Discuss belatedness in Through the Looking Glass.

Marah Gubar, “Reciprocal Aggression” (2009)
Gubar, Marah. “Reciprocal Aggression.” Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of
Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2009. 120-124.

…by creating a child protagonist who constantly finds herself having poems, stories, and songs inflicted on her by nonsensical men, Carroll dramatizes the plight of the child bombarded by other people’s discourse, which of course includes Alice Liddell and other young readers of his books. In the process, he manages to undercut the cheery notion that children’s literature exists merely to entertain children–an idea the Alice books are often credited with popularizing. After hearing that the Tweedle brothers regaled Alice with verse, Humpty brags, “‘I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that.’” Hoping to keep him from beginning, Alice hastily exclaims, “‘Oh, it needn’t come to that!’” But of course it does:

“The piece I’m going to repeat,” he went on without noticing her remark, “was written entirely for your amusement.”

Alice felt that in that case she really ought to listen to it; so she sat down, and said, “Thank you” rather sadly.

Carroll here sends up the whole idea of writing “for” children. Humpty Dumpty professes to have composed children’s literature: a poem created solely to entertain a particular child. Yet this claim is obviously specious, since he has just met Alice (and in any case seems far less interested in her than in himself and his own pronouncements). Worse than that, Carroll suggests, the mere act of designating the child as the intended addressee can exert a coercive, silencing effect: the child is essentially being asked to sit down and shut up, a point made explicit during Humpty’s rendition of the poem, when he “severely” informs Alice that she should stop inserting her own commentary in between his lines: “‘You needn’t go on making remarks like that,’ Humpty said: ‘they’re not sensible, and they put me out.’” (Gubar 340)

Carroll’s decision to represent Alice as immersed in discourse not of her own making and his habit of

dwelling on his heroine’s artificiality–her status as a figment of someone else’s imagination–are closely related. If we acknowledge that outside influences strongly / shape selfhood, we must face the possibility that even our dreams are not our own–an idea that might make anyone weep. Alice’s tears attest to how painful it is to conceive of oneself as a scripted being rather than an autonomous, totally authentic agent. Yet rather than regard this problem as unique to childhood, Carroll conceives of such belatedness as another point of connection between young and old. For the White Knight scene vividly illustrates that children are not the only ones imbued with ideologies not of their own making; adults, too, must cope with their profound unoriginality. Although the Knight prides himself on his power of invention, his ideas are either absurd or–in the case of his song–derivative. Not only does the plot of his poem come from Wordsworth, “the tune isn’t his own invention”; according to the highly acculturated Alice, “it’s ‘I give the all, I can no more.’” Adults, Carroll suggests, absorb, conform to, and improvise on various cultural influences, too, including and especially the kind of Romantic discourse about childhood that he himself frequently reiterates, reanimates, and caricatures. (Gubar 340-341)

Discuss belatedness in Through the Looking Glass.

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