What fools these mortals be!? (Shakespeare, a Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III. Scene ii.)

"Lingering in the golden gleam –

Life, what is it but a dream?" ~closing lines of AliceThrough the Looking Glass 

Reading these, I couldn't help but recite the closing lines of Puck's soliloquy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Don't they bear a striking resemblance to one another?:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,
...

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends. ~ Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act v. Scene i.)

Actually, I uttered these words a few years ago, myself, when I played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

My mom and I after the show. 

        I just remember telling my mother all about my role, and all she could say was, "You would pick Shakespeare at his most whimsical, wouldn't you? I should've known. It's like Alice in Wonderland for people who think they're high-brow." 

            Now, to be fair, I wouldn't say that exactly. Many of the themes are completely different. However, my mom did have a point about the draw of the play for me--- the dream-like nature of it. Any chance I had to escape "the real world" was sought with vigor when I was younger. I was one of those overly-optimistic types that thought that love and creativity and equality of all were possible if I just created it within my reality--- whether with man, animal, or woodland nymph. All I had to do was become a channel for those things. Moreover, becoming Puck meant becoming a fairy"ish" thing, half-man/half-creature (of which I am neither, by conventional definition). It required a huge stretch of the imagination. I found myself asking why he would say the things he would say. What would he be feeling at this point in the play? And now? How would he react? Who is he as a person? I had to become someone else-- much like children do when they are playing pretend or dress-up or whatever, but more cerebrally. I had to know what it was to be him. (If I harken back to earlier in our course readings, I'm reminded of the quote that you could never know what it means to be a bat, only what it eats and sees and looks like, etc.) So, there's much to be said for transporting one's self into a new world in which one must internalize a character, and I certainly had to forsake my own sense of what the world is and who I was to play Puck back then. And I don't remember ever thinking... "but I can't understand this, I'm human. This isn't my world." Nor do I remember an audience member ever coming up to me and saying that they didn't get why things happened as they did in this topsy-turvy reality we had created. So I suppose that that brings me to Alice. 

"Carroll does not invite Alice (and us) to learn human lessons from animal mouths, but rather to consider that animals might ALWAYS have had a voice that we have neglected to hear." (Bump) Classic.That would totally be me, chasing after the rabbit without much thought of consequences or the "why's." I was that kid who talked to animals more than other little kids. However, rather than putting daisy-chains on them and trying to make them fit into my world, I was usually the one who would kick off my shoes and try to get into their world. Throughout the course of my childhood I think I tried chirping, meowing, barking, lowing--- the whole nine yards. Doesn't really surprise you, though, does it? 

                So, perhaps, arguably, that's the common theme that made me draw some kind of linear relationship between Alice and Puck. After all, suspension of disbelief and transformation are two very big overarching ideas thrown around in the works. Now, I've always had a rather confusing relationship with Alice... and Carroll, for that matter. I love Alice for a multitude of reasons, including those listed in Professor Bump's analysis, for example, my appreciation that "it is the promise of a new perspective that sends her forward, and it is her preconceptions, particularly about animals, that she must leave behind." That's pretty much what I always took away from it. I loved the animals. I loved the whimsy. I loved the idea of a world turned upside down, in which reality was tenuous and anything was possible. You know? Even if everyone treated each other in ways that I did not understand and was slightly scared of, I still thought it interesting and wonderful.  

Suffering with the animal, knowing that pain consciously, feeling it, acknowledging it openly and directly, most of us will be less likely to inflict it on other animals, and more likely to take action against those who do.  It's high time I look at those little honking critters and feel for them--- as much as I say it, it's time to act. Lord knows, I give myself very good advice, but very seldom follow it. 

           But this is where I hit a wall as a young adult. I think part of me still wants to be that child. For one, I dislike that I am much more firmly rooted in the world (the bills to pay, looking professional at work, just generally meeting the demands a society who has the power to change my future makes on me). Perhaps "society" as I have called it has a hard time trusting Carroll. Like the Bluest Eye, in which Morrison said that the initial narration by a child "'gives the reader pause about whether the voice of children can be trusted at all or is more trustworthy than an adult's."
               That adds an entire other layer of complexity to my view of Alice. For one, I've always identified with her in a few ways.  So, it's dificult for me to look back now and call Alice cruel, playing "cat and mouse" with the mouse and threatening him, or playing croquet with the flamingo mallet or kicking poor Bill up through the chimney. I guess I really didn't think of that as pain at that point. I, too, would try to cart my pets around in my wagon as we went off on adventures. I would give them human voices and expect human things of them, patting them on the nose when they did something "bad," or at least joking that I would. I was suspended in a world where there was pain wasn't really a reality and events like that were just humor and absurdity. Of course, I, as a kid, it might have been argued, hadn't developed a sense of morality. Whether I was acting out of fear, wanting to exert my power because I felt like I had very little power ("now that she is large again, her first reaction is intimidation and violence), or I was avoiding my actual feelings ("Psychologically speaking, Alice’s apparent sadism derives from her denial of her feelings, reflecting the denial of her readers.") But I don't feel like I was immoral. 
                It was all wrapped up in a world of such outlandish ridiculousness-- however, as somebody who fondly remembers doing weird, random things like coming up with cock-and-bull stories that were random and made no sense to my family--- I look at this fondly and have to compare who I was then to who I am now in the context of my behavior towards things. For I had to learn the "ways" of this world from society, from my mom, from people telling me this hurts them, "No, no!" or that's right or that's how it is in this world. Etc. Etc. Etc. 
               And now I watch my family members teaching my nieces and nephews about the world, and I, wanting them to retain their childish wonder and enthusiasm and outlandishness for as long as possible, will encourage all their weird and subversive behaviors (much to the chagrin of their nonsupporting mothers).

“Carroll's parodies are fundamentally serious,” occupying “that ‘space of play’ for child readers described by Cosslett, ‘in which boundaries could potentially be transgressed.’"Lovell-Smith

We have tea parties. We write poems. We play chess. We play "house." We play with their kittens (and discuss how the kitten feels).We read copious amounts of literature. (Which, in the course of this, we somehow spend more time talking about the moral dilemmas in the books, ending up in 2-hour long conversations about all the issues that have come up during the course of our reading than what the book's actually about.) 

And I have to think, "this is how it happens." This is one of those fundamental points of change in her life where she's learning how to maneuver what she's going to have to face in her life. I actually am that channel of love and compassion and creativity that I thought I could be as an actress (whether I succeeded or failed I guess is up to the individuals who saw me.) 

So I guess if my niece ever sits down because she can't fit through a door and cries a river of tears like Alice did, 4 inches deep, I'll support that. ( Granted, she knows why she's crying.) Or when she cries because fictional animals die in movies, I'll take that as a great sign of her sympathetic imagination. 
But I do not mean to make light of this. "Life chances hang in the balance."

Ervin Goffman: “By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances” (1963,         5-6; cf. Davis 29).

I would never want to reduce anyone's life chances. What is the opposite of blind discrimination then? Love? Many have said so (including Bump). I suppose it is love that I will teach her, then. Love, indeed. What a simple, but unbelievably preposterous idea--- love. (which, as many have pointed out, is a misdefined word) I suppose when I read her Alice the next time, we'll have to discuss why Alice is behaving the way she is, (as I mentioned before, suppression of feelings, fear, discrimination, the power imbalance) and then we'll bake some kitty treats for her kitten Mittens. This sounds like a plan. 

"After this I'll think nothing of falling down stairs."