Alice's adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, a small, still-pastoral tale at once mad, moral and pedagogic for children, and clever and knowing for adults. Smack in the middle of a decade that would be marked out as the moment when modernism gathered momentum it nonetheless looks back at a mythical English past as represented by childhood. You can hear between the lines the crunching gears of modernity; a smugness in the clever dick rationality and superiority of Man; a parallel to the Victorian idealisation of Woman and the reality that you could buy a 13 year old girl for £5.
Alice is fearless in the face of the many and varied challenges to her identity and cleverness - she is not master of this or any other universe. The question is, does she remember any of this when she grows up? How could she possibly forget.
My contribution to Frailty in thought will be to make a work about Alice's adult point of view on the adventures in which she found herself.
No comments:
Post a Comment