Alice, Carroll, and Deleuze

In considering this week’s readings, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in particular, we are able to consider the character of Alice from a new perspective.  Much like the character of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s classic by the same name, there is much more to Alice than what meets the eye.  She is a seemingly ordinary girl for her time, but more importantly she is a young girl that embodies a number of our cultural archetypes surrounding children.  Alice’s natural curiosity, her commonness, her innate ability to commune and converse with animals and even her precociousness reflect the idealized and romanticized childishness that Carroll not only captured with his pen, but captured in his provocative photography of young boys and girls as well.  Alice undoubtedly represents a romanticized vision of childhood on the exterior, but as we delve not only into the rabbit hole but into the psyche of Alice as well, darker possibilities begin to wash up on the shore.

Gilles Deleuze looks at Alice’s Adventures through a different lens in his critique “Thirteen Series of the Schizophrenic.”  As the title suggests, Deleuze recognizes this darker side as “the language of schizophrenia” (Deleuze, pg. 84).  We can see throughout Alice’s adventure the shadow of this disorder in her apparent inability to feel comfortable in her own skin and the nagging sense of loss surrounding her own identity.  Deleuze lists “body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body” as “the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body” (Pg. 87).  We see in Alice at least two of these body types as she seems to lose track of her feet, shoulders, arms and hands at various points throughout her adventures (the fragmented body) and is unable to frame her own dimensionality at several other points along the way (the dissociated body).  Further evidence of Alice’s bifurcated concept of self is seen in her internal dialogue as she scolds herself, consoles herself and even questions herself in the company of the caterpiller: "I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since that" (Carroll, lines 49-50).

These seemingly schizophrenic moments leave us questioning just who was the dreamer, or even the schizophrenic in the tale of Alice, the title character herself, or Carroll; simply fulfilling the “becoming” of Deleuze and Guattari.  Ultimately, as we follow Alice down the rabbit’s hole, we are left with as many questions about Carroll as about Alice; questions of childhood, adulthood, the journey between and the disruption of the self-identity of the mind – the clarity that Alice finds upon her awakening eludes us.

** The image is from a Vogue magazine spread featuring Alice in Wonderland