Lewis in Wonderland: the looking-glass world of Sylvie and Bruno.(Lewis Caroll)(Critical essay)

Since their publication in 1889 and 1893, Lewis Carroll's two Sylvie and Bruno books have perplexed and disappointed both critics and casual readers, who have faulted them for bearing only a slight resemblance to their famous predecessors, the two Alice books. Walter Crane, who declined to illustrate Sylvie and Bruno, articulated what quickly became a common attitude toward the books when he noted that Carroll's new project "was of a very different character from Alice--a story with religious and moral purpose, with only an occasional touch of the ingenuity and humor of Alice, so that it was not nearly so inspiring or amusing" (qtd. in Green, 148). Many Carroll critics concur, judging Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded "disastrous" if "interesting" failures (Hudson, 287). (1) Even critics who admire the novels insist that they should be viewed not as successors to Alice, but "in [their] proper context" as Victorian romances (Miller), Menippean satire (Miller again), proto-Modernist experiments (Gattegno, Atherton, Wilson, Purdy), or post-structuralist meditations on textuality (Gordon, Deleuze). (2) Thus, to justify his claim that Sylvie and Bruno is an underappreciated "masterpiece," Deleuze notes that "in comparison with Alice and Through the Looking-Glass, [it] displays a set of entirely new techniques" (43).

The claim that Sylvie and Bruno's adventures bear only "minor similarities" to Alice's seems at first unassailable, given the many stylistic and structural differences between the two projects (Gattegno, 168). Eschewing the brilliantly eccentric economy of the Alice books, Carroll constructs a convoluted double plot in Sylvie and Bruno. One strand chronicles a political uprising in an imaginary country called Outland, which is aimed at depriving the fairy children Sylvie and Bruno of their rightful rule. The other involves a romance between two real-life residents of England, Arthur Forrester and Lady Muriel Orme. The books are narrated by an elderly bachelor who falls in and out of reveries that enable him to shift from one world to the other. Subject matter, size, and tone all suggest that these novels do not constitute another contribution to the genre of children's fantasy. Not only does Carroll choose to focus on political and romantic maneuverings, he also has his adult characters engage in endless dialogues about serious religious and philosophical issues, which bloat the books out to twice the length of Alice. Moreover, the saccharine sentimentality that hovers around the edges of Alice invades the main text of Sylvie and Bruno; the novels feature many scenes like the treacly one in which Bruno bestows a kiss on his sister, lisping, "'I ca'n't give oo nuffin but this!'" (282). (3)

Despite all this evidence, however, I will argue that the two projects are intimately connected, and that Carroll himself was aware of the many parallels between them and determined to downplay them. His second two-volume fantasy in effect constitutes a looking-glass reversal of his first: instead of sending a child into a dream world in which she suffers various indignities, he inflicts the disorienting vision of an alternative reality on himself. The narrator of Sylvie and Bruno, who baldly announces "My name's Lewis Carroll" in his first fictional appearance, supplies us with a first-person account of the strange ordeal of traveling through Wonderland ("Bruno's Revenge," 78). Carroll puts himself in place of Alice, I suggest, because he was aware of the aggression inherent in the kinds of games he wanted to play with children, and anxious to make amends for it. Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded repeatedly attest to his concern that adult and child cannot be partners in play, because their uneasy alliance inevitably degenerates into a cruel game of cat and mouse.

Critics like Jacqueline Rose, Carolyn Steedman, James Kincaid, and Catherine Robson have evinced anxiety about the ways in which authors like Carroll and J. M. Barrie use the figure of the child for their own psychic purposes, whether to reclaim a past self or to revel in the pleasure of the child's "erotic Otherness" (Kincaid, 275). Such "child-loving," they argue, constitutes an aggressive form of colonization, in which the adult projects his desires on to--and thereby objectifies--the child. But none of these accounts recognize the extent to which Victorian writers were themselves concerned about investing so much emotional capital in children. The engine that drives the narrative of Sylvie and Bruno is the Carrollian narrator's consuming passion for his "Dream-Children," and particularly his longing to possess Sylvie (473). Against Robson's claim that Sylvie and Bruno "presents the pairing of the old man and the little girl as the most natural thing in the world," I argue that Carroll portrays child-loving as a pathological and destructive act (129). As punishment for this sin, the adult swain is rendered doubly abject: he suffers the "pierc[ing]" pangs of unrequited love, as well as the very same kind of verbal and physical punishment previously inflicted on Alice, Carroll's original "dream-child" (624, 11). (4) Concerned that the power imbalance inherent in the adult-child relationship precludes reciprocity, Carroll reverses the position of the two parties precisely because he fears that no such switch is possible: adult and child are locked into the roles of ravenous hunter and unwilling prey.

Adherents to the view that the Sylvie and Bruno books bear little resemblance to Alice invariably quote Carroll's preface to the first volume, in which he insists that his goal has been to write something completely unlike Alice. Noting that dozens of other authors have already re-trod the road to Wonderland, he declares, "[I]t would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again. Hence it is that, in Sylvie and Bruno, I have striven--with I know not what success--to strike out yet another new path" (257). But as his uncertainty here indicates, Carroll's declaration of difference was motivated not by a conviction that the two projects had nothing in common, but rather by his concern that they shared too much. His original goal had not been to write a "new," "graver" kind of book--as he claims in the preface--but to produce another entertaining "fairy-tale" for children, "a book of the same general character as Alice's Adventures," as he put it in an 1877 letter (Cohen and Wakeling, 121, 338). Thus, when Punch artist Harry Furniss agreed to illustrate Sylvie and Bruno in 1885, Carroll exultantly informed him, "Now that you are found, I shall go back to my Alice in Wonderland style of work with every hope of making a success" (qtd. in Green, 149). (5)

Writing to Furniss just three months before the publication of Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll reveals his real motivation for distinguishing between the two projects in the preface: namely, his concern that critics will say "this writer can only play one tune: the book is a rechauffe of Alice" (Cohen and Wakeling, 171). Explaining his decision to postpone the inclusion of a comic poem until the second volume, Carroll informed Furniss that "anything which would have the effect of connecting the book with Alice would be absolutely disastrous.[...] I'm trying my very best to get out of the old groove" (171). Carroll's fear that he has continued to produce Alice-esque fiction also emerges in the text of Sylvie and Bruno. Jan B. Gordon identifies numerous passages that attest to Carroll's uneasy sense of "the impossibility of saying anything new," including one in which Lady Muriel observes that "'there are no new melodies, now-a-days. What people talk of as "the last new song" always recalls to me some tune I've known as a child!'" (Gordon, 186; Sylvie and Bruno, 537).

As Richard Kelly notes, such moments signal Carroll's "anxiety about writing the same book over again" (136). But given the many differences between Sylvie and Bruno and the Alice books, why would he have worried about this? Kelly lists a few connections between the two projects, noting that "the peculiar brand of nonsense that characterized the Alice books reasserts itself" in the passages of Sylvie and Bruno that deal with eccentric characters like the mad gardener and the absent-minded professor. He also points out that both projects concern themselves with the contrast between "dreaming and waking states" and conclude with violent transformation scenes (137). But these disparate links do not seem substantial enough to justify authorial anxiety about self-repetition. To understand Carroll's concern, we must take into account the genesis of the Sylvie and Bruno books. The novels grew out of a short story entitled "Bruno's Revenge" that Carroll wrote for a children's magazine in 1867, in between writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). This story, which appears in virtually unaltered form as chapters fourteen and fifteen of Sylvie and Bruno, is such an obvious rewrite of Alice that it would not be out of place in Alternative Alices, Carolyn Sigler's anthology of the kind of imitative texts that Carroll criticizes in his preface.