Therun Silver – Victorian Sexualities

A Jabberwocky’s Worth a Thousand Toves: Illustration and Non-Signification in the “Alice” Books

In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, critic Rosemary Jackson offers a generic analysis to help better understand fantasy. To Jackson, “[t]he fantastic exists in the hinterland between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary,’ shifting the relations between them through its indeterminacy” (35). As a genre of subversion, fantasy tests the bounds of reality. By “[p]resenting that which cannot be, but is, fantasy exposes a culture’s definitions of that which can be” (23). Fantasy primarily accomplishes its subversive goals by using motifs of invisibility, transformation, and, notably, non-signification. Frequently, fantasy foregrounds “the impossibility of naming [an] unnameable presence, [a] ‘thing’ which can be registered in the text only as absence and shadow” (39). This emphasis on non-signification easily applies to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). According to Jackson, “Carroll’s Alice books…reveal his reliance upon portmanteau words and nonsense utterances as a shift towards language as signifying nothing, and the fantastic itself as such a language” (Jackson 40). Alice enters a world of “semiotic chaos, and her acquired language systems cease to be of any help” (141). In Wonderland and the Looking-Glass, “[t]he signifier is not secured by the weight of the signified: it begins to float free” (40). Though Jackson provides a thoughtful and thorough analysis of the novels, I would argue that she fails to account for a fundamental aspect of Carroll’s texts: John Tenniel’s illustrations.

As Jackson points out, fantasy highlights “problems of vision” (45). “In a culture which equates the ‘real’ with the ‘visible’ and gives the eye dominance over other sense organs,” she writes, “the un-real is that which is in-visible” (45). Yet in the Alice books, Carroll makes the unreal visible and the unspeakable seeable through John Tenniel’s illustrations. Carroll and Tenniel worked in close collaboration when designing the Alice illustrations. In fact, Tenniel might have even based his drawings on original sketches created by Carroll himself (Hancher 39). Historian Michael Hancher rightly argues that Tenniel’s illustrations “make up the other half of the text, and readers are wise to accept no substitutes” (5). Without both halves, the Alice books do not work. The illustrations do not serve as mere adornments to the plot; they actively contextualize and shape it.

At multiple points in the text, Carroll does not even attempt to describe the fantastical creatures he creates. Instead, he defers to Tenniel’s illustrations. When Alice encounters “a Gryphon lying fast asleep in the sun,” the narrator directly addresses the reader in a parenthetical aside: “If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture” (80). Similarly, when Alice encounters the King of Hearts at a trial, she notices he wears “his crown over [his] wig” (94). Again, instead of describing this unusual attire, the narrator instructs the reader to “look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it” (94). The unspeakable—or at least the hard to explain—is made knowable through illustrations.

At other points in the text, Tenniel’s illustrations ground Carroll’s nonsense words by attaching them to concrete, visible objects. When Alice reads “Jabberwocky,” for instance, she remarks that the poem is “rather hard to understand” (132). As readers, we know that this is because the poem is nothing but nonsense; Carroll explicitly tells the reader in the preface that the terms in “Jabberwocky” are “new words” of his invention (115). Still, Tenniel provides the nonsensical word “Jabberwocky” a signified object to cling to. Before looking at Tenniel’s illustration, the reader only knows that the evil Jabberwocky has “jaws that bite,” “claws that catch,” “eyes of flame,” and some sort of “head” (130). After looking at Tenniel’s illustration, though, they can completely fill in the blanks left by Carroll’s sparse description. Tenniel takes significant artistic liberties, creating a monstrous creature with wings, antennae, whiskers, scales, and a long, twisting tail (131). The miniature warrior at the creature’s feet is undoubtedly the “beamish boy” of the poem, poised to strike the creature’s head off with his “vorpal sword” (130). Since the sword of Tenniel’s illustration looks like a typical knight’s weapon, the reader can assume that the nonsensical adjective “vorpal” means something along the lines of “sharp” or “dangerous” rather than “curved” or “tiny” (131). Similarly, the average trees in the background of the illustration indicate that a “Tumtum tree” is not a particularly remarkable plant (130). As far as the viewer can see, the Tumtum trees in the forest do not grow candy or sprout upside-down. According to Tenniel’s illustration, a Tumtum forest looks just like any other. Jackson argues that Carroll’s nonsense words “float free” without signified objects (40). However, she fails to recognize that Tenniel’s illustrations pull them back to the ground, limiting their potential meanings.

Tenniel’s illustrations also modify Carroll’s overall plot. When Alice meets the White King in Through the Looking-Glass, she encounters his two messengers, Haigha and Hatta. Nothing in the text indicates that either of these characters is familiar to Alice; she speaks to both of them as if she has never met them before. Tenniel’s illustrations might raise some alarms, however. Haigha is depicted as a rabbit, though nowhere in the text is he described as having any leporine features (196). Meanwhile, Hatta is depicted wearing an oversized hat with a price tag fastened to the side (198). For readers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the illustrations would be immediately recognizable as the Hatter and the March Hare. Hatta looks identical to the Hatter, while Haigha shares obvious physical similarities to the March Hare—namely two large ears. There are some slight differences between Haigha and the March Hare. In the first novel, the March Hare seems to have a darker fur color and darker eyes than Haigha (59). Still, a rabbit near the Hatter unmistakably calls to mind the March Hare. Without Tenniel’s illustrations, it would never be clear that residents of Wonderland can pass into the Looking-Glass alongside Alice. Of course, Carroll’s text implies this crossover. The name “Hatta” clearly echoes the name “Hatter,” while the name “Haigha,” according to the White King, is meant to rhyme with “mayor,” meaning it would be pronounced “hare” (195). Still, Carroll never draws any connections explicitly. Tenniel’s illustrations, on the other hand, leave little room for doubt: the Hatter is certainly one of the White King’s messengers, while the March Hare is likely his other. Once again, Tenniel reduces the ambiguity of Carroll’s text with visual cues for the reader.

At the beginning of the first novel, Alice asks herself a salient question: “[W]hat is the use of a book…without pictures or conversations?” (7) Carroll’s fanciful tales and Tenniel’s beautiful illustrations seem to answer Alice directly, asserting that a book is nothing without its pictures. The marriage between Carroll’s words and Tenniel’s drawings simultaneously complements and complicates Jackson’s definition of fantasy. On the one hand, their partnership emphasizes “that which cannot be said, that which evades articulation [and] that which is represented as ‘untrue’ and ‘unreal’” (Jackson 40). When words fail, Carroll is forced to defer to Tenniel to fill in the blanks with images. As in Lovecraftian horror, some creatures and settings simply defy language. On the other hand, Carroll and Tenniel’s collaboration challenges the notion that fantasy must create a complete “disjunction between word and object” (38). Tenniel provides the reader some ground to stand on, even as it shifts and shakes beneath their feet. New words and new creatures are given life through seeing them. Tenniel clarifies that smoking caterpillars have hands (38), Mock Turtles have bovine heads (83), and talking flowers have tiny faces (134). Carroll’s nonsense is made less nonsensical through Tenniel’s refashioning of his text.

One could hypothetically read the Alice books without Tenniel’s illustrations, but they would miss a fundamental aspect of the text: vision. Throughout her journeys, “Alice learns by looking, as does the reader, the other eye-witness of both her books” (Hancher 246). Carroll’s text suggests that a mere gaze can refigure, refine, and redefine language as we know it. To put it more plainly, to see is to mean, and to mean is to see.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Penguin Classics, 2015.

Hancher, Michael. The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, 2nd Edition. Ohio State University Press, 2019. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv30m1f0f. Accessed 7 Apr. 2025.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 2003. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=3d1a59e5-395f-3130-b732-52a5d20930b1. Accessed 3 Apr. 2025.

These Gaze! They’re Trying to Murder Me: Subject and Object in Lee-Hamilton’s “At Rest”

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre insists upon the power of the gaze. According to his existential philosophy, humans understand their relationship to others and the world around them primarily through the sense of sight. Often, this results in a battle for power. When one gazes upon “the Other,” the Other becomes “an object” in the eyes of the gazer (343). This puts the gazer in a position of authority, as they can reduce the Other’s existence to pure conjecture. Perhaps the Other’s “voice” is nothing more than “a song on a phonograph;” perhaps a “passerby” is nothing more than “a perfected robot” (340). However, there always remains a “permanent possibility of being seen by the Other” (344). This forces the gazer to look inward, recognizing themself as “a being-as-object for the Other” just as the Other is a being-as-object for the gazer (344). In other words, the gazer finds that they are nothing more than “an object for the Other,” something to be ogled at and judged (349). Suddenly, the gazer finds the world “alien,” “for the Other’s look embraces [their] being and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole” (350). Nothing is certain any longer. Is the gazer less real for being gazed upon, or must the Other be acknowledged as a cognitive being? A power struggle arises from a mere sideways glance.

In art, the gaze is often subverted, challenged, or confused. Famously, Michel Foucault questions the nature of art that gazes back at the viewer. In the painting Las Meninas, for instance, an artist wields a palette and brush while staring directly forward. When standing in front of the painting, it seems as if the artist gazes directly upon the viewer. In Foucault’s opinion, “the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity” (444). To put it more simply, the painting raises the question of whether the viewer is “[s]een or seeing” (444). If one applies Sartre’s philosophy, the painting also raises a question of power. Can a piece of artwork exert authority over its beholder? Whose world is more real—the painting’s or the gazer’s? Who gets the last laugh, and who gets the last look?

In his poem “At Rest,” Eugene Lee-Hamilton invites such questions by inviting the gaze. In the opening lines, the bed-ridden poet makes a dying request: “Make me in marble after I am dead; / Stretched out recumbent, just as I have lain” (lines 1-2). The statement seems audacious, even defiant. In “marble,” Lee-Hamilton could be sculpted in any position. He could loom as large as Michaelangelo’s David or lounge as comfortably as Donatello’s Saint John the Evangelist. He could finally escape his “daily rack,” or torture device (line 12). Instead, he chooses to remain “recumbent,” just as he has stayed for the better half of his life. Evidently, Lee-Hamilton’s disability constitutes an essential aspect of his identity. It is more important to him that this fact remains than any other. Yes, he wants his epitaph to acknowledge his creative capacities, too, but only if it first acknowledges that “his misery” compelled him “to create” (line 11). No matter what, his disability must come first.

As a disabled man in an era of rigid masculinity, Lee-Hamilton likely encountered the gaze repeatedly throughout his life. Confined to a bed, he would have stood out as a weak, feminine, asexual object. The Victorian man was expected to dominate the Victorian woman intellectually, socially, and sexually. Lee-Hamilton, on the other hand, would not have been expected to do any of these things. First, his disability would have rendered him an object that could quite literally be picked up, moved, and put out of sight. Then, the gaze would reduce him to an object once again, relegating him to a shadow existence in which his “consciousness” itself was called into question (Sartre 340). All his power, both physical and mental, would be usurped by the able-bodied caretaker or gazer.

By becoming artwork, though, Lee-Hamilton can reassert his masculine agency. He invites “those who care” to “see [him] once again / Such as they knew [him] on [his] hard wheeled bed” (lines 3-4). In welcoming the gaze, Lee-Hamilton takes control of it. Implicitly, he suggests that if he must be beheld, he should be regarded as artwork. No longer will he be considered inferior; he will ascend above the able-bodied beholder into the lofty realm of art. Moreover, in becoming a statue, Lee-Hamilton can finally gaze back. As Foucault argues, artwork can upset power dynamics established by the gaze. Instead of one party exerting authority over the other, art fosters a state of “pure reciprocity” (444). It levels the playing field. It forces the gazer to gaze inward, reminding them that they, too, are an object. It activates the superego. It forces a temporary empathy, a brief coexistence. With his “motionless and marble head,” Lee-Hamilton casts a stony glance upon his beholder (line 5). He demands not only to be seen but to be recognized as an equal.

“Look me in the eyes,” he says. “I am here.”

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things (Preface, Las Meninas).” Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, Third Edition, edited by Stephen David Ross, State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 440–54. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/jj.18254729.53. Accessed 25 Mar. 2025.

Lee-Hamilton, Eugene. “At Rest.” Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, Mosher Press, 1908, p. 23.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1992.

Baronet, Baronight: Portraying Poverty in “The Woman in White”

When Walter Hartright visits Old Welmingham, he meets the impoverished settlers still inhabiting the ruinous village. The town is littered with the bones of “empty houses;” some are “dismantled,” while others are “left to decay with time” (495). In a few dilapidated cottages, some inhabitants, “evidently of the poorest class,” struggle to survive on the most meager supplies (495). As a man of good heart, Walter pities such a “dreary scene” (495).

After a fire breaks out “in the vestry of Old Welmingham church,” Walter is forced to turn to the destitute villagers for aid (495). At first glance, Collins characterizes these “haggard men and terrified women” in a harsh manner (517). For instance, none of the villagers seem willing to help Walter rescue Sir Percival until he offers them “[f]ive shillings apiece” (517). Their desperate “hunger for money” is the only thing that can rouse “them into tumult and activity” (517). This paints them as greedy and selfish. Moreover, they show little regard for Sir Percival’s life as they cheer with “shrill starveling voices” (518). Poverty has altered the villagers on a fundamental level; even their voices show signs of their indigence. Their morals have been similarly corrupted. They rejoice at another man’s imminent death if it means they get a few measly coins.

Still, Collins cannot help but extol the virtues of a simple life. Walter acknowledges that the villagers’ “hunger for money” is only the “second hunger of poverty” (517). First and foremost, the villagers are desperate for food. Their inappropriate behavior, then, can be explained away by their starvation. The shocking appearance of the village is also reframed in a positive light. Though the village presents “a dreary scene,” Old Welmingham is “not so dreary as the modern town” of New Welmingham, repellingly overcrowded (495). In Walter’s estimation, even “the ruins of Palestine” cannot rival the “modern gloom” of an English suburb (483). The villagers, then, embody a nostalgic return to a simpler, more pastoral way of life in England. Most importantly, the villagers—prelapsarian in their ignorance—have not been corrupted by a lust for status. In the hubbub of village gossip, the villagers speculate on Sir Percival’s rank. “Sir means Knight,” one resident remarks (520). “And Baronight, too,” another replies uncertainly (520). By using the term “Baronight,” Collins emphasizes his sharp critique of the gentry’s laughable vanity.

The use of the nonce word “baronight” appears in other great classics of English literature, from Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fenton’s Quest (1871). Most famously, a servant in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817) mistakenly refers to William Elliot as a prospective “baronight” (154). This, of course, is a great insult to the vain members of the Elliot family. How dare the working class not respect their superiors? As editor Robert Morrison points out, the servant’s “malapropic combination of ‘baronet’ and ‘knight’…indicate[s] his indifference to the gradations of rank” (154). Critic Juliet McMaster argues that the term “baronight” suggests that “being a baronet can be a somewhat benighted condition” (116). In other words, the lower classes of England do not understand or care to understand what a baronet is or does. Is power still considered power if those underneath you are unaware of it or fail to respect it?

This same question can apply to The Woman in White. Sir Percival Glyde spends his entire life protecting his title as a baronet. He commits a capital crime to maintain his rank, and he dies trying to cover his tracks. In Austen, such an obsession with the Baronetage “is made not only comic but contemptible” (McMaster 116). The same can be said of Collins’s characterization of Sir Percival. When none of the villagers remember Sir Percival for being a baronet, the reader cannot help but scorn, pity, and laugh at the dead nobleman simultaneously. By trivializing Sir Percival’s title, Collins implicitly suggests that rank is superfluous. It is better to be poor and honest than a lying man of status and wealth. While on earth, Collins argues, we must lead lives worthy of salvation, whether we are rich or poor. If we fall into the fires of hell, we all become “dust and ashes” just the same (517).

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Persuasion, edited by Robert Morrison, Harvard University Press, 2011.

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Penguin Classics, 2003.

McMaster, Juliet. “Class.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 115-130.

Water Color? I Hardly Know Her: Subliminal Sexuality in “The Woman in White”

As Mr. Walter Hartright confesses his love for Miss Laura Fairlie, his latent sexual desires bubble to the surface. Hartright reluctantly admits to the reader that Laura has led him away from the “narrow path” of propriety and respectability (Collins 66). His “situation in life” usually acts as “a guarantee against any of [his] female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in [him],” but Laura is an exception to this rule (66). In Hartright’s mind, she experiences the same “unacknowledged sensations” that he does (67). These shared sensations imbue each of their interactions with an electric sexual energy, regardless of how innocent they may appear on the surface.

In a society where physical contact is frowned upon, even the shadow of a touch can arouse excitement. When Hartright recalls shaking Laura’s hand each “night and morning,” he acknowledges the eroticism in the slightest brush of their fingertips (66). To him, this ritual is not a mere formality; it represents a temporary transgression of social norms. If even for a moment, Hartright can feel Laura’s skin against his own. Their drawing lessons adopt a similarly sexual charge. Hartright cannot get “close to [Laura’s] bosom” without “trembl[ing] at the thought of touching it” (65). He longs to feel “the warm fragrance of her breath” on his skin (65). His body thrills as she watches “every movement” of his phallic “brush” on the canvas (65). It is reasonable to believe that these close encounters feed Hartright’s fantasies “in the quiet and seclusion of [his] own room” (64). He must keep his “hands and eyes pleasurably employed” to avoid other, even more pleasurable employments (64). Sin encroaches, and sexuality threatens to invite it into the most hidden recesses of the heart.

Other domestic acts and subtle word choices also imply sexual connotations. When Hartright claims that he “always notice[s] and remember[s] the little changes in [Laura’s] dress,” for instance, he inadvertently admits that he ogles at her body (66). Hartright considers Laura’s figure as alluring as a “Syren-song” (66). In many nineteenth-century paintings, these seabound seductresses are depicted without a shred of clothing; perhaps Hartright imagines his beloved in much the same way. One thing can be said with certainty, however; with Laura around, the “monotony of life” becomes “delicious” (66). This adjective choice invokes kissing, licking, and other erotic activities involving the mouth. The days become so sweet that they beg to be consumed. Perhaps, in Hartright’s eyes, the same occurs with Laura’s body.

Once considered “a harmless domestic animal,” Hartright evolves into a tertiary sexual predator (66). It only takes one encounter with erotic possibility for Hartright to discard his “hardly-earned self-control” as if he “had never possessed it” at all (66). As Hartright himself points out, the very same happens “to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned” (66). Collins demonstrates how quickly propriety crumbles under the immense weight of passion. As the novel progresses, I am curious to see if sexual desire is strong enough to fracture other Victorian customs, particularly the reticence surrounding the erotic.