A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan

Abstract

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.

Keywords

• alice in wonderland
• peter pan
• narrative theory