Childhood is a construct experienced differently in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The characters in both novels are in a state of continuous flux, adapting and altering themselves to their changing environments as the novel evolves. Readers are expected to come to either texts with the knowledge of the span of childhood. This essay explores the depiction of childhood experiences and its relation to the adult world, comparing both primary texts and their interpretation of childhood experiences.
The depiction of childhood experience and its relation to adulthood is undoubtedly emphasized throughout Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights. Before Heathcliff the ‘black villain’ was taken in by Mr Earnshaw, Catherine and Hindley had the almost idyllic childhood. Upon Heathcliff’s arrival most and nearly all of Mr Earnshaw’s affection is diverted towards his new foster son, marking the end of a civilised household. This is not to the delight of the likes of Hindley or Nelly, who described him as ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child… indeed its face looked older than Catherine’s’. Right from his introduction, Heathcliff is othered, and denied a humanising personal pronoun and referred to as ‘it’. He is an unwanted gift for Nelly and the children (mainly Hindley), and is perceived for a majority of the novel as an object of fright and fascination. No one could accurately and confidently read him, as his presence poses as a medium for portraying the domestic as odd, which threatens a type of day-to-day gothic, which terrifies Hindley. This obsessive behaviour of the residents of Wuthering Heights towards Heathcliff shows Victorians obsession with the systems of scientific and ethnographic categorisation in the Victorian era, often in quite terrifying ways. Every day of Heathcliff’s life, he is reminded of his otherness, same is the case for Brontë who is always presented as the othered because of her brains and strangeness. It is no surprise that Brontë represents her otherness through Heathcliff, the pariah, who in adulthood attempts to dislodge this stigma and impose it on his effeminate son. Just like his father, on Linton’s first arrival at Wuthering Heights, he is denied a humanising noun, and is described as Heathcliff’s ‘property’ and a ‘lovely charming thing!’. This statement is of course a paradox, as although Heathcliff ‘was not sanguine’, he did not expect Linton to be ‘worse than [he] expected’. This statement Heathcliff made to his son is what Levy describes as a characteristic of the Unloved household, which is Wuthering Heights. Members of the Unloved household such as Catherine and Heathcliff ‘turn loneliness into a community of rejection, where they wield control’. Levy groups the residents of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange into the ‘Unloved’ (where childhood is an experience of abuse and neglect) and the ‘Overloved (where childhood is an experience of overprotecting and overpampering), with the former embodying ‘heartless cruelty’ and the latter, ‘piteous helplessness’. As a result of the Unloved atmosphere, Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley were made to endure, they all turn to different attitudes. Hindley is forced to direct is anger towards the ‘usurper of his parent’s affection and his privileges’, whom he harmed with ‘blows’. Subsequent to Mr Earnshaw’s death, he drove Heathcliff to stay with the servants. This constant degradation Heathcliff had to face at Hindley’s hands ensured the same fate for Hindley’s son, Hareton, whom Heathcliff denied proper education , making Hareton ‘scorn everything extra animal as silly and weak’. Hindley’s strictness acted as a catalyst that united Catherine and Heathcliff, driving them to a love-hate relationship. Their relationship goes beyond a rational relationship, becoming a union of souls. Neither Catherine nor Heathcliff see their selves without the other. Her statement ‘I am Heathcliff’ and his statement ‘would you like to live with your soul in the grave’ resonates a disturbing image of bondage. Their souls are forcefully bound, representing an othered kind of love, between the societal abject, Heathcliff, and the faceted Catherine, who adopts another character when needed. Heathcliff’s imaginative rebelling presence in the novel creates gothic tension, that disturbs social order, as he enforces the concept of the slave to master retribution, embodying Victorian fear of retribution for complicity in slavery. It is undisputable that the atmosphere of the Unlove household created adults that never learnt to love, turning to loneliness, as only it can make them feel worthy of love.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland depicts childhood experience to the adult world in a more hyperbolised way, telling the story of a girl’s transition from childhood, to adolescence, then to adulthood. Dream, the undeniable foundation of this bildungsroman. Alice’s dream portrays several encounters with creatures that are a reflection of her personality and Carroll’s. Within her dream, Alice struggles to find her identity amongst the confusing changes she is going through. The first time she grows large, she laments, ‘But if I’m not the same, the next question is who in the world am I?’. Alice is unable to comprehend her change in identity, having been forced to grow. She does not question how she grew large, but rather how this affects her as human. Several times in the story, Alice’s physical size changes, struggling to maintain a stable size and identity. Alice’s fluctuating size portrays Carroll’s nostalgia for his own lost childhood innocence. Alice serves to entertain two types of readers, the child and the adult. The story is designated for the child (as suggested by the origin of the story where Carroll wrote the story for Alice of the Liddell household), showing their experience, while the adult reader comes to Alice to enjoy the benefit of re-entering childhood experience with adult experience, bringing new meaning. The novel takes up an anti-didactic culture where adults are distanced from the narrative, and the child is left to make the uncomfortable adult decision, which induces a constants state of flux. The caucus race is an example of Alice acting the role of the adult, pacifying childlike creatures with what she can summon from her pocket. The adult role is imposed on Alice as the capitalised ‘why, SHE, of course’ suggests. She is forced to entertain their game which she is not allowed to find ‘absurd’, therefore producing ethnocentric mindset, as Alice thinks the game funny, but she also resists said mindset as she adapts to the changes she faces. Alice is faced with the question, ‘who are you?’, on her encounter with the othered caterpillar, which she replies, ‘I – I hardly know, sir’. Alice is unable to comprehend her metamorphosis and tries to account for it to the unsympathetic caterpillar presented to readers through John Tenniel’s anthropomorphised illustration, which minimises Alice’s picture. ‘Little Alice’, as referred to by her sister and some of the creatures. The adjective ‘little’, works a diminutive function that brings awareness to Alice’s childlike state, but is then forced to go through unconsented changes, resulting in the loss of her childlike innocence. The adjective also shows Victorian romanticised notion of child where the narrative of the child changed from the sinful creature to a figure to be views as innocent purity. Waking up from her slumber, Alice tells her unnamed sister of her dream. Her sister then goes on ’with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had to open them again, and all world change to dull reality’. Alice’s sister experiences a spillage of Alice’s wonderland into her world, where a repressed part of her is conjured, as suggested by the pre-modifying adjective ‘closed’. Alice’s sister acts as a cypher for childhood, for the readers who have now witnessed Alice’s adventure, they mourn the loss of their lost childhood. Alice’s sister then goes on to picture ‘to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood’. Although the entire story tells the tale of a girl rebelling, this conclusion shows the fate that awaits a Victorian child which Greer argues ‘domesticates Alice’s chaotic adventures, and the frame is shifted to adults which makes readers aware of the differences between ‘Alice’s experiences and the adult figures’ desires’. The depiction of childhood experience predicts no change to Alice’s fate, as the period she is in leaves little to no room for her to explore like she did in her wonderland, all of this will have to stay as memories.
Childhood experience and its relation to the adult world as depicted in both Wuthering Heights and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland is varied as the childhood experiences of Catherine and Alice has little to no effect on their adult life. Catherine’s rather abrupt childhood is caused by an injury she suffered, and is made to stay in Thrushcross Grange, the Overloved household, where she learns ladylike manners. The manners she learn begin to fade the very moment she returns to Wuthering Heights, even going as far as hitting Edgar who ‘felt it applied over his ear in a way that could not be mistaken for jest’. This sort of behaviour is expected of the Unloved household, as Wuthering Heights as the name suggest is just a house waiting to blow up. On the other hand, Alice’s childhood, although still ongoing, is interrupted by ‘teatime’, bringing the narrative to an abrupt end. This rather anticlimactic end could suggest the invasive nature of adulthood that creeps in on you before you know it. Teatime is a way to get Alice into the norm of adulthood, as it is what will be expected of her in her later years. And as the title of the story suggest, the possessive determiner ‘Alice’s Adventure’ suggest, this adventure is purely for Alice (for Alice Liddell), and the readers are unwelcome guests, just like adulthood, prying into little Alice’s adventure to revive our lost childhood innocence. Carroll is experimental with his use of puns in the mouse’s tale which is shaped like a tail which shows the immature silliness in the Wonderland characters, reemphasising the theme of growing up. Brontë however, is more romantic with her writing in saying ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire’. Her use of simile and juxtaposition shows how both Heathcliff and Catherine contradict each other yet complete each other. Childhood is experienced differently in both poems, as one follows a trajectory that begins with life and death, and the other zooms in on the good and the bad of growing up. We see the effect of childhood experience in Wuthering Heights, while the effect is withheld but suggested to us in Alice.
Childhood experience as depicted in both texts really is a construct, as childhood experience ends for characters of Wuthering Heights after going through a life altering experience, for Catherine, her visit to the Thrushcross Grange, for Hindley, his father’s death, and for Heathcliff, an overheard conversation that puts his stance with Catherine into clearer perspective, he is poor. While for the main character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, her childhood is still going on, even at the end of the story. Childhood experience neither gives nor takes from the adult world, it just helps shape it.
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