By Humra Laeeq
Popularly known as Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, was an English fantasy writer, mathematician and photographer. This curious mix of different talents is showcased in Carroll’s best-known novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Last week, the novel marked its over-150-year-old tradition of being loved and cherished by children and adults all over the world.
It was made into a popular movie and cartoon series since its publication in 1865. The sweet and innocent Alice and her adventures captured every child’s and adult’s heart alike. The animated objects, flowers, and speaking animals have been elements of fantasy for children throughout ages and cultures. Lewis Carroll has been inscribed in Disneylands all over the world, in popular hearts and media. However, behind this flowery picture, like most writers of literature, Carroll is much more than a child’s fiction lover, perhaps even a nightmare.
The eccentric life of Lewis Carroll
Young Carroll was a victim of bullying throughout his school life. He was extremely shy and suffered several illnesses. One of these illnesses left him deaf in one ear. Further, he also had problems with language. Despite being looked down upon by his peers because of his nonsensical speech, Carroll showed brilliant mathematic skills. Except that math was not his only skill. Lewis Carroll remains a literary giant in the category of British literature. His poem The Hunting of the Snark is regarded as “nonsense literature of the highest order“. It continues to confound critics because of its depth.
Due to his fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford University, Carroll was ordained to never get married. As a social recluse, Carroll found joys at making puzzles for children with whom he found comfort. His favourite child was Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of Christ Church. His novel is based on Alice. The little girl used to visit Carroll in his lecture rooms.
Historians have argued that the girl-child was a marriage surrogate for Carroll. He was suspected of harbouring paedophilic feelings towards Alice. In a recent documentary on Lewis Carroll’s paedophilic tendencies, Vanessa Tait, the great-granddaughter of Alice Liddell stated: “My understanding is that he was in love with Alice, but he was repressed, hence, he would never have transgressed any boundaries.”
The controversy around Carroll’s sexuality
Carroll’s much talked about paedophilia has undergone vast research. The evidence collected from his life and work suggests a link between the two. Another of Carroll’s artistic interests was photography. Carroll perhaps showcased his sexual orientation in the photographs he took in his lifetime. He photographed children in all possible costumes and situations. He also made studies of naked children. Of the 3,000 photographs Carroll clicked throughout his life, over half of them are of children. Moreover, 30 of the photographs depicted nude or semi-nude children.
When some of Carroll’s famous photographs were exhibited in 1999, a quote by a New York Times reviewer drew a connecting link between Carroll and popular writer Vladimir Nabokov. He is the author of Lolita, a highly controversial paedophilic romance and the translator of Alice into Russian. The reviewer said that there was an “apathetic affinity” between Lewis Carroll and the paedophilic narrator of Nabokov’s novel. More recent criticism by American filmmaker and artist Tim Burton describes Carroll’s stories as “drugs for children”.
The other side of the story
Counter-narratives that defend Lewis Carroll talk about the historical culture in the writer’s times. A time that did not censor such photography and was a part of the “Victorian aesthetic“. This critique holds that instances that bewilder the 21st-century individual were normalized for the Victorian individual. Additionally, they state that Carroll indulged in several adult relationships with a number of women. Since sexual laxity was looked down upon by the Victorian upper-class social mores, to which Carroll identified with, his aristocratic family tried to bury his perverse history underneath the stories of “love for girl-children“.
Yet, there is contradictory evidence regarding Carroll’s eccentric life. In one his letters he mentions “I’m fond of children, except young boys”. It could be looked at as an innocent Victorian fetish with girls as a symbol of innocence. However, given his peculiar and singular attachment to little girls when he was so isolated from his society as a “recluse” and a “weird” logician, the assertion that Carroll’s interest could have been strictly innocent is naïve.
Cultural repression; was it complicit in hiding Carroll?
To many others, the writer probably felt what he dared to acknowledge. Not just to society but even to himself. His writing and photography could be one of Carroll’s ways to hide his paedophilic tendencies under a supposedly legitimate artistic means. Perhaps, Lewis Caroll found an outlet that Victorians did not find objectionable but also did not delve deeper into his intention.
D.H. Lawrence warns readers that they should “trust the tale and not the teller”. Writers often do not fully understand what they show. It could be that Carroll who perhaps harboured paedophilia but never made it explicit because his society did not permit him to. The societal strain let his sexual distortion live in the unconscious recesses of his mind. A process which the father of psychology Sigmund Freud would call repression. Since it is repressed and unconscious, readers or cultural critics can only hypothesise in detangling the complexities of the human mind.
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