Note: A PowerPoint presentation accompanied the delivery of this paper, given on 1 Nov. 2013 during the “Through the Looking-Glass” Victorians Institute Conference at Middle Tennessee State University. To preserve the multimodal life of the original experience, I include the PowerPoint (PP), and key each slide to a parenthetical reference within the essay.

Portions of this essay were published in a 2011 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, and, because that original material seeded my dissertation project, I am currently attempting to revisit the ideas in ways that are productive in formulating a fully-fledged chapter of the dissertation.@ See Manning. My thanks to NVS for allowing authors to reprint their work. In true Looking-Glass fashion, then, I now wish to access a realm in which the Carrollian “effect of living backwards” (Carroll, Through 95) allows me to remember things both ways . . . or, at the very least, to reflect on—and take further—some of the claims I have previously made in regard to the Alice books.

Lewis Carroll’s fictional Alice is an iconic cultural figure who has repeatedly found her way into the contemporary world via a diverse array of adaptations and re-presentations. From pioneer filmmaker Cecil M. Hepworth’s 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland and Disney’s 1951 animated film classic to Grace Slick’s 1967 rock song “White Rabbit,” American McGee’s Alice video games (2000 and 2011), and Tim Burton’s recent tech-savvy film (2010), Alice persists in our imaginations and continues to cross numerous narrative and technological thresholds, mirroring both her literary origins and her multimedia evolution (PP Slide 2). In this essay, I want to focus on Victorian proto-cinematic media and explore the seminal, nineteenth-century roots of Alice’s technological development as reflected by Carroll’s 1865 and 1871 narratives; that is, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (PP Slide 3) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (PP Slide 4), respectively. I hope to demonstrate that the Alice books always already embody a distinctly proto-cinematic multimodality, which, I argue, anticipated—and also participated in—subsequent innovations, such as the motion picture (cinema, 3D film, CGI), as well as interactive media (video games, hypertext, websites).

Some scholarly inroads have been made regarding the way texts appropriate or integrate visual media. John Plunkett, for example, has suggested that “a significant number of illustrated and movable books, usually aimed at a juvenile audience, . . . exploited the novelty of the latest optical recreations. These children’s publications attempted to replicate – or structure themselves on – the viewing experience of peepshows, panoramas and the magic lantern” (1). While Plunkett does not explicitly discuss the Alice books, Mou-Lan Wong has similarly asserted that Carroll took great pains with the physical layout of his books, and she notes that Carroll’s text and John Tenniel’s illustrations “are carefully coordinated to match each other,” thus creating opportunities for readers to actively engage with the stories both mentally and physically (139). Certainly, the first editions of the Alice books not only encouraged readers to figuratively follow Alice into Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land, but they also required readers to physically move themselves into the dream worlds with her by turning the pages. The entrance into Looking-Glass Land is, literally, a case of moving pictures (PP Slide 5; while the slide makes it look like the images are on facing pages, they actually appear on the recto and verso of the same leaf, so in turning the page, we cross the threshold of the mirror with Alice.). The layout of text and illustrations, as Wong rightly contends, creates the potential for optical illusions and visual phenomena that are activated by readers’ hands and eyes. I would like to take the participatory nature of the books a step further and suggest that, in the hands of adult and child readers alike, they were akin to the proto-cinematic optical toys that were so popular in nineteenth-century households.

Optical toys, sometimes called philosophical toys, were wide-ranging both in their availability and in their forms. The thaumatrope, for instance, blended two separate images into one [here, during the presentation I handed around an example, which—not coincidentally—features the Cheshire cat]. The zoetrope (PP Slide 6) created the illusion of movement from numerous individual still images revolving around the interior of a drum with viewing slots. Like the photographic camera, these and other optical toys represent early motion picture technologies and paved the way for cinema. Significantly, several manifestations of optical toys relied on mirrors to create the animated illusion. First developed in the 1830s, the phenakistoscope (PP Slide 7) is a handheld cardboard wheel, which requires the viewer to spin the disc in front of a mirror in order to perceive the motion through slots. The more refined praxinoscope (PP Slide 8), some featuring a lamp and elaborate viewing “theatre,” worked with a similar reflective concept and hybridized the functioning of the zoetrope and phenakistoscope. All of these devices necessitated the mechanical involvement of a viewer, and I want to suggest that Carroll’s Alice books, relying as they did (and do) on both our hands and our eyes, can be considered optical toys that also participated in the development of cinema.

We know that Carroll—or more accurately, Charles Dodgson—was interested in visual technology, as he was a fairly brilliant amateur photographer. (PP Slide 9; here we see Dodgson himself and a few of his photographs of girls, including Alice Liddell.) Recent contributions to Carroll scholarship have examined how photographic technology informs the Alice books. Stephen Monteiro, for instance, suggests “the terms of photography’s production and consumption permeate Carroll’s Wonderland” (101). Franz Meier similarly suggests that a “metaphoric subtext creates a ‘photographic space’ within Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World that is intricately related to surprisingly modern experiences of life and questions of identity” (119). I want to further these considerations by exploring how the Alice books not only recreated or mirrored existing visual media and effects, but also how they participated in and reacted to the development of optical technologies. A pattern of technological change is evident across the two books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reflects the Victorians’ interest in the still, photographic image—an interest in stopping motion—while Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There reveals a growing interest in—and anxiety over—the moving image. Even the respective titles of the books are telling in this regard. On the one hand, the implication of stillness and spatial fixity that marks Alice’s Adventures is captured by the preposition “in” and, on the other hand, a sense of movement and spatial instability is prepositionally suggested by Through the Looking-Glass. The photographic narrative of the former gives way to a proto-cinematic narrative in the latter. As Alice moves from Wonderland to Looking-Glass Land, she crosses a threshold into the world of celluloid and cinema.

Turning to the texts, then: Carroll’s first book is quite preoccupied with governing and arresting motion. Perhaps the most controlling and (literally) arresting figure is the Queen of Hearts (PP Slide 10), whose constant iterations of “off with her head!” threaten the members of her court with the surest way to stop bodily motion for good and all. However, much of the book focuses upon the ways in which Alice’s motion is impeded or fixed. Alice’s long fall down the rabbit hole, for instance, abruptly ends “when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over” (Carroll, Alice’s 6). Once in Wonderland, Alice’s attempts to follow the White Rabbit are repeatedly hindered by some new obstacle, particularly in the hall of locked doors. At this point, Alice discovers strange potions and cakes that will alter her size, and her body begins to undergo alarming vertical fluctuations (PP Slide 11a), changes that she attempts to control in order to facilitate her entrance into the garden. Both Monteiro and Meier note the garden door’s resemblance to a camera, in both design and size (PP Slide 11b). It comes as no surprise that Alice, immersed in the photographic space of Wonderland, is anxious to learn to control the effects of the food and drink she encounters there: she is, in a sense, an amateur photographer who must sort out the tools of her trade by trial and error. Simultaneously, however, she seems to be the subject of her own photographic process, as the sizing effects with which she plays allow her to enter new Wonderland spaces. In a telling passage (PP Slide 12), she says:

Employing what may presumably be the chemical effects of the mushroom, Alice shrinks herself down from her “right size” to “nine inches” in order to enter the Duchess’ “little house” without frightening its inhabitants with her monstrous proportions. Essentially, Alice produces a small, photographic version of herself, one that will fit properly into the next photographic space, or scene, of the episodic narrative. Thus, each of Alice’s adventures may be read as a carefully composed photographic shot into which she inserts—or extracts—herself, based on her size. Conversing both with herself and with the denizens of Wonderland, Alice works her way from one pictorial frame to another, in a sequence that quite resembles a photographic album of individual—and often unrelated—still images. In Wonderland, Alice becomes a composite element of precisely what she feels is lacking in her sister’s boring book: pictures and conversations. What is more, Alice has a hand in developing both of these, which is, of course, messy and troubling at times, like the photographic process itself. @ Nineteenth-century photography was messy and difficult due to the number of chemicals required to perform the wet collodion process. According to Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling, “photographers fought a never-ending battle with their chemical baths as they attempted to achieve consistent results. Dodgson bought his chemicals from reputable manufacturers whose products were more likely to be pure and reliable” (27).

In Looking-Glass Land, it seems Alice has no need to trouble about her own size and whether she will fit a particular frame; rather, she is troubled by the backwards nature of the mirror world. Published six years after Alice’s Adventures, Through the Looking-Glass takes Alice into a dreamscape that is less photographic and far more cinematic than Wonderland. If one of Alice’s concerns in Wonderland is finding and maintaining the “right size”, which alters depending on the photographic space she would like to join, her concern in Looking-Glass Land is finding the right place, which necessitates movement. To be sure, the landscape of Looking-Glass Land is “marked out just like a large chess-board” (Carroll, Through 38; PP Slide 13), as Alice discovers during her conversation with the Red Queen. The game of chess is, after all, about making the right moves, and Alice must move through Looking-Glass Land and gain the eighth square in order to become a Queen, as she wishes. During Alice’s meeting with the Red Queen, a peculiar form of movement, in combination with recollection, occurs (PP Slide 14):

Here, the Red Queen and Alice are actively engaged in motion; they are running, and Alice clearly experiences the effects of the effort, as she is out of breath and physically incapable of going any faster. However, the scene remains the same, appearing to Alice as though moving “along with” them. Puzzled by this, Alice becomes even more disconcerted when she discovers that she and the Queen have, in fact, been running for quite some time and have not moved at all. As the Queen says, “here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Carroll, Through 42). In Looking-Glass Land, where everything is backwards, one must run to stand still; motion seems to preserve stasis, like the twirling movement of the thaumatrope creating what appears to be a single, if flickering, image. Embedded also within this notion of simultaneously running and staying is an anxious hint toward the cinematic, for Alice experiences what seems, to her, the illusion of movement from a fixed position, very like a stationary viewer observing—and becoming caught up in—a motion picture. As in Carroll’s first book, Alice is also the subject here: she is the motion picture around which nothing else moves.

It is not always so in Looking-Glass Land, however, as Alice eventually does succeed in moving to somewhere else. Indeed, she often arrives at a new square via some form of transportation or another, a pattern that is metaphorically cinematic in that the squares might be read as individual frames of film through which Alice reels. She takes the train—yet another version of statuary motion, which likely prepared the Victorians for motion pictures—through the third square and eventually finds the Tweedles, who “stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive” (Carroll, Through 66; PP Slide 15). In Looking-Glass Land, Alice is often taken by surprise at the sudden movement of creatures who seem fixed, as in a photograph. Expecting wax-works and stuffed figures that are incapable of motion, Alice is constantly reminded that Looking-Glass Land is not a world of stasis; rather, it is designed to be moved through, and she and its creatures are meant to move through it. The final Looking-Glass scene culminates in a spectacular display of motion. Alice, finally a Queen and tired of the nonsense, disrupts the dinner party, which has become altogether confused and tumultuous: “‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor” (Carroll, Through 212-13; PP Slide 16). Alice, anxious and feeling the need to take action in order to put an end to the excess of insanity going on around her, makes a violent motion that brings everything “crashing down”. Indeed, she follows this action with another equally violent manoeuvre, as she shakes the Red Queen (PP Slide 17a) into a kitten (PP Slide 17b) “– and it really was a kitten, after all” (Carroll, Through 216). Thus waking herself, Alice discovers that Looking-Glass Land, like Wonderland, had been a dream-world.@ I should note that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, dreams are often perceived as cinematic. However, we are left with the sense that inanimate objects, like the chessmen, become animated with motion and life once they pass through the framed mirror over the mantelpiece. When “the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through”, we enter the celluloid world of motion pictures where fantastical beings and scenes temporarily do become tangible and real (Carroll, Through 10).

I wish to return briefly to some of the optical toys I mentioned earlier (PP Slide 18a). Carroll encourages his young readers—the generation that would grow up to feel quite at home in the cinema—to both produce and observe a form of motion picture, just as they would in actively spinning a phenakistoscope in front of a looking-glass to create the illusion of movement. The Alice books’ participation in the development of proto-cinematic technologies may also be evidenced by the praxinoscope, which was introduced by Emile Reynaud in 1877, several years after the publication of Through the Looking-Glass. The use of mirrors improved the illusion of movement in both text and technology. Furthermore, the mirrored animation created by the praxinoscope could also be projected by introducing a magic lantern into the equation, which offered viewers an opportunity to cross the threshold of the looking-glass, like Alice (PP Slide 18b). Finally, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous “Horse in Motion,” a photographic sequence capturing the minute movements of a horse, was made in 1878 and is often claimed as one of the earliest films. With the separate photographs spliced and edited together, we can see the effect is quite striking (PP Slide 19), particularly considering the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe would not be unveiled until 1895.

Ultimately, I think Carroll’s mirror world offers us an opportunity to understand the late Victorian period (in Lacanian terms) as an historical moment during which society at large was, significantly, encountering its own moving image and struggling to recognize, negotiate, and establish its cultural identity and desires in relation to that reflected “Other.” Alice represents the growing up not only of an individual, but she also reflects the coming of age of the modern period itself. Her constant reappearance in various forms of media also mirrors our seemingly persistent yearning for the past, our unstable, ever-shifting position in the present, and our hopeful, yet anxious speculations about the future.

Works Cited (PP Slides 20-21)

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865] and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There [1871]. Vancouver, BC: Engage Books,     2010. Print Facsimile.
Hollingsworth, Christopher, ed. Alice beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Print.
Manning, Kara M. “‘That’s the Effect of Living Backwards’: Technological Change, Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.” Neo-    Victorian Studies 4.2 (2011): 154-79. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.
Meier, Franz. “Photographic Wonderland: Intermediality and Identity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Hollingsworth 117-133.
Monteiro, Stephen. “Lovely Gardens and Dark Rooms: Alice, the Queen, and the Spaces of Photography.” Hollingsworth 101-116.
Plunkett, John. “Moving Books/Moving Images: Optical Recreations and Children’s Publishing, 1800-1900,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth     Century 5 (2007): 1-27. Web. 14 March 2012. PDF file.
Taylor, Roger, and Edward Wakeling. Lewis Carroll, Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums. Princeton: Princeton University Library and     Press, 2002. Print.
Wong, Mou-Lan. “Generations of Re-generation: Re-creating Wonderland through Text, Illustrations, and the Reader’s Hands.” Hollingsworth 135-151.