Eat Me, Drink Me: Examining the Ways that Twentieth-Century Heroines Outgrow the Prescribed Feminine Spaces of Victorian Fantasy Literature for Children

by

Coleena Fanjoy

Bachelor of Arts, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, 2007

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of

Masters of Arts

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: Dr. Sarah Maier, English

Examining Board: Dr. Robert Moore, English, Chair Dr. Linda Eyre, Interdisciplinary Studies Dr. David Creelman, English Dr. Sandra Bell, English

This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

April, 2010

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1+1 Canada Abstract

In the Victorian literature written for children that is considered "classic"— defining the parameters of the literature that follows—norms prescribed for social behavior are rampant. Although masculine codes do exist, they are in place for the male hero to reach his full potential, whereas the code of femininity negatively impacts the heroine and highlights her shortcomings. The heroine must be passive, domestic and silent while the woman who fails to conform to this ideal must be silenced. Essentially, a woman is angel or monster. This binary of womanhood that is present in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, Charles Dodgson's Alice books, and J.M.

Barrie's Peter Pan is challenged in a number of feminist retellings of these stories.

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Stephanie Bolster's White Stone and Laurie Fox's

The Lost Girls rewrite feminine space as a locus of the active, the vocal, and, indeed, the passionate in order to challenge their predecessors and emancipate their heroines from the confines of male-authorship and static, dichotomous Victorian ideals.

n Preface

As Wendy Saw It

It wasn't as pretty as he made it out to be—Barrie, that is.

Waking up to a stranger sniffing around the foot of the bed, whispering under your blankets—half truths at best— offering a kiss in his palm.

Standing on the windowsill, making like it's your decision to step off the edge; he and the stars, laughing behind your back because they know it's not.

Forces this dust up your nose and flies you off to East Jesus Nowhere in the middle of the night.

On the island, you clean to keep your hands busy; instead of socks, wish you could slipstitch the mouth that crows, baste the eyes that won't look straight at you.

You storm out, children in tow like beaten puppies, into the arms of a man with a hook for a hand who calls himself 'Captain.' Brings you aboard his ship—you're the only one he lifts by the hips.

Calls you -worm to bait the bird whose shell's stuck in his craw. Lashed to the mast to the tune of a ticking clock— and then you're as good as pushed back through the bedroom window without so much as a hey, it was fun while it lasted.

First thing Monday: buy that pair of crocodile boots you've been eyeing.

in Acknowledgement

There are a number of people that deserve my gratitude for the part they have played in the completion of this project.

First, to my supervisor, Dr. Sarah Maier: your support and direction have been invaluable over the course of my academic career and throughout this process. It has truly been a pleasure and an honour to work with you.

To the members of the English department at UNB: thank you for the guidance and knowledge that you have shared with me. Without you, this project would not have been possible; your expertise is inspiring.

To my parents: the fact that you are proud of me drives my success. To my grandparents: your unwavering belief in my capabilities is more than anyone could ask for. Lilly: your dedication and patience makes me a better person. And to my friends: your distractions were as helpful and appreciated throughout this endeavor as your support was.

You all had faith in my ability to see this through when I did not—you can never know how grateful I am.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

PREFACE iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS v

EPIGRAPH vi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 19

CHAPTER TWO 54

CHAPTER THREE 90

CONCLUSION 126

REFERENCES 133

CURRICULUM VITAE or CV

v "I am only a little girl" (Barrie 101; my emphasis).

VI Reductive thinking like that of Wendy Darling, exhibited in the epigraph from

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1911), appears with startling frequency in Victorian and

Edwardian children's fantasy fiction. The insignificance associated with being female is a common theme in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century works included in this study. Both Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers' versions of "Little Red Riding

Hood" (1697 and 1812 respectively) and "Cinderella" (1697 and 1812 respectively), the

Grimm version of "Snowdrop" (1812), Charles Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), and Peter Pan will serve to illustrate the gender stereotypes that exist into Victorian and Edwardian society. These male-authored, or, in the case of the fairy tales, male-recorded, narratives establish a binary of proper and improper female behavior. Lyn Pykett, in The "Improper"

Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), expounds the traits of these two versions of femininity:

The system of the proper feminine may be represented by the following set of polarities (the list is by no means exhaustive): the domestic ideal, or angel in the house; the madonna; the keeper of the domestic temple; asexuality; passionlessness; innocence; self-abnegation; commitment to duty; self-sacrifice; the lack of a legal identity; dependence; slave; victim. In the economy of the improper feminine, woman is figured as a demon or wild animal; a whore; a subversive threat to the family; threateningly sexual; pervaded by feeling; knowing; self-assertive; desiring and actively pleasure-seeking; pursuing self- fulfilment and self-identity; independent; enslaver; and victimiser or predator. (16)

In short, the proper woman is an angel and the improper woman, a monster. The texts in this study primarily depict children's negotiations of the world around them, so the term

"monster" is apt. Children fear the monster in the closet or the monster under the bed; within the nineteenth and early-twentieth century narratives in this study, female children

1 are taught to fear the monster within themselves: the corruptible, desiring impulses that threaten their respectability.

The idea of monstrosity is pertinent to this study. Monstrosity is both a physical and a moral state. Nina Auerbach, in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian

Myth (1982), suggests that Victorian society was particularly apt at suppressing monstrous qualities; patriarchal culture constructed an elaborate angelic ideal as a reaction to the fear of the monstrous: "The social restrictions that crippled women's lives, the physical weaknesses wished on them, were fearful attempts to exorcise a mysterious strength" (8). It is far easier to impose physical restrictions upon a population and use the body as the locus of control than it is to impose moral idealizations because physical progress can be represented visually: "one of the original meanings of 'monster' is from the Latin monstrare, meaning 'to warn' or 'to show.' With its usually horrific features, the monster demands to be seen" (Creed ix). It is not surprising, then, that in literature in which female characters feature prominently there is an overwhelming theme of body manipulation:

The sexual nausea associated with all of these monster women helps explain why so many real women have for so long expressed loathing of (or at least anxiety about) their own, inexorably female bodies [...] all this testifies to the efforts women have expended not just trying to be angels but trying not to become female monsters. (Gilbert & Gubar 34; emphasis in original)

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" takes particular issue with the transformation from creature to woman. The Little Mermaid gives up her tail to dance on bleeding feet, has her tongue cut out, and abandons her home in favour of a silent, disfigured life with her Prince:

Andersen's mermaid clings winsomely to her dispossession, but her choice is a guide to a vital Victorian mythology whose lovable woman is a silent and self-

2 disinherited mutilate, the fullness of whose extraordinary and dangerous being might at any moment return through violence. The taboos that encased the Victorian woman contained buried tributes to her disruptive power. (Auerbach 8)

Male-authored works like Andersen's literary tales and Dodgson and Barrie's narratives have become recognized as "classic" examples of literature written for children; they are highly renowned and have established a set of standards or conventions within the genre of children's fantasy fiction that are emulated in the literature that follows their publication.

This is not to say, however, that the social commentaries within these "classic" works have gone unchallenged. Late-Victorian and early-Edwardian texts by authors like

Christina Rossetti, Louisa May Alcott and L.M. Montgomery are examples of early, if partial, interrogations of the feminine binary established in male-authored, or male- recorded, works. Although these texts offer an alternate version of the feminine, it is not until after the second wave of feminism that the binary is directly challenged. This study will examine Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979) and American Ghosts & Old

World Wonders (1993), Stephanie Bolster's White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998), and

Laurie Fox's The Lost Girls (2004), four female-authored, late-twentieth and twenty-first century works that attempt to reinterpret the female characters created by these authors' male predecessors. These revisions are self-reflexive and directly address the mistreatment of the female characters in the children's classics that they attempt to rewrite. I would argue that the confinement of Victorian female characters cannot be fully realized until it is compared with the attempts of contemporary characters to free themselves from their male-authored/recorded forbearers: "a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of'angel' and 'monster' which

3 male authors have generated for her" (Gilbert and Gubar 17). Reading Angela Carter's

The Bloody Chamber necessarily recalls the original fairy tales from which Carter procures her material and begs comparison; she emphasizes the angel/monster binary that is imposed upon the heroines in the male-recorded texts while attempting to disband the dichotomy in her own prose. Lyn Pykett discusses the nature of female authorship:

these women writers will be seen to reinscribe their culture's stories about femininity. However, they also participated in a rewriting of this script of the feminine, as, in various ways and to varying degrees, they self-consciously explored or implicitly exposed the contradictions of prevailing versions of femininity, or developed new styles and modes through which to articulate their own specific sense of the feminine. (5)

Like the Victorian Sensation novelists of whom Pykett speaks, twentieth and twenty-first century feminist authors engage with cultural stereotypes and attempt to offer a locus for revision.

A discussion of gendered binaries in literature necessarily acknowledges the delineation between what is considered masculine and feminine behavior. Masculinity is characterized by activity, strength and control while femininity is described by passivity, weakness and submission. Other binaries are insinuated by the masculine/feminine dichotomy: public/private; economic/domestic; aggressive/responsive (Nead 6). In

Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988), Lynda Nead suggests that the regulation of gender norms is a consequence of the rise of the middle class and the resulting need for control by the upper class. More than simply a question of masculine/feminine relations, social and sexual norms in the Victorian age are indicative of class relations; for example, a citizen of the upper ruling class is subject to different expectations and morals than a working-class citizen. In this way, "the definition of norms of sexual and moral behavior was an important part of the creation of

4 class hegemony" (Nead 3). While gender and class divisions are important social control mechanisms, the intra-gender binary to which Victorian women were subject is the focus of this study. An examination of the angel/monster dichotomy will elucidate the moral, as well as the physical, differences between the ideal and non-ideal woman.

In 1854, Coventry Patmore gave a name to this ideal domestic woman: the Angel in the House. In his text The Angel in the House, which outlines the virtuous Honoria, the ideal wife, Patmore coined the term that would become the standard against which all women in the later Victorian age were measured. Honoria is almost deified in poet

Felix's description of her but Patmore evokes the Genesis creation myth which emphasizes that woman was made after man and is, therefore, submissive to man:

Lo, when the Lord made North and South And sun and moon ordained, He, Forthbringing each by word of mouth In order of its dignity, Did man from crude clay express By sequence, and, all else decreed, He form'd the woman; nor might less Than sabbath such a work succeed. And still with favour singled out, Marr'd less than man by mortal fall, Her disposition is devout, Her countenance angelical; The best things that the best believe Are in her face so kindly writ The faithless seeing her conceive, Not only heaven, but hope of it. (Patmore I.IV.1-16)

The female is praised for her devout and angelic nature while simultaneously being submissive to man. It is this quiet compliance with masculine authority that comes to define the figure of the angel in the house.

The angelic woman occupies three spaces in the patriarchal domestic world: daughter, wife and mother. In all three roles, she is ultimately submissive to the authority

5 of the male head of household. Even though as a mother to a male child she has a certain authority over her child, "maternal love was constructed as the apex of feminine purity and as an unattainable model for all other human relationships" (Robson 26). So, even as a mother, the ideal woman fulfills her duty of respectable femininity. Elaine Showalter writes, in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Bronte to Lessing

(1977), that a proper mother is a "queen in her own realm of the Home" (14). Oftentimes in middle and upper class homes a domestic servant or housekeeper had control of how the household was run and of essentially raising the children; socially, however, the lady of the house was in a higher position of power than those whom she employed and was the model from which her daughter would learn the proper conduct of an ideal woman.

Many of the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault hinge on this angel/monster dichotomy as it applies to a young heroine. As recorded folk tales, these narratives are, in part, shaped by a patriarchal folk tradition which predates the nineteenth century; however, the fact that Victorian culture adopted and translated these tales suggests that the tales both served the purpose of inscribing ideologies of gender and served as a locus for revision in which Victorian mores were written into the folk tales with the emergence of literary versions of these narratives. This study will examine three tales that are included in the works of both the German and French literary traditions:

"Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and "Snowdrop." These tales are concerned, at their core, with dictating ideal versus non-ideal feminine behavior. The heroines of all three tales must successfully negotiate their desires which are manifested in the figure of a second woman in the tale. In both "Cinderella" and "Snowdrop," the embodiment of these desires is the heroine's stepmother who victimizes the child and allows the heroine

6 to distance herself from the monstrous qualities of her stepmother. In "Little Red Riding

Hood," the wolf represents both male desire and a locus upon which Red can enact her own desires. Although the traditional reading of the tale suggests that it is a cautionary tale for women to avoid the predatory intentions of men, and many critics describe it as a rape narrative, this study will examine the wolf as a manifestation of Red's latent desires which she must best in order to attain her role as ideal woman.

Charles Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the

Looking Glass (1871) perpetuate this tradition of positing a naive heroine against a series of negative influences, including women in positions of power. Like Cinderella's stepmother who runs the household and Snowdrop's stepmother who is literally a Queen,

Dodgson's Alice is presented in opposition with a series of female characters, most importantly, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen and the White Queen. Whereas

Cinderella and Snowdrop negotiate their obstacles silently and obediently, Alice follows in Little Red's footsteps, actively confronting her own monstrous qualities in Wonderland and the Looking Glass World.

The Victorian angel/monster binary remains in place well into the Edwardian period. Academic criticism of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is often more concerned with the title character than the secondary characters in the novel. Wendy Darling, however, is the most ideologically inscribed character in the novel, the character with whom the narrator of the text is most preoccupied. Her time in Neverland as a domestic servant and mother is suggestive of the life she will lead in Bloomsbury when she returns to her

"real" life. The narrator allows her a few moments of petulance but, for the most part,

7 Wendy remains the good little housewife, especially in comparison to the other two prominent female figures in the novel: Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily.

The contemporary female revisions of these texts attempt to alleviate the confines of strict binaries on female characters and, instead, allow their appetites and self- assurance to signify their humanity, not their monstrosity. Because the contemporary works examined in this study are not written for children, there is a dimension of sexuality to the texts that is only implied in the originals. At the conclusions of these contemporary texts, the female characters are not completely freed from the bonds of gender stereotypes but, within the narratives, they are free to challenge them. Traditional male and female roles are not reversed through these feminist revisions, but the allowances made for the female characters suggest that the angel/monster binary of classic children's fiction does not remain as prevalent in its twentieth and twenty-first century feminist revisions.

The Victorian period instituted a new way of looking at childhood. The idealized child of the Romantic period is further developed in the Victorian era in two ways:

The first was a dawning sense of childhood as a special state, as not just a period of training for adulthood but a stage of life of value in its own right. With this, the child came to be seen as a symbol, in a prosperous, progressive society, of hope and optimism. The second was a vision of children as good, innocent and in some way connected with spirituality and imagination: an idea inherited from the Romantics, but transformed by Victorian morality, and popularized and sentimentalized. (WuUschlager 12-13)

With this new vision of idealized childhood comes a new literature written for children:

"Children's books, one of the most profitable parts of the Victorian publishing industry, belonged to this world, and were embedded in middle-class culture" (WuUschlager 16).

8 It is evident from the market demand for these books, then, that the middle classes praise the lessons and morals offered in these fantasies for children.

Although the state of childhood is idealized, the potential for corruption remains an issue. Stemming from a tradition of conduct manuals, the fairy tales and children's fiction included in this study offer varying degrees of moralizing. While Perrault's

"Little Red Riding Hood" concludes with the clear moral of appetite suppression, the

"new" way of writing children's fiction that is ushered in by Dodgson's Alice books challenges the tradition of direct morals and, instead, "use[s] conduct books both as models to emulate and reject. Specifically, [the authors of this new fiction] appropriate the language of these books: the instructional dialogue, the use of the moral guide or mentor(ia), and the emphasis on wonder and growth" (Ostry 27). While the Alice books do, indeed, teach, they are not confined to monitoring and restricting girls' behaviors; rather, Dodgson provides a world in Wonderland where conduct books and mentors are satirized and where a girl is free to experience the transformations of adolescence.

These transformations, though, are male-authored or, in the case of fairy tales, male-recorded; therefore, the female characters cannot help but be a product of masculine idealization. In their text, The Madwoman in the Attic (1984), Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar assert that masculine authority is ingrained in the very nature of text. The male author as creator and progenitor has complete control over his characters and, in the creative sense, fathers them:

The roots of "authority" tell us, after all, that if woman is man's property then he must have authored her, just as surely as they tell us that if he authored her she must be his property. As a creation "penned" by a man, moreover, woman has been "penned up" or "penned in." As a sort of "sentence" man has spoken, she has herself been "sentenced": fated, jailed, for he has both "indited" her and "indicted" her. (13)

9 Male authors have written women into the angel/monster binary. Male-recorded folk tales and literary tales are similarly affected by influence of authorship. Despite the fact that the original source material may have been provided by women, the translations and recordings are filtered through a male vocabulary. Instead of realistic female characters with human flaws, like so many of the popular male heroes in fiction, male authors/recorders write women who are solely good or wholly bad. The angelic female characters are always tested with temptation and often forced into unpleasant actions, but their grace and virtue overrule any human emotion or action that they may present: "an author both generates and imprisons his Active characters, he silences them by depriving them of autonomy (that is, of the power of independent speech) even as he gives them life" (Gilbert & Gubarl4). Male-authored/recorded female characters are, then, voiceless: the angelic woman is above all silent, while the monstrous woman must be silenced. The sentiment that good children should be seen and not heard extends to adulthood in the case of women.

Children's literature highlights the inevitable moments of transformation from daughter to wife and mother, although, as is the case with Peter Pan, this transformation can be represented symbolically in games of make believe, as opposed to actual, physical changes. It is precisely this transformation which is the focus of much of children's fantasy fiction. In children's fiction, mothers are usually absent, ineffectual or dead in order that the narrative focuses on an abstract ideal of motherhood that the heroine must emulate. Although the mother is not present, often there is some sort of monstrous woman whom the heroine must remember not to be like:

10 Patriarchal texts have traditionally suggested that every angelically selfless Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by a wickedly assertive Stepmother: for every glowing portrait of submissive women enshrined in domesticity, there exists an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious fiendishness of what William Blake called the 'Female Will' (Gilbert & Gubar 28).

Gilbert and Gubar suggest that this monstrous woman is not always separate from the angel. The greatest male fear is that the angel will strip away her beautiful virtuous layers and reveal her monstrous body. Gilbert and Gubar suggest that male authors have

"a horror of female flesh and a revulsion at the inability—the powerlessness—of female arts to redeem or transform the flesh" (30). The theme of transformation and the toll that it takes on the minds and bodies of female characters is central to this study.

As the Victorian age comes to a close, girls become less and less the focus of children's literature but this shifting focus does not negate the female angel/monster dichotomy; rather, female monstrosity and its counterpart are further emphasized because of their impact on a male protagonist. Where the female child was the focus of early

Victorian literature, the boy became the focus in later literature: "excessive focus on the innocence of the little girl could not help but destroy her and left the way clear for the boy to embody a new image of childhood for a new age" (Robson 192). The texts that are referred to as "boys'" books are novels like Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), a novel which follows Kim O'Hara on his adventures for self-discovery in the real-world setting of imperialized India. The adventures on which Kim embarks suggest that he needs to actively search for a sense of identity as he matures whereas fantasy novels for girls suggest that a woman knows the role she will come to fulfill. Dorothy Dinnerstein suggests, in The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise

(1977), that "people nod their heads comfortably to the idea that a man must prove his

11 manhood, while woman just feels her womanhood" (83). Boarding school narratives for boys, such as Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), were examples of boy- centered fiction. Hughes' novel follows Tom Brown through his years at Rugby School and offers a portrait of the English public school system in which boys learn to defend themselves, make acquaintances and fight for their honour and the honour of their friends. In these "boys'" books, there is a prevalence of fact that is supposed to benefit the mind and character of the boy child reader; books for boys instill self-confidence in male readers and illustrate active male characters who are role models for young boys

(Bratton 106). Like Victorian children's literature featuring female characters, books for boys offer prescriptive roles for their male heroes. J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is a transitional text in the shift from "girls" books to "boys'" books. Although Peter Pan is the title character and the novel's concern seems to be over his inability to grow up,

Wendy Darling is, arguably, the main character of the text. More important than Peter's conviction never to grow up, is Wendy's conviction to become a wife and mother. Peter is concerned that he will have to go to work in an office if he grows up whereas Wendy's future can only hold marriage and procreation, two fantasies that she acts out in

Neverland. Peter's discomfort and Wendy's frustration hinge on the same complicated issue: female sexuality. The women in Neverland are wanton which makes the boys in

Neverland uncomfortable:

Peter rejects the advances of Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell, through whom sexuality is portrayed as wanton decadence, and Wendy [...] while she matures sexually, he remains a boy [...] Wendy is left a Virgin Mother; with Mrs. Darling, she joins a group of idealized but sexually unthreatening mother-figures. (Wullschlager 129- 30)

12 Wendy's relegation to the realm of asexual mothers negates her desire and she is forced to subvert her hopes of a relationship with Peter based on more than his fickle need of a mother.

What is important to note in both Peter Pan and Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland is that both take place in a "Secondary World," to use the term J.R.R.

Tolkien employs in his essay, "On Fairy Stories," in The Monsters and the Critics and

Other Essays (1997) (132). Children's novels are often written as fantasies, wherein the characters exist in or travel to a world unknown to them and, on the surface, unlike their own world: "What really happens is that the story maker proves a successful 'subcreator'.

[The author] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what [the author] relates is 'true': it accords with laws of that world" (Tolkien 132). The journey to an "Other" world allows the child to return home, equipped to deal with the "real" world with the set of skills acquired for adapting to the Secondary World. Deborah O'Keefe, in

Readers in Wonderland: the Liberating Worlds of Fantasy Fiction from Dorothy to Harry

Potter (2003), suggests that "Fantasy does not provide comfortable answers and solve problems. It poses questions, nudging readers toward a new openness. It is moral but not moralizing" (10). Many critics dismiss these fantasy children's novels as escapist.

O'Keefe argues the opposite; rather than an escape from their real-world experiences, she suggests that reading fantasy is liberating for children and allows them into a world of

"openness and possibility and coherence" (O'Keefe 11). In these Secondary Worlds, children learn to adapt and problem-solve. Often, the Other world illustrates issues of the

"individual, community, and cosmos; past, present, and future; feeling, thought, and

13 action; the human, the natural, and the supernatural" (O'Keefe 18), all of which are interrelated.

The presence of these real-world issues within the fantasy world suggests that

Wonderlands and Neverlands must abide by real-world logic if their heroines are to negotiate them successfully. J.R.R. Tolkien asserts that "Fantasy is a rational not an irrational activity" (139, nt. 2). The Secondary World in a fantasy story must abide by rules and be presented as real. Tolkien goes on to say that "Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity" (Tolkien 144). It is evident, then, that fantasy hinges on a sense of reality. While Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland and Kim are respectively categorized as fantasy and realist fiction, both novels are based on the same rules of reality. Although the primary world of Alice's

Victorian upbringing is only implied for the majority of the novel and the laws of

Wonderland are different than those of imperialized India, both Dodgson and Kipling employ a realistic mode of presenting their fictional worlds. Within Dodgson's fantasy world, the female protagonist is as confined by her Victorian circumstances as she would be out of Wonderland. Her journey to womanhood—her progression from daughter to wife and mother—abides by a definite set of laws, making Wonderland a microcosm for

Alice's Primary World: Victorian England.

The 'long ago and faraway' of the Perrault and Grimms fairy tales and the

Secondary Worlds in the works of Dodgson and Barrie, are reworked in the contemporary fiction of this study. Feminist revisions are more than eager to place their narratives in a contemporary setting while tackling traditional problems and material

14 from the Victorian period, which places these texts within the neo-Victorian literary genre. For example, many of Bolster's Alice poems offer a contemporary voice and influence, through the poet-narrator, to actual Victorian events of Alice Liddell's life.

Similarly, Laurie Fox's text sees all five generations of Darling women present in the novel. The original Wendy is an active participant in the action of the novel and her presence suggests a Victorian influence that is still present in modern-day Berkeley,

California.

This nostalgia for the Victorian period is the reason that this study includes works of both prose and poetry. The Victorian literary scene was a time of development and abundance. Essays and pieces of criticism on religious, moral and nationalist ideals were prevalent, new forms of literature were being explored (the sensation novel, children's literature and detective novels, to name a few), and poetic works had great merit in the literary circles and expanded with new forms: the dramatic monologue, for example {The

Victorian Web). Although the form of the poetic work in this study, Bolster's White

Stone, is contemporary, it is important to acknowledge the variety of literary styles that are affected by the Victorian world. Retelling a novel in poetic form, or vice versa, brings to light the ways in which the material crosses genre:

Narrative genres clearly do inscribe ideologies (though that can never fix the readings), but later re-writings that take the genre and adapt it will not necessarily encode the same ideological assumptions. [...] When the form is used to critique the inscribed ideology, [...] then the form is subtly adapted to inscribe a new set of assumptions [...] It is read, with the original story encoded within it, so that one reads of both texts, aware of how the new one refers back to and implicitly critiques the old. (Makinen 23-24)

It is evident, then, that genre itself can be employed as a revisionary tool that works as effectively as content-revision in the rewriting of classic literary tropes.

15 The female authors in this study use revision as a mode of criticism. Because classic children's literature is so widely-read, revision is one of the most effective ways to critique the material. These female authors rewrite male texts in order to challenge how those male texts are read in the future; they are affected by and rewrite narrative feminine space in a way that recalls and disbands the rigid boundaries of feminine space in classic Eurocentric children's literature. Twentieth and twenty-first century authors use genre as a revisionary tool in order to challenge not only their predecessors' works but preconceptions about the structure of narrative.

Revision literature geared toward an adult-audience, while featuring classic children's characters, challenges the authorial confinement of the original characters.

These adult novels are not concerned with retelling the plot but revising the latent content of their source material. Female authors of fictional narratives are undeniably influenced by their predecessors as well as theoretical frameworks that exist in the twentieth century.

Because of these influences, these fictional narratives act in a similar fashion to literary criticism and become a tool for examining the texts from which they procure material as much as they are works in their own right. The primary problem with these twentieth and twenty-first century texts is precisely this anxiety of influence. Many female-authored revisions simply respond to classic works by positing an inverted gender structure in their narrative, which necessitates that the texts still work within that structure. The female works in this study do not fully escape from male-authored stereotypes and there are traditional male/female power dynamics and control mechanisms within these texts but they engage in a dialogue with classic texts that promotes further attention and revision.

16 The first chapter of this work examines the formulation of the angel/monster dichotomy in a selection of fairy tales recorded by the Grimm Brothers and Charles

Perrault and the internalization of this binary in the works of Angela Carter. In the twentieth and twenty-first century works included in this study, the female authors attempt to rewrite the angel/monster tension as an internal dialogue, as opposed to the classic texts in which the roles of angel and monster are delegated to a number of different women. Patriarchal stereotypes that are insidious in the traditional tales are vocalized, problematized, and eroticized in the feminist revisions in hopes of rewriting the psychosocial feminine space that is traditionally characterized as domestic, enclosed, and insignificant. Carter implodes patriarchal gender stereotypes in order to rewrite feminine experience as multi-faceted. In her introduction to The Virago Book of

Fairytales (1990), Carter elucidates the way that she interprets female experience:

Sisters under the skin we might be, but that doesn't mean we've got much in common. [...] Rather, I wanted to demonstrate the extraordinary richness and diversity of responses to the same common predicament - being alive - and the richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in 'unofficial' culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work, (xiv)

Although females, whether characters or not, have physiological similarities, they are a diverse group. Carter argues that these characters cannot be lumped together based on their gender; rather, she attempts to illustrate, in her collections of prose, The Bloody

Chamber (1979) and American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (1993), that when a variety of female characters are placed in similar situations they will all react differently depending on their individual experiences. Unlike the traditional fairy tales in which female characters are idealizations and archetypes, Carter's characters are motivated, make decisions and solve problems.

17 In the second chapter, a discussion of Charles Dodgson's Alice books will further explicate this theme of confinement and transformation. The version of idealized girlhood that Dodgson offers in his text is infused with the idea of stasis. Perpetual youth and innocence is Dodgson's ideal with which Stephanie Bolster engages in her collection of poetry. Bolster's text offers an alternative voice for Alice with which she associates herself with other characters of classic children's fiction, offers her opinions on the physical and emotional responsibilities of becoming an adult, and attempts to distance herself from the author that has written her into an impossible ideal.

The third and final chapter will examine Wendy Darling in J.M. Barrie's Peter

Pan who is resigned to the fact that she will grow up and become a wife and mother.

Both Mrs. Darling and Wendy occupy the ideal motherly position and accept the ritual maturation process of womanhood. Laurie Fox's novel, The Lost Girls, radically questions the idea of 'proper' feminine behavior and complicates the mother-daughter relationship that the characters in Peter Pan take for granted. Fox's novel makes the greatest strides in crafting female characters that are less confined to the stereotypes from which they emerge than are their Victorian counterparts.

This study will elucidate the ways that children's literature is being rewritten by twentieth and twenty-first century women in the hopes of offering a new feminine space in which traditional stereotypes of feminine behavior are questioned and disbanded, not for the purpose of inverting gender roles but in the hopes of crafting female characters with a legitimate voice who will influence further revision.

18 Chapter One

19 Until the mid-nineteenth century, when Charles Dodgson penned his Alice books, literature for children was an evolving genre. Fairy tales, themselves, went through an evolution process from the Middle Ages, through Charles Perrault's seventeenth-century

France, to the nineteenth-century Germany of the Grimm Brothers, and continue to be transformed and manipulated by twentieth-century feminist authors. These tales developed from oral to literary narratives, becoming the keystones for much of the literature that followed. This chapter will examine the roles that women play in three fairy tales: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and "Snowdrop." There are numerous examples of male-female interaction (brother/sister, Prince/Princess,

Hunter/Maiden, Father/Daughter to name a few) in these three fairy tales. More importantly, though, are the relationships in "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and

"Snowdrop" between women ([step-] Mother/[step-] Daughter, Sister/[step-] Sister) because it is this array of relationships that elucidates the way that the myth of femininity is perpetuated among women. Furthermore, depictions of the feminine self in these three fairy tales serve to illustrate the ways that female heroines internalize prescribed gender roles. This study will examine the ways that female fairytale heroines perpetuate their own confinement in the works of Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, and the degree to which these heroines are emancipated in the late twentieth-century works of Angela

Carter. Defined in relation to men and in relation to ideal archetypes of their own gender, female subjectivity is crippled. In Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and American

Ghosts & Old World Wonders, female heroines are offered alternative psychosocial spaces in which to exist. It is this transformation with which this study is concerned.

In early versions of the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale, it is typical for Red to trick

20 the wolf and escape harm thanks to her own wiles and quick-thinking (Zipes 25). When

Charles Perrault crafts his interpretation, and the first literary version, of the tale in 1697,

Red becomes a spoiled, helpless, vulnerable little girl who succumbs to her own sexual desires, manifested in the character of the wolf. The wolf, in opposition to the girl, has typically been characterized, and, in Perrault, identified, as male and the tale is often perceived by critics as a commentary on rape and molestation enacted by men upon vulnerable young women. Although this interpretation of the tale cannot be ignored, I wish to assert a different reading of the wolfs presence in the tale. The tale can be examined as a commentary on female sexuality and its repercussions, and the wolf as a physical manifestation of that sexuality. When the Grimm Brothers published their version of "Little Red Cap" in 1812, there were some significant changes to the text:

for the Grimms the tale was still too cruel, too sexual, and too tragic. They felt it necessary to clean it up for the bourgeois socialization process of the 19th century and adapted it to comply with the emerging Biedermeier or Victorian image of little girls and proper behavior. (Zipes 32)

Although the Grimm Brothers attempted to rewrite Perrault's tales to correlate with the idealized vision of the Victorian girl child, their collection remains ingrained in the patriarchal culture in which it was written and, therefore, offers commentary on many of the same issues with which Perrault grappled but in a more covert fashion.

In the Grimm tale, when Red sets out on her journey, her mother warns her:

"Don't tarry on your way, and don't stray from the path, otherwise you'll fall and break the glass" (Grimms in Zipes 135). The trope of broken glass is common in fairy tales and denotes consummated sexuality, as will be explicated more fully in respect to

"Cinderella." When Red meets the wolf on her way through the forest, she forgets her mother's warning and, instead, engages in a conversation with the wolf. The wolf desires

21 Red but it restrains itself for fear of male authority, characterized by the unseen but daunting group of woodcutters working in the forest. Instead, the wolf cajoles Red into observing her surroundings: "have you seen the pretty flowers which are in the woods?

Why don't you look around you? I believe you haven't noticed how lovely the birds are singing" (Grimms in Zipes 136). Red does look around her and she is seduced by the beauty of nature; she gives into her desire to pick flowers. In fact, Red's flower picking is discussed as an act of extreme appetite and gluttony: "only when she had as many

[flowers] as she could carry, did she continue on her way to her grandmother" (Grimms in Zipes 136). The wolf asks Red "what are you carrying under your apron?" Although this question is meant to imply the question "what's that cake and wine for?" it doubly implies the wolfs curiosity about Red's body, particularly her belly and nether regions which the apron covers. The fact that Red is so eager to tell the wolf (the manifestation of her sexual urges) what it wants to know suggests a degree of self-exploration.

Faced with entering her grandmother's cottage, Perrault's Red is curious and stubborn. She knocks on the door and when the wolf answers "Who's there?" she is said to be "scared" yet she ignores this intuition and enters the cottage nonetheless (Perrault in

Zipes 92). When she enters the house, the wolf directs her to get into bed with it and she unquestioningly undresses. Joan Gould in Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales

Reveal about the Transformations in a Woman (2006), notes that "invisible hair is the sign of repressed sexuality" (12). It is significant and, indeed, symbolic, then, that Red removes her riding hood, thereby releasing her hair and her pent up sexual urges, before she climbs into the wolfs bed. Unlike in the early versions where, upon realization that a wolf lies in wait, Red finds a way to get out of the house untouched, Perrault's Little Red

22 succumbs to her own desire. Little Red, although she is frightened by the wolfs gruff voice, undresses and gets into bed. In this respect, the tale is "a projection of male phantasy" where girls are complicit in their own despoiling (Zipes 31). The wolf, then, is not only a male attacker, but the repressed urges of the adolescent female. Having given into these premature sexual desires, Red suffers death. Death, here, can be read in two ways, both of which illustrate Red's transgression. Firstly, she is sacrificed for her sexual knowledge; secondly, the word "die" was a Renaissance euphemism for orgasm ("Die" in

OED Online). This alternate meaning was prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so it is undeniable that Perrault would have known of the double meaning. The fact that Red experiences orgasm from her encounter with the wolf suggests that she takes pleasure in her transgression. She is described as materially spoiled in the beginning of Perrault's narrative and by the end, she is, physically, spoiled goods.

Red notes a catalogue of the wolfs body parts in the two tales and in the Grimm version, they are altered for decency. In Perrault, Red notices the wolfs arms, legs, ears, eyes and teeth, while the Grimms leave her observations above the waist: ears, eyes, hands, and mouth. Furthermore, the Grimms' Red does not get into bed with the wolf but rather assesses it from the side of the bed when she pulls back the curtains. In the Grimm version, the wolf has disguised itself in Red's grandmother's nightgown, whereas in

Perrault's version, there is no disguise, the wolf is simply lying in the grandmother's bed.

The fact that Perrault's Red gets into bed with the wolf, as has already been discussed, illustrates her complicity in her degradation; the fact that the wolf is not even disguised causes Red to be even more aware of her transgressions and, therefore, more accountable for her actions in Perrault's tale.

23 In some ways, the grandmother is made responsible for Red's vanity and seduction. It is, after all, granny who makes a gift of the red cape:

Much ado has been made about her fetish of the red hood or cap. Clearly [Red's] innocence in the story has been suspect. There is a touch of nonconformity and sexual promiscuity in her character. But whatever her reputation and destiny, she has always been used as a warning to children, particularly girls, a symbol and embodiment of what might happen if they are disobedient and careless. She epitomizes the good girl gone wrong. (Zipes 17)

The red cape is Charles Perrault's invention; in the earliest versions of the tale there is no mention of any particularly symbolic garment (Zipes 33). The girl's red hood aligns her with the wolf through images of sin, seduction and the Devil, himself:

Symbolically linked to the devil, the wolf is a powerful agent, but he was not necessarily used to punish "sinners" in the folk tradition. The wolf was crucial in archaic thinking as a representative of the human wild side, of wilderness. He was more a hazard of nature linked to sorcery and part of organic nature. (Zipes

33)

Little Red is defined by her riding hood and, therefore, her complicity in her seduction, her embrace of her own wild nature. For Perrault, female vanity and sexuality are issues that need to be resolved. Red's dark fate illustrates the extent to which Perrault fears and despises self-aware women. It is impossible that Red escapes her fate in Perrault's tale because his own seventeenth-century social consciousness dictates that women are submissive while men are in control and any woman overstepping her boundaries must be reconciled with her actions.

As Jack Zipes notes in The Trials of Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood

(1993), "Salvation comes only in the form of a male patriarch who patrols the woods and controls the unruly forces of nature—both inner and outer" in the Grimm version of the tale (36). The hunter, a symbol of male governance, immediately recognizes the beast, both wolf and sexualized girl, and must dispose of it. It is in this final episode of the

24 Grimms' tale where the wolf is most equated with monstrous femininity and expressed female sexuality. The hunter performs, for all intents and purposes, a Caesarean section on the wolf:

he took a shearing knife and slit the wolfs belly open, and after he made a couple of cuts, he saw the glowing red cap, and, after a few more cuts, the girl jumped out and cried: "Oh, how frightened I was! It was so dark in the wolfs body." And then the grandmother came out alive. (Grimms in Zipes 137)

After its body is filled with stones, the wolf dies, virtually, in childbirth. Red and her grandmother are saved from the darkness by the reason and intelligence of the male patriarch. Significantly, after she is reborn, it is Red, herself, who fetches the stones for the wolfs belly; it is evident that her rescue by the hunter makes her understand that she must repress or 'weigh down' her desires before they devour her. Not only does their rescue negate any sort of self-empowerment (like in the traditional tales where Red saves herself), but it reinstates the cycle of female subjugation. Whether dead or reformed, the child at the end of the "Little Red Riding Hood" tales is absorbed back into acceptable feminine spaces.

In the same year that Perrault published "Little Red Riding Hood," he published his version of "Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper" (1697). Like "Little Red Riding

Hood," "Cinderella" follows a young girl's journey to womanhood. Instead of a wolf as the illustration of the monstrous woman, "Cinderella" has an evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters to embody the most-despised feminine qualities. Cinderella is the ideal virtuous, victimized, vindicated heroine. Immediately, there is a binary established: the stepmother is "the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen" and her daughters were "exactly like her in all things" (Perrault in Lang 64). Cinderella, by comparison, is "of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from

25 her mother, who was the best creature in the world" (64). This same dynamic exists in the Grimm version of the tale, "Ashenputtel" (1812), where the heroine's mother is replaced with a monstrous stepmother.

The heroines in both tales are presented as hyperbolic versions of the angel in the house, truly domestic. She takes care of the house and keeps things in running order:

"[Cinderella's stepmother] employed her in the meanest work of the house. She scoured the dishes, tables, etc., and cleaned madam's chamber, and those of misses, her daughters" (Perrault in Lang 64). Furthermore, Cinderella's living quarters are shut off from the rest of the family, making her a servant in her own house. Like a good girl,

Cinderella "bore it all patiently, and dared not tell her father, who would have scolded her; for his wife governed him entirely" (64). This silent suffering is a glorified trait of the good wife/daughter, while the governance that the new wife holds over her husband is seen as monstrous.

Perrault's tale is primarily concerned with Cinderella's attendance at the Royal

Ball. Conversely, the Grimms give a great deal of background information for

Ashenputtel's domestic situation and it is in this section of the narrative that the Grimms confer so much symbolic meaning on the mother-figure. Perrault simply has a fairy godmother appear and grant Cinderella's wish to attend the ball; the Grimms are not so simplistic. Unlike the fine clothes, pearls and jewels that her stepsisters receive,

Ashenputtel receives a hazel branch from her father when he returns from a fair, which she plants on her mother's grave. She waters the branch with her tears and it grows into a tree on which a little white bird resides and grants her wishes (Grimms in Lucas 191).

The mother, here, is an entirely organic symbol and naturalizes Ashenputtel's character.

26 The hazel-tree is often associated with fertility and growth, two traits that Ashenputtel must embrace as she matures (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 476). This symbolism is clearly contrasted with the stepmother:

Beyond the level of a gingerbread-house witch, she is the Terrible Mother herself, the black side of nature kept hidden from our daytime consciousness, who spawns the earth's children and is responsible for keeping them coming, only to swallow them back into her belly again. Or, looking at nature in a more favorable light, she is the force that pushes the pubertal girl out of her snug childhood home and into the trackless forest, where she will either die or find a mate and reproduce— nature doesn't much care which, so long as the species survives. (Gould 13)

Both mother and stepmother, then, are versions of the same, which illustrates the positive nature of the mother and the wickedness of the stepmother who displaces Ashenputtel, the epitome of virtue, from her rightful place in the household.

Fairy tales typically equate beauty with virtue and it is immediately established that Cinderella is a "hundred times more beautiful" than her stepsisters (Perrault in Lang

64). Her beauty is innate and she possesses modesty. Unlike her stepsisters, Cinderella does not possess a mirror. The full-length looking glasses that her stepsisters own give them a sense of self-awareness and individual entitlement which is a negative quality for a young woman to have. The "good" girls in fairy tales do not possess this individualization which leaves them meek and naive. The sisters' self-awareness leads to vanity, one of the most often criticized sins of womanhood. Instead of vanity, Cinderella possesses charity and goodness, despite her hardships. When the sisters are preparing for the ball, Cinderella "even offered her services to fix their hair [...] Anyone but Cinderella would have fixed their hair awry, but she was very good, and dressed them perfectly well" (Perrault in Lang 66).

27 Unlike Cinderella, Ashenputtel does not offer her help in preparing her sisters for the ball; instead, she is ordered by her stepsisters to comb their hair and she cries through the whole task (Grimms in Lucas 192). This episode illustrates that Ashenputtel is not an otherworldly specimen of virtue, but a naturally chaste woman who internalizes her own notions of virtue and lives by her own moral compass. As opposed to Cinderella who is directed to be home by midnight, Ashenputtel takes it upon herself to impose a personal curfew which illustrates her modesty and her restraint. Despite the fact that the Prince tries to follow her home, she manages to evade him three nights in a row. The fact that

Ashenputtel denies the Prince's advances illustrates that she, herself, is unwilling to sacrifice her chastity. Ashenputtel attends the ball three nights in a row, in three different dresses, progressing in magnificence as the nights go on. Joan Gould argues that

"Cinderella" is a story no more than six pages long in which the heroine changes her clothes nine times, each time an outer manifestation of what's going on inside her. In fairy tales as in life, a change of clothing or house is never trivial. It's an external sign of transformation, which is one of the chief themes of this work. (Gould xxiv)

Gould asserts that Ashenputtel's story is one of feminine transformation in which the

Prince must see her in her rags in order that she earn her right to be a Princess. Despite the fact that she changes back into her rags, the transformation that has occurred inside

Ashenputtel is irreversible.

On the third night of the King's Ball, Ashenputtel's slippers are "all of gold," the colour that often appears in fairy tales when the Princess has reached the pinnacle of her transformation (Grimms in Lucas 194). Female feet and the glass/gold slipper are infused with sexual symbolism:

A tiny receptacle into which some part of the body can slip and fit tightly can be seen as a symbol of the vagina. Something that is brittle and must not be

28 stretched because it would break reminds us of the hymen; and something that is easily lost at the end of the ball when one's lover tries to keep his hold on his beloved seems an appropriate image for virginity, particularly when the male sets a trap—the pitch on the stairs—to catch her. Cinderella's running away from this situation could be seen as her effort to protect her virginity. (Bettelheim 265)

The ritual fitting of the shoe has undeniable sexual connotations. Ashenputtel's stepsisters manage to trick the Prince into believing that they are the rightful brides.

Their feet are mutilated to make the slipper fit. As they ride off with the Prince, each stepsister trails blood. Because they force the slipper on themselves, the act of sheathing and deflowering is taken away from the Prince and, therefore, the stepsisters become symbols of sexually assertive women. The stepmother, by forcing the sisters to brutalize themselves, is equally representative of a sexualized, wicked woman. Ashenputtel, conversely, slides the slipper on in the presence of the Prince and does not have to manipulate herself in any way for the slipper to fit. Not only does a woman need to be a virgin at marriage (illustrated by the blood in the slipper) but she must be chaste and virtuous in character, which is the reason that Ashenputtel triumphs over her sisters. In

Jewish wedding ceremonies, the groom breaks a glass underfoot to denote that the marriage is official and to be consummated. The fitting of the shoe, then, is a marriage proposal much like the threat of breaking the glass in "Little Red Riding Hood" suggests that the girl's virginity may be compromised. Cinderella has proven her virtue and, therefore, she is ready to embrace her role as wife.

Perhaps most important is the brutality with which the wicked are punished in the

Grimm version of the tale. The stepmother forces her own daughters to disfigure themselves to win the Prince. All too willing to win this prize falsely, the stepdaughters are punished for all of their harsh actions toward Ashenputtel:

29 On the day of the wedding, the two false sisters came and wanted to curry favour with the bride, and take part in her good fortune. As the bridal party was going to the church, the eldest was on the right side, the youngest on the left, and the doves picked out one of the eyes of each of them. Afterwards, when they were coming out of the church, the elder was on the left, the younger on the right, and the doves picked out the other eye of each of them. (Grimms in Lucas 195-96)

Where Perrault praises excessive virtue, the Grimms clearly value harsh punishments for excessive wickedness. Through punishment, the monstrous females of "Ashenputtel" are reminded of their departure from appropriate feminine space and are relegated to the mutilated womanhood of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," which was discussed in the introduction of this study as an instance of patriarchal control over the female body and the space in which she exists.

The Grimms' "Snowdrop" (1812), more commonly known as the "Snow-White" tale, is another tale which is overtly concerned with the interactions of its female characters, illustrated through the dichotomy between angelic Snowdrop and her monstrous stepmother. The tale begins with a mother's wish for a child and she gives birth to "a daughter whose hair was black as ebony, while her cheeks were red as blood and her skin was as white as snow" (Grimms in Lucas 161); ebony, blood and snow are naturally-occurring elements and posit the child, Snowdrop, as a pure, vital girl in the same way that Ashenputtel's connection with the hazel tree illustrates the organic nature of her existence. Furthermore, the triad of colours present in the description of Snowdrop is indicative of the theme of sexuality in the tale:

it is as Snow White's mother pricks her finger that she conceives (both literally and figuratively) of a girl. Thus, pricked fingers as well as thorns represent feminine bleeding in connection with potential fertility. Which suggests that three blood drops match the three bleedings punctuating a woman's destiny at puberty, defloration, and birth giving. (Vaz da Silva 245)

30 While red denotes sexual maturity, white symbolizes purity and innocence. Black represents enchantment and death (247).

As often occurs in fairy tales, Snowdrop's mother dies and, a year later, the child's father remarries. Snowdrop's stepmother is described as "a handsome woman, but proud and overbearing, and she could not endure that anyone should surpass her in beauty" (Grimms in Lucas 161). As in "Cinderella," where the stepsisters' looking- glasses promote vanity, Snowdrop's stepmother is obsessed with the image of beauty in her looking-glass. She continually seeks reassurance that she is "fairest of them all"

(161). Not only does this recurring mirror motif signify vanity and self-awareness unbecoming in a woman, it puts the stepmother in direct contest with the beautiful child,

Snowdrop: "female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other" (Gilbert & Gubar 38). When, one day, the Queen asks the mirror who is the fairest in the land, the glass replies "Queen, thou art fairest here, I hold,/ But Snowdrop is fairer a thousandfold" (Grimms in Lucas 162). At this reply, the Queen "turned green and yellow with jealousy" and "pride and envy grew in her heart like a weed" (162). The

Queen cannot accept that she has been surpassed in beauty. Unable to suppress her jealousy and vanity, the Queen orders her huntsman to take Snowdrop into the woods, kill her, and return with the "lungs and liver as tokens" (Grimms in Lucas 162). The huntsman, despite his orders, is unable to kill Snowdrop and, instead, tells her to run into the forest. Before he returns to the castle, he kills a fawn, taking its lungs and liver. The

Queen orders these items to be cooked and she proceeds to eat them, thinking that she is consuming Snowdrop's life and, thereby, her beauty, youth and innocence:

31 Details in fairy tales are never accidental. The liver is an organ filled with blood, which formerly was thought to be the site not only of life but of the soul, in much the same way that we now regard the heart. In ancient forms of prophecy, the liver of a sacrificed animal was read for omens of the future, since it was thought to embody messages from the gods. Lungs provide the body with air, the breath of life, which the Greeks and the Romans considered to be the substance of our souls. (Gould 14)

It is clear that the Queen, by consuming what she believes to be Snowdrop, attempts to regain the qualities that she has lost with age. Joan Gould suggests that the reason that the huntsman cannot kill the child is that he is a stand-in for Snowdrop's father: "Like many men married to hot-tempered women, the father may pose as a servant subject to orders, a huntsman who puts meat on the table like the good provider he's meant to be, but nonetheless a servant unprepared to argue with the Queen" (19). He must obey this wicked Queen's orders, but he cannot kill his child; in this way, he plays a similar part to

Cinderella's father who is powerless against his overbearing wife. This control over men is one of the wickedest qualities that these stepmothers possess.

It is at this point in the story where Snowdrop is forced out into the forest on her own so that her pivotal transformation can occur. Joan Gould argues that this moment is entirely indicative of the role that the wicked Queen/mother plays in the text:

It's the Mother Goddess in her dark aspect, devoted to fertility and death but caring nothing about personal happiness, who forces the girl to grow up. If the wicked stepmother is vain, that proves how sexual she is. If her heart heaves with envy, that's because she embodies growth, and growth leads to withering and old age. Forcing her stepdaughter out of her childhood home and into the wilderness, she oppresses the girl, but at the same time she starts her on the path to consciousness. The example she sets is one of implacable strength, but it's the solitary, furious strength of the procreating mothers, who are capable of murder, not the harnessed and adaptable strength of the wife-mother-homemaker who casts her lot with her husband. (20)

32 Snowdrop needs to grow into this implacable strength, but Gould is correct when she suggests that the kind of strength that the Queen possesses is not the kind of strength that

Snowdrop, as the wife-mother-homemaker-future queen, needs to learn; rather, faith, chastity, loyalty, and self control are the areas in which the girl needs to develop strength.

Aside from being beautiful, Snowdrop has inherent moral qualities that make her representative of the angelic woman. When she stumbles upon the dwarves' cottage, she finds a clean abode with seven place settings at the table and "as Snowdrop was very hungry and thirsty she ate a little bread and vegetable from each plate and drank a little wine from each cup, for she did not want to eat up the whole of one portion" (Grimms in

Lucas 163). Her moderation reflects restraint and self-control, as well as her conscience and feeling toward the people who she assumes will come home expecting their meal.

Before Snowdrop goes to sleep, she says prayers, illustrating her virtue and piety.

Snowdrop is both physically and spiritually innocent. These prayers connect her with her dead mother whose goodness and faith she must emulate in order to embrace her future role as angel in the house.

When the dwarves return from their work in the mines, they find Snowdrop asleep in the seventh bed and agree to let her live with them if she agrees to "cook, make the beds, wash, sew and knit, and keep everything neat and clean" (Grimms in Lucas 165).

Snowdrop agrees wholeheartedly; this sense of duty and responsibility to the household and its head(s) is a necessary skill that Snowdrop must perfect if she is to be a good wife, and indeed a good woman, in the future.

Snowdrop, then, is on her way to developing into a woman. The wicked Queen makes three attempts on Snowdrop's life while the girl lives with the dwarves. In her

33 first attempt, the Queen laces Snowdrop's corset too tight. It is evident that the corset is seen to be an expression of male domination, forcing females to manipulate their bodies to the social ideal: "a severe, wasp-like waist. The more tightly laced her corset was, the more virtuous she was thought to be" (Bardey ][5). It is clear, then, that the Queen's actions simply exacerbate Snowdrop's virtue. As a symbol of elegance and class, the corset incident would seem to suggest Snowdrop's future position as Queen. What the

Queen attempts to wield as a weapon, is actually a symbol of the virtue that Snowdrop possesses and further exaggerates the binary between the two.

On her second attempt, the Queen uses a poison comb as a weapon. The wicked

Queen tempts Snowdrop with vanity by combing her hair, but according to Jean

Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (1996), "the teeth of the comb stood for the rays of heavenly light penetrating into the person's being through the crown of the head" (225). The spirit of Snowdrop's mother and the blossoming good qualities in Snowdrop, herself, have a part in sparing her from succumbing to the death that the comb is intended to inflict.

On her third and final attempt at taking Snowdrop's life, the Queen presents the girl with a poisoned apple. Snowdrop chokes on the apple and falls down dead. The apple, as a symbol of knowledge, is an important one to the tale. There is a sense in the narrative that the girl is not ready to acquire the ultimate knowledge of femininity: "Snow

White's body has begun to change by the time her story is under way— we know this from the violence of her stepmother's reactions to her beauty— but her self-awareness hasn't taken into account the biological upheaval starting to take place inside her" (Gould

5). Because the Queen attempts to thrust this forbidden knowledge on Snowdrop too

34 soon, the girl must succumb to a period of darkness. When the dwarves arrive home, this time they cannot wake the girl because, as Bruno Bettelheim suggests, this period of latency is necessary in her development into a sexually mature woman who is ready for the Prince when he arrives: "experiencing sexuality too soon, the story warns, can lead to nothing good. But when it is followed by a prolonged period of inertia, then the girl can recuperate fully from her premature and hence destructive experiences with sexuality"

(213).

After mourning for the girl for three days, the dwarves are still unable to bury her, so they "had a transparent glass coffin made so that she could be seen from every side, laid her inside and wrote her name on it in letters of gold, and that she was a King's daughter" (Grimms in Lucas 169). The dwarves preserve Snowdrop as an art object and it is as an object that the Prince first sees her. Immediately taken with the girl's beauty, the Prince says to the dwarves "Let me have the coffin; I will give you whatever you like for it" (Grimms in Lucas 169). The dwarves refuse to take money for the girl/coffin, so the Prince suggests "[...] give it to me as a gift, for I cannot live without Snowdrop to gaze upon; and I will honour and reverence it as my dearest treasure" (Grimms in Lucas

169-170). The Prince desires to own Snowdrop, symbolized by his reiteration of the pronoun 'it' in reference to the conflated entity of Snowdrop and the coffin. As luck would have it, when the Prince gets his servants to carry the coffin they trip over some brush and drop the coffin, which dislodges the apple, and Snowdrop wakes up. Her first question is "Where am I?" (170). The Prince's reply, "You are with me" (170), suggests that his presence in her life is natural and that waking up, literally, beside him is to be her destiny.

35 The two are married and Snowdrop gains her rightful place as woman and Queen.

The old Queen, content that Snowdrop is dead, consults her mirror for the final time regarding her beauty. When the mirror replies that the younger Queen is fairer than she, the old Queen desires to gaze on this new Queen: "when she came in she recognized

Snowdrop and stood stock still with fear and terror. But iron slippers were heated over the fire and were soon brought in with tongs and put before her. And she had to step into the red-hot shoes and dance till she fell down dead" (Grimms in Lucas 170). Like

Ashenputtel's stepsisters who have their eyes pecked out, Snowdrop's stepmother is punished for her wickedness and is reduced to a spectacle.

The moral standards suggested for women and girls in the Perrault and Grimm fairy tales were not left unchallenged. In 1979, English novelist/journalist Angela Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a collection of short prose pieces based on Charles

Perrault and the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales, adding her voice to those of Anne Sexton,

Vicki Shanamary, and Joan Vinge in a tradition of rewriting folk tales from a feminist perspective. The female characters in Carter's tales disband from the traditionally- accepted path of female maturation and are not confined to the strict angel/monster binary provided by the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault in their tales: "the heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism" (The Bloody Chamber [BC] xii). In the collection, Carter offers three different versions of the "Red Riding Hood" tale and "The Snow Child," a short retelling of "Snowdrop." In her posthumously-published collection of prose, American

Ghosts & Old World Wonders (1993), Carter constructs a three-part narrative, "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost," which offers a new version of "Cinderella." Within these tales,

36 Carter illustrates the active desires and potential for corruption in female heroines. One of the ways that Carter offers a new version of these tales is by placing her heroines at the peak of sexual maturity, as opposed to the children of the original tales. Most of the tales in Carter's collections deal with girls who have just started to menstruate and to develop the physical body of a woman. The quest for sexual identity, then, exists in tandem with a set of natural physical transformations. Carter pushes female desire from symbolic to literal in her collections. The erotic overtones of her retellings of classic tales serve to illuminate and rewrite the gender stereotypes that exist within the originals, paralleling the second wave of 1970s feminism where liberty of female sexuality was equated with gender equality.

Patricia Duncker notes, in "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody

Chambers" (1984), that "Fairy tales deal in transformations which subvert the apparently unalterable social realities; magic translates, fragments, inverts, the lower classes are upwardly mobile, official morality is calmly set aside, cunning and deception pay off

(5). Carter's tales are not so much concerned with magic or lifting the lower classes to wealth as they are concerned with biological transformations and the upward mobility of womanhood from a state of passive chastity to aggressive sexuality and the repercussions that these transformations have on the relations between genders in her tales. The traits of "cunning and deception" are not featured as prevalently as are blatant aggression and hunger as catalysts of change. Carter's tales are, themselves, transformations. Her fairy tales are less retellings than reconstructions of classic tropes and characters:

not only do fairy tales provide Carter with a radical content - fundamental and revolutionary - in their sexual and violent manifestations, but they also contest the authorial position, rejecting the romantic and modern authoritative voice in favour

37 of the multiplicity of voices, often female, that have been repressed by the 'official' tellings of Perrault, Grimm, or Disney. (Brooke 67)

Her tales are concerned with rewriting the feminine position as one with infinite potential for corruption.

In Carter's tales, female sexuality is not frowned upon as it is in Perrault's works; rather, much power is awarded to the female heroines through sexual exchange. In her article, "Lyons and Tigers and Wolves—Oh My! Revisionary Fairy Tales in the Work of

Angela Carter" (2004), Patricia Brooke explains the conundrum of Carter's fairy tales:

"While her work does not always successfully disrupt the stereotypes of sexual predator

(active, male culprit) or prey (passive, female victim), it plays with presumptions about, assumptions of, and identifications with either side" (68). For example, in "The Bloody

Chamber," the leading tale of her collection of prose, which is based on Perrault's

"Bluebeard," the Marquis is, without a doubt, the aggressor, and the narrator is the passive virgin whom he "impaled" (BC 17); however, the narrator, while virginal, has "a rare talent for corruption" and her "thin white face" carries with it a "promise of debauchery" (20). All of the heroines in Carter's text show this curiosity and hunger; while the power dynamics are often posed as traditional, Carter re-characterizes what it means to be feminine.

Merja Makinen, in "Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonisation of Feminine Sexuality" (2000), suggests that Carter's text alters the traditional power relationship between male and female to an extent that the work can be considered feminist: "the curiosity of the women protagonists is rewarded (rather than punished) and their sexuality is active (rather than passive or suppressed altogether)" (22). Carter uses three motifs in her tales to subvert typical gender stereotypes: violence, metamorphosis

38 and hunger. These themes are used to afford the female protagonists power where it traditionally would have been held by men, specifically through economic and sexual arrangements: "In all of the tales, not only is femininity constructed as active, sensual, desiring and unruly - but successful sexual transactions are founded on an equality and the transforming powers of recognizing the reciprocal claims of the other" (Makinen 28).

This transfer of power is particularly evident in the wolf trilogy within The Bloody

Chamber. "The Werewolf," "The Company of Wolves," and "Wolf-Alice." The first two tales in the trilogy are more closely associated with the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale than is "Wolf-Alice." "Wolf-Alice" is an amalgamation of a number of fairy tales and other traditional narratives like Charles Dodgson's Alice books.

Although "Wolf-Alice" appears as the third wolf tale in Carter's The Bloody

Chamber, it is important to examine it first here because it deals with perception of self and the process of finding subjectivity. I would argue that this subjectivity is necessary before it is possible for the young women of Carter's other two wolf tales to use their self-awareness to challenge social expectations. "Wolf-Alice" follows the development of a child, Wolf-Alice, who is "not a wolf herself, although suckled by wolves" (BC 119).

Her wolf-mother is shot and killed, leaving Alice to be found and taken in at a nunnery in hopes of being civilized. When she is found, "she is young enough to make the noise that pups do, bubbling, delicious" which makes her young enough to be reconditioned (119).

The nuns are, for the most part, unsuccessful: "she did not feel the cold and it took a long time to wheedle a shift over her head to cover up her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper" (120).

39 Because she is unable to be civilized, Alice is sent to live with a Duke in his mansion. The Duke, like Alice, is feared for his animalistic state of being. The Duke is a werewolf and Alice seems a suitable housemate. The animalistic Duke is described only in terms of his voracious hunger for flesh: "His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things" (BC 120-21).

The reference here to Charles Dodgson's Through the Looking Glass (1871) suggests that the Duke exists only in terms of his primitive desire; self-actualization has not been achieved.

Before she encounters the Duke's mirror, Alice is content in her domestic near- invisibility. She has no interaction with the Duke aside from acting as his housekeeper until the end of the tale: "She sleeps in the soft, warm ashes of the hearth; beds are traps, she will not stay in one. She can perform the few, small tasks to which the nuns trained her, she sweeps up the hairs, vertebrae and phalanges that litter his room into a dustpan, she makes up his bed at sunset, when he leaves it" (BC 121). The tasks that she can perform are associated with traditional female duty so it is not surprising that the nuns, paragons of acceptable femininity, teach her these tasks before anything else. She has no conception of time, sexuality, or even herself until her first menstruation. In all of

Carter's tales, a girl's first menstruation plays a pivotal role in defining her. Along with menstruation comes an awareness of the rhythms of the body and both the lunar and the biological cycles. Wolf-Alice, uninformed about the cycle of the female body, is

"bewildered" by her first menstruation (122). She thinks that the bleeding must be a wound, but she attributes it to another wolf who "while she was sleeping, had subjected

40 her to a series of affectionate nips too gentle to wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin" (122). The sexual component of this imagined experience illustrates the consciousness of sexuality that accompanies menstruation. Alice finds her bleeding shameful but that does not stop her from being fascinated by the physical changes that she associates with menstruation: "She would spend hours examining the new skin that had been bora, it seemed to her, of her bleeding. She would lick her soft upholstery with her long tongue and groom her hair with her fingernails. She examined her new breasts with curiosity" (BC 124).

While looking for rags, she encounters her reflection in the Duke's mirror. At first she believes it to be a second wolf but as she becomes more conscious of the changes of her body, she realizes that "she saw herself within it" (124). One night she finds a dress that the Duke has kept behind the mirror and dons it. Her consciousness is fully realized when "In the mirror, she saw how this white dress made her shine" (125).

In the dress, she wanders out into the moonlight where a group of townspeople are waiting to kill the grave-robbing Duke. When the Duke is injured, she returns with him to the mansion—he, "locked half and half between such strange states" and she, fearful

(126). As he lays in his bed bleeding, she comes to a decision that will catapult her into humanity: "she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity the blood and dirt from his cheeks and forehead" (126). She adopts the mothering role, the traditionally acceptable female role. As she licks him clean, both of their human reflections blossom into the mirror in full. Despite the fact that Wolf-Alice grows up outside of cultural inscriptions, the rhythms of her body restore her to a state of humanity and, indeed, femininity. The transformation is from primitive beast, literally a creature, to self-realized being for both

Alice and the Duke. Carter puts forth some of the same themes in her tale "The

Werewolf which appears first of the three wolf tales in The Bloody Chamber, but she affords the young female character some characteristics that are less than traditional.

This tale has more in common with the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale than does "Wolf-

Alice." Like the Grimm version, Carter's tale begins with a mother's directions. There is, however, a significant addition to the directions: "Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter. [...] Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it" (BC 109).

The fact that the child knows how to use a hunting knife suggests a subset of knowledge that the Grimms' Little Red Cap is not afforded. Carter's heroine is not helpless in the forest; she knows how to protect herself from the wild animals that are certain to be present. She has more in common with the child of the earliest-recorded Red Riding

Hood tales who escapes the wolfs ravenous appetite than the Victorian Little Red Cap.

When the child does encounter a wolf in the forest there are no pretenses of discussion; the wolf goes for her throat and the child takes off its paw with the knife. She even has the foresight to clean her knife and wrap the severed paw in a cloth after the wolf retreats into the forest. She has taken the trophy for her violence. Unlike in traditional tales in which female violence is frowned upon, in Carter's tale the child is praised for her keen instinct, quick reflexes and capability with a knife. She continues on to her grandmother's house unfazed. She finds her grandmother in an awful fever and

42 when the girl retrieves the cloth from her basket to use as a compress, the paw falls to the floor but it is now a human hand: "The child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been" (109).

The neighbors hear a commotion, chase the werewolf out into the yard and stone her to death. The grandmother's animalistic violence, attributed to her being a witch, is inexcusable and she must be sacrificed. Even though the child has been violent, it is out of necessity and she is rewarded for her self-reliance. Margaret Atwood, in "Running with Tigers" (1994), suggests the simplest way that the tale can be interpreted at its conclusion: "Moral: women can be werewolves too. Other moral: to be a 'good child' does not mean you have to be a victim. In the 'cold country', to be a good child is to be a competent child" (129).

In "The Company of Wolves," the penultimate tale in The Bloody Chamber,

Carter offers the most provocative version of femininity of all three wolf tales. Unlike

Wolf-Alice who becomes a mother and the self-preserving child of "The Werewolf," the girl in "The Company of Wolves" possesses an appetite of her own. This tale is the most anti-tradition of the three: "Mercy, pity, peace and love, and especially chastity and motherhood, go out the window; in come ruthlessness, lasciviousness, the separation of sexual pleasure from procreation, and delight in the pain of others" (Atwood 119). While

"Wolf-Alice" is concerned with achieving subjectivity and "The Werewolf is concerned with the different versions of female violence, "The Company of Wolves" is concerned with budding sexual identity.

43 "The Company of Wolves" is most recognizably a reconstruction of the "Little

Red Riding Hood" tale. Before the tale introduces the child who is to be the focus, there is a great deal of time spent on describing the nature of wolves and things of which to be wary because "the wolf may be more than he seems" (BC 111). The tale hinges on a clothing motif. It is noted that "Seven years is a werewolf s natural lifespan but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabouts think it some protection to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf, as if clothes made the man," so "if you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you" (113). Clothes are a marker of humanity in Carter's tales.

Those who wish to appear less beastly are well-dressed, while the more animalistic beings are denoted by a state of dishabille. Thus prefaced, the heroine of the tale is introduced, heading through the woods to her grandmother's house on Christmas Eve:

"She is quite sure the wild beasts cannot harm her although, well-warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses" (BC 113).

A great deal of emphasis is placed on the girl's physical development and the ambiguity of her station; she is virginal but her budding sexuality is evident:

Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman's bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month. She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing. (BC 113-114)

The girl is unspoiled, but her growing breasts, scarlet cheeks, menstruation and fearlessness are all hints that her desires are becoming more prominent.

44 On her journey to her grandmother's house, she meets a young man and allows him to accompany her. She willingly allows herself to be seduced, entering into a bet with the man that if he can reach her grandmother's house through the woods before she arrives by way of the path she will give him a kiss. Her desire is more than evident: "she wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the handsome gentleman would win his wager" (115). When she arrives at her grandmother's house and finds only the man, she knows that she has entered into a dangerous situation but "since fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid" (117). Instead, she slowly disrobes, throwing her clothes upon the fire: "The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh" and she "freely gave the kiss she owed" (BC 118).

The girl is not the victim preparing herself to be sacrificed; rather, she is adopting the aggressive role. His threats of "all the better to eat you with" are idle at this point because she has embraced her sexuality and her appetite (118). Rather than being afraid, her hunger is fueled by his words and she becomes increasingly aggressive: "The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing" (118). Her hurried, violent undressing of the man suggests that she has become the predator. The tale concludes with an unusual visual: "See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf (118). It is evident with the burning of the clothing that both characters are now wolves. She, however, is the alpha at this point. "Tender," here, is an intentionally ambiguous term.

While it can suggest that the wolfs demeanor has been tamed and the relationship between the two is now a gentler version of the typical male-female discourse, the word

45 'tender' is used in regard to meat. It would seem that the wolf has become the meat, the prey, the victim of the girl's monstrous appetite.

Within Carter's collection of fairy tales, binaries are blurred; the categories aggressor/victim, sadist/masochist and predator/prey are intentionally presented as a conundrum. Margaret Atwood states in "Running with Tigers" that "Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times"

(121-22). Carter is unwilling to present her male and female characters in a one- dimensional fashion. Heroes can be passive, heroines can be hungry, and no character is fixed to a single existence; the potential for change is evident and encouraged.

The idea of male and female relations goes through a process of inscription and erasure in "The Snow Child," a two-page story which appears before the wolf trilogy in

The Bloody Chamber. The Snow Child is a manifestation of the Count's phallogocentric phantasies and desires. Unlike the traditional Snowdrop, who is a manifestation of maternal desire, the Snow Child is sustainable neither as an idea nor as an actual girl.

When the Count wishes for the girl, she appears "beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked" (BC 91-92). Her white skin, combined with the fresh snow blanketing the landscape, serves as a contrast for the grey and black horses on which the

Count and Countess are mounted. The Count and Countess appear to subscribe to the patriarchal and cultural stereotypes of wealthy medieval European aristocrats; however, with the appearance of the Snow Child, the male power structure is destabilized. Soman

Chainani states, in "Sadeian Tragedy: The Politics of Content Revision in Angela

Carter's 'Snow Child'" (2003), that Carter's tale "empowers neither the heroine nor the villainess and instead simply depicts the power imbalance of the patriarchal status quo"

46 (219); however, I would suggest that while the male-female power struggle is evident, the more important dynamic in the tale is between the Snow Child and the Countess. The male is actually the most powerless of the three characters. While he holds the highest economic position, it is the Countess who controls the girl's fate. Carter does not intend to focus on the Snow Child's victimization but to illustrate the way that the Countess negotiates her own desires and impulses. The trajectory of this negotiation can be determined through the Countess' interaction with the Snow Child; the Countess demands three separate tasks from the girl which are meant to be the death of her.

The Countess is the more powerful female; she has the capability of movement whereas it is impossible for the child to leave the spot of her creation. Although the

Count lifts her onto his saddle, they do not ride. Instead, the Countess drops her glove in the snow and tells the child to find it, meaning "to gallop off and leave her there" (BC

92). The Count tells his wife that he will buy her new gloves so she is forced to again confront the object of her hatred. In a second attempt to be rid of the girl, she throws a diamond brooch into the pond and tells the girl to retrieve it, hoping that she will freeze or drown; however, the Count, again, foils her plot and keeps the girl saddled. In a third and final attempt to kill the child, the Countess sees a rosebush and demands that the girl pick her a rose, a task that the Count does not recognize as a threat. When the girl plucks the flower, she "pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls" (BC 92). It would seem that the Countess has achieved her goal by eliminating the threat to her power but, instead, the Count jumps from the saddle and rapes the girl's corpse while the Countess watches. The Count's attack is a literalization of the metaphoric rape of the thorn, catalyzed by the Countess. This scene suggests that the Countess is both responsible for

47 the rape and is a voyeur to the sexual act which makes her a willing participant in her rape. Whereas the child represents all that is natural, the Count and Countess represent the monstrous and the uncivilized through his rape. After the Count commits his attack, the child melts, leaving only "a feather a bird might have dropped; a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's kill on the snow; and the rose she had pulled off the bush" (92).

Traditionally a love token, the rose in Carter's tale symbolizes female menstruation, gained knowledge and violent sexuality. When the Count hands the rose to the Countess, she claims that it "bites," and will not take the offering (BC 92). The Countess, unlike the Snow Child, refuses to be abused by the Count or the thorn; instead, she is the abuser.

That the child leaves behind a bloodstain like a fox's kill is significant in tandem with the clothing motif throughout the tale. The Countess is introduced as "wrapped in the glittering pelts of black foxes" which suggests that it is she who is responsible for the girl's destruction, despite the fact that the Count commits the physical assault upon the corpse (BC 91). The fact that the Count remains clothed through the story signifies that he exists essentially in a static state and outside the central conflict of the tale. Whereas

Carter's wolf trilogy uses the burning of throwing of clothing as a catalyst of change from human to wolf or back again, the Count, in "The Snow Child" remains clothed, a static symbol of the patriarchal conventions against which Carter writes. In "The Snow

Child," the transfer of power exists between the Countess and the Snow Child, which is symbolized by the transfer of clothing from the Countess to the girl and back again. With each demand that the Countess makes of the girl, her lush clothing is transferred to the girl, leaving the Countess naked. When the girl picks the rose and falls to the ground, the clothing is, as if by magic, transferred back to the Countess, reinstating her power after

48 she orchestrates the child's death. Clothing, here, acts similarly to in Carter's other tales wherein clothing is equated with civility. With each of the Countess' murderous demands she becomes more monstrous and, therefore, loses her clothing. Although the

Countess realizes the threat in the Count handing her the rose at the finale of the tale, it is an idle threat because the Count is ultimately powerless as a wielder of patriarchal values.

His voice stands in for the patriarchal cajoling of the magic mirror but it is the Countess who orchestrates the action of the tale.

The aggression between females, although catalyzed by the action or inaction of a peripheral male character, becomes the focus of Carter's "Snow Child" and carries through to her "Ashputtle" tale, wherein male characters do not feature prominently, if they are at all present, and the true conflict is between generations of women. "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost" is comprised of three versions of the Cinderella tale: 'The

Mutilated Girls,' 'The Burned Child,' and 'Travelling Clothes.' In "Ashputtle," like in

"The Snow Child," Carter does not focus as entirely on the title-character of the story as she does on the mother-figure:

But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and centre it on the mutilated sisters - indeed, it would be easy to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they wiW. fit in, some sort of circumcision-like ritual chop, nevertheless, the story always begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtle's mother, as though it is really always the story of her mother. {American Ghosts & Old World Wonders [AG] 110).

"Ashputtle" follows a disenfranchised young woman on her journey to womanhood in the face of her stepmother's hostility and with the help of her dead mother's spirit.

The first of the three 'versions' of the tale is a reactionary piece; it retells the story but with extensive facetious commentary and the postulation of questions as to the logic of the original tale. 'The Mutilated Girls' asks why is Ashputtle's father content to allow

49 the stepmother to bully his child? Why does the girl ask for "the fist branch that knocks against her father's hat" (114)? Why is the mother's spirit intent upon her daughter marrying the prince? Carter does not attempt to answer these questions; she simply brings them to light in an effort to problematize the traditional readings of fairy tales.

Carter is at her most confrontational at the end of the tale where she claims that "the story is not complete without the ritual humiliation of the other woman and the mutilation of her daughters" (115). It is here that Carter explicates most avidly the mother-daughter dynamic that the "Cinderella" tale hinges on. Both mothers, Ashputtle's dead mother and her stepmother, are seeking the same end for their daughters and, unlike in the works of

Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, Carter suggests that the mothers are not so different from one another. Ashputtle's mother wishes her daughter to marry the prince as avidly as the stepmother who "wants a son so badly she is prepared to cripple her daughters"

(115). In the original tale, the resolution comes when Cinderella's foot fits the slipper perfectly. Carter is not content with asserting that Ashputtle is naturally perfect, but rather, naturally crippled: "Ashputtle's foot, the size of the bound foot of a Chinese woman, a stump. Almost an amputee already, she put her tiny foot in it" (AG 116).

Biologically being the bearer of small feet, it would seem that Ashputtle's mother is in some way responsible for her daughter's feet being stumps but, because she does not physically mutilate her daughter, she appears less at fault than the stepmother in gaining a son.

Carter asserts that a certain amount of discomfort and mutilation is necessary for a woman to be a good wife:

So now Ashputtle must put her foot into this hideous receptacle, this open wound, still slick and warm as it is, for nothing in any of the many texts of this tale

50 suggests the prince washed the shoe out between fittings [...] if she does not plunge without revulsion into this open wound, she won't be fit to marry. (116)

She successfully completes this task and is restored as the rightful bride but Carter does not afford Ashputtle an entirely happy ending. The tale concludes with the dead mother's words: '"Her foot fits the shoe like a corpse fits the coffin! See how well I look after you, my darling'" (116). To whom the final line of the story is directed is left ambiguous. The mother's ghost has 'looked after' her daughter by ensuring that she marry the prince, but she has 'looked after' her new son-in-law by preventing him from marrying one of the false brides. The final image of the coffin changes the tone of the tale completely. Unlike in the original in which the stepsisters' eyes are pecked out for their sins, it is Ashputtle, herself, in Carter's tale who is a victim of the macabre.

In the second of the three versions of the tale, 'The Burned Child,' the unnamed girl is a victim of her stepmother's hostility but there are some significant changes to the tale. There are no stepsisters; instead, the burned child is in direct competition with the stepmother. Upon her mother's death, the burned child's father "married the woman who used to rake the ashes, and that was why the child lived in the unraked ashes" (AG 117).

The burned child is not, however, simply vying for her father's affection; the stepmother is an adulteress: "there was a man the stepmother wanted and she asked him into the kitchen to get his dinner" (117-118). The child wants the man for herself and embarks on a journey of self-discovery with the help of her mother's spirit. The spirit enters a cow and tells the child to drink the milk so "she drank milk every day, she grew fat, she grew breasts, she grew up" (117). The second incarnation of the mother is a cat who combs the girl's hair. Finally, the spirit enters a bird: "The bird struck its own breast with its beak. Blood poured down on to the burned child under the tree" (118). The blood

51 transforms into a brilliant red dress, but it is symbolic of the girl's first menstruation which accompanies the other physical changes through which she is going. Most importantly in this ritual is the learning process that the girl goes through. Her mother prepares her for "next time" when the girl will have to complete these kinds of tasks without her mother's help (118) and to negotiate the biological cycle of womanhood.

When the girl enters the house, the man is enamored by her appearance and "He gave her a house and money. She did all right" (AG 119). The tale, like the previous one, ends with a pronouncement by the mother's ghost: 'Now I can go to sleep,' said the ghost of the mother. 'Now everything is all right'" (119). She has successfully helped her daughter negotiate the transformation from child to woman, symbolized by the peeling of the scabs and the blood running over the girl's body.

As in "The Company of Wolves," where "clothes made the man" (BC 113), and

"The Snow Child," where clothing symbolizes power, the Ashputtle story hinges on the transformative power of clothing: ball gowns, shoes and jewelry. The third incarnation of the Cinderella tale is "Travelling Clothes." There is, again, an absence of siblings and the girl is victimized by the stepmother alone. In this tale, the daughter's face is burned with a "red-hot poker," an attempt by the stepmother to physically maim the girl (AG

119). The girl cries on her mother's grave and her mother rises to help her daughter.

There is no confrontation between the girl and her stepmother in this third tale; rather, the mother offers an escape. She gives her daughter a red dress and a diamond ring made from "worms from her eyesockets" (119). Her third and final direction is for the girl to step into her coffin: "The girl stepped into the coffin although she thought it would be the death of her. It turned into a coach and horses" (120). The mother tells her child to go

52 and seek her fortune. Unlike the mothers of the previous two versions, this mother does not arrange a marriage for her daughter; rather, the daughter is given the tools to be free of her domestic animosity and to provide a life for herself. Her mother does not direct her to seek a man, but her own fortune. This third version of the tale more fully manages to extract itself from the strict patriarchal values of the works of Perrault and the Grimm

Brothers.

Angela Carter's revisionist fairy tales serve to illustrate the degree to which twentieth-century female writers are willing to emancipate their female characters from the binaries of patriarchal society. Carter's work resists masculine and feminine dichotomies like aggressor/victim, predator/prey and sadist/masochist. Her female characters are free to explore their appetites and violent impulses. This allowance forces the angel/monster binary within female gender stereotyping to be imploded. Violent women are sometimes punished, but Carter argues that there are degrees of punishment conducive to the situation in which the woman exhibits aggression. Carter's women are often resourceful and vocal and her female characters have agency where the traditional heroines do not. Although there are still numerous systems of exchange within Carter's text, they are often non-traditional and allow for an alternate, rather than completely inverted, narrative space. Carter's The Bloody Chamber paves the way for other feminist revisions of classic children's literature and offers a more fluid psychosocial space in which female authors can craft their characters.

53 Chapter Two

54 Before Charles Dodgson released Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the nom-de-plume Lewis Carroll in 1865, literature that was produced for consumption by children was mostly didactic and moralizing. Dodgson's fantasy text confronts the previous examples of children's literature and, indeed, makes a mockery of them

(Knoepflmacher xi). Six years later, when he published Through the Looking Glass

(1871), Dodgson's satirical treatment of didacticism is replaced with an anxiety toward his child heroine's transformation into a woman. The idealization of girlhood that can be found in Dodgson's novels is characteristic of the Victorian period. The Victorians were recreating their idea of childhood as a special and sacred state, thanks to the influence of the Romantics, and it was becoming obvious that the literature that children consumed was changing as quickly. On the first page of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there is a separation between the books that Alice's older sister is reading and the books that are being constructed for the likes of Alice; Alice wonders, "what is the use of a book [...] without pictures or conversations?" (1). Dodgson's two Alice novels are precisely that: pictures and conversations. Unlike didactic and/or adult literature that had previously been prescribed as children's reading, Dodgson's novels introduce a new way to educate children though literature, using what children encounter in everyday life and understand: the visual and the vocal. This technique of writing for children is not harmless on

Dodgson's part; while catering to children's preferences, he subversively prescribes an idealized role to his child protagonist, teaching her a lesson despite the apparent lack of didacticism in the novels.

It is clear from the previous chapter that fairy tales are much more than simply didactic; however, the conventional roles of women and the stereotypical outcomes of the

55 tales are important to remember when reading Dodgson's works. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice reminisces about her own encounters with fairy tales: "When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!" (33). In this passage, Dodgson self-consciously illustrates that Alice is a fictional character, placing her within a concrete genre of literature. He legitimizes the fairy tale traditions and opens the novel up to the question of genre. Dodgson, himself, classified his novels as fairy tales in letters and diaries (Berman 51) but, although his texts influenced fairy tales to come, according to J.R.R. Tolkien in "On Fairy Stories" (1997), any story that uses the "machinery of Dream" cannot rightfully be termed a fairy tale (19). While

Dodgson's tale is not "a fairy-tale proper," it uses the conventions of fairy tales past and he crafts his female protagonist in a similar way to the heroines recorded by Perrault and the Grimm Brothers: a child embarking on the pursuit of ideal womanhood (Henkel 96).

While Tolkien suggests that dream-tales are not fairy tales, sleep plays a significant role in fairy tales as well as in Dodgson's texts: "This fascination with the Sleeping Beauty may seem at first merely cautionary and repressive, suppressing woman's energy and activity in favour of a desirability that emerges only in passive, semiconscious states"

(Auerbach 42). Alice's sleep is not passive; unlike fairy tale heroines whose period of death-like slumber reinscribes femininity, Alice's sleep is the locus of her power and rebellion, by way of her dreams. Dodgson, however, while assuming this fairy tale trope, employs it to illustrate his disapproval of the process of transformation undergone by his girl child-muse. The issues of growth, development and the pursuit of self identity are prevalent within the novels.

56 Mary Cadogan, in her article "Feminine Imagery in the Alice Books" (2003), suggests that girls' educational experiences were much different than boys' in the

Victorian period. Dodgson's satire of the education system for girls in his Alice books elucidates a profound shortcoming in the skills that girls were allowed to learn, especially when it comes to making it possible for girl children to cope in the outside (or underground) world:

most of Alice's first readers were probably still receiving their education from governesses at home. Parents feared that school might engender radical attitudes and immodest behavior, and preferred to keep their daughters at home where their work, play and reading could be supervised. Domestic skills were stressed, and much time was given to training in music, dancing and deportment. In countless well-ordered nurseries throughout the country younger girls were encouraged to play with wax, china, stuffed or wooden dolls which strengthened their images of themselves as potential mothers. (46)

In Dodgson's books, the lessons that Alice has learned prior to tumbling down the rabbit hole serve her no purpose in Wonderland. Whenever a character in Wonderland asks her to recite a song or verse that she should have learned in her lessons, Alice cannot manage to recite anything properly. Dodgson has the pseudo-adult figures in Wonderland chastise Alice for stumbling over the simple task, but readers are meant to sympathize with Alice, wondering why the verses are important in the first place.

Her incorrect use of words and phrases is not an innocent mistake; this

"Malapropish confusion about language" is a typical symptom of girl characters and is meant to suppress the call for women's education (Gilbert & Gubar 58). What is most interesting about Alice's misspeaking, though, is that the words or verses with which she replaces the originals are, more often than not, violent images. Alice's penchant for violence is established early when she assumes that the world into which she has fallen must be the "Antipathies" as opposed to the "Antipodes": '"How funny it'll seem to

57 come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think—'(she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [A W] 4; emphasis in original). Julia

Wright, in '"Which is to be Master': Classifying the Language of Alice's 'Antipathies'"

(1994), suggests that this linguistic error illustrates that Alice is "identifying the space she is about to enter as the site of hostilities and aversions" (303). Violence is one of the issues within the Alice books that most clearly places Alice within the binary of angel/monster. It would seem, on the surface, that Alice is meant to be read in opposition to the Queen of Hearts and her constant cry of "Off with his head," as well as the

Duchess and her poor parenting abilities in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. These two female characters make Alice very uncomfortable with their violent tempers. The first thing that Alice learns about the Duchess is from the White Rabbit's frantic muttering: "Oh! The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! Won't she be savage if I've kept her waiting!" (A JF13-14). While Alice attempts to maintain her composure, she often succumbs to her own violent nature; for instance, in the chapter "The Rabbit Sends in a

Little Bill" Alice does not hesitate to resort to violence: "saying to herself 'This is Bill,' she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next" (AW 37). There are far more instances in which Alice succumbs to her violent nature than resists it.

As the Alice books progress, there are increasingly more episodes where Alice is associated with, instead of presented in opposition to, these violent female characters.

While Alice's involuntary size changes result in anxiety for the other characters, her voluntary violence is more threatening to both the Wonderland creatures and Victorian sensibility. By the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice has embraced her

58 violent nature; rising to her full height over the court of Wonderland creatures, she declares, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" (135). Directly following her words, "the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off (A W136). Her final act in

Wonderland is one of violent temper and self-defense. Jennifer Greer argues, in '"All

Sorts of Pitfalls and Surprises': Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis

Carroll's Alice Books" (2003) that "although [Alice's] final assertion of power shatters the conventional mid-Victorian image of a loving, self-sacrificing girl, it does so by reasserting an ordinary domestic hierarchy in which girls do control inanimate objects such as playing cards" (10). By the end of Dodgson's first Alice novel, the girl is reinstated to her traditional Victorian station, reinforcing that female violence is not acceptable in the 'real' world of Victorian England.

Through the Looking-Glass, Dodgson's seconds/zee installment, discusses

Alice's violence in greater detail. U.C. Knoepflmacher, in Ventures into Childland

(1998), suggests that "Carroll reluctantly approves of this new Alice's decision to become an adult and his approval goes hand in hand with her solicitude for mutilated males" (216). Through the Looking-Glass begins with Alice chastising a kitten for being naughty. She plays at the role of disciplinarian in her own drawing room and when she crawls through the looking-glass she is given full reign to explore this role more completely. Knoepflmacher suggests that the preoccupation in Through the Looking-

Glass with the removal of male heads is indicative of Dodgson's mistrust of grown women (216). One of the instances in which Alice's growing violence in the novel is presented, is the association between her and the "son" in the poem "Jabberwocky."

59 Knoepflmacher asserts that in John Tenniel's illustrations of Through the Looking-Glass, the character depicted as fighting the Jabberwock looks undeniably like Alice, herself.

Alice adopts the role of the headhunter in the poem which makes it evident that her penchant for violence aligns her with the more monstrous females in Dodgson's texts:

"The vorpal sword used to behead the Jabberwock is connected to Alice's appropriation of the King's pencil" at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass (Knoepflmacher

216). Furthermore, Alice is the only character in Wonderland or in the Looking-Glass

World that is ever called "monster." In the chapter titled "The Lion and the Unicorn," the

Unicorn shows contempt for Alice: "he turned round instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust" {Through the Looking-Glass [LG] 256).

When the Lion asks what Alice is, the Unicorn answers that she is a "fabulous monster" and the Lion persists in calling her "Monster" (LG 256, 257).

The direct title that the Unicorn bestows is not the first instance in which Alice's monstrous potential is evident; in Dodgson's first Alice novel, the heroine has a habit of vocalizing inappropriate things. Her social monitor for conversational skills is lacking early in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; in the pool of tears, she cannot help but speak about her cat, Dinah, and its skills as a hunter in front of the Mouse, who interprets her words as a threat. More interesting, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is Alice's encounter with the pigeon in the chapter "Advice from a Caterpillar." As Alice's neck elongates impossibly, she finds her head in the trees. Although Alice is clearly a little girl and the Alice books follow her burgeoning female identity, her story is male-authored and, therefore, there are certain metaphors used in Alice's adventures that are undeniably masculine in nature. The significance to males of growing and shrinking bodies, or body

60 parts at least, cannot be eliminated from the range of symbolism in the text. Alice, in her journey out of childhood, repeatedly finds herself either embarrassingly small or inexplicably elongated, either "shutting up like a telescope" or "opening out like the largest telescope that ever was" (A W 8, 11). The phallic nature of the images is furthered in the Serpent and Pigeon episode: "she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk" (51). Alice is monstrous in this episode because of the masculine nature of her growth and, therefore, the perceived appropriation of masculine values by a female. Furthermore, her serpentine appearance suggests that she is, like

Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, a half-creature:

The imaginative association of women with monstrosity, or that which is conscious but not human, is both a stigma [...] and a celebration of female powers of metamorphosis [...] comedy and terror depend upon the potential interchangeability between woman and creature: to the grotesques of her dreams, Alice seems a still more curious monster. (Auerbach 65)

Her physical monstrosity in this episode is colluded with images of her violent appetite.

As she tries to make her way back through the foliage to her body, a pigeon accosts her, calling her a "snake" {A W 53). The pigeon is afraid that Alice is a serpent who has come to eat its eggs. Alice protests that she is not a serpent but that "little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do" (53). The pigeon concludes that if girls eat eggs "then they're a kind of serpent" (53). As she has illustrated throughout the stories, Alice has a taste for violence which is incongruous to ideal girlhood. Much of this violent imagery is associated with appetite and food ingestion. In fact, most of the female characters in

Dodgson's novels are, in some way, connected with food. Carina Garland, in "Curious

Appetites: Food, Desire, Gender and Subjectivity in Lewis Carroll's Alice Texts" (2008),

61 suggests that the texts are about "the often spiteful attempts of the male author to suppress and control Alice's agency so that Carroll can desire and own her. This control, and the anxieties Carroll has surrounding female sexuality and agency, is expressed by representations of food and appetite" (22). Food is a "terror" in Dodgson's texts; from the "eat me'V'drink me" episodes, to the commentary on the "bread-and-butterfly" living on weak tea, moderation is a virtue when it comes to food (WuUschlager 34; AW 1-9; LG

191).

According to Gilbert and Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1984), there are a number of prevalent images in literature that illustrate female confinement:

Images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles function as social surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors—such patterns recurred throughout this tradition, along with obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia, (xi)

Gilbert and Gubar's theory introduces anorexia as a common theme among female characters. In the Alice books, there is particular attention paid to eating or, more importantly, not eating. Food regulation is indicative of a male fear of the growing female body as a locus of sexuality. Moderation, restraint and sickness are all associated with the act of eating. Victorian corset culture and dieting are evidence of physical ideals imposed on women; manipulation of the body through restriction of food intake is a method of maintaining the physical Victorian ideal and it is an opportunity for a woman in Victorian society to assert control over the only thing that she can: herself (Wolf 198).

In Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal about the Transformations in a Woman (2006), Joan Gould suggests that "moderation with food is a prime virtue in fairy tales" (Gould 27). In this fairy tale tradition, Charles Dodgson's Alice's Adventures

62 in Wonderland is preoccupied with food's transformative power. The cake that Alice sees in Wonderland says "Eat Me" {AW9). When she consumes the cake, she gets larger. When she wishes to be smaller, a bottle appears, with a note that says "Drink Me"

(7). When she drinks, she shrinks. There are interesting connotations with the syrup that allows shrinkage. From the eighteenth century onward, Ipecac syrup was a household commodity, kept in stock in case of accidental poisoning and used to break up mucus and congestion. The properties of Ipecac syrup induce vomiting when ingested. Although used primarily as a poison remedy, Ipecac syrup has been documented to be used in cases of bulimia to induce vomiting ("Ipecac" in Mondofacto). In Inventing Wonderland: the

Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and

A. A. Milne (1995), Jackie Wullschlager acknowledges the discomfort with which

Dodgson treats food in his Alice books:

In the Alice books, food is a terror and an indulgence: a baby is tormented by pepper, the dormouse by a teapot, Alice is almost assaulted by a soup ladle. Tyrants exhibit gastronomic excesses, from the Hatter's T eat what I see' to the Walrus and the Carpenter gobbling up all their oyster companions. Carroll prefers the refined tastes he hoped little girls would have: the sisters who eat only treacle, the bread-and-butterfly living on weak tea. (34)

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is never hungry but eats the cakes and the mushroom because she is told to. Here, then, her appetite is restricted to what the male author feels is appropriate.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice even shows appetite restraint which is becoming in a girl in Dodgson's eyes: "It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but Alice was not going to do that in a hurry" {AW7). In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is often described as hungry but is never given the opportunity to satisfy her appetite. The concentration in Through the Looking-Glass on Alice's appetite is evidence to the fact

63 that Dodgson perceives maturing girls as more prone to appetite than are children and that this desire must be forcefully denied. The best illustration of the impossibility of satisfaction in the Looking-Glass World is the White Queen's philosophy: "the rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day" {LG 216). By this rule, there is no hope of ever getting jam and, therefore, never satisfying hunger. Garland's conclusion about food in Dodgson's novels is worth quoting in full:

In the same way that the Queen of Hearts became murderous and reached the pinnacle of her repulsiveness in the final Wonderland scene, during the trial regarding her stolen food in Wonderland, so Alice becomes similarly aggressive and violent during the last Looking Glass scene, at her feast. Alice, despite being told it is impolite to eat food once it has been introduced to her by the two Queens, finds her hunger (which has constantly been either prevented from being satisfied or been satisfied without her feeling any hunger) overwhelms her to the point where she is prepared to kill to eat. This new attitude coincides with her move to Queendom (adulthood) and aligns her with the other fearsome women (the Duchess, The Queen of Hearts, the Red and White Queens). (Garland 36)

To align the violent satisfaction of her hunger with adulthood, suggests that Dodgson's anxiety over food and female agency stems from his fear and dislike of adult women; this opinion is manifested in the character of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, who suggests that "with proper assistance" Alice "might have left off' growing {LG 235).

Despite the fact that Alice does not satisfy her hunger until the end of the second novel, she is always capable of this appetite, another point of anxiety for Dodgson. At the Mad

Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, it is stated that Alice "always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking" {AW76). It is clear, then, that this threat of adult appetite is ever-present. More than by adult women, Dodgson feels betrayed by the immortalized girl child that he creates and her desire to grow up. The agency that Dodgson fears, however, is actually an ineffectual agency. While appearing to occupy the role of monstrous woman, Alice's place as Queen and woman is

64 realistically powerless. John Ruskin's "Of Queen's Gardens" (1865) which is included in his Sesame and Lilies lecture, elucidates the stereotypes of ideal Victorian girlhood and uses the metaphor of Queendom as a confining and unimposing role.

John Ruskin's lecture advocates female education, but suggests that "A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different way. His command of it should be foundational and progressive; hers, general and accomplished for daily and helpful use" (Ruskin \A5). Despite instances where Ruskin states that women should know the same things as men, he relegates the female to the domestic. He states that "the woman's true place and power" is the home

(f 34). He suggests that a woman has a place in the public realm, but it is only using the skills of the domestic: "a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of that" (Ruskin ^[66). He goes on to list a set of characteristics that a good woman must have and emphasizes that all of these traits are best befitting the home. Furthermore, these traits are discussed, primarily, in the context of a woman's relationship with her husband:

She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation; wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side; wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of woman. (Ruskin |34)

Gentleness, modesty and loyalty are not, in fact, skills learned in an educational setting.

Ruskin asserts that by letting girls read books and synthesize these traits for themselves, they will conform to the ideal. He cites Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Dante and

Coventry Patmore as only a few examples of the beneficial depictions of womanhood

65 available to women in fiction. It is necessary to note that there are common depictions of women in all of these source materials.

Women are characterized as "steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose,"

"infallibly faithful [...] incorruptibly just and pure" "with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power [...] dignity and justice" (Ruskin ^11, ^18, %2.0).

Goodness and purity, then, are the most desirable traits of the ideal woman. The emphasis on words such as "infallibly" and "incorruptibly" suggests a degree of constancy that the ideal woman must have in regards to her husband. This constancy is one of the reasons there is a dichotomy of women in literature; the ideal woman is constant in her goodness, while the monstrous woman is incomparably inconstant, ruled by whim and often given to manic bouts of temper. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Alice, while possessing some of the ideal qualities of girlhood, often gives in to her temper which, as has been discussed, aligns her with monstrous female characters like the Queen of Hearts who usurps her husband's power and the Duchess who is the paragon of poor motherhood. Alice's tendencies toward violence become more pronounced as she travels across the chessboard looking-glass world, symbolically ages and is crowned Queen Alice.

The theme of growth and development is treated with progressively more anxiety and malice as the Alice books unfold. Most of Alice's control over situations in

Wonderland is based on her size in relation to the other characters who she perceives to be adult figures. Alice's cartoon-like growing and shrinking offers a hyperbolic representation of her feelings of power within certain situations. The first time that Alice grows incredibly tall, she begins to cry, but quickly chastises herself: '"You ought to be

66 ashamed of yourself [...] a great girl like you [...] to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!'" (A W12). The second time that she sprouts up, she grows much bigger than the White Rabbit and the narrator notes that "she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of it" {A W 34). Courage is equated with size and, thereby, adulthood. As a growing girl, one of the themes that inevitably informs her narrative is motherhood, another state in which a woman grows and shrinks. Mary Cadogan, in her article on feminine imagery in Dodgson's work, argues that, while motherhood is a central motif, there are not many positive visions of motherhood in Dodgson's Alice novels:

Motherhood, of course, lies at the core of images of femininity in both everyday and imaginative worlds. However, in the Alice books there are distortions rather than reflections of the classic portrayals of maternity. In Alice's Adventures the Duchess, when singing the 'Speak roughly' burlesque, violently shakes her baby at the end of every line and tosses him up and down [...] Only Dinah, Alice's cat, who has matured into motherhood by the beginning of Looking-Glass seems to be cast in the accepted maternal role, as shown by her meticulous washing and grooming of her kitten. (52)

Alice, herself, is uncomfortable with motherhood. She cannot properly nurse the

Duchess' baby and, so, abandons it; when she encounters a playful puppy she is more afraid of it than interested in nurturing it. Most importantly, no one pays any notice to

Alice's attempts at motherhood in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In Through the

Looking-Glass, questions of domesticity and motherhood are more explicit in regards to

Alice's successful transformation from an insignificant pawn to a Queen worthy of a crown. In the chapter "Queen Alice," in which Alice is crowned, the Red Queen asks her

"Can you answer useful questions?" and proceeds to ask: "How is bread made?" "Do you know Languages?" "What is the cause of lightning?" {LG 287-288). Laura Mooneyham

67 White discusses, in her article "Domestic Queen, Queenly Domestic" (2007), that these questions are useful only in the sense that they deal with stereotypical female issues:

All these 'useful questions' concern either housewifery, female accomplishments, or pregnancy (the question about the cause of lightning might seem a meteorological question, but 'lightening' is also what happens in the last months of pregnancy as the baby drops more deeply into the pelvis to prepare for birth—a subject on which Victoria, with her eight full-term pregnancies, was a very unwilling expert). (123)

The Queens are testing Alice's femininity to see if she is worthy of being crowned and taking on the role of woman instead of child. Like Ruskin argues, being Queenly encompasses conforming to ideal femininity but does not offer any "real scope for geopolitical rule" (White 112).

Dodgson's discomfort with the issue of Alice becoming an adult is evident as soon as Alice crosses into the looking-glass world. In the garden, the female realm, a

Rose suggests that "you're beginning to fade, you know—and then one can't help one's petals getting a little untidy" (LG 174). Mary Cadogan suggests that "this remark is a prosaic expression of Lewis Carroll's regret that little girls have to grow up" (49). This scene, in which Alice is made aware of the fact that her childhood is "fading," sets the tone for the whole of the text. Alice's pursuit of Queendom is an ambivalent subject in the novel. On one hand, it is a threatening position: "girls who take on queenly attributes become warped by the exercise of authority; they become capable of callousness, violence, egoism, and other autocratic flaws"; on the other hand, Dodgson "shows that a queenship based in domesticity is a queenship without authority" (White 112). This lack of authority is predicted through the Victorian setting of the first chapter of Through the

Looking-Glass. Talking to her kitten, Alice ponders: '"Do you know what to-morrow is,

Kitty?' [...] 'You'd have guessed if you'd been up in the window with me [...] watching

68 the boys getting in sticks for the bonfire" (LG 152-153). The novel is set the day before

Guy Fawkes Day, a symbol of failed regicide and an apt setting for Alice's chessboard journey.

Through the Looking-Glass ends, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with a violent outburst which aligns Alice with the monstrous monarch, the Queen of Hearts; by the end of Looking-Glass, however, Alice transgresses even more seriously than the

Queen of Hearts, whose threats are never carried out. In fact, the Queen of Hearts pales in comparison to Alice in the final scene of Through the Looking-Glass because for all of the Queen of Hearts' idle threats, it is her husband who has the true power to pardon all whom she threatens. Alice has no such mediator and destroys a whole world: "she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor" (LG 301-302).

Earlier in the novel, the Red and White Queens "both 'gang up' on Alice, possibly seeing her, young, pretty and newly crowned, as an unwelcome rival for power and influence whom they must cut down to a suitably small size" but, by pulling the table-cloth out from under them, Alice displays untamable temper and suppresses the other Queens

(Cadogan 58). This episode is rife with fairy tale imagery: the older Queen(s) finding it necessary to remove the threat to her power, the younger woman overthrowing the ineffectual power of the elder and restoring the domestic order. This episode is indicative of the angel/monster binary that Alice is subject to. It is arguable that she does not restore domestic order because her actions are monstrous in temper but, as Mooneyham

White argues, pulling out the table-cloth is "a revolt fitting for a queen without real power or a housewife distraught at her inability to create the 'sweet ordering,

69 arrangement, and decision' Ruskin had claimed as the housewife/queen's particular strength" (124).

Just as the fairy tale heroines of Perrault and the Grimm Brothers are subject to authorial prejudices, Alice is irrevocably confined to Charles Dodgson's mid-Victorian agenda and personal idiosyncrasies. Through images of appetite suppression, violent repercussions for premature development, and ultimately ineffectual displays of temper,

Dodgson reinscribes idealized girlhood in his Alice novels. At the conclusion of Through the Looking-Glass, Dodgson writes that

Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die. Autumn frosts have slain July. Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes. (311)

The sense of loss that the author illustrates over Alice's aging exacerbates his idolization of the ideal girl-child. In the Alice books it is evident that the microcosm of Wonderland which stands in for Victorian England teaches Alice how to negotiate her 'real' world and illustrates the potential that little girls have for corruption. The lesson that Alice must learn in Wonderland is self-control. While the author can prevent the child from engaging in certain activities in the texts, like eating, she must learn to restrain herself from indulging her temper.

Stephanie Bolster's collection of poems, White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998), attempts to rewrite Alice. Her work exists within an extensive tradition of female- authored imitations or parodies of Dodgson's texts. Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow,

Maggie Browne, and Juliana Horatia Ewing all offered subversive parodies of

Wonderland in the late-nineteenth century. While these texts draw attention to

70 Dodgson's stereotypes and respond to his commentary on youth and idealism, Bolster's collection negates restraint and, rather, encourages Alice to free herself from the standards that Dodgson has set for her, not parodying Dodgson's Alice but rewriting her.

Bolster does not limit her scope to the world inside Dodgson's texts; rather, she extensively consults biographies of Dodgson and his child-model Alice Liddell as material for her work. Ultimately, Bolster's work hinges on the idea that Dodgson's story stunts Alice Liddell's development because she is caught in the trap of her namesake. In her text, Bolster examines the effect that this type of confinement would have on Alice Liddell and the result is an extensive commentary on male-female relations, female growth and development, and the search for identity outside of prescribed norms.

Stephanie Bolster's collection of Alice poems is separated into four sections:

"Whose Eyes [in which we look upon Alice's childhood]," "Close Your Eyes and Think of England [in which we consider Alice's adulthood]," "Portraits of Alice, Annotated [in which she is buried and written upon extensively]," and "Hide and Seek [in which Alice discovers the New World and eludes the poet]." The trajectory of the collection implies a linear progression from childhood, through adulthood, and after death—from confinement to freedom. Alice begins the collection as the object of Dodgson's, the poet's and the audience's gaze; by the final poem, she is free from all confinement and, instead, the poet-narrator is the subject of the work. One of the tropes throughout the work that suggests this movement is photography.

Photography is often characterized as an art of obj edification. The act of posing a model and confining her to the frame of a photograph further emphasizes the way that

71 male artists manipulate their female subjects. The artist is free to render the model in any way he sees fit, making her the object of an infinite audience's gaze. John Berger, in

Ways of Seeing (1972), asserts that the photographer selects "that sight from an infinity of other possible sights [...] The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject [...] Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented"

(10). The tension caused by the image outlasting the original is the focus of the first section of Bolster's work in which Dodgson's photographic image of Alice is created and maintained. The vocabulary of photography is used extensively throughout the collection. In an interview with Anne Compton (1999), Bolster discusses the photography motif:

The photograph of [Alice Liddell] as The Beggar Maid has a bizarre, slightly creepy, combination of the sensual and the childlike. Her gaze in [Dodgson's] photographs informed my book. There is a solemnity in some of his photographs of her, and the last photograph that he took of her, when she was an adult, is incredibly dismal. That informed my sense of her unhappiness at having been transformed into a character. Actually, the first photograph I saw of her was one by Julia Margaret Cameron. All of those together formed a composite portrait of her. (187)

It is evident throughout the collection that photography is a means to control and confine women to patriarchal standards. With the presence of Julia Margaret Cameron as photographer and Bolster's female poet-narrator, it becomes clear that women artists are as responsible for prescribing male-authored norms to their female characters; however,

Bolster's aim throughout the collection is to free Alice from artistic gaze entirely and, therefore, emancipate her from the oppression into which Dodgson has written her.

The first poem in the collection, "Dark Room," shows Alice Liddell and Charles

Dodgson waiting for a photograph to develop. The portrait is the famous rendering of

Alice as The Beggar Maid. The narrator of the poem, an observing poet, notes that "Two

72 faces wait above the vat/where Alice will loom little, stopped" (White Stone: The Alice

Poems [WS] 13). The fact that Bolster refers to the photograph as "Alice" suggests that the girl child in the portrait is as developed as Dodgson would like. There is a precise desire for Alice to stop aging altogether and forever remain a child. U.C. Knoepflmacher elucidates Dodgson's attempt at immortalizing Alice Liddell:

The photograph that he placed in a mirror-like oval at the end [of the copy of his novel that he gave to Alice Liddell], however, was that of a girl of seven, and hence exactly the fictional Alice's age. Decorated with the symmetrical festoons that resemble the signs for parentheses as well as the mathematical symbol for infinity, this mirror reflects a face that cannot age. (168)

Dodgson attempts to prevent Alice from aging through text and through portraiture. The first two stanzas of "Dark Room" are especially important in establishing Dodgson's creation of Alice:

We're here, the three of us, lit by one candle. Dodgson's wrist dips into solutions; he nudges a glass plate to make her be there

sooner. Standing on a box, Alice peers down— when will she appear in the slow mirror that is not a mirror? (WS 13)

This "slow mirror" is most specifically the photograph being developed; however,

Dodgson's prose is a sort of mirror that reflects Alice back upon herself as she reads it.

Mirrors function similarly to photographs in the repression of the feminine. Although, on the surface, mirrors show the self and, therefore, offer a sense of self identity and even vanity—neither are favourable traits among women—mirrors are confining. John Berger suggests that "the mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman [...] The real function was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight" (51). In the fairy tales discussed in the first chapter of this

73 study, mirrors are used as a tool to denote those women who are vain in nature; however, being confined to one's own reflection illustrates one's confinement to male-authored stereotypes of the female self. In fairy tales, the vain women, those confined to mirrors, are always punished and brought back within the reign of acceptable femininity. In

Dodgson's own work, Alice confronts her reflection in the Looking-Glass World but she is ultimately confined by Dodgson's gaze within the Looking-Glass World and the agency that she finds there is ineffectual.

In her poem, "Portrait of the Poet, Annotated," Bolster writes of mirrors:

"Corseted, she had/that cello shape—or hourglass, a word/a younger me confused with

'looking-glass'" (^544). Although the childish confusion seems arbitrary, the opposite is true. Both hourglasses and looking-glasses measure time: one by grains of sand, the other by fine lines and wrinkles. The presence of a mirror makes growth and development as undeniable to the self as it is to the surrounding world. The second section of Bolster's text concentrates on Alice's adult life and, appropriately, the section begins with a poem that catalogues her desire. Bolster's poem "In Which Alice Poses for

Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872" is separated into three parts, referencing three portraits:

Cordelia, Pomona and St. Agnes. The 'Cordelia' section asks "What prince will take you now,/mock Queen of an old man's kingdom?" (WS 25). Alice does not, however, know how to escape objectification; she merely wishes to be re-made in another man's image:

Had you not become a still life in his dark room, you would not be here now, waiting for another lens to take you in and make a new self, neither you nor Alice. (WS 25)

74 Alice's desire to be objectified by another man is inscribed and erased in the 'St. Agnes' section of the poem. On the Eve of St. Agnes, girls are supposed to look into a mirror and see the face of the man she is to marry. In Alice's case, her desire is unfulfilled:

"Each morning after, your face/inside a frosted mirror no man glances into" (WS 27).

Instead, the narrator confronts Alice: "Through a hole you see a light, a girl/in white. Is this your dream?/She cannot be the answer" (WS 27). Instead of a man, she sees only herself in the mirror and is, therefore, married to her image. Alice objectifies herself in the way Berger suggests women do by making themselves a "sight" when they gaze into a mirror (51).

One of the greatest tensions in Bolster's work is Alice's attempt to find herself.

There is a refrain throughout the work of phrases like "who are you?" in association with

Alice (WS 20). The moments in the text that explicitly illustrate Alice questioning her identity are at pertinent stages of a woman's life. The first instance of Alice, herself, recognizing her own identity as nondescript aside from her association with Dodgson's novels, occurs in "The Curse, 1863." The poem catalogues the morning of Alice's first menstruation and how this rite of womanhood challenges the identity that has been constructed for her: "she tosses in white sheets./Then at dawn a word, breach'''' (WS 20).

The first menstruation of the virginal heroine in Bolster's work, like Angela Carter's, is the locus of consciousness for women. This biological cycle is a catalyst for the search for subjectivity. The poem notes that menstruation is "merely growing up" but that "the mirror shows her someone else" (WS 20). The word "breach" suggests both a rupture and an infraction or violation and its use in the context of Alice's development implies that her transition to womanhood is a negative experience. Charles Dodgson is specifically

75 mentioned in this poem because it is partly his reaction to this rite of womanhood that shapes Alice's view of it: "Mr. Dodgson, who loves pink cheeks,/doesn't come to take her picture, doesn't/send a note with kisses and a riddle to explain" (WS 20). Dodgson's sudden departure leaves Alice conflicted and wondering, "Alice, who are you now?" (WS

20).

This movement into womanhood results in Alice's first act of defiance. Unlike former occasions when Dodgson would tell her to "Fretend you are the Queen of Hearts, in a huff" Alice becomes destructive in a genuine huff (WS 16):

Thighs pressed to stop her insides coming out, Alice steals off, scrapes her name in Father's marble desktop, knocks ink over his Greek scribbles. She taints Mother's perfume with vinegar, chews loose the stitches of her own best dress, pummels Old Pricks for catching her. (WS 20)

This sudden physical aggression is an outlet for how trapped she feels. Until this point, she has taken Dodgson's love for granted; when it is withdrawn, she misses it. All that she has left are the "droning tales of ordinary/tea-parties and dumb rabbits" that Miss

Prickett has to offer (WS 20). This newfound independence from Dodgson's affections is bittersweet in the early poems in the collection. Alice is left pondering who she is if she can no longer be the girl-child in Dodgson's heart. As the collection progresses this sense of longing turns to resentment. Whereas in the poem "Whose Eyes" Alice is only pretending to be the disgruntled Queen of Hearts, as an adult throughout the rest of the collection, she takes on the Queen's role in truth. The defiance and anger that often flare up in Alice's actions and interactions with others is reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts' unprovoked rage in Dodgson's text. Powerlessness is clearly frustrating for Alice and the

76 Queen, and much of this frustration is a result of being confined to an ineffectual role by the patriarchal system within, and of, fiction.

In "Portrait of Alice as Her Own Universe," there are two different ways that

Alice is rebelling against her confining idolatry. Firstly, this poem comes after two others in the collection titled "Alice as the Poet's Universe" and "Alice as Queen

Victoria's Universe." This third poem illustrates Alice moving beyond her entrapment by focusing on internal subjectivity. The poem begins with the statement "This big, you can't be photographed" (WS 64). There is a sense of freedom in that line that not many of the other early poems in the collection give to Alice. In the poem directly following

"Portrait of Alice as Her Own Universe" there is, again, this sense that Alice is more than her fame suggests. "Still Life" acknowledges "Alice's frantic tardy heart/invisible inside a cage/of lace" but suggests that she cannot be defined by the society which confines her or as the object that they depict:

Alice was never just that taxidermied girl

through Dodgson's lens, that woman's face looming in my dark room. ( WS 65)

The idea that the Alice of Dodgson's fiction is a taxidermied version of Alice, herself, suggests both that she is ultimately passive and that she is confined to her maker's design; however, the use of the word "never" illustrates that from the poet-narrator's perspective, the internal Alice is always present. It may seem as though the girl is only a

"blue-eyed doll" (WS 52) but in actuality she possesses subjectivity. This selfhood being incongruous with passive femininity, though, must be suppressed and internalized.

77 In the collection of poetry, Bolster includes three poems that make explicit reference to mythical and historical figures, all of which aim at illustrating Alice's subjective view of herself: "Portrait of Alice with Persephone," "Portrait of Alice with

Elvis," and "Portrait of Alice with Christopher Robin." One of the most interesting aspects of these three poems, all included in the third section of the collection, is that they are the only three poems in the collection that compare Alice explicitly with another popular figure. Although Alice is not alone in any of the poems—the poet, especially, is always a voyeur—the relationships that she has are often inferred or suggested. The majority of the other poem titles cast Alice "as" something else in metaphor; these three poems are the only poems that connect her with another person, or mythological figure, in order to draw direct comparisons between Alice and others.

Persephone is the embodiment of earth's fertility but she is Queen of the

Underworld. In myth, then, she is the paradigm of natural processes. This dual role is drawn from the Victorian double role of woman as good, fertile mother and the monstrous woman who embodies death and decay. As has been discussed in the context of fairy tales, the angel and the monstrous woman are one and the same. Bolster's Alice illustrates the conflict she feels between her immortalized angelic self and her own aged state. In the poem "In Which the Poet and Alice Are Suddenly Old," Bolster suggests that Alice, and women in general, longs to reconnect with her idealized childhood self once it has been lost. Alice, in the poem, is uncomfortable with her place among the aged, a "bent" woman (WS 36). The poet-narrator claims that "I was young, a hundred years beyond you,/and let myself fall from colour into/monochrome. We're grey from loss of childhood" (WS 36). This idea of colour is important. As has been discussed of

78 fairy tales, colour is symbolic. The fairy tale heroine is most often described in relation to a tri-colour schema whereas the monstrous Queen/mother is monochrome. In the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the three other queens that little Alice is pitted against—the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen and the White Queen—are all characterized by a single colour. In Bolster's poem, Alice herself has become monochrome, longing for her lost childhood. The narrator suggests that Alice "still believe[s] a shutter-click will reunite you/with yourself (WS 36). When the poet tries to take Alice's photograph, however, she leaves the lens cap on and only captures "a blackness absolute" (WS 36).

This blackness is indicative of Alice's position as an old woman. Bolster uses the fact that Alice has been immortalized as a tool to prove that the stunted development to which Alice has succumbed because of her fame as a child has an incredible effect on the way that she perceives herself as an adult. In comparison with Persephone, Bolster suggests that "Persephone is ancient/and Alice long ago became antique/each could pass for sixteen" (WS 45). There is the suggestion here that both are stunted. Bolster draws connections between Persephone's underground—Hell—and Alice's underground realm—Wonderland. Both underworlds have the same effect on the girls: "this battered look—dark crescent moons beneath/the eyes, lips swollen and split at the corners./Dirt in their scalps, at the roots" (WS 45). Bolster is clearly not offering a paradisiacal view of

Wonderland. It is not a place of growth and health; rather, it is a kind of Hell for Alice.

As a child she is free to enter and exit Wonderland; as an adult she is confined to childhood adventures in Wonderland.

79 Confinement is symbolized in similar terms for Alice and Persephone: through images of fruit. Persephone's pomegranate symbolizes both fertility and transgression.

Because the pomegranate is a fruit with so many seeds, it is commonly associated with fertility. Like Cinderella's slipper, Persephone's pomegranate, split open to reveal its offspring, is a vaginal symbol. In Bolster's poem, it is noted that one of the differences between Alice and Persephone can be illuminated by their relation to fruit:

The difference

has to do with the glint tightened around Persephone's finger, the magenta of pomegranate in the creases of her palm and thighs. Alice's thighs are clean. (WS 46)

The pomegranate imagery is clearly sexual. Alice's temptation, unlike Persephone's, is never completed. It is noted that "Alice was accused but innocent,/of course, much too young for such things/as illicitness and seeds" (WS46). Alice is stuck in childhood; she is dirtied only by the soil, not the stain of forbidden fruit. The apple tarts that Alice is tempted with recall not only original sin, but the literary fairy tales that Charles Dodgson must have known, especially "Snowdrop"; however, because Alice does not succumb to temptation and learn from her mistake through a period of death-like slumber, she is unable to negotiate womanhood in the proper way:

Single, we would say of Alice, and yet it's clear she's not, here with the grown woman no mirror will let her forget, whose name echoes destiny. (WS 46)

Alice's stasis, according to Bolster, hinges on the immortalized girl child of fiction who hinders the real Alice's development.

80 In her poem, "Portrait of Alice with Elvis," Bolster again tackles the question of stunted development. Going into the poem with preconceived notions, one would seem to equate Elvis with Charles Dodgson, not Alice. The allegations that Dodgson was a pedophile, or at least, was fascinated by young girls, recalls the fact that Elvis Presley began a romantic relationship with a fourteen-year-old Priscilla when he was twenty-four years old; in Bolster's poem "Aperture, 1856," she claims that Dodgson, too, was twenty- four on his first meeting with Alice Liddell (15). The connection, however, is meant to be made between Alice and Elvis, not between the two men. Both Alice and Elvis are cultural icons who are, according to Bolster, uncomfortable with their fame. As Alice becomes Queen, so Elvis becomes King. Although the titles appear to hold power, they are actually, in both contexts alluded to here, ineffectual roles which confine the characters to stereotypes and social roles that are not necessarily beneficial to them.

Although other poems mention the fame that Dodgson's texts have afforded

Alice, this is the poem that explicitly discusses the cult following that Alice has and the marketable nature of her character:

In rare arguments over fame, he cites the Churches of Elvis, the Vegas tributes, while she mentions the Alice shop in Oxford, the Alice ride at Disneyland. He says more books have been written about him, but she insists hers are of higher caliber, her words are quoted much more often than his. He calls up wax figures, she teapots and tarot cards. Both delight in their limited edition collector's plates. (WS 49)

The merchandizing aspect of these characters' existence cannot help but be tinged with sadness. Bolster's work makes sympathetic characters of both Elvis and Alice.

Catherine Robson, in Men in Wonderland (2001), suggests that the various ways that

81 Alice is portrayed in merchandized society has had a long-lasting effect and, thereby, justifies a modern comparison between her and Elvis:

In all her different and associated forms—underground and through the looking glass, textual and visual, drawn or photographed, as Carroll's brunette or Tenniel's blonde or Disney's prim miss, as the real Alice Liddell, the dean's daughter or the imaginary beggar, in novel, poem, satire, play, film, cartoon, newspaper, magazine, album cover, or song—Alice is the ultimate cultural icon, available for any and every form of manipulation, and as ubiquitous today as in the era of her first appearance. (137)

As a cultural icon, Alice is subjected to the idealizations of all the eras in which her merchandise exists, not only the era in which she, herself, existed.

Although the majority of the poems in the third and fourth sections of Bolster's work concern Alice as an adult, the poems that posit her in direct comparison with another person, whether Persephone, Elvis or Christopher Robin, illustrate a childlike

Alice. It seems like a reversion of character to jump back to a child-self but this characterization allows Bolster to make the point that Alice is, in fact, stuck in a child­ like state because of the immortalized girl child of literature with whom she shares her name.

"Portrait of Alice with Elvis" ends on a sad note: "In sleep/their tear-blotched faces could be anyone's" (WS 50). The grief that Alice feels over her confinement to her merchandized self is continued in "Portrait of Alice with Christopher Robin." As a main character in another immortalized set of children's books, Christopher Robin occupies a similar position to Alice's: both are the sole human characters in a make-believe world of talking animals and all other manner of animate, usually-inanimate, objects; both are defined by their relationships to the characters in the make-believe worlds—Alice in

Wonderland and Christopher Robin in the Hundred Acre Wood.

82 Their discomfort with the roles is made evident in the first two stanzas in the poem in which the girl and boy child are seen in a "winter wood" (WS 51). Alice "walks like old age,/bent under falling snow and the ghost/of her written self while Christopher

Robin "huddles his narrow shoulders" at the base of a tree (WS 51). The moment in the poem when the two characters connect is with the realization that both are "irrevocably stuck" in their fictions (WS 51). Unlike in the Persephone poem where Alice never succumbs to temptation or the Elvis poem in which she recognizes, but is powerless against, the confines of her namesake, the Christopher Robin poem culminates in an act of defiance against her confinement:

To the magic flame he makes with two rubbed sticks she gives her pinafore and white socks, the ribbon from her fallen hair. He fumbles with his buttons, burns his trousers and dirty shirt.

They point to figures in the smoke— lumpen bear, white rabbit, honey pot, teacup. (WS51)

Both children disrobe themselves of their reputations and well-known exteriors. Like in

Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" discussed in the first chapter, the two characters burn their clothing and embrace their wilder natures, freeing themselves from the confines of patriarchal culture. Along with their clothing, their legacies of bears and rabbits go up in smoke. The fire as a cleansing ritual allows the children to be reborn outside of their prescribed beings. The final two lines of the poem illustrate the comfort with which this disrobing takes place: "Naked together, they watch with ash-stung/eyes and neither blink nor shiver" (WS 51). By burning the pieces of themselves that everyone recognizes, Alice and Christopher Robin essentially find true selfhood together in their

83 nakedness. Directly following this poem, the final two poems in the section cast the poet-narrator as the subject of the poem instead of Alice, herself, which suggests that this cleansing ritual has worked, at least temporarily, to destroy the limitations of Dodgson's creation.

Despite this temporary relief there is an overwhelming sense of discomfort with change in the collection. In the poem "Symbolic Logic" it is clear that neither Alice nor

Dodgson embraces Alice's adulthood:

When he published Looking-Glass, Alice was nineteen and wore her hair up; from his last forced portrait she regarded him with sullen adult eyes. (WS 17)

Dodgson has lost his muse and adult-Alice can only be self-conscious of this fact. An interesting detail that Bolster includes in this passage is that Alice's hair is tied up, whereas in "Portrait of Alice with Christopher Robin" she lets her hair down from its ribbon (WS 51). In Victorian symbolism, wearing one's hair down signifies youth while letting one's hair down signifies transgression: "Hair is one of woman's main weapons and therefore the act of its being concealed or displayed, plaited or hanging loose, is often a sign of a woman's availability, surrender or modesty" (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 462).

Rob K. Baum suggests, in "Travesty, Peterhood and the Flight of a Lost Girl" (1998), that "the female Victorian passed from long-haired girlhood through the upswept coiffure of womanhood and on to the concealing cap of the 'old maid'" (83). This type of physical marker for both age and for personality is evident elsewhere in Bolster's text, hi

"Portrait of Alice as Victoria's Universe," Alice is described as "willowy in corsets/abundant hair reined in" (WS 31). There is a degree of conscious restraint in this description that suggests that, early in the text, Alice is conforming to the ideals that

84 Victorian society and Dodgson have set out for her. There is a great deal of concentration on the body and its manipulations in the collection as a means of escape.

As in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, these physical transformations are alluded to with discomfort, despite their eventual promising outcomes.

The overt nature of "The Curse, 1863," is only one way that Bolster tackles the question of growth and development. In "Symbolic Logic," not only is Alice's hair tied up, but "her breasts/the figure of an 8 turned/sideways, rising infinitely slowly" show the progression of her development (WS 17). While a sideways figure 8 symbolizes her breasts, a figure 8 right-side up symbolizes the maturing female body in general.

Dodgson, in the poem, does not accept the biological changes of womanhood and, instead, sees Alice's development as an act of malicious defiance: "she/infected his symbols" (WS 17). The bitterness with which Dodgson treats the maturing female body is echoed in Bolster's work: "And you, Children of Victoria, you cloaked/carved legs of furniture to save yourselves/the bother of the body" (WS 29). The body is, at once, seen as something to be hidden and as the locus of objedification: "Your head would have to go. Be hands/to hold aloft a cup of tea, be waist" (WS 29). To be no more than one's body negates subjectivity and, therefore, the development that Dodgson so feared in his child-muse.

The third section of Bolster's work, however, begins with a poem centered on a significant transformation. "Portrait of Alice as Chrysalis" deals with two of the central issues that can be found in Dodgson's texts: food ingestion and growth. The poems states that "She would never devour; only sip, nibble" (41). This line recalls the idea of the

Victorian angel and the dangers of a female appetite that have been discussed in terms of

85 Dodgson's texts. The growing female body is the representation of over-indulged appetite and Dodgson seeks to suppress both in his heroine: "Tell her story from the caterpillar's/point of view and movement would be/slower, measured in inches" (WS 41).

The poem suggests, however, that while Dodgson has control over his confined protagonist, Alice Liddell is free to change:

[...] a light in the distance. It could be an oncoming train, or sun breaking open a chrysalis, or the end of the tunnel. (WS 41)

Transformation is presented in Bolster's work as a light in an otherwise "vague and stormy" existence (41). Changes for Alice, while often uncomfortable, are necessary for emancipation from Dodgson's authorial confinement.

Alice desires "to be/not Alice but a woman" and yet the markers of womanhood—menstruation and childbirth—are treated with bitterness in Bolster's collection (WS 27). In part, this is because Alice realizes that she does not escape her objectification by becoming a woman; rather, she is more confined to her role as object of male desire. Before childbirth and, therefore sexuality, is explicitly discussed in the collection, there is an interesting moment of connection between photography and sexuality as confining forces for females. In "In Which the Poet's Graduation

Photograph is Taken," the poet-narrator describes the photographic process:

now I've fallen in this burrow lined with badly-painted backdrops, where a man will take me in his choice of poses and will not wholly let me go. (WS28)

The poet's photographic experience mirrors Dodgson's words to Alice during a photo shoot: "There./'You are just right" (WS 16). These passages echo later discomfort

86 between the male and female during the act of procreation. Neither act affords the woman any control over her own body; it seems that they have no choice but to allow themselves to be "taken" at a man's will. In "Close Your Eyes and Think of England" the poet-narrator wonders "Did you follow that advice/while your husband strained for sons?" (WS 35). Alice is merely a receptacle for the male—both her husband and her unborn sons. Perhaps a more explicit objectification through child-bearing is offered in

"Another Son, 1887":

Too late, he's here, you can't shove him back but must go on with this gape where the core of you

should be, black hole, tunnel you want to crawl into. Your innards spewed into a bowl. (WS 32)

There is the tone in this passage that something has invariably been lost with the birth of her son. The negative connotations of sexual relationships and childbirth are evident in the collection and, as markers of maturity, it is not surprising that Alice, stunted as she is, is uncomfortable with these adult endeavors.

Even more uncomfortable than maturity is old age. In "Portrait of Alice as

English Landscape," Bolster discusses Alice's transformation from child to adult to old woman in all of seventeen lines. There are three very concrete descriptions of Alice throughout the poem: "At first you were a verdant/field, your hips slight/as the rise and fall of hills" (WS 63). The young vibrant girl in this passage is much different from the other images in the poem. The natural imagery in each description mirrors the age of the woman in the poem. The rolling hills of youth are contrasted with the adult self: "Soon you swelled/were covered in a tight checkered dress./The landscape divided" (WS 63). It

87 is interesting that growth and division exist in the same sphere of development. As one grows, one must divide herself from childish fantasies. The checkered dress and the landscape in the poem are equated with a chess board. The tactical maneuvers of a chess game are meant to suggest the woman's choice of her adult role. As in Alice's

Adventures in Wonderland where Alice must attempt to separate herself from the negative female characters—the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts—Alice, here, must negotiate her future. As in Dodgson's novels where dream-Alice ultimately succumbs to her role as Queen and becomes the ineffectual ruler, Bolster's Alice ends the collection as an old woman:

By the end you are that crone it's said all women become—wizened and wise. Cracked lake-beds where your eyes were. (WS 63)

This vision of an aged Alice is in direct opposition to Dodgson's idealized youth "rowing under shapely willows with a man three times her size,/who liked her little, who kept her between pages [...]/ kept under glass, scalloped like a fancy cake" (WS 59). Bolster's poetry does not, however, suggest that Alice's age and experience leaves her ineffectual.

Instead, the final poem that features Alice in the collection, "Still Life," concludes with

Alice's escape: "When the camera turned/away, she ran" (WS 66). Alice actively rejects and escapes from her photographic and textual frames. Bolster's collection ends with a defiant image: "this is me, I am: the doorway opened" (WS 69). Whereas Dodgson's

Through the Looking-Glass concludes by mourning the loss of childhood, Bolster's text ends with opportunity and potential. Like Angela Carter's heroines who have the chance to challenge their prescribed norms of womanhood, Bolster's Alice and, by association, her poet-narrator, are freed from the male-authored and/or photographed spaces that they

88 occupy in the beginning of the work. Much like Angela Carter challenges the

"Cinderella" tale in the first section of "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost," Bolster confronts the preconceptions of womanhood and poses questions concerning the motives of male authors. Alice Liddell, Bolster's heroine, at the finale of the collection, is not only freed from Dodgson's character but from the poet-narrator of Bolster's own work, eluding the author's gaze and, ultimately, rewriting a less-threatening space in which her female character can exist. Bolster, herself, is working within Alice's fame in writing her text and her own poet-narrator is confined within her narrative, but her Alice character finds a means of escape. Alice, in Bolster's work, is still defined by her author, but this author, as opposed to Dodgson, is willing to let Alice go at the end of the narrative.

89 Chapter Three

90 J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1911) is a pivotal children's text of the early twentieth century. A great deal of academic work has been produced on Peter Pan's character, the

Pan mythology and its hedonistic implication for Barrie's texts, and the Oedipal structure of the conflict between Pan and Hook. The title character of the tale becomes the voice of youth and boyhood in Edwardian children's fiction. This chapter's focus, however, is on Wendy's role in J.M. Barrie's narrative and the implications of being female in

Edwardian Bloomsbury. The female characters in Barrie's tale, in both play and novel form, occupy a slew of stereotypical roles: mother, daughter, wife, and temptress.

Wendy plays at all of the roles offered to female characters throughout the narrative and, therefore, embodies both the role of angel and monster. Christine Roth, in "Babes in

Boy-Land: J.M. Barrie and the Edwardian Girl" (2006), suggests that "at one end of the spectrum, the girl figures as a corruptible (and corrupting) agent of adult desire and transgression. At the other, she possesses an invulnerable chastity that aligns her with domesticity and a sense of moral duty" (49). Generations of Darling women, then, can expect to struggle with temptation in Neverland in order to find their place on the spectrum between corrupt and ideal. At the conclusion of Barrie's text, Wendy has embraced the role of ideal mother and sends her daughter, Jane, away to Neverland to experience the same domestic training that she, herself, had undergone as a young woman: "destroyed by traditional female activities—cooking, nursing, needling, knotting—which ought to have given them life as they themselves give life to men, the women of this underground harem are obviously buried in (and by) patriarchal definitions of their sexuality" (Gilbert & Gubar 94). This unquestioning perpetuation of the idea that proper women occupy solely domestic roles does not sit well with twenty-first century

91 author Laurie Fox. The Lost Girls, told in first person by Wendy Darling Jr., follows five generations of Darling women and their unhealthy, non-ideal negotiation of their feminine sensibilities. Barrie's text ends with an idealization but Fox's text explores the darker side of Pan's influence on the Darling women. Finding connections is the greatest struggle for Fox's characters. As in the fairy tales discussed in the first chapter of this study, the female dynamic in Fox's text is so influenced by patriarchal standards that what results is bitterness and hostility between women, especially between mothers and daughters. Much of this tension results from the experiences that each of the Darling women have on Pan's island. Whereas in Barrie's text the trip to Neverland helps Wendy to work through her unhealthy pseudo-sexual urges and allows her to embrace her future role as ideal mother, Fox's text shows Neverland to be a detrimental place for nearly all of the female characters that travel there. Instead of offering a route to idealization as it does in Barrie's text, the night-journey in Fox's text emphasizes the stunted development of her female characters. Fox confronts prescribed norms and relationships in an attempt to re-work the one-dimensional intra-gender dynamic in Peter Pan.

J. M. Barrie's narrative opens by characterizing Mrs. Darling as the ideal wife:

"Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him" (PP 8). According to John Ruskin, whose views on ideal womanhood were discussed in the previous chapter, respect for one's husband is, perhaps, the most admirable trait in a wife. It is noted that Mrs. Darling "was married in white," which is meant to illustrate her chastity and virtue {Peter Pan [PP] 8). Barrie continues that "at first [Mrs. Darling] kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out,

92 and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been toting up" (PP 8). Apparently, in women, the instinct to bear children usurps any interest in the world of business. Unlike a man, who can be a professional and a father simultaneously, a woman must choose between the two. Nancy Chodorow, in "Gender personality and the sexual sociology of adult life" (1984), claims that "a boy, in order to feel himself adequately masculine, must distinguish and differentiate himself from others in a way that a girl need not—must categorize himself as someone apart"

(359). Subjectivity, then, is praised in boys who differentiate themselves from the other men in their lives, whereas girls are praised for their emulation of their mothers' ideal qualities. Rob K. Baum, in "Travesty, Peterhood, and the Flight of a Lost Girl" (1998), suggests that "boys are encouraged to play while girls work at homemaking; boys become fathers under duress [...] while girls transform into mothers" (72). Motherhood is presented as a natural biological transformation. For Mrs. Darling, there is never any question that children will be her priority; there is no sign that she resists the urge to replace her bookkeeping with children and it is presented as the natural progression of her and Mr. Darling's relationship. She is idolized and idealized for her unquestioning dedication to maternity.

Mrs. Darling "does not often go out to dinner, preferring when the children are in bed to sit beside them tidying up their minds, just as if they were drawers" {Peter Pan and Other Plays [PPOP] 89). The place that she feels most comfortable is with her children, grounded in the domestic. One of the reasons that she feels so content in the nursery is that she is, at times, characterized as childlike, herself. A stage direction in

Barrie's play has Mrs. Darling "pouting" and it is said that Mr. Darling "knows exactly

93 the right moment to treat a woman as a beloved child" (PPOP 93). Her childlike nature does not, however, prevent her from being the mother; it simply makes her more desirable to a middle-class audience. In fact, Mrs. Darling is so attached to her role as a mother that she does not only nurture her children but her husband. She constantly has to reassure her husband and even has to help him dress for dinner by tying his tie. After Mr.

Darling's juvenile temper tantrum over his not being "coddled," the Darling parents make their exit (PP 31).

When Mrs. Darling leaves the nursery she turns on the nightlights which are symbolic of her presence in the nursery; but, almost immediately after her departure,

"Wendy's light blinked and gave such a yawn that the other two yawned also, and before they could close their mouths all three went out" (PP 35). The mother and daughter are physically separated and the measures that Mrs. Darling leaves behind to watch over her children are extinguished. It is at this moment that Pan enters the nursery. Wendy is awakened by Pan's sobs from the foot of the bed, a maternal response. Wendy wakes as a mother and is almost immediately whisked off to Neverland where she is free to play at the maternal role and its alternatives.

This navigation of numerous female roles is, as has been discussed in the previous chapters, a fairy tale convention. Neverland is a reflection of fairy tale culture, which is evident in its description:

the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. (PP 13)

94 The old lady with a hooked nose is reminiscent of the witches and wicked stepmothers of fairy tale fame. Neverland, then, is established as a place of negative femininity before

Wendy ever meets its inhabitants. It is evident that Wendy's encounter with Neverland's populace will be a lesson in what behaviors to avoid if she is to become the angelic mother figure that she so desires to be.

After her idealized mother, the first woman that Wendy meets in the novel is

Peter's fairy: "It was a girl called Tinker Bell, exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly inclined to embonpoint" (PP 35). Tinker Bell is described as the epitome of female sexuality and desire. French words are used in conjunction with both her and

Hook throughout the novel. This foreign language has two purposes: to display an

English nationalist prejudice against the vices that supposedly run rampant in France; and, to use that idea of vice in order to show Wendy what not to be if she is to become the idealized mother figure. The French embonpoint translates to fatness or rotundity and, in Barrie's play, it is noted that after being in Neverland for some time, Wendy "is slightly different in appearance now, rather rounder, while John and Michael are not quite so round" (PPOP 118). The idea of growth and development links Wendy to an already sexualized woman, Tinker Bell. Throughout Barrie's narrative there is increasingly more anxiety attributed to the maturing female body. In the finale of Barrie's play Wendy expresses to Jane the discomfort that she felt with her growing body as a young woman:

"oh the terror of me sitting waiting for him—for I was another two inches round the waist!" (PPOP 159). Rob K. Baum explicates that growth and time are inextricably linked in Peter Pan: "unlike the boys, who view time as a friendly play-mate, Wendy

95 recognizes time as psychologically and physically distorting—a punishment of growth with its visible betrayal" (Baum 84). This is not to say, however, that the boys are unaware of Wendy's changing shape: "[Wendy] should not have mentioned size, for he has already expressed displeasure at her growth" (PPOP 153). As in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, childhood in Peter Pan is praised. Growth is treated with anxiety, especially by Peter, himself. The fact that Mrs. Darling can only release her kiss to a symbol of perpetual childhood, suggests that she is the epitome of motherhood, giving the whole of herself to her children and the boy who will forever remain a child. Susan

Kissel, in '"But When at Last She Really Came, I Shot Her': Peter Pan and the Drama of

Gender" (1988), suggests that "Mrs. Darling, it seems, cannot give herself to another adult in a totally free way; it is only in her role as mother that she can open up her innermost box and give most deeply of herself to the most gay and heartless child of them all. And so, childishness is encouraged in perpetuity" (39). There is no mention of the body in relation to the ideal mother but the mature female body is a source of fear and displeasure in Barrie's novel in regards to other characters. Tinker Bell, who is described as fully physically developed, is sexualized and posited as the monstrous other in relation to Wendy.

Unlike Wendy, who is a middle-class child, Tinker Bell "is quite a common fairy

[...] she mends the pots and kettles" (PP 44). The fairy is a specimen of the working- class and, therefore, it is not surprising that she is highly sexualized:

promiscuity and prostitution were seen as a 'natural consequence' of an inherited degeneracy in the lower orders [...] The construction portrayed lower-class girls as essentially less innocent than their middle class counterparts—an economically based construction that enabled men to see one girl as worldly and the other as ethereal, based almost solely on markers of class. (Roth 50)

96 Much of this stereotype comes from a study that William Acton conducted on the moral, social, and sanitary aspects of prostitution in a collection of cities in England in the mid- nineteenth century which asserts that the working-class is, by nature, corrupt. Aside from her sexuality, there are other instances that illustrate that Tinker Bell is of a lower class than Wendy: the fairy flits around the nursery "using offensive language," pulling

Wendy's hair (PP 46), and "Tinker Bell hated to be under an obligation to Wendy" (PP

68). Clearly, there is the connotation here that if Wendy were to give in to her desires and become, essentially, like Tinker Bell, she would catalyze a fall from both angelic, idealized daughter to monster and from middle to working class.

Like the evil Queens in fairy tales, "Tink hated [Wendy] with the fierce hatred of a very woman" (PP 70). Wendy is both a class and love rival to Tinker Bell and, therefore, the fairy attempts to dispose of Wendy, telling the Lost Boys that she is a bird that they must shoot down. Tinker Bell is characterized throughout the novel as jealous, vengeful, murderous and coy—all traits of the monstrous woman. Although Wendy and

Tinker Bell both spend their time in the underground home, their physical spaces are entirely different, mirroring the separate psychological spaces that they occupy:

But there was one recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the home by a tiny curtain [...] Tink was very contemptuous of the rest of the house, as indeed was perhaps inevitable; and her chamber, though beautiful, looked rather conceited, having the appearance of a nose permanently turned up. (PP 106)

Tinker Bell's boudoir is a self-indulgent space, flaunting Queen Mab couches and

Charming the Sixth dressers. In her apartment, Tinker Bell even has a mirror, the only one mentioned in the entirety of the novel. The fairy's vanity is contrasted by Wendy's

97 practical domestic space, crowded with beds, bassinets, and piles of laundry that require mending.

The narrator of the novel notes that fairies, like Tinker Bell, are incapable of feeling more than one emotion at a time. This lack of depth suggests that fairies are less- evolved, more primitive creatures. Tinker Bell is, therefore, aligned with another of

Neverland's female characters:

Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. (PP 77-78).

That Tiger Lily is a 'wayward thing,' suggests that she is uncontrollably independent and that she consciously denies the idealizations of girlhood. Like Tinker Bell, Tiger Lily is a coquette and is clearly desirable among the men of the tribe. The fact that she occupies the most dangerous place in the war march suggests that she is fearless and violently able to take care of herself.

The pirates catch Tiger Lily "boarding the pirate ship with a knife in her mouth"

(PP 118) and decide to leave her to her death on Marooner's Rock. Though she faces drowning, she is "too proud to offer a vain resistance" (PP 118). Pride is not an admirable trait in a woman so it is not surprising that she faces a death sentence where later Wendy is offered the chance to be the pirates' mother and keep her life. After a spot of mimicry from Peter Pan, Tiger Lily is freed from her bonds and "at once, like an eel she slid between Starkey's legs into the water" (PP 119). The serpentine imagery accompanying Tiger Lily's escape clearly illustrates that she is both seducible and the seducer. Native women are historically subjected to racial stereotypes of eroticism:

98 The portrayal of the squaw is one of the most degraded, most despised and most dehumanized anywhere in the world. The 'squaw' is the female counterpart to the Indian male 'savage' and as such she has no human face; she is lustful, immoral, unfeeling and dirty. Such grotesque dehumanization has rendered all Native women and girls vulnerable to gross physical, psychological and sexual violence. (LaRocque)

In the text, this stereotype is responsible for Tiger Lily's conflicted female role; she is sexualized by the men of her tribe, but she wards off any physical assault. The Natives in the novel refer to Wendy as "squaw" and she feels betrayed by this term, recognizing that it promotes objectification (PP 140).

Tiger Lily thanks Pan for rescuing her: '"Me Tiger Lily,' that lovely creature would reply. 'Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me not let pirates hurt him.'

She was far too pretty to cringe in this way, but Peter thought it his due" (PP 139). She begins with acknowledging that she has been saved but then immediately offers her protection to Peter against the pirates. She does not occupy the ideal female role of damsel in distress, as opposed to Wendy at the end of the play who exclaims, "Oh,

Michael, stay with me, protect me!" (PPOP 144). Wendy requires protection even by the smallest of the boys whom she is supposed to be mothering. Pan further exemplifies

Tiger Lily's deviance when he claims that "there is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother" (PP 145). The fact that Tiger Lily will fight to the death to prevent marriage to one of her own tribe but is more than willing to court Peter, romantically, further exacerbates the racial stereotype of the 'squaw.' Like Tiger Lily,

Tinker Bell is frustrated by Pan's lack of response to her blatant affections and expresses her usual displeasure: "Silly ass!"; Wendy, for a moment, aligns herself with Tinker Bell and, by association, Tiger Lily: '"I almost agree with her,' Wendy snapped" (PP 146).

The narrator, however, points out how unnatural this role is for Wendy: "Fancy Wendy

99 snapping" (PP 146). She immediately reverts back to the maternal and forgets her devious potential.

Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily are the monstrous women who are in contest with

Wendy. Both of these characters, however, are reined in and subverted within the text.

Their relative silence is indicative of their position within Neverland. Tinker Bell's fairy language, translated only through Peter, and Tiger Lily's limited vocabulary confine these characters to their lowly positions. Another voiceless female presence in the text can be found in the Mermaid's Lagoon. Wendy's fascination with the mermaids is clearly symbolic of her fascination with womanhood. Mermaids can be read as a symbol of transformation: they are half animal and half human. They attempt to transform children to adults through seduction. Mermaids are blatantly sexual and murderous creatures—the ultimate monstrous female:

The mermaids, lounging voluptuously in their lagoon, represent the attractive hedonism denied Wendy in her Victorian household. They are shown both as physical sex objects and as pleasurable subjects of the male gaze. In mythology, mermaids are supremely feminine, both dangerous and seductive. (Crafton 44)

Although Wendy is fascinated by the idea of mermaids when she is safe in the nursery, she does not have such an affinity for them when she meets them in Neverland. She watches them "combing out their hair in a lazy way that quite irritated her" (PP 114).

The narrator suggests that the mermaids are most haunting "at the turn of the moon" but that "Wendy had never seen the lagoon by moonlight, less from fear, for of course Peter would have accompanied her, than because she had strict rules about every one being in bed by seven" (PP 115). Her sense of decorum is affronted by the mermaids and their wild games. Although she plays in the lagoon with the rest of the boys, Wendy avoids the mermaids. The only contact that she has with them is when one attempts to pull her

100 into the lagoon from Marooner's Rock. She manages to narrowly escape immersion into the seductive world of the mermaids in the same way that fairy tale heroines must come in contact with and best temptation.

The theme of a female child's seduction is not only present in fairy tales but in classic Greek myth. One of the traditional myths that Barrie's text borrows its basic structure and themes from is the Demeter-Persephone myth. Like Alice, in Alice's

Adventures in Wonderland, who is transported to an underground world in which she becomes Queen, Wendy's Neverland adventures are influenced by the Greek myth. The

Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells of Persephone's abduction and transport to the

Underworld and Demeter's grief over her loss. A number of the details included in the

Hymn are mirrored in Barrie's text and illuminate the themes of motherhood, femininity and temptation. Andrew Radford suggests, in his text The Lost Girls: Demeter-

Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850-1930 (2007), that "the Demeter-

Persephone myth, with its unnerving images of abduction, random violence, wrath, and rape, was considered suitably 'bright' material for the moral edification of mid-Victorian children" (19). One of the reasons that Hymn may have been accessible to children is that Persephone, herself, is associated with childhood. In the myth, she is referred to as

Kore which means 'maiden.' This title places her in the traditional mother/maiden hierarchy. Because she is named 'maiden,' it is clear that her importance in the myth is her negotiation of feminine roles. As has been discussed in previous chapters, the successful development from maiden to mother is at the core of fairy tales and literature written for children, especially fiction labeled as girls' books. The development from maiden to mother is often rife with temptation which must be experienced and suppressed

101 in order for the female child to take her place in the realm of idealizations. Rob K. Baum suggests that, "summoned at the eve of her 'awakening' from the childhood nursery,

Wendy acts out a (male) fantasy of motherhood, abduction and rape" (80). Along with these female-specific themes, any story "about an adolescent woman growing up must acknowledge the question of physical and emotional maturity, if only as a telling omission" (Crafton 46). That is to say, there is the assumption in the text that menstruation is a growing concern for Wendy as a marker of the transition from girlhood to womanhood. At the time of sexual maturity, Wendy is transported to Neverland in the same way that Persephone is transported to Hell.

Persephone is not simply seduced to the Underworld; her father is complicit in her abduction: "She was given away by Zeus, the loud-thunderer, the one who sees far and wide" {Hymn 11. 3-5). Barrie adopts this theme in the fact that Mr. Darling is more than willing to have his children grow up and leave the nursery for the adult world. It is Mrs.

Darling who wishes to forestall adulthood, much like it is Demeter who mourns the loss of her daughter. Mr. Darling is most likely the catalyst for the dinner date between him and his wife which removes them from the house and he takes Nana out of the nursery and ties her in the backyard, removing both of the mature women from the house. It can be assumed that the Darlings' servant, Liza, is still in the house when Wendy and her brothers fly away to Neverland but she is not considered a mature woman in the sense that is Mrs. Darling and Nana. In the nursery scene at the beginning of Barrie's text

Wendy is equated with Liza—Liza puts Mr. Darling's medicine on his bureau and

Wendy retrieves it: "the faithful Liza had found it [his medicine], and put it back on his wash-stand. 'I know where it is, father,' Wendy cried, always glad to be of service" (PP

102 28). Similarly, Persephone is away from her mother when she is seduced away to the

Underworld. Radford suggests that "the fact that mother and daughter are separated at the time of abduction implies that Persephone is moving towards maturity and independence from her mother" (22).

Thanks to Mr. Darling's actions, Wendy is left as the only Darling woman in the house and she is open to temptation. Seduction comes in a very similar form in both the myth and Barrie's text. Hymn depicts Persephone's temptation: "[Persephone] was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands/to take hold of the pretty plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her" (11.

15-16). The pretty plaything that Persephone reaches for is a narcissus. The plant is the key to the trapdoor into the Underworld. Persephone is seduced by the flower but is transported to the Underworld most unwillingly: "[Hades] seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot,/And drove away as she wept. She cried with a piercing voice"

(11. 19-20). It is here that Barrie alters the myth for his own commentary on women and their monstrous femininity. Wendy is, likewise, seduced by a narcissus, but not the flower; Peter Pan, whose only concern is for himself and his wonderfulness, has a

Narcissus-like personality. In Greek myth, Narcissus was the son of Leiriope and was renowned for his beauty at birth. It was said that "when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers of both sexes; for he had a stubborn pride in his own beauty" (Graves 267). Narcissus sends a sword to Ameinius (his most persistent suitor) with which Ameinius kills himself, asking the gods for vengeance.

Artemis hears Ameinius' pleas and makes Narcissus fall in love. While walking through the forest, Narcissus stops at a lake to drink and sees his own reflection, immediately

103 falling in love with his face. Not being able to leave the sight of his reflection, he pines away, finally killing himself with a dagger. Where his blood was spilled, a white narcissus flower sprouted. Peter Pan's self absorption and pride is reminiscent of

Narcissus. His unwillingness to be touched by other people and his selfishness both doom him to a life in which he is ultimately alone with only his own crowing as company. Unlike Persephone though, Wendy is more than willing to be transported to

Neverland and is complicit in her seduction.

Persephone does, however, eventually find some benefits in the Underworld.

Hades offers Persephone a seemingly good life in the Underworld if she should choose to stay with him:

If you are here, you will be queen of everything that lives and moves about, and you will have the greatest timai [honour] in the company of the immortals. Those who violate dike [justice] - will get punishment for all days to come —those who do not supplicate your menos [power] with sacrifice, performing the rituals in a reverent way, executing perfectly the offerings that are due. (11.364-369)

Hades offers Persephone Queendom. As was discussed in the previous chapters, 'Queen' and 'mother' are often interchangeable terms in fairy tales and children's literature. As

Persephone is offered the throne, Wendy is made mother of the Lost Boys, a role that she may fulfill as long as she remains in Neverland. Just as Hades offers Persephone a pomegranate in a sly attempt to prevent her returning to the world from which she came,

Pan flies back to Bloomsbury and closes the nursery window, hoping that it will persuade

Wendy to remain in Neverland. In both texts, however, the abductor is unable to contain the daughter entirely: "[Zeus] assented that [Demeter's] daughter, every time the season came round,/would spend a third portion of the year in the realms of dark mist

104 underneath,/and the other two thirds in the company of her mother and the other immortals" (11. 445-447). Persephone spends one third of the year in the Underworld.

Similarly, Wendy's mother permits her to spend one week of the year in Neverland for spring cleaning. Mary Lefkowitz, in Women in Greek Myth (1986), suggests that "it is this reunion of mother and child, with the promise of its renewal each year, that marks the climax of the poem [...] Demeter gets Persephone back, though she is not quite the same

Persephone, and only for a portion of the year" (50). Like Persephone is both Queen and daughter, occupying both roles because of her dual spatial habitations, Wendy is mother in Neverland and daughter in Bloomsbury. At the finale of Barrie's text, Wendy has experienced both roles and, therefore, has returned to the nursery changed, physically and psychologically.

What is most important to this study is this trajectory of Wendy's development from nursery to Neverland and back again because her growth illustrates a successful navigation of stereotypes, idealizations and norms. The first time that Wendy appears in

Barrie's text, she and her brother are playing at being new parents. The stage directions, when John pretends to hand her a baby, illustrate the degree to which Wendy is already prescribing to the maternal role: "Wendy gives way to ecstasy" {PPOP 89). There is a discussion between John and Wendy, when pretending to be parents, about the difference between finding out whether your new child is a boy or girl. To Wendy there is no difference; she is happy to have a child at all. For John, the difference is paramount.

Wendy informs him that his 'child' is a girl and he responds with "Tuts," understood as a distasteful remark {PPOP 90). When she says that his next 'child' is a boy, the stage

105 directions prompt that "John beams" (PPOP 90). Her ecstasy over her maternal role is clearly developing prior to her experience with Peter Pan.

Before she is ever actually transported to Neverland, she dreams of the island. In her dream, she is "in a house of leaves deftly sewn together" and has "a pet wolf forsaken by its parents" (PP 14). Even in her own dreams, Wendy finds comfort in the domestic world of the maternal. Her fantasy allows her to play at motherhood first to an orphaned wolf and, when she finally traverses the sky to Neverland, a pack of orphaned boys. It is not enough, however, to have Wendy simply accept her maternal role; she must be tested and tempted. When she resists temptation she will be ready to fully embrace her ideal womanhood.

Like Snowdrop's apple and Little Red Riding Hood's wolf, Peter Pan is an object of temptation for Wendy; she must negotiate this desire properly and grow up to be a respectable mother. This temptation is a ritual for generations of women, as illustrated by the encounters of Jane and Margaret with Peter in the final chapter of the novel and the afterword of the play. Women must encounter this temptation but must successfully repress it if they are to obtain and maintain their role as angelic woman. Wendy is, indeed, angelic: "In introducing herself, Wendy not only calls upon the power of one middle name, Angela, which conjures up all the domestic power of the 'angel of the house,' but also her second middle name, Moira, a derivative of Mary, possessed of all the iconic power of the Virgin Mother" (Morse 297). Wendy's first encounter with Peter

Pan is one of domesticity; she sews Pan's shadow on then wonders if she should have ironed it too. She exalts in the fact that she has this knowledge and insight while Pan does not (PP 39). When she finds him crying over his lost shadow, she claims "I will

106 sew it on for you, my little man" (PPOP 98). This scene mirrors the earlier scene in the nursery in which Mrs. Darling successfully ties Mr. Darling's tie around his neck, thereby shifting the maternal focus from Mrs. Darling to Wendy who will become the mother for the greater part of the text.

Wendy does not simply agree to go to Neverland, she is seduced: "'Wendy,' he continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, 'Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.' Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not very many inches, and she peeped out of the bedclothes" (PP 40). Just as Hades persuades Persephone to return to the Underworld with promises of power and the reverence of her subjects, Pan seduces Wendy with the promise of admiration: "He had become frightfully cunning. 'Wendy,' he said, 'how we should all respect you'" (PP 48).

Pan caters to Wendy's desire not only to be respected but to nurture. He capitalizes on her predisposition toward the domestic in order to seduce her. He does not promise her freedom from the domestic but absolute rule over the domestic: "'Wendy,' he said, the sly one, 'you could tuck us in at night.' 'Oo!' 'None of us has ever been tucked in at night.' 'Oo,' and her arms went out to him. 'And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us. None of us has any pockets.' How could she resist?" (PP 49). Although her role in Neverland will be a domestic one, there is a hint of escapism in her adventure:

'"Don't go, Peter,' she entreated, 'I know such lots of stories.' Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him" (PP 47). The narrator's commentary here suggests that Wendy's monstrous possibilities are evident before she has even left the nursery.

107 In Barrie's texts, it is noted that "[Wendy] made herself rather cheap by inclining her face towards [Peter]" (PP 41) and on occasion "she holds out her mouth to Peter, but he knows they cannot do that" (PPOP 124). Wendy's eagerness for Pan's kiss, a stand-in for her budding sexuality, is frowned upon. Her desire must be tempered; her voyage to

Pan's island illustrates the numerous things that offend her middle-class sensibility and, therefore, do not coincide with her future role as mother. Wendy has her moments in

Neverland when she contemplates the alternatives to idealized motherhood: '"Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied.' Her face beamed when she exclaimed this" (PP 107). The fact that Wendy is envious of spinsters, women who are not confined to the roles of wife and mother, illustrates that she is uncomfortable with her domestic existence. That she 'beams' at the thought of being free of domestic duty, suggests that the patriarchal idealizations of womanhood are confining. Rather than give in to her corruptibility and become an abandoned little creature, though, Wendy holds onto her role as mother as tightly as she can. She distinguishes herself as different from every other being on the island. Because she is the only mother on the island and she is not like any of the other female characters, it can be assumed that the qualities that the other women have are not motherly and, therefore, not desirable to emulate.

As the surrogate mother for the Lost Boys, Wendy aspires to provide them with the care that their own mothers did, or could, not. Wendy, instead, emulates her own idealized mother and forsakes any interest in outside world adventures and remains in the home, mending and cleaning. Wendy's time in Neverland prepares her for the world to which she will return. Her relationship with Pan is, perhaps, most indicative of her transformation. Pan asserts his dominance when he first shows up to whisk Wendy away

108 "and she told him with spirit that he was not captain in her house" (PP 46). She has this reaction in Bloomsbury before her Neverland adventure but after some time on the island where she defines herself against the non-ideal women she has a change of heart: she

"was far too loyal a housewife to listen to any complaints against father. 'Father knows best,' she always said" (PP 140). Her impulses, then, are suppressed and she is even closer to being ready to go back to Bloomsbury and accept her role as idealized daughter who will grow up to be the idealized mother. Her transformation is complete when she and the boys are kidnapped by the pirates:

No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the boys there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling, but all that she saw was that the ship had not been scrubbed for years. There was not a port-hole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written with your fingers, 'Dirty pig'; and she had already written it on several. But as the boys gathered round her she had no thought, of course, save for them. (PP 190-191)

Wendy's only thoughts are for the cleanliness of the ship and the wellbeing of the children, illustrating how intrinsically her maternal role has been grafted to her personality.

At this point in the story, though, Wendy begins to let the maternal role fall into the background. She begins to act more as a child, preparing her for her journey back to the nursery. Before the boys walk the plank, she offers these parting words: "At this moment Wendy was grand. 'These are my last words, dear boys,' she said firmly. 'I feel that I have a message to you from your real mothers, and it is this: "We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen'"" (PP 191). She evokes the boys' real mothers as she reverts back to her child-self. Her role as mother is clearly over when she loses her ability to protect the boys: "Wendy, of course, had stood by taking no part in the fight, though watching Peter with glistening eyes" (PP 209). She relies on Peter and the boys

109 to protect her, asking Michael to stay with her. She is silent for the rest of her time in

Neverland and the journey back to Bloomsbury.

When Wendy, her brothers and the Lost Boys, sans Peter Pan, return to the

Darling nursery, it is under the pretence that Mrs. Darling not Wendy will mother them all. She relinquishes maternal power to the rightful mother figure as it is not Wendy's time to be a parent—she is still the idealized girl though she is now fully equipped to transform, when the time is right, into an apt mother and wife: "Wendy fails to properly educate and socialize Peter—her female prerogative and mission" (Baum 77). Her failure forces her to return to the nursery, like Alice returns to the drawing room in

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

In the afterward to Barrie's play, Wendy is now an adult woman with a child of her own. She makes an entrance that embodies the traditional Victorian wife and mother:

"she sails forward to the fire in an excessively matronly manner. She comes straight to audience, points out to them with pride her long skirt and that her hair is up" {PPOP

157). The text ends on the note that Wendy's trip to Neverland, and all its symbolic implications of growth and development, will be relived, she hopes, through her daughter, granddaughter, and many generations to come:

This is how I planned it if he ever came back. Every Spring Cleaning, except when he forgets, I'll let Jane fly away with him to the darling Never Never Land, and when she grows up I will hope she will have a little daughter, who will fly away with him in turn—and in this way I may go on for ever and ever, dear Nana, so long as children are young and innocent. {PPOP 163)

Although this final sentiment is meant to perpetuate the hope of maintaining childlike wonder, it also illustrates women's complicity in "maintaining the legend of male

110 superiority" (Baum 75). Mrs. Darling, and Wendy after her, is more than willing to allow her daughter to return to Neverland on a yearly basis to perform all the duties of a wife.

In her novel The Lost Girls (2004), Laurie Fox attempts to rewrite what constitutes useful knowledge and emancipate her Darling women from the confines of domestic duty. Fox's text exists within a plethora of retellings of Barrie's narrative.

Authors such as Gilbert Adair, J.E. Somma and Karen Wallace all offered late-twentieth century novels inspired by Barrie's text. These texts are often preoccupied with Pan's ability to cope with the changing world outside of Neverland from which he gathers children. Fox, however, heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and feminism, offers a glimpse into the lives of the Darling women and the toll that their journeys to and from

Neverland take on them. Joan Hoffman, in '"She Loves with Love that Cannot Tire':

The Image of the Angel in the House across Cultures and across Time" (2007), argues that female authors like Fox attempt to dissociate themselves from their patriarchal forbearers:

some authors, mainly but not exclusively women, have subverted antiquated plot structures, opened up their endings in counter-traditional ways, and given their female characters less angelic demeanors, more alternatives, and a stronger voice with which they articulate their own destinies and champion their own authenticity. (266)

Whereas in Barrie's text women who do not possess the Edwardian ideals of femininity are presented as monstrous, Fox destabilizes the idea of monstrosity and embraces women's less-ideal qualities. Furthermore, while growth and development are feared and despised in Peter Pan, these qualities are praised in Fox's novel. Just as Stephanie

Bolster elucidates the way that Dodgson's anxiety over Alice's growth affects her subjectivity, Fox explores the generations of women that follow Wendy Darling and the

111 degree to which their development is stunted by the perpetual stereotyping of feminine behavior.

In Fox's text, the Darling girls are between the ages of thirteen and fifteen when

Peter enters their lives. Unlike Barrie's child-Wendy, the young women in Fox's novel meet Peter at puberty; their journey to Neverland is a more explicit allegory of sexual awakening and maturation. As in Angela Carter's fairy tales and Stephanie Bolster's poetry, in Fox's novel the girls' first menstruation marks the point of initiation into womanhood. Aware of their own changing bodies, the Darling girls note the sexual tension that is evoked through their first bedroom meeting with Pan. This desire is most evident in the various descriptions of Peter throughout the text. Wendy Darling-

Braverman, the great-granddaughter of Barrie's Wendy Darling, describes her first encounter with J.M. Barrie's eternal boy:

And there he was: the figment, the scalawag, the dreamboat [...] His hair was a shambles; a forerunner of Ziggy Stardust or Bob Marley, it boasted both spikes and braids. His arms were caked with cobwebs and dirt, and old crumbs of chocolate framed his downturned mouth. His tears, mixed up with the dirt and crumbs, were grimy, too, and his outfit—distressed button-fly Levi's of unknown vintage and a Fruit of the Loom tee—was undeniably modern. The tee bore the faces of Manny, Moe, and Jack—the Pep Boys—and made me laugh out loud. Nothing on his person was green. (Fox 22)

Pan has clearly learned a few fashion lessons from listening to stories on windowsills in twenty-first century society. Although it is anticipated by the later generations of the

Darling women (their mothers and grandmothers prepare them for their Neverland journey), their first meeting with Peter always begins with him at the foot of the bed crying, even if he hasn't lost his shadow. This ritual awakening appears in tandem with the first menstruation, illustrating the cyclical nature of women's development. As in

Barrie's text, all of the girls wake from their sleep as a woman, albeit evoking different

112 versions of womanhood. Wendy Jr. is skeptical and keeps reiterating that she must be dreaming; this reaction is significantly different to the welcome that Peter receives from

Wendy Jr.'s mother: "Margaret—never one to miss an opportunity to be clever— dispensed with tradition and blurted out, 'Hey gorgeous!' Then she waltzed circles round

Peter, showing off her see-through nightie, and watched his eyes pop out of his head like a cartoon cat" (Fox 15).

Aside from being a time of sexual development and exploration, adolescence is a time of burgeoning self-awareness. Barrie's Wendy, who is still in the nursery and, therefore, confined to mimicking her mother as a means of acting out her femininity, is far different from Fox's Wendy Jr. who is overwhelmingly aware of the changes that her body is undergoing:

I resembled the elongated Alice in Wonderland, the Alice who outgrew her little house [...] I rarely went to bed without consuming at least three Fig Newtons and downing a full glass of chocolate milk. For a chaser, I'd swallow a handful of Sweet Tarts—sleeping pills in my book—and nibble on cheddar cheese. Food couldn't hurt me, I reasoned. Not like boys who don't show up on schedule. (Fox 20)

Her emotional distress at Pan's tardiness is comforted by food. That Fox evokes binge eating, comfort food and Alice in Wonderland all in a five-line passage shows that she is engaging in the cultural preoccupation with food and its repercussions on the female body. Concerns of the female body are rampant in Fox's text, especially the instances of sexual arousal.

When Pan meets Wendy Jr. for the first time, there is clear sexual tension: "He bent over to get a better look at me and I blushed" (Fox 23). Her blush vocalizes female desire in a way that Barrie's text could not, given the fact that Wendy is still a child and to impose blatant sexuality on a child in the Edwardian period would be an egregious

113 error of judgment. Given Fox's characters' teenage curiosity, there are more explicit references to Pan's seductive talents and the effect that they have on the Darling women:

"Now sprawled impishly across my bedspread, he gazed up at me and, not quite against my will, something akin to warmth flushed my cheeks" (Fox 25). Neverland is a place where sexuality can be explored. Margaret's experience is one of playful discovery and flirtation. When Wendy Jr. asks if the Lost Boys remember Margaret, one replies,

"Princess Margaret? Yeah, some of the blokes had mad pashes on her. Me, I don't know the bird. But I hear good things. I hear she's tasty" (Fox 41). Later, in Neverland, Wendy

Jr. finds a rock and "the letters M+P were carved into the stone, a schoolgirlish heart circling the sentiment" (Fox 118). Margaret's interaction with the boys in Neverland is far more sensual than the Neverland relationships crafted in Barrie's text:

Sometimes I would watch Margaret from afar, as she bumped and grinded against the Boys in a slinky dance she must have picked up from the Americans. I watched as she kissed the more developed boys, using moves I've never seen. She was always laughing gaily but a little shrilly, and I suppose she was the picture of contentment, if young women are ever content. (Fox 263-264)

The physical connection that Margaret is allowed with the boys is anomalous. Margaret is content with using her beauty and teasing the boys, whereas Wendy Jr. wants the desire she feels to be returned to her.

When Wendy Jr. gets to Neverland, she realizes that she can be the object of sexuality but she cannot wield it. She discusses an incident between her and Pan:

"Before I could comment on the boy's revolting love affair with himself, he stuck a banana in my mouth—one freshly plucked off the tree to our left. He fed it to me slowly, and it was delicious" (Fox 58). For Wendy Jr. this is a sexual encounter of sorts;

114 however, she is sorely disappointed if she thinks that she can have more from Pan than he is willing to give:

'It's just, I need to remind you about tickling me. And putting your hand on my mouth.' 'Yes?' 'Don't' 'What?' I asked. 'I said, don't ever touch me again. I am not to be touched.' (Fox 60)

Wendy Jr. is frustrated by the one-sided relationship that she finds in Neverland. She discusses a time where she and Peter engaged in heavy petting and then admits that she imagined the whole thing; her desires are rebuked and unrequited. Pan knows how to use himself to seduce women but cannot capitalize on that desire. Instead of fulfillment,

Neverland offers Wendy Jr. frustration: "My dreams are full of people I used to know.

Lovely and unlovely people. A man who kissed me against my will and a flying boy who refused to kiss me. Well, he gave me buttons and called them kisses. Isn't that clever?"

(Fox 83). Her encounters with Hook and Pan linger with her and colour the way that she interprets events in her life after she has grown up.

As in Barrie's text, Wendy Jr. is not the only girl on the island that exudes some manner of sexuality. She discusses her relationship with fairies "who seem to have appropriated the worst qualities of my sex and made a go of it" (Fox 121). Although the fairies do not play a very significant role in Fox's text, there is one that assumes the role that Tinker Bell plays in Barrie's text:

I was assaulted by a pest no larger than Great-Nana's cocktail ring. And just as gaudy. It (she?) appeared to be swathed in a silver-sequined bathing suit that was positively blinding in the glossy sunlight. Mummy always said that a little Bob Mackie goes a long way. 'Wendy, meet Cher,' Peter announced with swollen pride. (Fox 123)

115 Cher is a fan of designer swimsuits and the gleam of sequins which is reminiscent of

Tinker Bell's extravagant boudoir. Fairies are characterized as shallow, jealous and vengeful creatures. Cher's introduction is the only mention of fairies in the text; they merely act as passing exemplars of women's wiles that Wendy Jr. encounters in

Neverland.

Wendy Jr. has more experience with the world of mermaids in Fox's text. She actually slips into the water with the mermaids and is mistaken by a sailor for one of the sirens. Wendy Jr. does not join the ranks of the mermaids and, so, does not give into her desires, but she does come to an interesting conclusion about the mermaids: "They don't read and they're not that self-aware or emotionally complex. It's intuition that keeps them afloat [...] True, they have a gift for seduction—but should they have to apologize for their beauty?" (Fox 125-26). Wendy sympathizes with the mermaids, or at least understands that the label of monstrosity is placed upon them by men. Unlike in Barrie's text, where the Neverland women show Wendy different versions of womanhood, Fox's text suggests that these stereotypes are all dependent on women's proximity to men:

So what did I learn from all this? That women are bad, or mad? That sensuousness hurts others? God, no. I learned that women tend to overwhelm men; men simply can't handle our presence, it is that rich. I learned that we should stand back a few feet to let men breathe. Of course, we can't. It is our nature to be close, to dig in, to nestle in the arms of another. We crave and deserve nearness, contact. 'Touch me and I'm yours,' we say. T give myself to you.' And this is a good thing. It is a good thing to devote ourselves so fully, a spiritual thing if you will. Too bad it comes off as clingy. Too bad it makes monsters out of us. (Fox 128)

The way that men, and the whole of patriarchal society, perceive women is what dooms the female populace to be categorized as angelic or monstrous. It is the fear of losing control that makes men pigeonhole women. In Barrie's text, Pan is outside this

116 prejudice. Although he does not see the need for mothers beyond his own amusement, he does abide by social norms and treats Wendy with respect, building a house to her liking and claiming that the Lost Boys should not touch her because it would not be respectful

(PP 94).

In Fox's text, however, Pan is clearly sexist. When he disagrees with Wendy Jr. on the subject of flying, he claims "You are dead wrong. All wrong. Girl-wrong!" (Fox

23). Peter, however, is not the only sexist male on the island:

Known to be a sex too smart to fall out of their strollers (and thus unlikely to end up on the island), the few girls who made their way there were regarded as prey by the men. Perhaps I don't have to tell you, but these men practiced rapine—the art of carrying away things by force. Perhaps I don't have to tell you that those things included girls. (Fox 36)

The Neverland men are, according to Wendy Jr., a group of barbarians. Never land is a place where men thrive and women are objectified, brought in simply to show off the male's propensity for seduction. The journey to Neverland, like Persephone's transport to the Underworld, is meant to separate mother from daughter in order for the daughter to realize the adult self that she needs to embrace. The competition between mother and daughter is hinted at in Barrie's text but manifested more completely in Fox's novel; for

Wendy Jr. this mother/daughter tension arises from Peter's memories of Margaret and

Wendy Jr.'s feelings of inadequacy: '"Margaret was a real dolly bird, the prettiest mum of all.' On hearing this my face caved in. 'But she was a stubborn girl, impossible to tame. And a tragically useless cook. Surely you can do better?'" (Fox 24). For Pan there is a Trinity of Good Womanhood: a perfect mother is pretty, tame and domestic.

Wendy Jr. is clearly put off by her mother being remembered as the most beautiful girl to come to Neverland and commits herself to out-sweeping her mother.

117 In fact, striving to excel at domestic chores is the typical behavior of women in

Neverland: "we donated our young bodies in Springtime and worked those bodies to the bone—scrubbing, laundering, sweeping—our ropes of strawberry hair tied up or back.

We became consummate caregivers [...] our character has been shaped by service, by devotion" (Fox x). What problematizes this devotion is the effect that it has on the girls as they mature: "In the same way my great-grandmother once sewed Peter's shadow to

Peter himself, I must sew the two halves of my life together. To make the cloth whole"

(Fox xi). The journey to Neverland, then, for Wendy Jr., is a quest for the self—to separate herself from Neverland and its expectations and find where she belongs. Wendy

Jr. often blames her mother for her failings: "Daughters think mothers are the source of everything that's wrong with the world. Don't get me wrong, mothers are appreciated later in life. But most of all, mothers remind daughters that the world is made out of pain, out of icky intimacy and regret" (Fox 228). This insight is offered to Wendy Jr. by her father and suggests that competition is not the only function of this mother/daughter conflict. At the end of Fox's novel, Granny Jane, the original Wendy's daughter, explains the problematic nature of motherhood that has been presented throughout the novel. While a separation of daughter from mother is necessary for the Neverland trip,

Jane asserts that this temporary separation is meant to draw mother and daughter closer together, not tear them apart: "the Darling women are a force of nature [...] we are connected and [...] our well-being depends on the mothers and daughters staying connected" (Fox 267). It is for this reason that the Darling women of Fox's novel are

"lost girls." They have lost connection with their mothers—if not physically, then emotionally.

118 Fox, because of the uncomfortable position that motherhood occupies in her novel, incorporates the father-figure's influence on the daughter into her narrative.

Although the similarities between Mr. Darling and Pan are implicit in Barrie's text, the connection of all men to Pan is explicitly discussed in Fox's text:

[Margaret's] narratives tended to confuse Daddy with Pan. This was forgivable, I suppose. Both were boys of some charm who refused to play by the rules. Both loved flying more than the world itself (and forgot about the world from time to time). Both Daddy and Peter made you feel extraordinary in their presence. But that was the catch: you had to be in their presence. (Fox 9)

Margaret's ex-husband, Wendy Jr.'s father, is a pilot and he does not have a lot of time for anything but his own work and recreation. As in Barrie's text in which the male is responsible for the business and the female is responsible for the domestic, the separation of male and female spheres is present in Fox's text. Wendy Jr. goes to see her father in his workshop and notes that "I approached cautiously; usually banned from entering this realm of nuts and bolts and male paraphernalia" (Fox 28). Wendy Jr.'s place, like all good women of tradition, is in the domestic.

When her great-grandmother tells Wendy Jr. about the trip that she will make to

Neverland, she does not sugarcoat it: "He will make you his queen and then his mother and then the mother of all the boys in his neighborhood" (Fox 13). The overlapping of terms like queen and mother, as has been discussed in reference to Barrie's text and the texts in previous chapters, is common in children's literature because these roles only assert power successfully over the domestic. Wendy, then, remains engrained in her

Victorian sensibilities. Margaret, however, is a self-proclaimed feminist and follower of psychoanalysis who specializes in women's issues. Wendy Jr. notes that "Mother had recently forced Anne Sexton on me" (Fox 19). Anne Sexton, an American poet, wrote

119 extensively on women's issues such as menstruation, suicide, abortion, masturbation and adultery and for Margaret is a manifestation of her desire to place her daughter in the realm of real women. Margaret, unlike her daughter, is an unapologetically sexual creature: "She fluttered her lashes and placed her tiny hands on her hips, drawing attention to her thrilling hourglass figure [...] she shook her head sharply and her coiled plait came loose, falling open suggestively between herself and the doctor" (Fox 4).

Although Margaret claims to be a feminist and explains her love of men as an acceptable manifestation of her empowerment, Wendy Jr. is constantly embarrassed by her mother's eccentricities. Margaret's sexuality is problematized in the first pages of the novel; when she is speaking with a doctor at the hospital, he calls her by her title, Mrs. Braverman— her married name, which she still has despite being divorced. She responds with distaste:

'"Call me Margaret,' Mother encouraged. 'No, call me Maggie'" (Fox 4). The regression of names from the marriage title to the childhood nickname suggests that she is attempting to hold onto a youth that she has no right to prolong. This discomfort at letting go of her youth aligns Margaret with the stepmothers in fairy tales who despise their daughters for their youth and beauty. This discomfort manifests when Wendy Jr. meets Freeman, her future husband. Margaret and Freeman have a mutually flirtatious relationship; he calls her Mae West because of her free-spirited manner and her willingness to embrace her sexuality.

Her mother's infamy, alongside the fairies and mermaids in Neverland, is not the only unpleasant thing that Wendy Jr. must negotiate. In the same way that all of the

Darling girls must experience Peter Pan and his cohorts, they must experience Hook and his phallic implications:

120 He smacked his lips, drawing his tongue back and forth over a voluptuous lower lip until it glistened in the moonlight [...] 'I know you,' I said quietly. 'Of course you do,' he assured me. 'All girls know me.' He paused as if to consider the magnitude of his claim. (Fox 86)

Hook is most commonly discussed in relation to Peter Pan and the Oedipal implication of their feud or the captain's relation to time and death. Barrie's Hook is comical and, at times, feminized in the novel. His desperation to end Pan's reign of youth and joy echoes with a sense of the absurd. He is superstitious and a dandy. In Fox's novel, the pirate captain plays a dark role for Wendy Jr. He is utterly masculine and exposes her to the darker side of seduction: "It would be too easy to say that I was ravished. Rape is too strong a word, devalued not strong enough. For I believe the shadow had its way with me. I know it had some sort of horrid meat hook for an arm" (Fox 36). Wendy Jr. is victimized by Hook and, therefore, patriarchal standards of youth, beauty and ideal womanhood. Fox's leading line of the novel preempts the fear of age: "I was warned against it, lectured, teased—even threatened. But it was bound to happen: I grew up"

(Fox ix). The choice of the word 'warned' places Fox's novel in a tradition of literature; she is warned through fairy tales and other books, especially Barrie's text, of the inescapability of aging.

Despite the warnings, Wendy Jr. succumbs to the idealizations of Neverland: "To me, never had always been the highest rating, on par with incomparable, ideal, perfect.

The Neverland, an ideal that lived on in my mind if no longer in practice, was a place where you were never alone, never hungry or without hope, and most certainly, never crazy" (Fox 140). Her idealization of Neverland becomes detrimental to her because when she is forced to leave Neverland she truly feels that she has been abandoned. The

121 result is her "always living safely at the intersection of kindness and duty," hoping to regain access to the ideal (Fox 162). Throughout the text, Wendy Jr. is infantilized by her mother and her husband. They talk down to her, comfort her, and cajole her as she is very rarely able to make decisions for herself. When she has a child, she gains a sense of purpose and her daughter's unorthodox behavior helps to distract Wendy Jr. from her own idiosyncrasies.

Wendy Jr.'s daughter, Berry, is perhaps the most evocative look into womanhood in the novel. Her mother claims that "she had come into this world with a surplus of aggression that didn't sit well with society's notion of sweet young things" (Fox 133).

Berry is loud and violent as a child and becomes rebellious and cold as a teenager. While

Margaret's adventure to Neverland led her to the study of psychoanalysis later in life, and

Wendy Jr.'s experience left her irrevocably wounded, Berry never actually makes it to

Neverland. Her experience with Pan is, perhaps, more detrimental than any of the other characters' journeys. What it means for Berry is a stunted growth.

When Peter arrives for Berry, she immediately recalls the stories she has been told about Pan:

'My mom said you were a fox. You know, irresistible. But I thought that was, like, a joke.' 'Your mum's right on the beam,' he said. 'I can't resist myself.' 'And not the least bit shallow or stuck-up, either.' 'Yeah, it's a puzzlement.' (Fox 172)

Berry is impatient with Pan and is eager to leave, thinking Neverland will be an escape from her mother and her mundane life. Her eagerness and willingness confuse Pan at first and he wonders if Neverland is the place for Berry. She reassures him, much like generation after generation of women reassure their men: "7 know stories.'' She whistled

122 boyishly into the wind. 'More stories than Scheherazade. Greater tales than Grimm. More fabulous fables than Aesop'" (Fox 169). She embraces the storyteller role but not the mother role; instead, she doesn't "want to be reminded of the mothership," her nickname for her mother and the general idea of motherhood (Fox 169).

Her own mother, Wendy Jr., expressed doubt at embracing motherhood: '"But I don't know if I want to be a mother. I can hardly take care of myself! If I feel any pull at all, it's towards you, Peter, and that thing we can never speak of (Fox 116). Fox's Peter, then, is not the epitome of childhood that he is in Barrie's text—there is no Mrs. Darling to applaud his perpetual childhood with a kiss. Rather, Peter is an object of temptation for multiple generations of Darlings.

Berry, however, is not of the same mould as the other Darling women in the text.

In twenty-first century society, girls are much more developed by the time they are teenagers; Berry is claimed by Pan when she turns fifteen, two years later than her mother had been. Wendy Jr. notes that "as was customary on the island, I was packaged in a virginal, white-flannel shroud" (Fox 115). All Darling women travel to Neverland in their nightgowns, a symbol of the transformation that will occur:

All rites of passage are paradoxical. On the one hand, there's the opportunity for personal growth, the promise of transcendence. But there is terror and disintegration, too—deep blows to the ego. No wonder that the day a mother hands off her daughter to Pan is unquestionably her worst. Of course, events of this magnitude always occur at night, nothing of import happens in daylight anymore. (Fox 165)

The night journey to Neverland is clearly a night of transformation, a rite of passage that must be completed for the Darling women to successfully mature, or at least that is what

J.M. Barrie would have his audience think upon reading Peter Pan. Fox's women do not mature successfully per se. All are negatively impacted by their adventures. Berry,

123 although eager to leave Berkeley behind, has already experienced the things that

Neverland offers symbolically. Her mother overhears her discussing the night Pan comes for her: '"So he comes into my bedroom. My bedroom. Of course, that's the way it is with boys—they go straight to the bedroom these days [...] And he looks at me with the biggest eyes, like I'm an angel or a virgin, which I'm not" (Fox 184). Berry has clearly already encountered the seduction that leads her to womanhood and it is much more literal than Pan's island can offer. This point is reiterated in the fact that, unlike her mother who travels to Neverland in a symbolically white nightgown, Berry attempts her flight in an over-sized Joan Jett t-shirt.

In the traditional sense of womanhood, this early sexuality is frowned upon; however, the most interesting aspect of Fox's text is the fact that monstrous women are not vilified. Wendy claims that "if we suppress what Jung calls our shadow— traditionally, the awfully nasty part of us—we end up terribly flat creatures" (Fox 161).

Here, it is acknowledged that people are not meant to occupy only one extreme of the spectrum of womanhood or the other; they are meant to have an array of qualities.

Instead of sewing Peter's shadow back on, the women of Fox's text must attach their own shadows in an act of defiance and self-actualization. Whereas the angel/monster binary that is overwhelmingly present in Victorian and Edwardian literature fictionalizes women's experiences, Fox literalizes the pursuit of womanhood, offering her female characters roles somewhere between the extremes of angel and monster. Unlike Barrie's text, Fox's novel does not seek to reprimand women for their unladylike behavior; rather, it seeks to expose the limitations that society places on women and the stereotypes with which both ideal and non-ideal women are labeled. The journey to find oneself is not as

124 easy as doing chores in Neverland in the spring. Self discovery means engaging with the everyday world around you—not separating yourself from it, but finding your place within it. Whether Fox's characters ever find their place is debatable. Masculine stereotypes of marriage and madness are prevalent in the novel and the effect that male characters have on the Darling women is as detrimental in Fox's text as it is in the originals. The hope for an alternate space is only provided through Berry who never makes it to Neverland. The youngest generation of Darlings escapes the traditional ritual domestication of Pan's island but her alternative is not glamorous or desirable; rather, she leaves her mother's house in favour of living on the streets and prostituting herself at fifteen years old. Although Berry does not subscribe to the idealizations of classic children's literature, Fox's text demands its own critical attention and revision. While escape from Barrie's confinement is praised, the alternate space that Fox writes for her

"emancipated" heroine is confining in its own right. The twentieth and twenty-first century revisions of classic children's literature, then, require revisions of their own before heroines can be said to have ultimately escaped binaries.

125 Conclusion

126 The twentieth and twenty-first century feminist works in this study attempt to rewrite the psychosocial space in which their female characters exist. The feminist space is one of agency, self-awareness and voice. It is not necessarily the possession of agency that has changed among female characters—they have always had it—but the reception of that agency by patriarchal society that has been altered with the upsurge in feminist revisions of "classic" male-authored/recorded works for children. Unlike Perrault's Little

Red Riding Hood who is aware of her decision to climb into bed with the wolf and is punished for it, Angela Carter's heroine is praised for her ability to confront her wilder nature. The images of appetite and unnatural growth which confine the female characters created by Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, Charles Dodgson and J.M. Barrie to the stereotypical binary of angel or monster are addressed and challenged in the revisionist works of Carter, Bolster and Fox. While the Victorians instituted a new way of reading childhood, twentieth and twenty-first century feminists institute a new way of reading womanhood. The heroines of feminist works are able to vocalize their discomfort, unabashedly embark on journeys of self-discovery, and be an active participant in romantic, and sometimes erotic, relationships.

Selfhood is a common theme in the feminist revisions of male-authored/recorded texts. The "classic" texts in this study conform to prescribed norms of Victorian and

Edwardian womanhood while the feminist revisions emancipate their heroines from the confines of male-authorship and attempt to offer a locus of rebellion and development that is not feared or despised, but is commended. It is significant that the male- authored/recorded texts in this study are written for children. The girl-child characters of these works must negotiate a symbolic representation of the journey from childhood to

127 womanhood and all are bound by the Victorian ideals of femininity: silence, passivity, and domestic duty. In the feminist revisions, the female characters are on the brink of adulthood—most are represented as experiencing their first menstruation or the first instances of sexual awareness—and, in this time of transformation, the young women are encouraged to explore their appetites and identities. These women are by no means silent; instead, they can speak for themselves without the mediation or temperance of a male author and/or narrator. The vocalization of desire in the feminist revisionist texts is indicative of the positive fashion in which female authors view transformations of the female body and psyche.

Unlike the male-authored or male-recorded texts in this study wherein growth is hyperbolized as monstrous and destructive, the female-authored works treat the manipulations of the female body as a natural physical progression. The hybrid female, half woman-half creature, which features prominently in the male-authored/recorded texts in this study, is both demythologized and empowered in the feminist revisions of children's literature. The amphibious heroine of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little

Mermaid" and serpentine Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland must be subverted within their texts in order to suppress the monstrous aspects of their natures. Conversely,

Wolf-Alice in Angela Carter's "Wolf-Alice" and the mermaids in Laurie Fox's The Lost

Girls are praised for their dual existence as woman and creature because they are symbols of the transformation which female characters must undergo on their quest for subjectivity. In Fox's novel, Wendy asserts that one must incorporate the darker aspects of the personality into any sense of self if one is to be whole. The monstrous must be integrated into the feminine sensibility—not for the purpose of being suppressed, as it is

128 in the fairy tales of Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, but for the purpose of being explored.

The male authors/recorders in this study employ mirrors in their texts to symbolize the vanity and pride of women who are self-aware. Mirrors, then, are seen to empower women by way of their recognition of their own reflection and, therefore, their sense of self; however, in the feminist revisions of the children's texts discussed in this study mirrors are not empowering, but confining because the mirror is a manifestation of the patriarchal gaze imposed upon women. Instead of being freed, women are trapped by their reflections and the extent to which they conform to societal ideals. Within the revisionist texts examined in this study, the tropes of both mirrors and photographs are used to elucidate the fact that female characters in the male-authored or male-recorded

"classics" are confined to a static image of femininity. The dual nature of the mirror's power is most adequately illustrated in "Snowdrop." The evil Queen is empowered by the self-awareness that she finds in her reflection but she is suppressed by the patriarchal voice of the mirror and the society that forces her to dance in hot iron shoes at the finale of the tale. Self-empowered women are not desirable and, in the twentieth-century work of Stephanie Bolster, mirrors and photographs remain a detrimental force. Rather than confront the mirror, the object in White Stone: The Alice Poems is to escape the mirror.

Away from the mirror, the woman is away from its patriarchal cajoling and, therefore, is emancipated from the confines of the feminine binary: angel/monster.

In the feminist revisions of "classic" children's literature, the domestic world of wife, mother, and daughter is not always presented as a comfortable or even a desirable one. As opposed to the idealized asexual mothers of male-authored/recorded children's

129 literature, twentieth and twenty-first century revisions of said literature encourage sexual exploration and the implications that sexual transactions have on economic and social hierarchies; traditionally-male adjectives such as 'active,' 'aggressive,' 'public,' and

'economic' are consistently used in the context of the feminine in the revisionary texts in this study. As I have argued, the intent is not to simply invert gender roles and stereotypes in favour of androgyny or hermaphroditic characters, but to offer female characters a locus of consciousness that is not available to them in male- authored/recorded texts of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In much of the male- authored/recorded fiction in this study, growth and manipulation of the female body is described as monstrous because it is presented as an appropriation of male space. Within the feminist revisions examined, the female characters do appropriate male space, not with the intent to make it their own but to cohabit it, thereby creating a new psychosocial space in which female characters exist that is not defined strictly by proper and improper feminine conduct.

Lyn Pykett's definition of an improper woman in which "woman is figured as a demon or wild animal; a whore; a subversive threat to the family; threateningly sexual; pervaded by feeling; knowing; self-assertive; desiring and actively pleasure-seeking; pursuing self-fulfilment and self-identity; independent; enslaver; and victimiser or predator" is imploded in feminist revisionary texts (16). This is not to say that women are at liberty to act in all manner of immoral, injudicious, and transgressive ways within feminist texts, but they do not subscribe to certain roles simply based on gender. In the

"classic" children's texts in this study, the female characters are punished for pride and vanity—as opposed to Peter Pan, who is never punished for his pride but is seen as vital

130 because of it. In the feminist revisions of the "classic" texts, pride, as a by-product of self-awareness, is an acceptable female trait. Instead of a condition of Edwardian boys' books that is only available to the male heroes, differentiating oneself from others based on a sense of ultimate selfhood within feminist texts is seen as a necessary transformation for all characters.

Perhaps most importantly to this study is the tension between female characters which exists in the "classic" texts and in the revisionist texts. The perpetuation of the myth of femininity by females is the most powerful tool that male authors have written.

While many twentieth and twenty-first century female characters are allowed a voice and are accepted into the world of traditionally-male vocabulary, the real struggle for female characters is emancipation from the other female characters in their narratives because it is precisely this competition between women that characterizes patriarchy and its institutions. In Fox's The Lost Girls, the youngest generation of Darling women is the most resistant to this ritual. Unlike Wendy Jr., who is overwhelmingly vocal about the competition in which she engages with her mother in terms of her relationship to the men in her life, Wendy Jr.'s daughter separates herself from her mother. Berry does not go to

Neverland; in the beginning, she thinks that this is a failing on her part but, in the end,

Berry's freedom from the perpetuation of female servitude and mother-daughter competition allows her to occupy a space outside of the traditional.

By examining twentieth and twenty-first century feminist fiction, it becomes clear that the myth of femininity and the space within which female characters exist is consistently being rewritten to accommodate a more diverse definition of womanhood.

Or, perhaps, what these feminist authors seek to do is challenge the concept of defining

131 womanhood at all. Unlike in the works of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, in which words like 'silent,' 'passive,' and 'dutiful' were synonymous with femininity, the twentieth and twenty-first century feminist narratives included in this study attempt to, if they do not always succeed, rewrite the limitations of "traditional womanhood" and offer a psychosocial space for their female characters which comes to be defined by the more general state of personhood.

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138 Curriculum Vitae or CV

Coleena G. Fanjoy

BA, Honours English, University of New Brunswick, 2007 MA, English, University of New Brunswick, 2010