David O'Kane, "Lewis Carroll and Alice."
Lewis Carroll a pedophile Victorian
Abstract: The idealization of childhood is associated with abuse. The English children's literature of the nineteenth century reflects this reality, rooted in family history its authors.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll - author glorified Alice in Wonderland - suffering from a pathological obsession for young girls. His work as a writer and photographer, as well as the extensive private correspondence he bequeathed it possible to reconstitute the universe in which he lived and to update the root of his sexual neuroses. Thus, the idealization of childhood that characterizes children's literature inaugurated by Carroll door she marks of abuse and confinement in which generations of children were kept. And that is why these writings captivate.
Idolatry
"I hope you will allow me to photograph at least Janet bare it seems absurd to have qualms about the nudity of a child of this age. "(1) When he wrote this compelling the mother of three girls, Lewis Carroll has had a long practice of photography, largely dedicated to its" child-friendly ", with which the honorable professor of mathematical relationships passionate. At Christ Church College, where he teaches, the residence of Carroll looks like a nursery full of toys and animated when prompted by a particular child exquisite, he wrote in his diary: "I mark this day with a white stone. "Around 1850, he began to photograph the girls in poses heroines of fairy tales, then goes to clichés destroyed stripped it requires that after his death, before giving up photography in 1880 (2) .
In the middle and legalistic bourgeois evolves where the author of Alice, it is common for a respectable man to idolize girls. Lewis Carroll - who remain single all her life - is incapable of an adult relationship and openly express the satisfaction he derives from his juvenile associates. Then in the sixties, He writes, for example the mother of another of his "friends-children": "Thanks, many thanks for having me again loaned [sic] Edith. It is a most adorable child. It's really good - I mean for the spiritual life, in the sense that it is good to read the Bible - to be in contact with such sweetness and innocence. "(3)
But the Victorian sentimentality barely conceals a perverse obsession for the child's body, particularly that of girls. Writing in his diary, an Anglican priest describes his encounter with a young lady dressed Eve posing on the beach for an artist: "It showed his slender and flexible, soft curves of the chest, breast budding, charming and graceful line of pretty delicate limbs, and above all the gentle curves of the buttocks and delicious pink and plump white thighs wide. "(4)
Mother
idealized childhood, Charles L. Dodgson is entirely immersed in the world of the concentration of Victorian England. His father, a pastor of a small village in Cheshire, has a taste for nonsense, a form of literary expression in which the typical British ducks hide in coffee mugs and the notables are turned into cake. Very early, Charles anime family shows to entertain her sisters and dials to turn all kinds of texts, seemingly without rhyme or reason, which already prefigure the story of Alice. At twelve, he wrote a poem in which he imagines a boil in a stew of his sisters and a younger brother gives this advice surprising: "Do not be afraid to roar to be abolished! "(5)
The terror that reigns in Dodgson is such that seven of the eleven children of the family are afflicted with a stutter. Charles's lifetime of disability that leaves him in the presence of his "friend's children." His education is fully devolved repression of all emotion, all vital impetus to the point that the young Dodgson developed a retention and obsessive mania. He spends his remaining energy to entertain her sisters and her mother, a woman demanding, exhausted by frequent pregnancies, who died at forty-seven, two days after Charles had left home to Christ Church College, where he began his graduate studies. In an attempt to bury the memory of the bad treatment he was dealt, he does his childhood the ideal time would regret it forever:
I willingly give all the wealth,
Fruits bitter decline of life
To be again small child
During one summer day. (6)
Fury educational
The figure of the idealized mother is one that cultivates compulsively Carroll in his relations with his "friend's children." These friendships are so intensely lived at the same time wrenching, since they bear the scars of her ordeal children face a cruel and distant mother. At a little girl he met on the beach, he writes: "O my child, my child! I kept my promise yesterday afternoon and I went down to the sea to walk with you along the rocks, but I've seen in the company of another gentleman, so I said you do not want me yet. "(7) Sometimes, it can not suppress a reproach that address actually moved to his mother by proxy. As a friend of nine years, he says: "Tell me how I'm going to Sandown fun without you. How can I walk on the beach alone? How can I sit all alone on those wooden steps? "(8)
The maternal fury, that Carroll is not even able to discern consciously reflected in his writings. Alice is a kind of permanent nightmare, a world violent from the first pages where familiar objects flying in all directions. The heroine tumbles to the bottom of a burrow, a cook throws pots and plates to the head of a baby, and if the novel's central character sticks to his good manners, the least forgetfulness can be punishable by death: "Well, you see, miss," says one gardener to Alice, the fact is that this rose it would have been a rose bloomed red roses, and we planted here by mistake, a white rose, yet if the Queen was to find it, we'd all be assured of having his head cut off. "(9)
According to Carroll, the Queen of Heart is the uncontrollable passion. "It's kind of blind Fury whose rage is pointless" he wrote in 1887 in the journal The Theatre (10). It is likely that this figure represents a particularly terrifying facet of Frances Jane Dodgson, Charles' mother.
Flagellation
To find the origin of this latent hysteria - that Mrs Dodgson itself was feared like the plague - he must return to the educational practices of Victorian England, particularly those whose religious circles Lewis Carroll is coming. The Old Testament openly encouraged parents to beat their children (11) and all joy of life is severely condemned. In public schools - a term that actually refers to private schools where the bourgeois elite abandoned her offspring - boys and girls are beaten in public, in rituals of flagellation overtly eroticized (12).
These tortures pervert the child for whom violence and humiliations become inseparable from the intimate relationship. Charles Kingsley, a writer and theologian contemporary of Carroll, recommended such a regime to his fiancee and floggings of abstinence prior to consummate their marriage and sent him the portraits of the couple being love chained to a cross. He is the author of a book for children, The Water Babies (1863), packed with images of guilt and sexual defilement (13).
By contrast, the girl embodies a fantasy of chastity and innocence, that purity can be consumed without fear of parental wrath or challenge the ideal breast. Carroll has some intuition of the excesses he committed to his "child-friendly" when told, for example, one of them: "Boo! Hou! There Mr. Dodgson has drunk my health, now I have a drop. "(14) But his compulsion Sequencing and disgusted the point that it holds itself to a rigorous discipline to try to control his consuming passion. At St Bartholomew's Hospital, he attended an hour to an amputation of the leg to determine whether, in case of emergency, it would be able to "live up to the situation. "(15) is its own life force that is now undergoing castration psychic pain inflicted in the learning of" good "ways. Its sensitivity perverted repugnant to him, as before his little boy unbearable exuberance of his mother, frozen in terror of his own life, however, that he sacrificed his child's soul.
Marc-Andre Cotton
Notes:
(1) L. Carroll to Mrs. Mayhew, May 27, 1879, in The Collected Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Marton Cohen, London, 1979.
(2) See Lewis Carroll, a Victorian photographer, ed. du Chêne, Paris, 1979 or http://aliceaupaysdunet.free.fr/pages/index.htm.
(3) L. Carroll to Mrs. Stevens, 1 June 1892, ibid.
(4) Francis Kilvert, Diary, July 13, 1875, p. 232.
(5) Quoted by Jackie Wullschläger, Lewis Carroll: the child-muse, dreamed in Childhood, ed. Otherwise, al. Mutations No. 170, March 1997, p. 43.
(6) Quoted by J. Wullschläger, op. cit., p. 44.
(7) L. Emily Carroll or Violet Gordon, in The Collected Letters, August 14, 1877, op. cit.
(8) L. Carroll Gertrude Chataway, July 21, 1876, ibid.
(9) L. Carroll, Alice A, trans. H. Parisot, ed. Flammarion, 1979 158.
(10) L. Carroll, Alice On The Stage, The Theatre, April 1887.
(11) It further specifies that the child must be stoned unruly "until death ensues" (Deuteronomy 21-21).
(12) See Jonathan Benthall, Invisible Wounds: Corporal Punishment in Schools Brithish as a Form of Ritual Child Abuse and Neglect 15 (1991), pp. 377-388.
(13) Quoted by J. Wullschläger, dreamed in Childhood, Op. cit., p. 37.
(14) L. Carroll Gertrude Chataway, in The Collected Letters, op. cit., p. 230.
(15) The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. I, Roger L. Green, London, 1953, December 19, 1857.
(16) Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likeness, cited by Jackie Wullschläger, dreamed in Childhood, Op. cit. p. 37.
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