Down the rabbit hole?
Transformation cannot happen if we return from the rabbit hole unchanged.
In Australia, we have a kind of anti-intellectualism that runs deep. We prefer to listen to shock jocks and TV presenters than to people who actually know. We roll our eyes at “the science”, “the experts”, or the thought of reading to work out what is what. I know the feeling of how boring and tedious it can be listening to some old person rattle on about things you have never heard using language you have never spoken. Some scepticism at anyone posing to be an expert is warranted to make sure they aren’t speaking shit or abusing power.
Both are entirely possible.
But we must not cease to seek out truthful understandings about what is going on. Sometimes it is easier just to turn off, as to turn on can be hard work.
Going down the rabbit hole is part of this essential work.
The original rabbit hole was all about Alice going to Wonderland. It is powerful imagery even today, over 150 years after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (known also as Lewis Carroll) penned the classic in the old stonewalls of Oxford’s Christ Church College and along the lush banks of the River Thames in Port Meadow. The character of Alice is stark as she questions the lucidness of the world of grown-ups[i]. She can be interpreted both as the rebel who rejects Victorian expectations of good little girls[ii] and also as a lost and whimsical little girl – the epitome of passive femininity, created within the Victorian era male gaze[iii]. Some have even claimed that Alice is a psychoanalytical decryption of Dodgson’s creepy desire for his real-life child muse.
In popular imagination, Alice’s rabbit hole is often about a personal journey, and one that will be exciting and thrilling with a little bit of discomfort to keep life interesting enough. But looking closer at Alice, her journey isn’t world changing.
Except for the few times Alice has been taken up by interpretations beyond the West, Alice remains a white, blonde girl dressed in a blue dress with a white apron in the remakes of the story. She is consistently portrayed as part of the elite Oxford aristocracy. My point being, it doesn’t matter how many times she goes down the rabbit hole; she herself continues to return unchanged.
Alice’s exploration of the world down the rabbit hole is also constructed in her image, dripping with bourgeoisie sweat – the white rabbit is a figure of the British countryside, his pocket watch and waistcoat are artefacts of the Oxford don, the tea party is a flourish of aristocratic life, the queen is the British monarch, and the characters talk in accents carried by those of elite England.
Whilst the story is about all these strange and wonderful creatures, they are all of her world. The adventure that promises to be new and otherworldly casts bourgeoisie, racialised and colonial depictions of the world. It’s about as adventurous and otherworldly as holidaying in Bali by drinking Bintang, receiving a daily massage and living it up in a resort affordable only because of the cheap exchange rates that stop others from keeping their heads above the water. The rabbit, the caterpillar on the mushroom and the other curious animals at the tea party are all used in Alice’s adventure to excite adventure and possibilities, but only within the elite, racialising and colonial imaginary.
It is ironic, if not so serious, that the text itself was written from the colonial institution of Oxford – the training centre for its colonial officers sent around the world to administer the dispossession, violence and oppression of the British Empire. The same British empire that colonised First nations people around the world, including Australia. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written in part from Christ Church, the same college that hosted John Locke, another Oxford don who funded the slave trade that resulted in over 40,000 million lives being taken from lands across Africa to territories that would later be named the Americas. Locke has been given the name of the “father” of liberalism and enlightenment – the author of On Liberty and other “seminal” texts used still in universities under the myth of the universality of modernisation. His concern was with finding freedom for European white men and no one else – not the slaves, the women, queer people, the disabled or the precariat.
Oxford is also the place to which the British officer Cecil Rhodes left his fortune, seized from the killing and dispossessing of populations across the African continent, to train the next generations of men in the Commonwealth to follow his footsteps through the Rhodes Scholarship. Some did follow; Australia has had its fair share of Rhodes Scholars who have gone on to do unremarkable things. Tony Abbott is obvious and so it Angus Taylor, both dedicated to many a cultural war and to causing Australia to all but fail in addressing climate change, but the list also includes many that have gone on to excel in the management consultancy world, advising companies how to screw people over in the name of profit, or what they like to call “win–win”. It’s probably a good place to add that I also studied at Oxford. Not as a Rhodes Scholar, but I hold the degree.
My overall point is this: by the time we finish Dodgson’s Alice in Wonderland, we leave Alice where she left off – in her rich garden surrounded by her family, who are waiting for her. She has made friends with the other – the rabbit, the caterpillar, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Alice returns unchanged and these characters only existed to reinforce her privilege.
I say this because we have our contemporary Alice stories too – of travel, self-help, making money, practicing charity and development, yoga… these are all stories, in some sense, about going down the rabbit hole for adventure and meaning. Just like Alice, these stories feel good; but truth be told, they rarely shake the foundation of the prison that keeps us screaming and others locked in cupboards. We may be affected, but we return to continue reproducing the same conditions of our privilege, and, more so, everyone else’s suffering.
As I have come to see that whilst they are not completely futile, these contemporary Alice efforts can be problematic because they are often depoliticised. It is this disconnection from the broader politics and relations of the power of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, ableism and settler colonialism that keep the kids in closets and efforts ultimately falling short from the transformation needed. A rethink through confronting and changing these politics that draw in not only ourselves but the world around us. It’s about unpicking the structures that assemble the status quo as transformation cannot happen when we return, changed, to an unchanged world.
Originally written 2019-2020
[i] Alice Lurie, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1990).
[ii] Megan S. Lloyd, "Unruly Alice: A Feminist View of Some Adventures in Wonderland," in Alice in Wonderland in Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser, ed. Richard Brian Davis (Hoboken, New Jersey: 2010), 7-18; Judith Little, "Liberated Alice: Dodgson's Female Hero as Domestic Rebel," Women's Studies 3, no. 2 (1976): 195-205.
[iii] Carina Garland, "Curious Appetites: Food, Desire, Gender and Subjectivity in Lewis Carroll's Alice Texts," The Lion and the Unicorn 32, no. 1 (2008): 22-39.