’t quite make up half the cast, but they certainly do better for themselves than most picture books and children’s books.

The same goes for Carroll’s lesser-known novel Sylvie and Bruno. The second volume, published in 1893 but decades in the making, contains an interesting chapter in this regard. It is called ‘Jabbering and Jam’, and the scene takes place at an English dinner-party of eighteen distinguished eaters. After a dinner filled with banter and philosophical discussion, the women leave the table and the men ‘[c]lose up the ranks’ for their port.

Henry Cole, The Dinner Party (mid-nineteenth-century). Reproduction provided by Bridgeman Images, original by Philip Gale Fine Art, Chepstow, Wales.

This gender separation was very common. Nineteenth-century British society was to a large degree organised along homosocial lines: men consorting with men, women with women. Men conducted much of their life, business and leisure with only other men, and ditto for women. This is frequently remarked upon in the context of Jane Austen’s novels: the fact that they are all about social interaction among women is supposedly because she did simply not know how interaction amongst men proceeded. (Novels about the social interactions among men generally invite less explaining.)

Carroll knew very well what men did. But what does he make of it?

As soon as the ladies at the party in Sylvie and Bruno have left the table, one man pronounces:

“They are charming, no doubt! Charming, but very frivolous. They drag us down, so to speak, to a lower level. They——”

“Do not all pronouns require antecedent nouns?” the Earl gently enquired.

“Pardon me,” said the pompous man, with lofty condescension. “I had overlooked the noun. The ladies. We regret their absence. Yet we console ourselves. Thought is free. With them, we are limited to trivial topics[.]

Carroll here caricatures the high notion some of his fellow males had of themselves. The man continues:

With them, we are limited to trivial topics—Art, Literature, Politics, and so forth. One can bear to discuss such paltry matters with a lady. But no man, in his senses—” (he looked sternly round the table, as if defying contradiction) “—ever yet discussed WINE with a lady!” He sipped his glass of port, leaned back in his chair, and slowly raised it up to his eye, so as to look through it at the lamp. “The vintage, my Lord?” he enquired, glancing at his host.

The Earl named the date.

“So I had supposed.[”]

Apart from caricaturing self-importance and pretense, Carroll also seems to enjoy himself showing the triviality of some of the all-male conversations he had experienced. He does so by parodying a discussion about the intricate modulations, tones and flavours of wine by a bunch or self-appointed experts – themselves, least of all, understanding what they are on about. In order to make absolutely certain the reader understands his intentions, Carroll replaces wine with jam: a substance just as recognisable to his Victorian audience as wine, but one that would not be mistaken for a serious theme, in a culture that did not pay much interest to the creations of women. So we are now witnessing a heated debate about jam:

[Another man,] quite hoarse with excitement, broke into the dialogue. “It’s too important a question to be settled by Amateurs! I can give you the views of a Professional—perhaps the most experienced jam-taster now living. Why, I’ve known him fix the age of strawberry-jam, to a day—and we all know what a difficult jam it is to give a date to—on a single tasting! Well, I put to him the very question you are discussing. His words were ‘cherry-jam is best, for mere chiaroscuro of flavour: raspberry-jam lends itself best to those resolved discords that linger so lovingly on the tongue: but, for rapturous utterness of saccharine perfection, it’s apricot-jam first and the rest nowhere!’[”]

After two pages of this wonderful dribble, the desperate host intervenes:

“Let us join the ladies!”

Never mind that this was not Carroll’s best work and that he has the narrator somewhat superfluously add:

“A strange dream!” […] “Grown men discussing, as seriously as if they were matters of life and death, [such] hopelessly trivial details […] What a humiliating spectacle such a discussion would be in waking life!”

The point is that Carroll has us strongly doubt the pleasures of Victorian all-male company, even though one would have thought these to have been mightily valued in the country where he lived, with its boys’ schools, its universities, its army, its parliament, its banks, its offices… that is, mostly all of the elite’s self-chosen company outside the family. Carroll himself never married and was employed at the still all-male university of Oxford. In this chapter, however, he mocks this men’s world. It strongly suggests that he preferred mixed company, for its perceived power to stem his fellow country-men’s tendencies towards self-importance and triviality. The rest of his oeuvre only strengthens this impression.

It looks like Carroll certainly participated in the feminist thinking that was happening all around him in the late nineteenth century. He did so in a somewhat hesitant manner, perhaps, but nevertheless more than I had expected. Late-nineteenth-century feminism has gained most fame for winning women more educational and political participation. But women’s cultural and intellectual participation were also on the agenda. Carroll’s contribution reaches us from the other side: he gave the feminist cause further ammunition by undermining the self-evidence of interesting male chatter.

Is this what a feminist looks like?

Hubert von Herkomer, posthumous portrait of Lewis Carroll, based on photographs (c. 1898). Now in Christ Church, Oxford. Black-and-white reproduction via Wikimedia Commons.

A very reverent Alice

In a previous post, I made a call for African, African American, or otherwise non-European-looking Alices in Wonderland. Several reached me, including two Australian editions, Whoopi Goldberg’s urban retelling, and the 2018 Pirelli calendar.

Now, designer Marlon McKenney has published Alice in Wonderland: Re-Mixed.

The book is a drastically shortened, retold version of the classic story, richly illustrated with digital images. These illustrations do an excellent job at normalising the depiction of brown-skinned people in picture books: exactly as I wished for when I made my call last year:

The book also includes some nice finds in the genre (yes!) of Alice art: there is a water-clock tea set; the Cheshire Cat practices voodoo; the White Rabbit is a DJ carrying a bling-bling watch; the game of croquet has been turned into a singing contest; and the Queen of Hearts’s children have been turned into – white – security guards, carrying guns, batons and tasers: ominous, but no less ominous than Carroll’s original.

The special aim of this publication is to bring African American children in touch with African American heritage.* The book thus aims to help consolidate a canon of art works and ideas created by people with African roots. Or, as it seems in some parts of the book, the aim may even be to create a canon of non-whites from across the entire world.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a book with a didactic tone and little humour. During Alice’s long fall down, for instance,

She saw mystical books, ancient symbols, and pictures of important historical women. Alice was dazed and confused by the images circulating through her mind, yet somehow, they felt vaguely familiar. She’d have to remember to ask her sister about them. [bolds in the original]

At the end of the story,

everyone from Wonderland finally decided to stand up to the Queen and stop her from hurting anyone else anymore.

And after Alice’s return above ground, she says to her sister:

‘I’m just glad to be back where things are really what they seem[.]’

What chafes most in this respect, is that Lewis Carroll’s intentions and methods – to entertain children with nonsensical conversation – have been lost.

And perhaps this is inevitable. The makers of the book clearly thought: what better way to strengthen a new canon than to attach it to an existing canonic work?

But in many ways, the original Alice is an anti-canonic work. Irreverence, critique and irony are at its very heart: Shakespeare is reduced to a textbook portrait of a man with a finger pressed against his forehead; the Battle of Hastings, focal point in the British self-image, is the driest story a crowd of animals can come up with; there are the ineffectual King and Queen of Hearts; haughty Humpty Dumpty falls off his wall; and afternoon tea is a never-ending affair. Every bit of British canonicity is ridiculed.

To create a similar, humorous critique of African American figureheads might, Marlon McKenney may have deliberated, undermine the purpose of his book, which was to offer its readers a first introduction to these people and make it unambiguously clear that they are our heroes. In a typical sentence therefore, Alice’s sister Kenya

was reading aloud from one of her favorite books by the great poet Maya Angelou.

On the other hand, the Re-Mixed retelling also offers a refreshing take on the idea of a canon by mixing up what in books is usually demarcated as two separate realms: that of low culture and of high culture – of street art and salon art: Tweedledee and Tweedledum figure as two breakdancers on cardboard, next to the novels of Maya Angelou; vodou stands next to the high politics of Nelson Mandela.

Refreshing, but also a little risky. Because by following this tactic, and by including icons from across the history of the world, ranging from the Bhagavad Gita, via shamans, Frida Kahlo, and a southern-Asian caterpillar, to Queen Nefertari, all in a text of only a few thousand words, McKenney runs the danger of creating the impression that African American history offers little material that is worthy of a cultural canon. It is as if he only had a few people and works of art to choose from. Granted, every canon-building endeavour has to start somewhere. But by limiting himself to, for instance, twentieth-century North America, the author would have made a much stronger case for the global significance and influence of African American culture.

And perhaps the best service McKenney could indeed have done his heroes, would have been to treat them with a little less reverence. (Okay, apart from Maya Angelou. But Haile Selassie?) Because: once we can laugh with our cultural icons, we know that they have undeniably made it to the canon.

 

A digital copy of the book is available for free from Conscious Culture Publishing.

This post also appears on Culture Weekly, a ‘weekly bilingual culture blog on the creative industries, arts patronage and cultural policy written by scholars at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands’.

* This is my interpretation of the publisher’s blurb, which reads:

CCP is an independent publishing company committed to creating a platform for diverse content that push the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Through the creation of narratives that are a reflection of the people both creating and experiencing these stories, we empower young readers to reach their fullest potential while embracing their history and culture.

Our stories are a reflection of the global community and we believe it is important that young people of color not only see themselves reflected in stories but also have a platform to provide their own authentic voice, culture, and experience. Storytelling is an extraordinary way to educate and empower young readers and show them that they are limitless.

Alitji in Wonderland

In my post about a Swahili Alice in Wonderland I made a call for Alices who would look a little different from the blond English girl we know from so many depictions of Carroll’s classic, even those which are set in contemporary Europe or North America.

The 2018 Pirelli calendar came up. As did Whoopi Goldberg’s variation on the story, with its dazzlingly urban illustrations by John Rocco.

Now a new book has found its way to me: Alitji in Dreamland, (European-Australian?) Nancy Sheppard’s 1975 adaptation and translation into Pitjantjatjara, illustrated anew in 1992 by Donna Leslie (of Australian Gamileroi heritage).

Like Elisi, Alitji makes an attempt at translating Lewis Carroll’s Victorian world into that of a different culture, in this case situated in the central region of Australia. This book, too, seems to start off with the rather safe work of bringing a European cultural gift (Alice in Wonderland) to a faraway culture, without Aboriginal Australian cultures or people conversely impacting on the white homeland (whether this is England or white settlements in Australia itself). In that sense, Goldberg and Rocco’s book is more exciting: there, an African American Alice finds her way through money-obsessed New York City.

But as their story unfolds, Sheppard and Leslie’s work does touch on often dangerous cultural contacts. And in doing so, it gave me a new perspective on Carroll’s original story in the bargain.

The Caterpillar for example, who is often likened to a crabby Oxbridge don, is not only transformed into a Witchety Grub (which, interestingly, would have counted as a food in Alitji’s waking life), but also into a pink, or ‘white’, man. It gives a whole new angle to the famous question ‘Who are you?’ From a university tutorial, the scene has changed into a colonial interrogation. (I was perhaps slightly disappointed that Alitji ends the scene by eating from two sprigs of berries, rather than nibbling the top and the tail off the Witchety Grub.)

Donna Leslie, Alitji in Dreamland (1992)

The Mad Teaparty develops even more ominously.

The Stockman – the Mad Hatter – who seems to have been a light-skinned man in Sheppard’s conception (though not in the pictures), utters his usual

‘No room, no room!’

Of course Alitji retorts:

‘There is plenty of space’.

Territorial politics?

Then the Horse – the March Hare – chips in:

‘Your skin is very dark. You ought to wash yourself.’

Obviously, this is a comment the Aboriginal Australian girls reading the book in the 1970s may in fact have heard (do they still?), and its racism gives a much starker edge to the original Hatter’s ‘personal remark’ ‘Your hair wants cutting’.

As befits her, Alitji again has her answer ready.

‘My skin is always dark, even after washing,’ Alitji replied with dignity.

And so, there were a number of moments throughout this book which made me find the adaptation pretty grim. A final example:

A stockman is an Australian herdsman. The Horse in Alitji would probably have been his work companion. And like the Hatter his watch, so the Stockman has his own accessory.

Donna Leslie, Alitji in Dreamland (1992)

The Horse picked up the Stockman’s rifle and said,

‘Really, this is useless. Why did you tell me to put salt in it?’

Rather embarrassed, the Stockman answered,

‘It was good salt.’

The Hatter’s little machine was a watch, the Stockman’s is a rifle. Not the friendliest of machines to sit next to on a tea visit, especially when one’s hosts are as mad as a Hatter.

But then again, is the Hatter’s original watch so innocent? To what extent have clocks been used since the nineteenth century to terrorise schoolgirls, factory workers, prisoners, indigenous peoples?

Perhaps I’m only thinking this because I have been reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at the same time as reading Alitji, yet perhaps also Sheppard has simply not made such a violent leap at all when introducing her Alice into rifled company.

After all, is Carroll’s Alice not one of the most violent of children’s stories which we still read? (Children’s stories tended to be more violent in the nineteenth century anyway, but most we have stopped reading.) How about the Queen’s decapitations? How about the Pigeon’s children who continue to be taken away from her by serpents, or by little girls such as Alice? How about Alice’s own repeated laconic confrontation of mice and birds with her mice- and bird-eating pet Dinah?

It’s a cruel book, Alice is, and it seems only right that Sheppard and Leslie did not sanitise it.

Elisi in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland is one of the most adapted books ever. That means that by studying one of its many translations you could learn to read almost any written language. It also means that by studying its illustrations, you are in touch with artists across the globe, and with the iconographies and visual imaginations of cultures around the world.

This, for instance, is an edition published for the Eastern African market in 1940:

Elisi katika nchi ya Ajabu is a Swahili translation and adaptation. It was created by Ermyntrude Virginia St Lo de Malet (also known as Conan-Davies). Whether she also drew the illustrations, I do not know.

Saint Lo was a missionary and it is interesting to see that someone whose aim was to save souls for the Christian Church should translate such an irreverent, even positively anti-authoritarian book. (The translation was self-commissioned.)

The text makes an effort to transpose the setting of the story from England to Eastern Africa. And so do the images, sometimes less successfully, but sometimes also more so.

The images take the original Tenniel drawings as their basis. They are modified, however, to turn the Dormouse into a bush-baby, for instance, and the White Rabbit’s umbrella into a cane. Significantly also, they turn white Victorian Alice into a barefoot girl with braided hair, wearing a kanga: Alice/Elisi is now a Swahili girl.

This scene from Chapter IV offers a particularly interesting comparison:

Alice’s hand has been copied from Tenniel’s drawing and more heavily hatched in order to suggest a darker skin colour. But another thing has changed.

When there’s no longer any room for Alice’s arm inside the Rabbit’s nice little brick house, she sticks it out of the window. Then,

after waiting till she fancied she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.

Tenniel, on reading the text, duly drew a cucumber-frame.

But the nice thing in this scene is Alice’s limited perspective: she just hears the crash and therefore concludes she has broken ‘something of the sort‘ of a cucumber-frame. Even if it sounded more like glass than anything else, this is an ideal spot for an illustrator to seize some extra freedom.

The illustrator of the Swahili edition indeed chose to make a complete cultural translation. Instead of a greenhouse for growing cucumber, they drew a cluster of ceramic pots. Equally breakable. And just as likely a thing that you might encounter at the corner of a house. Importantly also, since so much of Alice is about eating and drinking, the illustrator chose an object that is used for food: these pots are probably used by the Rabbit to transport and store foodstuffs or drinks.

Translating images from one culture to another can be just as challenging as translating words. In this scene, it seems to me that the image translator has done a fine job.

Now Elisi is a transcultural translation, aimed at making it easier for readers in Eastern Africa to relate to Carroll’s story. (See Byron Sewell’s Indigenous(-looking?) Australian illustrations for another example.)

But how about new illustrations set in North America, Europe, or urban Australia? How about the millions of different girls and boys living there, reading Alice for the first time? Almost all those translations depict pink (‘white’) Alices. It is very hard to find much variation in the way she looks, even in those editions which are not set in Victorian England but in contemporary locations, which in real life are filled with an abundant variety of children.

So let me use Black History Month to turn an endemic problem into a ‘news item’: who can help me find an African American Alice? An African French Alice? A Sri Lankan British Alice? …

 

I have used Lewis Carroll, Elisi katika nchi ya ajabu, trans. St Lo de Malet (London: Sheldon Press, 1967). There is a more recent translation by Dr Ida Hadjivayanis, Lector in Swahili at SOAS in London.

Regarding copyright and my reproducing the 1940 images here: since the illustrator is anonymous, I have counted 70 years from the year of first publication, but please comment if you have further information.