Alice IN Wonderland PDF

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This is my summary for the lectures, seminars and readings for the text 'Alice in Wonderland'....

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Romanticism to Modernism - Week 8 ALICE IN WONDERLAND Darwin and Alice ● Darwin as a looming presence in literature, popular, intellectual and visual fields ○ Darwin was ‘very much in the air, a pervading bad smell’ (William Empson) during the 1860s ● Idea of the ‘entangled bank’ from the end of The Origin of Species picked up by Carroll starting where Darwin left out ○ Relationships between different species ● Alice stories engage with contemporary educational and scientific cultures ○ Pushing the bounds of human knowledge ● Breaking down barriers between humans and animals ○ Conceptions of human identities - is Alice human? ○ Species identity is not fixed in Darwin ○ Alice’s existential dilemma ○ Arbitrariness of taxonomy ● Concerns with violence as part of interspecies relationships ● “Ontogeny then repeats phylogeny” - individual growth grows from past experience ○ Victorian ideals of childhood ○ Disciplining of children ● The anthropological machine ○ Caroll starts to break this down ○ Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human (Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal) ● Strangeness draws on the implicit strangeness of Darwin’s work ● Imperialism ○ Naming as a gesture of authority ○ Alice exists in a privileged relationship to the world ● ‘It is not Alice’s humanity that defines her engagement with nature, but her physicality, positioning her as potential predator, prey or equal’ (Ruth Murphy) Wonderland as ‘limbo’ state between life and death, conscious and subconscious, time and space. “Freedom/madness”? ● Trial - purgatory, waiting for judgement, law and order ● Time stuck - mad hatters tea party, trying to control time, time as a human invention, history and the present as one, civilisation as progression across time ● Death - stuck in childhood, stuck in a half-developed (and constantly changing) body limbo in herself as well as in the world ● Dodos - afterlife ● Near death experience of falling down the hole ● Dreams - the subconscious, states of our own being, constructed through binaries of reality and dreams, dreaming as an in between state

Eating, drugs, the body (limbs, head, tears, gender) and identity ● Alice on opium - element of nonsense, psychedelic ○ Alters sense of reality and identity ○ Context - opium problem in Victorian England, linked to the imagination ● The caterpillar is high ● Increasing weirdness as the book goes on ● Unable to link anything to a rigid logic ● Lack of food - never actually eats anything at the mad hatters tea party, lack of sustenance in dreams, the subconscious ● Agency - substances removing agency, unlike dream world - opposite of a dream state, elements of the subconscious breaking through to the conscious mind ● self/identity and drugs - the human as a body responding to chemical reactions ○ No two people have the same reactions to drugs - internal ● Negative relationship to food - relying on it to fix her body, lack of control over how much she eats ○ Eating disorder - context: Lewis Caroll ○ Between upper classes/excess and lower classes/scarcity ○ Trial over tarts - symbol of power, taking from the upper class ○ Lack of agency/control in the body Language, naming, meaning ● Naming = allowing an identity, personality ○ Naming as the ultimate act of power ○ Reinvention ○ Power of the human to control the other - Adam naming the animals ○ Resistance to naming = resistance to power, disruption of the rigidity of language ○ Language and names as a human invention ● Surface level names - outlandish personalities, not restricted by names ○ Not putting people into boxes ● Upsetting of order - telling, giving meaning, rationalising Distinction animal and human ● Children as being closer to animals ● Animals more knowledgeable than Alice, understand the world on a different level ● Distinguishing between the human and animal ○ Darwinism ○ Body shapes - distorted ○ World where animals and human are the same ● Language central to humanity - expressing the unconscious ● Control over desires, instinct ● Pre pubescence - transitioning from childhood to womanhood ○ Avoiding questions of sexuality? ○ Hormonal, chemical imbalances - relationship to food

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