Author: jarmank

Throughout Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s intelligence/knowledge/ability to learn repeatedly comes under scrutiny—scrutiny from herself as well as from the residents of Wonderland. For example, during her fall down the rabbit hole, Alice talks to herself, speculating as to where the rabbit hole might take her:

“I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards… I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is… what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.” (3)

Here, Alice seems self-conscious about her childhood curiosity and lack of worldly knowledge. Concerned that others will perceive this age-appropriate lack of information as ignorance, Alice resolves to not ask questions. Rather than seeking out information from others, Alice leaves her discovery of new information to chance: “perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere” (3).[1] Furthermore, Alice negatively associates questions and curiosity with childhood/immaturity: “what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking!” (3).[2] For Alice, education and learning are tiresome tasks one must complete before becoming an adult: “‘But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!” (26). Alice views adults as possessing full knowledge with no need for “lessons” or education.

Playing on Alice’s initial fear, many of Wonderland’s residents accuse her of being ignorant or stupid: ‘“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact’” (45). Alice’s (often misremembered) knowledge from school and understanding of the learning process fail to help her successfully interact with the characters she meets in Wonderland. After calling her “very dull,” the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle criticize Alice’s education:

“I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice…

“With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle, a little anxiously.

“Yes,” said Alice: “we learned French and music.”

“And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.

“Certainly not!” said Alice, indignantly.

“Ah! Then yours wasn’t a really good school!” (79)

The exchange that follows, full of puns (“Reeling and Writhing) and nonsense words (“Uglification”), seems to satirize the education system. Comparing the curriculum of their school with that of Alice’s school, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle equate Alice’s traditional school subjects, French and music, with their foolish-sounding subjects. The utility of education and certain kinds of knowledge appears to be dynamic and subjective rather than standardized and static, like Alice’s view of adult knowledge. In Wonderland, characters like the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, though not recipients of a formal, British education, often possess more useful knowledge than Alice. Alice’s trepidation about education as well as Wonderland’s satirical conceptions of schooling, suggest Carroll was attentive to, and critical of, issues in Victorian education.

[1] Emphasis added.

[2] Emphasis added.

In Christina Rossetti’s poems “In an Artist’s Studio” and “Goblin Market,” men are depicted as thieves or consumers of women’s physical beauty. Drained of this beauty, the women in these poems face two different, but similarly undesirable, fates: The model ceases to exist outside the artist’s “dream” and Jeanie dies a single woman—a fate Laura narrowly manages to escape as well (“Artist” 14).

The speaker of “In an Artist’s Studio” explicitly charges the male artist with “feed[ing] upon her face by day and night” (9). The phrase “feeds upon” suggests that the model’s beauty is something he can consume in order to sustain himself. Indeed, as an artist he makes his living off of the aesthetic objects he creates through his art. Therefore, by capturing or “feed[ing]” off the model’s beauty and using it for his art, the artist metaphorically consumes her body for his own gain. The speaker argues that the artist’s repeated use of this particular model for multiple works reduces the model to an abstract ideal, an intangible “dream” (14). In the artist’s paintings, the model appears “fair” and “joyful” (11). Yet, the speaker informs us of the model’s beauty in the paintings through negation: “Not wan with wanting, not with sorrow dim;/ Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright ;/ Not as she is, but as she fills his dream” (12-4). Though the artist’s paintings continuously depict the model as an “angel[ic]” beauty, the speaker suggests that his image of the model is merely a fantasy or memory. He sees her “not as she is, but was when hope shone bright” (13)[1]. The tense shift in this line indicates an important temporal distance between the time the painting was created and the speaker’s present viewing of the piece. Rather than concluding the poem with the artist’s romanticized image of the model, the speaker leaves her reader with an image of a “wan” and depleted woman (12).

In “Goblin Market,” Jeanie and Laura’s respective encounters with the goblin men result in a more literal loss or consumption of beauty. We learn from Lizzie’s anxious memory that Jeanie’s meeting with the goblin men led to her untimely death: “She thought of Jeanie in her grave,/ Who should have been a bride;/ But who for joys brides hope to have/ Fell sick and died/ In her gay prime” (312-16). As we have seen in our study of Victorian art, the idealized image of a woman depicted her as a young, healthy, sensuous woman in her “prime” (316). Illness would mean a loss of this standard of beauty. Laura’s loss of beauty is more overt. First, the goblin men take a “precious golden lock” of her hair (126). Then, in the aftermath of her encounter, Laura’s youthful beauty begins to fade: “Her hair grew thin and grey;/ She dwindled… To swift decay and burn/ Her fire away” (277-280). Just as the artist robbed the model of her beauty through his painting, so too do the goblin men (literally and figuratively) steal Lizzie and Laura’s beauty.

[1] Emphasis added.

In her chapter on Wilkie Collins’s unique variations on the standard marriage plot, Carolyn Dever discusses the ways in which Collins triangulates romantic relationships in The Woman in White: “The novel distributes the emotional intimacy ordinarily credited to marital love among three figures, rather than the conventional two” (113). Dever focuses her exploration of this idea on the novel’s most overt triangulated relationship—the relationship among Laura, Marian, and Walter. She asserts the relationship between the two sisters “is the novel’s most fully realized ‘marriage,’ if we consider marriage a union based on emotional depth, mutual trust, and the presumption of permanence” (114). While Marian functions as an emotional ‘spouse’ for Laura, Dever continues, she simultaneously serves as an intellectual, masculine ‘spouse’ for Walter: “Walter and Laura enter a marriage anchored by its essential bisexuality. Providing a masculine companion for Walter and a feminine one for Laura, Marian is a full partner in this marriage of three” (114). The novel contains ample support for Dever’s argument.

Laura and Marian share multiple scenes wherein emotions and thoughts are shared and accompanied by physical touch or gesture. For example, after Laura finally discloses some of the events of her unhappy honeymoon, the sisters embrace and ultimately kiss: “I had caught her in my arms, and the sting and torment of my remorse had closed them around her like a vice… How long it was before I mastered the absorbing misery of my own thoughts, I cannot tell. I was first conscious that she was kissing me…” (Collins 262). The impassioned embrace and comforting kiss that follow a scene of emotional intimacy, though not overtly sexual, do seem as though they are gestures that would typically come from a lover or a spouse. Similarly, Walter frequently confides in Marian, sometimes asking her advice or for her assistance in carrying out a plot or scheme. In the wake of Sir Percival’s death and the Count’s disconcerting visit to Laura, Marian, and Walter’s temporary London home, Walter turns to Marian for advice on how to protect Laura moving forward: ‘“I was guided by your advice in those past days,’ I said; ‘and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold greater, I will be guided by it again’” (558). Their exchange results in a plan to extract information from the Count as well as Laura and Walter’s marriage.

Though Dever is undoubtedly correct in pointing out Marian’s unusual, and possibly subversive, partnerships with Laura and Walter, I do think she fails to address one important fact that may limit the extent to which we can read this triangulated relationship as a challenge to traditional marriage. Since Marian is a woman, she does not pose a threat to the main legal purpose of marriage—inheritance. At the end of the novel, Walter happily allows Marian to “end our Story” with her introduction of Laura and Marian’s son as “Mr. Walter Hartwright—the Heir of Limmeridge (626-7). Marian’s presence in Laura and Walter’s relationship, while disrupting the institution’s traditional heteronormative binary, poses no threat to marriage’s perpetuation of patrilineal inheritance.

Throughout the novel thus far, our narrators occasionally pause their testimonies of the mysterious and sinister events at Limmeridge House and Blackwater Park to describe another character’s manner of dress. Clothes, in literature, are often metaphorically linked to themes of identity and selfhood. In a theatrical novel driven by instances of mistaken or concealed identity, I find such attention to clothing particularly resonant. The bulk of the references to clothing relate to Anne Catherick, Laura Fairlie, and Count Fosco—three characters who are central to the novel’s mystery plot. However, as the title of the novel indicates the importance of the women’s garb and my space here is limited, I will focus my current exploration of this topic on Laura and Anne.

Our first narrator, Walter Hartwright, introduces clothing as an important trope and plot device in the first epoch. For example, his description of Laura’s “white muslin” dress not only foreshadows her link to Anne, but also reveals aspects of Laura’s personality that become important for how we read her relationship with Sir Percival: “It was spotlessly pure: it was beautifully put on; but still it was the sort of dress which the wife or daughter of a poor man might have worn” (56). Hartwright’s allusion to class anticipates the future importance of Laura’s economic status. In an emotional conversation with Marian following her marriage to Sir Percival, Laura explicitly rebukes her wealth as a form of constraint and credits Marian’s “poverty” with saving her sister from the bondage of an unwanted marriage (258).

Furthermore, the simplicity of the dress, which Hartwright stresses, here echoes his description of the dress Anne wore the night of their initial encounter—a dress, “certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive materials” (24). Hartwright’s implicit linking of Anne and Laura in this passage foreshadows the explicit connection drawn between the two women at the end of the chapter. This explicit association between the two women comes as Marian reads Mrs. Fairlie’s letter detailing her encounters with Anne as a child, noting the troubles the young girl faced. While listening to Marian read about young Anne’s love for the white clothes she inherited from an unknowing young Laura, Hartwright keeps his gaze on Laura: “There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight… the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white!” (62). I find it interesting that Hartwright comes to this startling realization upon learning that Anne grew up wearing Laura’s clothes. Laura and Anne’s identities seem to intertwine at this moment, the similarity in physical features and the sharing of clothes foreshadowing more connections to come. Since the white dress is so connected in Harwright’s (and therefore the reader’s) mind with his vision of Anne on the night of her escape from the asylum, it acts as a marker of sorts—marking Laura for some kind of impending suffering.

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