‘Drink me’, from Alice’s adventures in wonderland , illustration by Sir John Tenniel. Ó The British Library Board. All rights reserved 17 Oct. 2013, Cup.410.g.74, 5. 

Context in source publication

Context 1

... that the schizophrenic demands of the ‘virgin-whore dichotomy’ tend to define women’s clothing styles at either extreme of the decency continuum (highly revealing/ sexualized or too covered/modest). As a result, the cultural construction of women’s fashion tends to be subject to public debates and institutional regulations (for example, at work and school). This highlights the established multiple binaries of sexualization/modesty through which women tend to be represented, particularly in but not exclusive to Euro-American cultures. Japanese female performers, particular those in the mainstream, and their girlish yet ‘asexual’ Alice fashion possibly serve as an alternative to such restrictions. The duality associated with Carroll’s books – namely, the innocent and the sexualized readings of the books – is frequently noted in contemporary scholarship on Lewis Carroll. For example, Will Brooker has pointed out that Alice can be understood on the basis of two schools of thought: ‘those who choose to enjoy them merely as a pretty nonsense (broadly speaking, the nineteenth-century approach) and those who insist the text has hidden meanings that they want to shake out (to generalise, the twentieth-century method)’ (2005, p. 90). This tendency to inspect the dark side of Alice has increased in recent times. ‘Rather than offbeat speculation’, Brooker notes, ‘the idea that Alice has adult overtones and a dark heart seems to have become key to the way the story reso- nates in the broader public imagination’ (2005, p. 72). This duality is largely due to the enigmatic sexuality of the author. The tendency to perceive Carroll in dualistic terms as ‘a national treasure and a vaguely suspect enigma’ includes speculation on his possible paedophilic attachment to children, which is largely unproven (Brooker 2005, p. 64). Like her creator, Alice herself has been perceived and interpreted with variations from ‘a child of her time and class’ (Haughton in Carroll 1998, p. xli), to a brashly sexualized Lolita (Thomas 1996, p. 365), for example. The idea of Alice as being steeped in sexual implications is arguably endorsed by the fact that Vladimir Nabokov, (in)famous for his creation of Lolita (1955), translated Alice’s adventures in wonderland into Russian in 1923. The influence of Alice on Lolita is further assumed, for Nabokov allegedly said that ‘I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert’ (Nabokov quoted in Appel cited in Carroll 1970, p. 377). Accord- ingly, ‘whether intentionally or not, Humbert’s style has distinct Carrollian ech- oes in Lolita ’ (Prioleau 1975, p. 434). Such an eroticized reading of Alice is also present in Japanese culture, as Mary A. Knighton (2011) discusses in her analysis of Kanai Mieko’s novella Rabbits ( Usagi , 1973) about a young girl implicated in sadomasochistic eroticism and an incestuous relationship. A factor behind this ‘dark’ reading of Alice is the discrepancy between her cultural image and her actual age in Carroll’s stories. Although she is a child of 7 (7 1 / 2 in Looking-glass ) in Carroll’s books, Alice tends to be represented, particularly in illustrations, as a girl in her early adolescence (Brooker 2005). One of the reasons for this visual misrepresentation, apart from the absence of depictions of the heroine’s appearance in the original books, is Alice’s fairly independent personality. Despite her appearance of being a demure, young Victorian child, Alice is depicted as a rather emotionally flat yet autonomous character. As Brooker states: The heroine never seems troubled by them [the grotesque inhabitants of Wonderland]. There is no sign that she is terrified, that she fears she won’t escape Wonderland alive, that she is ever praying to get out of this place and go back home to the river bank . . . she remains calm, and so the adventure never sinks fully into the ‘darkness’ that some contemporary critics see in the text. (Brooker 2005, p. 145) Catherine Driscoll interprets this complexity of the character, saying Alice ‘is as self-interested as she is generous and is not unambiguously a good girl (i.e., lov- ing, courteous, or trustful) . . . the little girl in Carroll is marked by curiosity and delight’ (2002, p. 43). Yagawa Sumiko (1994, p. 181) in the afterword to her Japanese translation of Alice offers her interpretation of Alice as a symbol of the loneliness that often accompanies autonomy and indicates that this reading is also shared in Japanese culture. Alice’s sense of agency is further conveyed by her dress. Elizabeth Ewing, author of numerous books on fashion history, elucidates this point: ‘Alice is a spirited, uninhibited, outspoken little girl, though always a polite one, and her clothes too are unrestricting’ (1977, p. 96). Little girls’ dresses in mid- to late nineteenth- century Europe were, even with certain restrictions, slightly more practical than adults’, and the dress Alice wore in Tenniel’s illustrations (see Figure 1) was a fashion current to the time of the book with a faint hint of the practical future (Ewing 1977, p. 97). Tenniel’s Alice is particularly important since the imagery of Alice as a cultural icon was largely fixed by his illustrations. Indeed, the visual qualities that shape our image of Alice are not solely Carroll’s creation. This is because the contextual analysis of Carroll’s books indicates that they are ‘surprisingly vague about the appearance of [their] characters and settings, and [were] designed from the outset to rely on illustrations rather than written description’ (Brooker 2005, p. 143). In other words, visual descriptions of Alice, let alone the clothing she wears, are rarely delineated in Carroll’s original work. Rather, the imagery of Alice now so familiar to us is mostly a creation of Tenniel whose illustrations accompanied the first edition of Alice and allegedly influenced Disney’s animated version (Brooker 2005, p. 105). Both the character and dress of Alice thus point out that she is neither assertive nor passive but is rather positioned comfortably in between the two. This combination of aloofness and autonomy displayed by Alice makes the character correspond with the Japanese concept of ‘ shojo ’. Another reason Alice is significant in Japanese popular culture is because she embodies the concept of ‘ shojo ’, or girl. Indeed, the feature story ‘Looking for Alice’ in So-En endorses this idea: ‘Even after 142 years since the book’s publication, Alice exists as the ideal of shojo ’ ( So-En 2007, p. 26). The term shojo is laden with values and history. By applying the concept of shojo as articulated by Honda Masuko (2010, p. 36), John Wittier Treat aptly describes shojo in his seminal essay on Yoshimoto Banana’s early novels: ‘It is probably incorrect and certainly misleading to translate the term shojo with any single English phrase. “Young girl” is not only redundant but can refer to infants, and “young woman” implies a kind of sexual maturity clearly forbidden to shojo ’ (1996, p. 282). Treat’s idea of shojo assigns a degree of independence to the category of adolescent girls and hence separates them from both older and younger women. The concept of shojo originally had an ideological purpose: it was constructed by the Meiji government in the late nineteenth century in order to educate girls under the slogan of ‘good wife, wise mother’ ( ryosai kenbo ). According to the government, the shojo demonstrated three virtues – ‘affection’ ( aijo ), ‘chastity’ ( jun- ketsu ), and ‘aesthetics’ ( biteki ) – in order to discipline female students between the ages of 12 and 17 (Watanabe 2008). Regardless of the effectiveness of the concept as a regulatory principle, shojo can refer to certain mannerisms, behaviours and states of being in Japanese culture. Sarah Frederick (2005, p. 67), for example, interprets the concept of shojo as the embodiment of ‘a hyper-feminine ideal’ in the early 1900s. A common image of the shojo ‘was often defined in literature and art by qualities associated with femininity at the time – sentimentality, interest in flowers, clothing, dolls, and dreamy thoughts of the moon and stars’ (Frederick 2005, p. 68). The core ingredients of shojo aesthetics are largely unchanged, and this image of the shojo is valid even in the present day. A common form of the shojo , for instance, ‘focus[es] on reversion to a prepubescent girlhood with ribbons and frilly skirts’ (Nakamura and Matsuo 2002, p. 69), which clearly corresponds to the description of Tenniel’s Alice. For Honda (2010, p. 35), this reference to frills and ribbons and to the movements they make when they flutter ( hirahira ) subtly captures the ephemerality, capricious- ness and transient nature of the shojo -scape (Aoyama 2005, p. 53), further affirm- ing the link between the concept of shojo and frilly fashion aesthetics. Despite the ‘girlish’ image, what is striking about the concept of shojo is its presumed ‘asexual’ qualities. In other words, the Meiji era promotion of chastity as a core shojo virtue has been modified to connote a kind of innocence and asexuality. For instance, Treat (1996, p. 281–282) claims that shojo constitute their own gender, neither male nor female but rather something importantly detached from the productive economy of heterosexual reproduction. Moreover, ‘[p]erforming shojo [can be] one active and dynamic way that Japanese women can control their sexuality’ (Nakamura and Matsuo 2002, p. 69). This view perceived the concept of shojo in accordance with Joan Riviere’s famous theory of ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ (1991 [1929]), in which a display of emphasized femininity allows women to claim power in male-dominated work environments. When the concept of shojo initially developed, girls from certain class backgrounds for whom this concept was most likely created, took advantage of the ideology of ‘good wife, wise mother’ and took the opportunity to be educated. As Melanie ...