Lecture 3:
Classics of Children's Literature

Alice in Wonderland

There is a haunting exchange between Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell Alice that she's not real. She replies that that's nonsense, but the twins insist that she, and they, and pretty much everything, are merely the stuff of the White King's dream. Alice says she's not convinced, but she does demand they all be quiet so they don't risk waking the king.

The scene is reminiscent of Chuang Tzu's most famous Taoist story "I Dreamt I Was a Butterfly" (translated here by N.A. Giles):

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Children may find both snippets entertaining, but both strike at some of the deepest metaphysical and epistemological puzzles that have kept philosophers wondering and writing for thousands of years.

This is one of the wonders of both Lewis Carroll's Alice books: they can be read as nonsense, entertainment, psychological analyses, satire, cultural documents, mathematical games, philosophical treatises--all of these approaches work with these richly-textured novels.

The action, talking animals and wordplay are easily accessible by children; they have no difficulty recognizing the puns of the mock turtle: "We learned reeling and writhing" and "We called him tortoise because he taught us." Victorian children would have more readily identified the changes from "How doth the little busy bee" (which they would have had to memorize and recite to relatives in the parlour) to "How doth the little crocodile" (which reflects the violence they probably felt because they had to memorize and recite poems to relatives in the parlour).

Older readers come back to the book and discover more layers of meaning: they see the attack on the ineffectual, unjust aristocracy in the characters of the Duchess (who has a title which grants her a certain amount of power even though she can't control her cook, is abusive with her child, has no original thoughts) and the Queen and King of Hearts (sentencing people to death without trials only to release them all later).

Alice in Wonderland is open to many interpretations, though not all. Looking at the size/shape changes following all the mushroom eating as a sort of mind-altering, psychedelic trip is not especially sensible considering the source: The Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" used images from the novel to suggest drug hallucinations from the 1960's; LSD was nowhere in existence in the 1800's when Carroll wrote his book.

In their anthology Classics of Children's Literature editors Griffith and Frey see the size changes in much broader human terms:

Alice might be seen as moving from a kind of birth trauma--falling down the tunnel, the long low hall, the amniotic pool--through meeting little animals (mouse, rabbit, lizard, caterpiller, pigeon) to meeting larger animals and adult humans. Her adventures intensify in the sense that the Duchess and plight of the baby seem more powerful and threatening than the Caucus Race or Caterpiller, and the tea party picks up the pace of madness while the Queen of Hearts and the Mock-Tutrtle adventures introduce increased fear and nostalgia ("'off with her head,'" songs of voracious shark and panther). Then comes the final trial, a full social event in which Alice reaches the limit of her frustration and anger, asserts herself aggressively, yet wakes to "dead leaves" and "dull reality." Alice is in one sense "socialized" but with decidedly mixed results (just as in Through the Looking Glass she becomes Queen all right yet finds it is not all "feasting and fun").

This same sequence of size changes can also be analyzed as an individual's self-actualization. Readers come back to the book again and again, and it offers new ideas each time.

The book works on so many levels, and it is one of children's literature's most enduring classics.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

When it was first published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was hailed as "The American Alice in Wonderland."

Well, it just isn't. Both works have young female protagonists. Both stories have the main character trying to reach a goal (the lovely garden, the way back to Kansas). Both are children's fantasies. Beyond that, the two are really very different.

For one thing, the Baum work is not as tightly unified; it's a series of digressions really. Dorothy is two-dimensional compared to Alice; her character does not grow (that is not a pun :) the way Alice does as the story progresses. On the whole, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is much simpler and less sophisticated than Carroll's story, and it doesn't offer much more depth on a second or third reading.

Some have suggested the work is symbolic, an economic allegory (see "The Cross of Gold and the Wizard of Oz" for an interesting analysis), even though Baum claimed there was no symbolic significance in his book (then again, neither did Carroll about his Alice book; you can't always believe authors).

In any case, the book does not invite several reasonable interpretations.

Griffith and Frey list what Baum seems to have been most interested in in writing his story:

• He was interested in scenes where characters confront simple, definite physical problems, and solve them. (Pursued by the Kalidahs, the Tin Woodman makes a bridge by felling a tree and then destroys it before they can follow. Faced with the question of how to move a 400-pound lion out of a poppy field, the Scarecrow mobilizes thousands of mice to pull a jerry-built truck. To fight off wolves, the Ti Woodman uses his ax; to fight off crows, the Scarecrow scares them; to fight off bees, the party covers its vulnerable members with straw and lets the bees destroy themselves against the Woodman's tin. To rescue the Scarecrow from the middle of a river, they enlist the aid of a friendly Stork. And so forth.)

• He's interested in the simple pleasure of moving through a foreign world and finding a place to sleep, chance to wash up, and food to one's liking. (This scene occurs ten times in the story's twenty-three chapters.)

>He's interested in setting up an odd or striking phenomenon and then explaining it. (The Scarecrow explains how he was made; the Tin Woodman explains how he came to be made of tin; the Winged Monkey explains the charm of the Golden Cap; the Wizard explains his hoaxes and illusions.)

• He's interested in implications that would follow "realistically" from unrealistic fairy-land premises. (If a Scarecrow were alive, he would be most afraid of fire, but he would not need to eat or sleep. If a sentimental man were re-cast in metal, his tendency to weep would be a problem for it could make him rust. If people were made of china, they would break easily, mend easily, but the cracks would show. If everyone wore green glasses inside a certain city, they would think everything in the city was green.)

• He's interested in problems that turn out to be a lot easier than they seemed. (To kill a Wicked Witch, all Dorothy has to do is let the mark of the Good Witch's kiss protect her, and throw an ordinary bucket of water on the villainess. In order to grant the Scarecrow's, Woodman's, and Lion's wishes, all the Wizard has to do is give them any old thing and call it brains, heart, and courage. In order to get back to Kansas, all Dorothy has to do is click her heels and wish to be there.)

The book is fun, whimsical, fantastical; it was and still it incredibly popular. It doesn't have the depth of Alice in Wonderland, but not much in children's literature does.

Since the Victor Fleming film version of The Wizard of Oz is so popular, it invites comparison with the book. Many feel here is a case where the movie is better than the book. The movie develops the central character more fully. The theme is more fully-developed as well: In the book when Dorothy wants to go back to the "great gray prairie" where there is little joy or interest, readers often wonder why (it just seems like a place to go for convention's sake); in the movie, Dorothy's adventure/dream is built of representations of her real (Kansas) world, and when she returns, it's to the realization that even though there is unfriendliness in her world, there is also friendship, support, and love. The screenwriters also weeded out a lot of the less successful (or less integral) scenes; as a result, the film is tightly unified; it feels like a single story rather than a patchwork quilt of episodes.

The success of the book and the film spawned many sequels. After finishing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum thought he was done with it, but much to his chagrin the remarkable demand for more Oz from readers (and, no doubt, Baum's literary agent), pushed him to write several other Oz books, and a number of film and cartoon versions of the stories have been, and continue to be, made.