Curiouser

Just finished Melanie Benjamin's Alice I Have Been.

It presents a three-tiered exposition of the life of girl whom the character Alice, of Alice in Wonderland is based.

The story is all the more harrowing because of the truth it is based on.

The narrative in the first section focuses on the relationship between Charles Dodgson and the young Alice Liddell.  The lingering glances and ambiguous physical contact between the author and the infantile muse are palpable.  Sinister undertones erupt from the pages and make for an uncomfortable reading.  This fails to detract from the quality of the book however, it rather brings to light some truths which our childhood nostalgia would have us undoubtedly avoid.

The photography of Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, which Benjamin discusses in the afterword, is the primary source material that inspired Benjamin to write her fictionalised account of the tension and controversy experienced in Victorian Oxford.  The questionable motive behind Lewis's photo project appears to have been largely eradicated from Carroll's public image.  The principle image that Benjamin attended too was predictably one of the real Alice posed as a beggar girl.  It is both unsettling and distressing to see an image of a child from the Victorian period, one of staunch conservatism, in a virtual state of undress.  Benjamin does specify the speculative nature of much of her narrative, but the fact that the foundation of her story derives from fact makes an image such as this all the more loaded.

Add caption

The irony that haunts Benjamin's story and Alice's life, was that it was her reputation that remained tarnished after the mysterious incident that is not truly revealed until the close of the novel.  Her life was marred by the stigma while Dodgson, with the success of the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland series, sailed through rather unscathed.

Though she is chosen as Benjamin's narrator, that is not to say that Alice occupies the position of the victim. As the narrative progresses, and we meet her as a woman of twenty-three and then finally in her twilight years, it becomes more difficult to feel sympathy for a girl so self-assured and self-possessed.  Though presumably the mature sensibilities of a thirty-something lecturer such as Dodgson should have been more aware of the inappropriateness intimacy of their relationship, the precocious Alice is held accountable too in Benjamin's expert narration.

This is a gripping read due to its anchor in history, and only lags when the superficiality of a lovelorn twenty-three year old Alice overwhelms in the middle-ground of the novel.  Alice and Wonderland has always fascinated me, I have never, unfortunately read the source material, but both Disney movies enchanted me. The comforting ideal of escapism is after all something everyone can undoubtedly relate to.  Alice I Have Been lends a web of meaning to the creation of the escapist Wonderland.