In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we found a few places where Alice (and the narrator) clearly identifies certain people or animals or things as “ugly” or “beautiful.” For example, in the scene where the baby transforms into a pig, Alice says happily to herself, “If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think” (57). The strong adjective appears again as Alice’s experiences with the Duchess are recounted: “Alice did not much like her keeping so close to her: first, because she was very ugly” (78). The word “ugly,” in this text, seems to be reserved for humans; in contrast, Alice and the narrator describe the garden as “beautiful” (308). While ugliness elicits fiercely-stated repulsion, Alice desires the beautiful.
Through the Looking-Glass opens with the stating of that desire: “Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into the Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it!” (127). Several sentences later, Alice passes through the glass. Of course, the relationship between beauty and desire is obvious, especially for a child. However, I wonder if this runs as a counter-impulse to Alice’s scientific taxidermist/anthropologist/natural-historian drive. That is, we’ve talked about Alice as being a sort of explorer/scientist-figure; it seems, though, that some of those moves are motivated and modified by a desire for beauty. Her curiosity for travel and exploration is, in both texts, initially generated by an aesthetic longing. And I read scene with the baby’s evolution into pigness as Alice’s shifting the “thing” from the category of “baby” to that of “pig” in order to transform the relative ugliness into relative beauty (i.e., it’s ugly for a baby but handsome for a pig).
I see something similar happening in the scene in Through the Looking- Glass where Alice speaks to the Gnat about the purpose of naming. The conversation takes up the taxidermic system as a site of referential questions, with the Gnat skeptical of the possibility that an animal would recognize itself by the name it has been given, and Alice anthropocentrically concluding that “it’s useful to people that name them…If not, why do things have names at all?” (149). Alice’s anxiety about naming increases as they begin to talk about her own re-naming in the woods: “I shouldn’t like to lose [my name] at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one” (152). We find Alice putting aside her scientist casual-ness about naming; instead of her previous understanding of names as an arbitrary combination of sounds and letters that are solely useful as humans’ referents to things, here Alice expresses angst at the possibility of having her own name switched to something ugly-sounding. This may be an unease caused by learning that she, too, is a thing that can be named, but the aesthetic concern here is interesting, too. Aestheticist- Alice trumps Scientist-Alice, here.
The scene following this has social/food-chain norms suspended as Alice heads into the woods and loses her name. She runs into a Fawn, which “didn’t seem frightened at all” (153), and they travel together comfortably. However, as they exit the woods and regain their names, the Fawn cries, “’I’m a Fawn…And dear me! you’re a human child!’” with a “sudden look of alarm” coming into its “beautiful brown eyes” (154). Names, here, seem to both indicate and produce “good” and “bad,” and Alice is ready to “cry with vexation” at this development (154). They also create reality (and social/scientific norms, specifically), which is startling to the scientific Alice.
Alice’s pursuit and admiration of things she terms beautiful comes up in several more places (including the scene with Humpty Dumpty). However, there’s one place that seems anomalous to Alice’s character as aestheticist. When the Knight wishes to recite a poem to Alice, he tells her that it is “very, very beautiful” and that it “brings tears” to the listener’s “eyes” (213). Alice, as she has done the entire novel, expresses boredom and impatience with poetry. The Narrator tells us that “she stood and listened very attentively” but that “no tears came to her eyes” (214). Here, Alice as scientific observer emerges, but not Alice the aestheticist. This seems strange to me, as we would expect that literature would elicit a more aesthetic response, and nature a more scientific, but these experiences are reversed in these texts. I’m not sure what to make of this final inversion, where the natural world elicits emotive responses in Alice and poetry a detached scientific one, but it complicates Alice-as-scientist reductions.
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