La propuestas de un taller de tesis a) Primero, la escritura

Alice’s flexibility—her recognition of different options in different cultures—is crucial. The child who recognizes only one culture and one script for childhood is, in Carroll’s scheme, doomed to become whatever serves a selfish adult’s interests.

Carroll’s Duchess is a parody of moralists (“Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it” [AW 91; ch. 9]) and has decided opinions about children. In fact, the Duchess’s use of

language and violence to dominate her infant son epitomizes Perry Nodelman’s description of imperialism directed at children. As Nodelman observes, adults who claim to define “the truth” about children can “justify” domination of children, including “blatantly cruel punishments” (Nodelman 31). Rather than heed the counsel of a didactic poem directed at adults (“Speak gently to the little child!” from David Bates’s “Speak Gently”),63 the Duchess’s reworking of that poem is part of a larger pattern of controlling children through language—taking the power position as interpreter of childhood and silencing the child. The Duchess’s own pseudo-

moralistic poem sets forth an expectation for children’s behavior that culturally scripts both the child’s performance and the adult’s:

Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases. I speak severely to my boy, I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy

The pepper when he pleases! (AW 62; ch. 6)

The Duchess claims to understand her child, and indeed all children, better than she possibly can. Although her infant cannot speak (apart from singing “Wow” along to his mother’s cruel song) and thus cannot give his own account of his actions, the Duchess claims that she knows his

thoughts and motives, and the motives of everyone else’s child as well: “he only does it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases” (AW 62; ch. 6). The Duchess would be unlikely to listen to a

child’s thoughts in any case: “‘I’ve a right to think,’ said Alice sharply… ‘Just about as much right,’ said the Duchess, ‘as pigs have to fly’” (AW 93; ch. 9). When she calls her son “Pig!” the Duchess disavows his right and ability to think for himself (AW 60-61; ch. 6). Indeed, the

Duchess has thus far trained her son to limit his verbal expression to joining in with her own assessment of him: his only vocalizations are howling and sneezing (as in her song), singing “Wow” along to the song in which she ascribes hostile motives to him, and grunting like the pig she considers him to be. As Nodelman observes, when “speaking for the other… we silence it” (Nodelman 30). In scripting one single role for her son to perform, the Duchess has robbed him of his agency and his voice.

By performing his mother’s script, the baby does in fact become what his mother has called him: a pig.64 Alice’s preferred script for childhood (and aspiring adulthood) includes not only the “right to think” (AW 93; ch. 9) but “a proper way of expressing yourself” (AW 63; ch. 6)—not merely grunting, as she tells the baby-turned-pig. Perhaps the pig could become a child and eventually a man if he could follow such a script, but as a pig he has lost all chance of gaining the verbal abilities he needs. The Duchess’s baby lack Alice’s advantages: Alice has seen two cultures and knows her options, the multiple cultural scripts available to her to perform; the Duchess’s baby has never encountered more than one cultural script, and is thus doomed to perform it and be transformed by it.

The Duchess secures her power by raising a boy to be a pig, and is doing so in a kitchen with an angry cook who seasons the boy with pepper and hurls kitchen utensils at him. Alice certainly believes that “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two” (63; ch. 6)—perhaps they intend

64 _{What is curious is that critics who emphasize Alice’s negative attributes tend to justify the Duchess’s view of her}

son—that he was always a pig and never human—and even justify her abusive treatment of her son. Kincaid calls the boy “a thing which turns out to be a pig” and decides that the Duchess’s “violence is mainly a burlesque of real violence” (“Alice’s Invasion” 94). Likewise, Bivona says that “the ‘baby’ really is a pig” and therefore Alice’s concern for it is “misplaced sympathy” (155). However, Carroll makes it clear that the Duchess’s son really is a human baby at first, and only becomes a pig later. Despite calling the child “Pig,” even the Duchess refers to him as “my boy” (62; ch. 6). The narrator describes the transition from baby to pig as a gradual process: “its eyes were getting very small for a baby” (63; ch. 6). Finally, the Cheshire Cat recognizes that the child was originally a baby and transformed into a pig:

“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to ask.” “It turned into a pig,” Alice answered….

the boy to go in the soup.65 Didactic literature, as we have seen, promised that performance of a single script would transform a child into a successful adult; Carroll suggests that performance of a single script can transform a child into the prey of predatory imperialist adults.