ilx!

Thinking about the enduring appeal of the Alice world:1. It is about ideas - intellectual issues - philosophy turned into brain-teasers. So it has had a long afterlife in the intellectual / academic world, as model / something to quote to lighten the tone. I imagine that the Wittgensteinians and logical positivists, et al, made some hay with it; but so have post-structuralists. It has a pliable sort of quality in this respect, perhaps - it can illustrate whatever paradoxical concept you want it to.

2. It also has an indeterminacy, a mystery about it that has never quite been cleared up - an excess of imagination (over the required, I suppose I mean), a lot of odd juxtapositions and abrupt shifts. It has obviously fed into a general C20 interest (artistic and otherwise) in dreams: Surrealism, Joyce (refs in FW), the 60s / hallucinatory / mind-expansion (hence Jefferson Airplane), etc.

3. Can't underestimate sexuality here - though this is a difficult issue because it skirts the edges of paedophilia, with support from the author's biography. But I think that the appeal of Alice as a figure is mildly analogous to that of later icon Lara Croft. I know nowt about LC's video game, but it seems clear to me that (whatever the game's qualities) a lot of identification / fantasizing is going on to boost its appeal. Would Alice be so popular (or popular in the same way) if (s)he was a boy, or if there were no cute blonde drawings pictures of her in her wee dress and stockings?

4. Then again, this kind of thing also feeds into the cultural imaginary broadly identifiable as 'twee' - ie, roughly, a (neo- Romantic?) cult of childhood, a playing at innocence (nb. possible vital importance of Alice as icon for indie-pop girl look? Never mentioned by Reynolds et al). This needn't have an 'indie' inflection - it can just be a matter of people who are comforted by the thought of buttered scones, Oxford colleges, summers by the river, talking rabbits...