At the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s older sister imagines “how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman […] and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys” (Carroll 99, Norton 1992 Ed. Gray). Alice’s sister immediately thrusts her forward from childhood into womanhood, from an imaginative, experiential role to an informative, supporting one. Although initially problematic because it seems to sketch Alice’s future solely within the confines of motherhood, this image of Alice as a maternal figure subtly legitimizes her role as a female storyteller.
Alice’s experience in Wonderland is validated by its transmission to the next generation, whose gaze lies “bright and eager” on her tale. Through the socially accepted role of “mother,” Alice is able to use her imagination (which, despite her dream state, I would deem her female experience) to form new physical and emotional bonds within her society—to “gather about her” a group of children, and to “feel” their sorrows and joys, perhaps even giving them advice. Her role as mother empowers her to retain her dream-world in a way that other adults cannot, and to spread the lessons that she learned and the experiences that she had there to the next generation.
In “Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti similarly paints the two sisters transitioning from an experiential otherworldly danger to the safe, idealized realm of domesticity. Although their story is more explicitly didactic than Alice’s tale, it still retains the thrilling, imaginatively provocative elements of “the haunted glen,” “the wicked […] men,” “poison in the blood,” “deadly peril,” and “the fiery antidote” (Rossetti 488). That they have access to the experience with which to tell such a tale positions Lizzie and Laura as authoritative storytellers. Furthermore, the moral of their tale, like the end of Alice’s sister’s imaginings, includes connective imagery—with their story, they “[join] hands to little hands […and] bid them cling together,” thus aligning the emotional bond and mutual reliance of sisterhood with the physical bond of clasped hands (Rossetti 488). Like Alice, the sisters bring about structural social change in the next generation by telling their story. This depiction empowers them in their role as female storytellers, underlining their experiential authority—but it does so by first legitimizing them as mothers.
I think your idea that female protagonists can find a sort of narrative authority (an authority they are often denied in the Victorian literature we have examined in this course) through a socially-approved role like motherhood allows for a provocative, yet nuanced reading of these texts. Yet I wonder how the subject positions of the respective authors might affect our reading of maternal themes in their works: Rossetti as a woman and Carroll as a man. Rossetti, I agree, works cleverly within gendered social expectations/constraints to give Lizzie and Laura a fair amount of agency and authority (they save each other, for instance–no knight in shining armor needed). However, I find Carroll’s treatment of Alice slightly more problematic. For example, Alice’s agency is confined to a dream world, one that does not extend beyond her own mind. Furthermore, this dream world is associated solely with Alice’s youth and naivety. For me, this association romanticizes the infantalization of women. Alice is either an imaginative child or a mother–Carroll does not seem to offer an alternative.
You draw a very interesting and nuanced connection between the two texts. I wonder if the retelling of a story is in effect a form of reproduction, emphasized by the presence of children. There is a sense of a “passing on” of knowledge and experience in a similar way to the “passing on” of genes. The generative properties of a narrative therefore parallels women’s fertility and motherhood. You concede the somewhat “problematic” formulation of their authority, and I too doubt how “empowering” these endings truly are. Do they offer women the power of storytelling or constrain them within a prescribed societal role?