"Do Cats Eat Bats?" Having Fun at Alice's Expense

This is the first time I have written a response to a book that I have previously written a response to. Yes, I have written three academic articles on ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, and when I came to write my first response I was what I then called "stingy" in my willingness to be open regarding my emotional response. This second attempt faces me with the choice of either repeating my, by now well-rehearsed, ideas or somehow facing up to the connection that the book undoubtedly has to my inner life. Let me say clearly at the outset that I think this is a book which can and does live for young readers, but not for all young readers; I have tried at least once before, in an article published in CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN EDUCATION, to explain my reasons for thinking this. I don't want to repeat those explanations here. What I do wish to say is that I know that this story did effect me strongly when I was a child.

I cannot remember when I first encountered Alice, and I don't even know whether I ever read or had read the book to me when I was young. It seems likely we had a copy kicking around somewhere in the house; we had copies of several of what were considered improving books for the young. I remember abridged versions of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, ROBINSON CRUSOE, TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN in our house; I can't recall that I read any of them, although I do recall beginning one or two and then setting them aside as tedious. But what I do remember, vividly, is seeing Disney's version of the 'Alice' books. And what sticks in my mind is its craziness and its frightening bits. The Cheshire Cat, the bellicose Queen of Hearts, the spades who paint the roses red, the dark and forboding woods in which Alice, while following a path, meets a dog whose tail is a brush that wags and as it wags it brushes away the path leaving Alice in the middle of nowhere (not in the book), the Caterpillar who pronounces his words queerly and who blows smoke in the shape of letters at Alice, and the wierd insect glasses that crawl onto her face (not in the book)--all remain clear in my mind. In short, I know I was captured by this story. (I must say "story" because, as I indicated, my memory draws more on the film than on the book.)

Interestingly, I am now aware that many readers find the book troublesome; Joan Aiken, as I recall, thinks the book is a nightmare and sees nothing redeeming in it. My interest here is not going to be with this issue of whether the book is scary and therefore unsuitable for children, because I think that what is scary for some will be a ho-hum for others. I am also not interested in taking up here the question of whether the book is too difficult for today's young readers. Nor will I offer a reading or interpretation of the book simply because I have done this those several times before. Finally, I will skirt the issue of my present response to the book since think I dealt with this in last year's response paper. No, what I will follow is the track of what I remember of my first encounter with the story.

Unavoidably, this exercise in reminiscence will necessitate several flaws in my argument. First, I will not be speaking directly or intricately of the book; rather I will be trying to examine how I responded to the version I encountered as a child. Second, I cannot, of course, remember with certainty my responses as a child; what I say is inevitably a reconstruction and as such must be coloured by my more mature mind looking back. The danger is that I will reconstruct my responses to conform to what I now think about both reading and about the story. And third, I cannot remember what age I was when I met Alice, although since the Disney film was made in 1951 I can make a pretty good guess. I think I saw the film on T.V., but I'm not certain; if I did, then I was at least ten years old when I saw it. I cannot, however, make any sensible comment on the suitable age for this book. What I can do is point out that Alice herself is seven, and I suspect that Carroll had an audience of about that age in mind for his book.

Okay, so why did this story have such a strong effect on me? First let's look at some context. I was (and I still am!) a male growing up in a culture which was aggressively gender specific: girls read books, boys played sports and if boys read books at all, then they read manly works of adventure by such writers as Kipling, Burroughs (Edgar Rice of Tarzan fame), Twain, or Stevenson. Adventure consisted of forays into the jungle, trips to the Spanish Main, or encounters with robbers and even worse--murderers. What did not constitute adventure was encounters with swimming mice or dodos or caterpillars who force the hero to recite poems or Mad Hatters who say such things as "Twinkle twinkle little bat/How I wonder what you're at." In short, I don't think Alice was a story ready made for a young boy socialized to spurn anything "girlish." And yet I liked it.

Before pressing on to speculate why, I need to supply a more personal context than I have yet done. My home was not an especially happy one. I don't want to overplay this and drop into melodrama, because many children's homes are not especially happy. In any case, tension ran high in my family, and as a child I could not, of course, fully appreciate the reasons for this tension; it was enough that it was there making life a strain. Fear was a large part of this strain, fear that the house would erupt in argument, fear that violence might follow harsh words, fear that a personality change would come over one of my parents.

In this context, the story of Alice offered a wonderful release. First there are the pent up tensions within the story, perhaps best exemplified in the Queen of Hearts who is a walking paranoiac. For whatever reason, she trusts no one and loves herself to distraction. Her desire for self projection is monumental. I know that I was scared during the painting of the roses, and I now know that the Disney animators worked on the potential for this fear by drawing an analogy between the red paint and blood. The parts I responded to were the parts that involved fear, violence, isolation, disorientation--all those parts that confirmed my own worst nightmares. In other words, I too, I think, reacted to the nightmarish aspects of the story that offend the adult Joan Aiken. But I did not react negatively. Quite the reverse. I think my reaction was akin to what I now think of as catharsis. As a child I loved scary things. We--my sister and I-- used to look forward to Saturday nights when we were allowed to stay up until midnight when our one T.V. channel played The Witching Hour, a late night movie which was, as the title of the programme suggests, a spooky one. God how I loved that Witching Hour.

But something else caught my attention, something I also remember from Disney's version of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. I refer to the clear vein of lunacy in these films, which I remember best in Alice in the mad tea party scene. Here the out and out zaniness, the iconoclastic energy of the scene puzzled me, but fascinated me. I suspect what was so powerful here was the combination of something which bordered on the frightening--frightening because so unavailable to sense--and something which was so wildly liberating. All those adult pretensions associated with the dinner table, with polite tea parties, with propriety and convention are simply thrown asunder by the Mad Hatter and March Hare. This whole scene subverted the world into which adults tried, with amazing success, to induct children into. What sticks in my mind are the buttered and then shattered watch, and the spinning eyes of the characters. I have little doubt that I liked the powerful spirit of revolt against time and tide.

As an adult I can think of the book's themes: identity, satire of education, the nature of language, growing up, the quest, adults versus children and so on. And I can argue that the book offers children a humourous use of language combined with nonsensical characters and events. I can, in short, say that it offers much to the imagination, much food for imaginative play. But really, I do not know whether I reacted at all to the linguistic subtlety of the story or to the parodic and satiric aspects it so clearly contains. I reacted purely and simply to the visceral delight of the possibility of heads rolling and children being lost in the woods.

So: what to conclude from this? This is one reader's story of reading. It is a story because it may be part fictional. But I want it to demonstrate one thing: stories do matter. If we can catch the right match between story and reader, then something happens that is permanent. My guess is that ALICE is not a book for every child, but I suspect there are children to whom this book will speak, not necessarily the way it spoke to me, but in its own way matching the child's needs and personality and context.