A Brief Interlude

Let's take a brief interlude from our journey down the rabbit hole to discuss something rather disturbing that cropped while researching Alice in Wonderland.

CW: Child Abuse

I started going to see movies when the interlude - a 10 minute break half-way through the show - was still a thing. You could leave the screen, get a soda or ice-cream at the shop, go to the toilet and be back again in time for the rest of the show. In Dublin’s old cinemas, such the Savoy or the Stella, with their red velvet curtains and gold-leaf stucco, this felt like a treat, as if you were actually at a theatre presentation of the Muppets Christmas Carol rather than a projection.

In researching my inaugural essay on Alice In Wonderland (1951) I was dismayed to come across a couple of articles alluding to their creator’s, Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, suspect relationships with young girls including Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired his beloved protagonist. These claims were either discarded as unfounded or dismissed by virtue of Victorian morals differing from our 21st century post-#MeToo understandings of sexual conduct. His fondness for young girls was described as wholly innocent or his actions downplayed as ‘not very serious’, contentious or still up for debate. Few articles actually delve into any of the substance behind the rumours, which left me very unsure how to interpret or what to do with this information.

Then I stumbled on Lolita Podcast. Within the first hour host, Jamie Loftus, mentions Lewis Carroll’s inappropriate behaviour with children which includes hundreds of semi-nude and nude photos of young girls. Indeed, Loftus quotes Nabokov’s own feelings on Lewis Carroll’s behaviour:

‘He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. [Humbert Humbert] but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his retched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nymphalepsy. His were sad, scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.’

On hearing this, I realised I could not gloss over nor avoid this troubling history.

But this left me with a dilemma: I want to tell a story about a book and a cartoon that helped me feel less alone when I was a child but, in doing so, I feel like I’m betraying my feminist principals by giving this piece of media more coverage.

I'm not sure how to reconcile these two truths.

I’ve never read the original book, nor it’s sequel. I haven’t even watched the cartoon that many times, my principal connection to Alice was the read-along paperback I was given as a Christmas present. This particular edition feels so pared down and far removed from the original text as to almost be irrelevant but, many lines from the still made it through the many filters into Alice’s dialogue and songs.

Alice Liddell was the 10 year old daughter Carroll’s friends and the book was written and presented to her as a present during their acquaintance. Carroll took many photos of a young Alice which continue to circulate in the public domain and purportedly asked her parent’s permission to marry her when Carroll was well into his thirties and Alice only 11. Her parents eventually cut ties with Carroll for reasons which remain unclear.

And Alice may not have been the only girl to have caught his interest. Carroll’s own biographer has stated:

A long procession of charming little girls (we know today that they were charming from their photographs) skipped through Carroll's life, but none ever took the place of his first love, Alice Liddell. 'I have had some scores of child-friends since your time,' he wrote to her after her marriage, 'but they have been quite a different thing.

All in all, the insistence on skipping over these uncomfortable details reeks of our culture’s propensity for excusing powerful and culturally influential men from their harmful behaviour. We’re supposed to separate the art from the artist. But how can separate a fictional Alice whose existence is rooted in the potential harm enacted against the real 10-year-old Alice Liddell?

To help myself confront this dilemma I returned to Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, the show that made me rethink the misogynistic history of Western art. I owe Hannah two things now: my autistic diagnosis and the definitive argument for separating the art from the artist.

Hannah rails:

These men control our stories! And yet they have a diminishing connection to their own humanity, and we don’t seem to mind so long as they get to hold onto their precious reputation. Fuck reputation.

That the real life harm of the men we herald as greats continues to be silenced, the voices of their victims marginalised or erased, is a measure of our willingness to forgive and forget their deeds. It speaks to our cultural denial about the real pervasiveness of child abuse, while at the same time creating hysteria over stranger danger, the satanic panic or other popular conspiracy theories when it has been proven time and again that children are most likely to be harmed by someone they know.

So yes, fuck reputation, fuck Lewis Carroll…

In trying to figure out how I feel about my own connection to this tainted piece of art I have begun to wonder if, in depicting a fictional Alice and her adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll was actually telling on himself and how he might have treated the real Alice Liddell? Wonderland is populated by creatures whose intent is rather dubious and whose gaze causes discomfort. The smirking Chesire Cat and the doped out Caterpillar could be read as enigmatic or creepy and threatening. Alice expresses fear and distress multiple times throughout the film. All she wants is to escape the strangeness around her and find her way back home, where she’ll be safe. The original text and even the movie imply multiple times that Alice herself is to blame for her repeated mishaps. Perhaps Carroll, who appears to have preyed on little girls, was actually betraying a dynamic he was all too familiar with?

I find it deeply disturbing that as I nine year old one of the character’s I most related to in this world was a girl created by a man who was a child pornographer, if not also a pedophile. I thought about scrapping the text altogether, finding another way to discuss childhood experiences of disorientation and overwhelm, but the words from my read-along book and cassette still haunt me 30 years later.

My conclusion is that these two truths cannot be reconciled. Rather they sit uncomfortably alongside each other in the fucked up world where we continue to feed our children a diet of art and many other cultural products rooted in harm. Luckily for Alice Liddell her parents stepped in and cut all ties with Carroll. In the interceding 150 years, however, we have mostly just looked away.

So yes, fuck reputation, fuck Lewis Carroll. But not Alice, I want to keep Alice, just for now, returning to her trails in Wonderland for a final instalment this Thursday.