often including obsessions with food, body, weight and shape’ (10).This is made abundantly clear with Alice, where she doesn’t just take a bite of food but rather binge-eats and ends up regretting doing so later. During the first chapter of the book, Carroll has his protagonist ‘set to work, and very soon finish off the whole cake’ (2), a behaviour that results in her ‘shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all around her’ (2).The obvious metaphor here is of a young girl actually drowning in her unhappiness, brought on by a dangerous and unhealthy relationship with food.Throughout the book, Alice is ‘stuck in a cycle where she overeats and then has to eat or drink even more to correct her original consumption’ (11); later she confides in the Caterpillar that she is not happy in her current size and is given a mushroom to control her size and shape. It is clear that Alice relies on food to solve her problems, but one must consider whether food is the cause of her problems in the first place. From a biographical perspective, it could be argued that Carroll reflected his anxieties around food onto Alice. Cohen has suggested that ‘Carroll was known to struggle with his own eating habits’ (12), and his personal diaries have revealed that he would often skip meals and refuse to eat at luncheons, claiming he ‘had no appetite for a meal at that time’ (12), in addition his meals were small and restricted to ‘simply a biscuit and a glass of sherry’ (12). It has been speculated that Carroll had multiple close friendships with young girls, the most prominent being the spur of his imagination for the Alice books – Alice Liddell herself, yet rather than enforce the restrictions on food he reserved for himself, Carroll would prepare indulgently planned meals for her ‘including cocoa, jam and other treats’ (12). Cohen has argued that Carroll not only reflected his wishes onto Alice and these other young girls, but also his anxieties – and while he may not have explicitly had a classifiable eating disorder, such as anorexia, he was clearly very controlling with his own diet. In many ways,‘Alice seems to be eating all the food that Carroll would not eat, while also suffering Carroll’s imagined consequences of eating such food’ (11).The dream-like state of Wonderland is filled with mainly sweets, cakes, tarts and custards, suggesting a subconscious longing for the rich and indulgent food that neither Carroll nor Alice could eat in real life. It is important to recognise that the physical changes Alice undergoes, such as shrinking to ‘only ten inches high’ (2) or ‘opening out like the largest telescope that ever was’ (2), are all happening within the breadth of her imagination, where her unconscious mind seems to be fixated on her body.This is comparable to people with classifiable eating disorders, who often have a voice inside their head telling them they are too large or too fat, which is, in fact, not the case. It is undeniable that Carroll was influenced by
in Wonderland. Freud theorised that the superego ‘forms its impressions and sensibilities during an individual’s childhood’ (6), in that influential figures – such as parents or teachers – help to form a child’s sense of right and wrong, and so help evolve the superego. From the Caterpillar’s advice we can see a possible reflection of Alice’s childhood, in which the ideals of a respectable Victorian woman would have been conditioned into her from a young age – ‘keeping her temper’ being one of them. The final pressure on Alice’s psyche is that of the ego; defined by Freud as a ‘representation of what may be called reason and common sense’ (6), the ego seeks to balance the instinctive drives of the id with the moral domination of the superego and the demands of the real world. It is evident that Alice plays the role of the ego in Wonderland, where she finds herself forced to balance fantasy and reality; for example, on the several occasions where she must differentiate between food and animals. In the chapter The Lobster Quadrille, the Lobster says ‘perhaps you were never introduced to a lobster’ (2), and Alice begins to mention she once toasted and
ate a lobster, showing her struggle to comprehend the fantastical animals of
Wonderland with real-life food and lobsters. Although Alice does learn to keep these ‘rather awkward remarks’ (2) to herself,Vembar suggested that Alice is ‘constantly warring between the creatures of Wonderland in forms of the superego and the id’ (5), essentially balancing the drive between the contradictory elements of her psyche. Freud used the term ‘ego defence-mechanisms’ to describe the ways one may alleviate the pressures of the two strong dominating forces on the psyche, and suggested that if this balance of forces didn’t occur then psychiatric disorders may prevail. Carroll’s portrayal of mental disorders in Wonderland can therefore be looked at from a psychodynamic perspective, wherein Alice’s balancing of her psyche leads to the emergence of mental abnormalities in several of the creatures in Wonderland,‘bearing a remarkable significance to the tripartite role of the psyche’ (5). Part 3 - Biographical factors The descent into madness in Victorian England has been likened to ‘the journey into a dark, subterraneous realm’ (9), wherein the cleverly woven depiction of madness within Wonderland speaks of a more sinister mental decline faced by Carroll himself.A biographical reading of Alice’s eating habits would look upon the author for a reflection of mental abnormalities surrounding food; it is clear that one of the most overt illnesses dealt with in the book is Alice’s eating, where she seems to be constantly struggling with her body. Eating disorders are generally defined as ‘an unhealthy relationship with food,
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