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Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture
by Will Brooker
Continuum Press
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Pity poor Alice. What a queer story and what a queer book. Not only did she fall down the rabbit hole into topsy-turvy Wonderland, but since she first came onto the literary scene-- first with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and then in 1871 in a sequel Through the Looking-Glass-- Alice has been subject to cultural transformations that make her mysterious growings and shrinkings in Wonderland look like kids' play. It's hard to find a book published in the past century-and-a-half that's been as metamorphosed by literary reinterpretation, or repurposed for such a range of new works. Aside from the well-known film versions-- particularly Disney's in 1951-- Alice has been inspiration for A.M. Holmes's 1996 gruesome thriller, The End of Alice; Jefferson Airplane's 1967 acid-rock hit "White Rabbit"; the 1983 film The Care Bears' Adventures in Wonderland-- not to mention a variety of overtly pornographic Alice websites that delight in violating their heroine, archetype of Victorian innocence. Not only doesn't Alive live here anymore, she's hardly even Alice anymore.

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Will Brooker's Alice's Adventures is an exhaustive yet highly readable examination of the myriad cultural manifestations of not only the Alice books, but the characters of Alice and her creator Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Brooker is a leading Alice scholar and covers a lot of ground. While first seen as innocent fairy stories, a 1930s psychoanalytic reading argued that Dodgson was in love with preteen Alice Liddell, the model for the literary "Alice." Since then, the implication that Dodgson was an emotional, or even sexual, pedophile has been a solid core of Alice interpretations. (The discovery of Dodgson's penchant for photographing nude youngsters-- mostly girls-- set this in stone; almost all of the photos were destroyed, at his request, after his death.)

But Brooker's take on Dodgson is really just the start. He's equally interested in how the Alice books became part of recreational drug culture-- so much so that in 1974, Disney actively promoted the re-release the their 1951 animated Alice with clear references to the film's psychedelic visuals, the better to attract the drug-friendly audiences that made the 1969 re-release of Fantasia such a hit. As 60s sexual freedom devolved in the 80s and 90s into a generalized sense in the culture of sexual menace, the dark-and-scary side of the Alice books became fodder for sophisticated comics, such as Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

While Brooker understands that the Alice books can be all things to all people-- they are, as post-modernism would have it, "texts"-- he's careful to avoid the attitude that everything is simply "open to interpretation." This is particularly useful in his book's early chapters, when he analyzes almost a century of biographical writings about Lewis Carroll and deftly dissects known truth from conjecture. Brooker homes in on the prayers Dodgson penned in his diaries between 1862 and 1864-- described as "anguished and hysterical"-- asking God to help him live a "better and more earnest life." Many biographers see this as proof of Dodgson's feelings for Alice Liddell, or perhaps guilt over masturbation; Brooker offers a less causal, and more plausible, reason.

But Brooker fails to really hold onto how "queer" Alice (both in art and life) really is. He's happy to entertain the idea of Carroll having sexual inclinations toward children, but then reduces his case to questions about the author. The reality is that Victorian culture was fascinated with such desire-- check out James Kincaid's excellent 1992 Child Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture-- and Carroll's possible passions fit squarely with the times. Whether Alice is "innocent" or not is open to interpretation, but the fact remains her character unfolds in an aura that's erotically charged. Ditto for that other starring child persona of Victorian literature, Peter Pan.

Lewis Carroll's books are conduits for so many forms of pop culture, and remain so popular, because-- like all great literature-- they have the ability to live outside their own time. And both for the Victorians and us today, Alice engages the swirling maelstrom of our respectively confused and contradictory ideas about kids and sexuality.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com