In a forward to the museum book, Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll, Neal Benezra writes that one of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “…special strengths has been its willingness to investigate the origins of modern culture and modern life, broadly defined. Sometimes the best way to do this is to look at art that does not at first seem to fit our definition of modernity.”
I find this statement helpful, as I struggle to understand the significance or works like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and authors like J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll. It is rather easy to get lost in the obsessive speculation about the adult authors’ seemingly unhealthy level of interest in young girls. But if we look at Alice in Wonderland or Carroll’s photographs of children as a way to “investigate the origins of modern culture,” we can hopefully wind down a somewhat more productive road.
Carroll’s fantastical tale to the Liddell girls can be analyzed from hundreds of perspectives, given the richness and perversity and unexpected fantasticality of much of the narrative. My interest today will focus on what it has to say about our societal ideas of children. Mr. Hodgson (Carroll) made up a story to entertain the young girls, and in doing so, perhaps revealed some things about children and adult perceptions of childhood.
The nonsense language and dense imagination of Carroll’s work is an adult effort to recapture or grasp something of the imagination and innocence of youth. The writing of Carroll and others in this period seems to highlight a belief of the magical innocence of the child -- a kind of purity of imagination -- that we lose after entering adulthood. The perception of this adult-child gap seems to have filled both Barrie and Carroll with a longing for that more magical, natural state.
As we’ve seen from our readings, the image of the pure yet somehow sexualized young girl was used for advertising soap and many other commodities. Carroll/Hodgson was drawn to capturing this essence in his photography and his storytelling. There was obviously a desire there that was certainly more than prurient. The sweet, innocent child is truly a beautiful thing, and the photographer of Alice Liddell seems to have sought to capture both that reality and the inevitable transition to sexual maturity. The knowing eyes of Alice and Xie and many others in the Carroll collection demonstrate an arresting in-betweenness.
I’ve attached an ad from my collection that is likely from the late 19th century which has some of the qualities of the childhood imagery we have considered to date. The cute little girl with the rabbit in the chocolate advertisement does have the sweetness of youth, and the rabbits obviously represent a kind of spring or rebirth, hence the Easter bunny. Perhaps Carroll and society’s obsession with images of childhood are enmeshed somehow with this idea of beginning or an unspoiled Eden, now forever lost to the adult audience.
We long for the simplicity and purity represented by the little smile on the face of our chocolate advertising girl. Yes, she’s cute, but there is something as satisfying as chocolate about her smile and stance. Carroll tried to photograph and write about this illusive quality of the child. Perhaps he wanted to revert to that state, whether real or imaginary.
Carroll is interesting for the success of his venture into this realm. We don’t know quite why, but it is an investigation into the magic of childhood that most certainly recognizes something of a loss for both Carroll and the world of the modern adult. Desire, loss and the positioning of the child in modernity – perhaps. At the very least, there is rich written and visual material here for our investigation into the origins of modern life and culture.
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