Author: QueenOfHearts<3

After Alice becomes a queen, she tries to enter through a doorway, but stops when she cannot figure out which door to enter based on her position. She remarks, “…and then I’ll ring the –the-which bell must I ring?’ she went on, very much puzzled by names. I’m not a visitor, and I’m not a servant. There ought to be one marked ‘Queen,’ you know-” (Carroll 207). This reminded me of the discussions of sign, signifier, and signified that we had in class. The words above of the door, “servant” and “visitor,” carry no real meaning and do not modify the door in any significant way; the door still opens and closes the same way no matter what it is labelled as. Much like Humpty Dumpty’s explanation of the Jabberwocky poem’s words, this scene enforces the subjective nature of words. For example, even though no part of the definition of “visitor” signifies that Alice should not be able to open the door, Alice assigns her own additional meaning to the word that prevents her entering.  

On the flip side, however, Alice is creating new definitions of words in order to maintain a balance in the upside-down world. Alice’s roles as pawn and queen were well defined, the change from one to the other being defined by a physical signifier (the crown). Now that she has progressed from a pawn to the Queen, she does not want to be associated with a lower hierarchical level. In the quotation, “ought” is italicized, drawing attention to the importance of traditionally practiced social standards. 

Thus, Alice’s apprehension at entering into through the door is based in paradox. She makes up new definitions of the words above the door in order to reinforce the very real hierarchies she lives in. Perhaps Carroll was attempting to poke fun at how rank and social status tied people to certain groups, professions, and neighborhoods in the real world. Although these distinctions are arbitrary, they still reflect the power of words and labels to limit people’s movement. 

The fourth and fifth paragraphs on page 108 of Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing-Room illustrate how intensely the narrator feels shame surrounding his sexuality. Although the narrator does not deny that he wishes to court Vanora, throughout this passage, he places distance between himself and the actual effects of a courtship, like sex. First, despite the fourth paragraph’s equal focus on Vanora and the narrator, seven of the eight sentences begin with “I.” This repetition obviously favors the narrator’s feelings over how they may affect Vanora. However, it also highlights the difficulties he has in figuring out his feelings. Every attempt he makes at naming his emotions falls flat and necessitates another sentence. He cannot say that complex feelings he has are not just love, but also sexual desires. As with many pieces of Victorian literature, the length of a passage or even an entire book reflects how the characters skirt around the unsaid.

When it comes time for the narrator to admit his love for Vanora, he falters, and writes, “I suppose I must have been in love with her…(Caird 108).” Instead of directly saying “I loved her,” the narrator creates both physical space on the page and a string of apologies for his feelings by adding two additional verb clauses. In a setting where marriage was at stake, love equated sex. By questioning his declaration of love, he distanced himself from the thought of having to perform with the confident, liberated Vanora in an intimate setting.

The narrator’s hidden desires become clearer in the following sentence, where he writes, “I longed to make her yield to me…I had a burning desire to subdue her (Caird 108). The sentence carries dual meanings, pointing to both the narrator’s wish to quell her rebellious, “New Woman,” characteristics, and wish to subdue her sexually. Because Vanora holds power over the narrator because she reputes his advances, he secretly wishes to match her power in a physical way. Using “burning,” an adjective frequently associated with the heat and intensity of sex, further paints this picture. However, the way he explains it is characteristically confusing and shadowed by inuendo.

The narrator’s shame revolving around sex can partially be pinned on the old-fashioned views on romance that he admits that he has. However, these textual elements point to an additional factor: how Vanora emasculates the narrator by refuting him. By losing the power in courtship that his gender would normally afford him, he becomes ashamed of his inability to be viewed as a legitimate, sexual man. He wishes to act as a “man” by being sexually dominant, but to plainly admit this would also implicate his feelings of insufficient masculinity.

On page 527, Hartright positions himself as a modern-day holy figure through his inability to understand how flippantly people view the death of Sir. Percival. He exclaims, “One of the village women, whose white wild face I remembered, the picture of terror, when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old washing-tub…Solomon in all his glory, was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace” (Collins 527). This sentence references Matthew 6:29, where Jesus explains that even the extremely wealthy King Solomon did not have expensive clothes. With his extreme wisdom, he saw that worrying about worldly things like clothing inherently meant ignoring the more important things in life, like goodness and worship. This second sentence implies that Hartright is similar to Solomon in that they are both surrounded by heartlessness, yet he is able to see through their self-interest and remember the sanctity of death. Ironically, “elements of the contemptible” follow Hartright to his “castle”; this scene lies before he learns that Count Fosco has visited his apartment in London.  

The description of the two women falls in line with how Hartright processes and relays information about people as an artist; both of the women are described as being “pictures.” Although this is a common phrase, because of Hartright’s artistic background, the phrase can be taken more literally, like Hartright is imagining how he would paint the women. This word choice explicitly creates a hierarchy between the painter and the painted; Hartright gets to choose how the women are depicted. If Hartright is to be taken as a holy figure like Solomon, he has the perspective to accurately discern a person’s character. Any mention of “white” cannot go unnoticed in the novel, and is normally associated with Laura or Anne’s purity. In the moment of Percival’s death, the woman behaved morally through the amount of fear she displayed. However, now that she lives without fear, she loses the innocent “white” face, and Hartright judges her to be immoral. Hartright’s judgment is consistent throughout the novel. Like a holy figure, he decides who is good and who is evil; just as his name suggests, his heart is always correct.