Viewing Alice in Wonderland through a Foucauldian lens
When Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is read through a Foucauldian lens, the impacts of discursive power become evident. Since Carroll was writing before Foucault, it cannot be said he was writing to uncover discourses; however, it can be claimed that in challenging people’s taken for granted assumptions, that is exactly what he did. Alice’s experiences are analogues of Foucault’s ideas of discourse and power made manifest in narrative form. Many examples can be drawn from the text but the focus here is on the discursive power of time and Carroll’s manipulations of it throught his narratives. As temporal beings, we exist in the space between the past and the future yet often our thinking is governed by what has happened and what will happen with the notion of time itself seldom questioned. Yet, as Mark Currie points out, “Time is not something which exists in the world and is then reflected in the human mind, but something which arises from human being … and is then projected onto the world” (Currie 51). Carroll makes this evident in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Time is a construct. In everyday life we may not see discursive constructs as linked to power but as Foucault argues, and Carroll indicates, that is very much the case.
For many people power is viewed as a top down structure. It is something that is imposed on individuals and society by a governing body or those we consider to hold power over us. Foucault’s notion of power differs considerably. For him:
Power exists only when it is put into action; … What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly or immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions. … It is a total structure of actions brought to bear on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces; it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon their actions … The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome … To govern in this sense is to structure the possible field of action of others (Foucault, “The Subject” 788-799)
An examination of time as it is portrayed and used in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, indicates its discursive power and serves to elucidate Foucault’s conception of how power works. In fact, it is hard to separate power and time since every action is temporarily and spatially located. From the beginning of the narrative Carroll plays with time.
When Alice falls down the rabbit hole she is subject to a “temporal elasticity’ (Sherman x). She falls for an inordinate amount of time. Alice cannot decide whether the well is very deep or whether she is falling very slowly. Alice concludes that it must be deep even though her actions suggest she is falling slowly. For instance, while she is falling she has time to take marmalade off a shelf and relocate it in a cupboard (Carroll 13). Alice is unable to use her knowledge to make sense of a nonsensical situation. Already time is not operating in the usual way. Carroll does this throughout Alice in Wonderland. Alice has time to think but rather than questioning her beliefs about tie and gravity, appearing intelligent and ensuring that she acts in a socially acceptable manner when she emerges on the other side of the world are her greatest concerns (Carroll 14). This makes no sense and yet few people resist the desire to act in accordance with social norms. We are conditioned to do so. Carroll’s nonsense serves to expose the power these ingrained ways of being have on the way we see and act in the world. Maybe many are a complete waste of time and energy.
In chapter three Carroll challenges another taken for granted assertion. Is there always a correlation between a person’s age and the depth of their knowledge? For Alice the answer is yes. Alice and several other animals are wet and need to dry themselves. This leads to Alice having an argument with the Lory presumably about the state they find themselves, since Alice’s tears are the cause, but Carroll does not say. The debate revolves around who is older. When the Lory’s argument becomes “‘I am older than you, and must know better'” (Carroll 32), Alice’s only issue with this idea is that that the Lory will not tell her how old he is. Since she cannot discern who is older, she cannot decide who is right. This seems illogical until you consider Alice is a child and therefore trained to der to adults. In this way, knowledge, power and time become intimately linked. Often, in life, as in Alice in Wonderland, adults make decisions and say and act in ways that suggest the entire concept is nonsense. Just because something appears logical does not make it so. though, in time, Alice will become an adult and inculcate the next generation with the same idea. But for now, she is just a child trying to make sense of the world she finds herself in.
Yet, in Wonderland, Alice’s attempts are largely in vain. She is ill-prepared to operate in a discursively different world as she only views situations through her own internalised belief system. In Alice’s world time is associated with linearity. Throughout Alice in Wonderland Alice learns that what was true for her before is not true for her now. For example, when the Mouse’s “dry” story fails to dry Alice and the other animals, the Dodo suggests a Caucus-race. In the Dodo’s Caucus-race contestants are situated randomly around a marked course. They start running whenever they wish, and they stop whenever they choose. Ultimately, some characters keep running until an arbitrary end is called. Since there is no actual start or finish line, deciding who wins proves impossible and hence everyone is declared a winner (Carroll 34-5). This idea is foreign to Alice because, for her, all activities are measured temporally. There is a start and a finish. Time in this sense is so indelible that to conceive of it, and thus our way of experiencing the world, differently seems impossible. We cannot see outside the discourses we within. For Alice, time is a fixed entity that operates in a predictable way. But she continues to discover this is not the case in Wonderland.
When Alice crashes the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, she determines yet another way time does not act in accordance with her expectations. In Wonderland, Time is a “he”. When the Queen of Hearts accuses the Mad Hatter of “murdering time” by wasting it, Time retaliates (Carroll 86-7). The link between murder and death should not be ignored. The belief that time is precious and should not be wasted is a powerful discourse and suggests one of the ways time controls people. Like Foucault’s notion of power, time is also productive. It encourages and produces physical actions. Power and time can only be experienced in the present, but they can influence how we see the past and what is possible in the future.
Carroll demonstrates this in Alice in Wonderland in various ways. When Time will no longer help the Mad Hatter, and instead makes it permanently 6pm for him, the Hatter must act accordingly. The idea that 6pm is dinner time means the Mad Hatter’s tea-party is a never-ending event. This alone is a completely foreign concept for Alice for reasons previously stated. However, for the Hatter adn his tea-party guests the new time and the way it controls their actions is normal. Since it is always tea time, they do not have time to clear the dishes between meals so upon the Hatter’s command everyone moves one space around the dinner table. The Hatter is the only one to benefit from the move since he is the only one to end up with a clean dinner setting (Carroll 89-90). Time controls the hatter’s actions but in turn, he controls the guests possible movements. For Alice, this means moving from her original clean space to a place covered in spilt milk. Here Foucault’s assertion that ‘it is often difficult to see who holds the power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power,’ holds (Foucault, “Intellectuals and power” 213). At the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, the characters move around the table, like hands around a clock face, in a never-ending cycle instigated by Time and encouraged by Hatter.
Alice, however, does not grasp that time is not proceeding and that instead they are living in an ongoing present. When she asks what happens when they have completed a full circle around the table, the March Hare interjects that it is time to change the subject. A permanent present means there i no future to consider. This is how Carroll deals with the lack of temporality in this section of the narrative, whilst raising questions in the mind of the reader. We cannot remain in a perpetual present, even in a narrative form. Actions have consequences.
In Alice’s world, because of its linearity, time is precious. This too is a discourse. Many social norms exist around what people should be doing with their time in order to operate and function as useful and successful members of society. Alice believes in this as Carroll makes evident in Through the Looking-Glass. Nevertheless, at the tea-party in Alice in Wonderland when Alice challenges the March Hare for wasting her time with an unanswerable riddle, the Hatter counters with:
‘If you knew Time as well as I do … you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice.
‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. ‘I dare say you’ve never even spoke to Time!’
‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied: ‘but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.’
‘Ah! That accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He won’t stand beating …’ (Carroll 85).
Here, through a play on words, Carroll cleverly links language and time. For Hatter, who experiences Time as a “he”, “beating time” could either refer to subjecting time to a physically violent act or to beating time in some form of competition. Whereas “beating time” for Alice is a rhythmic way of maintaining the correct tempo when playing music. For Alice, time is a system. In her non-dream world that system appears to exist and operate in a logical and stable manner rather than at the whim of an individual male. However, this is not the case.
Time is intimately linked with discourse and power. The concept and importance of time, expectations of punctuality, and living according to the clock, are all taken for granted ways of thinking accepted as “normal”. They are rarely questioned and yet these ideas are all social constructions. According to Kenneth Grattan (A Brief History of Telling Time), the seven-day week did not come into being until the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the State religion and changed the eight-day week to the current seven-day format early in 4 AD. Just like Time in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Emperor Constantine had the ability to change the way people viewed time and Foucault’s maxim that power is knowledge is represented in both Wonderland and our own world. This may appear to be reflective of a certain historical period and the perceived power of an emperor; however, in 1895 New Zealand entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, put forward a proposition for “seasonal time adjustment.” It was trialled in 1927 and now, because a shift worker wanted more daylight hours, many countries around the world put their clocks forward an hour to create a perceived increase in summer time daylight hours (Gibbs), and whether people like it or not, they comply. This shows that time is a discourse rather than merely an abstract concept and Carroll’s nonsense has more ‘truth’ behind it than it initially appears. Moreover, Foucault’s claim that discourses “create” reality is supported.
Ultimately in Alice in Wonderland whenever Alice becomes overwhelmed by Wonderland’s reality, she claims her power back by leaving the situation. Albeit, in the final chapter, when the Queen attempts to bully her, Alice realises her power by standing up for herself. She becomes the dominant character until she wakes up and Carroll returns her to her sweet innocent child-like self. Her sister tells her to run along to tea and she does so without question (Carroll 146-48). The progress she made in the dream is lost. As the author, and the fancier of the innocence of young girls (Skinner 10), Carroll uses his power to freeze Alice at an age he finds her most desirable. He may have allowed her to leave the tea-party but he still froze her in time.
However, in Through the Looking Glass Alice is older and she experiences a more adult-like world. Through the Looking-Glass moves in a more linear fashion. A chess board guides the narrative. In this book Alice wants to transform herself from a pawn to a queen. To do so she believes all she must do is make her way from one side of the chess board to the other. Rather than seeking adventure, Alice now wants power. Whilst she does make it to the other side, and in turn becomes a queen, she does not become powerful. She has misunderstood how power works. She did not garner cultural, social or financial capital. Nor did she develop any other form of symbolic authority. She is still a child and treated as such.
When she meets Humpty Dumpty, he assumes the dominant position. He dismisses her name as meaningless, accuses her of asking simplistic riddles, and bamboozles her with his pedantic treatment of her sloppy language (Carroll Looking-Glass 248-251). Yet, when Alice questions his explanation of what certain words mean, he explains to her that words mean whatever he wants them to mean. Whilst this does not make sense to Alice, she defers to him nonetheless because he appears more knowledgeable. This is in keeping with Foucault’s claim that: “Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’” (Foucault Discipline and Punish 27). So, even though Alice questioned Humpty Dumpty’s explanations of words, she asks him to explain the Jabberwocky poem (Carroll Looking-Glass 180). He obliges. Yet, as Beatrice Turner (245) points out, more than a quarter of the poem consists of created words. That does not prevent Humpty Dumpty from telling her what those words mean.
The first line reads, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” (Carroll Looking-Glass 256). Humpty explains to Alice that “‘“Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon – the time when you begin broiling things for dinner”’ and “slithy” ‘means lithe and slimy with “lithe” being the same as active, and ‘“toves” are something like badgers – they’re something like lizards – and they’re something like corkscrews.’ He adds that “toves” ‘make their nests under sun-dials – also they live on cheese’” (Carroll Looking-Glass 256). In other words, Humpty Dumpty shows he has considerable knowledge to impart about something meaningless.
Rather than desist, he uses his existing knowledge and his understanding that people interpret poems to construct meaning, thus confirming what Stanley Fish highlighted in “How to Recognise a Poem When You See One” ̶ people will find meaning in something meaningless if they look hard enough. It is possible to argue that Carroll was either pre-empting what academics would later do with his works or showing the nonsense behind it. Either way, Humpty Dumpty will continue to show how words, ideas and meanings can be defined by those deemed to have the authority to do so. Furthermore, since Humpty Dumpty is not the only individual to spend time deciphering Jabberwocky, the poem has taken on a life of its own. Humpty Dumpty’s meta-language can in turn create another meta-language and so on and so on just as the potential interpretations of Jabberwocky and Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass can go on ad infinitum.
The relevance and association of temporality to narrative, to knowledge, to power and life itself cannot be ignored. Like power it is everywhere. Lewis Carroll uncovered many illogical ideas related to both time and power that are generally accepted as “truths”. People may claim they see through the ‘untruths’; however, it is doubtful that anyone is totally immune to the power of discourses. Whilst time has been shown to be a discursive construction it is difficult to imagine a world without a temporal structure. Language as we know it would break down. Our ability to describe events, our conceptions of ourselves and our place in the world, and our ability to function in the world as it now exists would cease to be. It is beyond this writer’s ability to comprehend. But, therein lies the power of discourses. They are embodied to such an extent that we are often only able to perceive that life can be different after it has changed. Therefore, academics could spend lifetimes dedicated to the study of these supposed children’s books without exhausting the possibilities. As time goes on, entirely new readings will become possible as societal changes impact the way things are perceived. Unlike in Wonderland, in our world, the power of time is that it passes.
I have included this essay because I have reviewed an Alice inspired tarot deck – Tarot in Wonderland.
Works Cited
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Vintage Books, 2007.
Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh UP, 2006.
Fish, Stanley. How to Recognise a Poem When You See One. http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/Fish/HowToRecognizeAPoem.htm
Foucault, Michel. “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.” Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 205-217.
—. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8 no. 4, 1982, pp. 777-795. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197
— . Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1977.
Gibbs, George. “Hudson, George Vernon.” Te Ara The Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, New Zealand Government, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h42/hudson-george-vernon
Gratton, Kenneth. “A Brief History of Telling Time.” The Conversation, The Conversation Media Group, 16 May 2016, https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-telling-time-55408
Sherman, Stewart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785. U of Chicago P, 1996.
Skinner, John. “Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Wonderland.” American Imago, vol. 4 no. 4, 1947, pp. 3-31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26301172.
Turner, Beatrice. “”Which is to be Master?”: Language as Power in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 35 no. 3, 2010, pp. 243-254, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2010.0005
