"Visual Culture and the 'Alice' Books"

About the Author

Erin Clark Frost is a graduate assistant at Illinois State University. She is pursuing a PhD with specializations in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, and women's and gender studies. She especially enjoys studying visible rhetoric and culture.

Contents

Introduction

Cheshire Cat & Dodo

The Brothers Tweedle

Political Cartoons

The Hatter

Renaissance Era

Appropriation

Conclusion

Works Cited, References, and Image Locations

Conclusion

The image below, drawn by modern cartoonist Steve Bell, appeared in The Guardian newspaper. It’s titled “Iraqis Celebrate the Withdrawal of American Combat Troops.” It clearly demonstrates Bell drawing on Tenniel, but Bell also adds more modern elements in order to alter the meaning of the cartoon in order to make it significant to a modern context.

“Tenniel is credited with changing the direction of English political caricature . . . for bringing artistic skill, impartiality, and wit” (“Sir John Tenniel” 201). In introducing these elements to the Alice books, and because of the context he brought from his own life, Tenniel forever changed the trajectory of text-image partnerships by demonstrating the possibilities for placing them in intertextual conversation. Not only were Tenniel’s illustrations such an integral part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass that they cannot be divorced from the meaning of the texts today, but also the historical context of Tenniel’s life created a very particular rhetorical situation for readers of the time. This rhetorical situation affected the way we read texts with images today, and ultimately if foreshadowed the Internet age and the multimodal possibilities available to us today.

As Ann Wysocki explains, images and texts are more entwined than we might think. Both are limited by the constraints placed upon us in shaping them, but these constraints are also artifacts of our realities. On page 58 of “Awaywithwords,” Wysocki says:

It is also worth considering what happens when “image” is used to represent all that is not made exclusively of words. First, even if I were to pretend that the repertoire of communication materials available to us has nothing to do with other practices that shape what we do in the world, I think that “images”—if by that term we mean what many of us implicitly imagine when the term is used, a page-sized or no more than 3 by 3 realistically representational photograph, drawing, or painting— nonetheless exceed logics of space.

Thus, we must consider what we mean when we talk about texts, for—as shown by Tenniel’s effect upon Carroll’s writings—images and writings are integrated in such a way as to make it impossible to talk about one without calling up—at the least—echoes of the other. The consequences of this are that we work in forms that we call texts, but which are actually integrated image-texts. This is a consequence of the constraints we work under, which actually refl ect our belief systems about images and writings.

Reflecting on Tenniel’s work and its consequences for the Alice books can help us discover the ways in which we must rethink our own abilities to separate word from image. The implication here is not that contemporary scholars must continue to seek out the connections between images and texts, but that we must work to reconceptualize our understanding of those two entities. This presentation, for example, works because of two separate files: an audio file and a Prezi. But neither of these files makes sense alone, and neither of these files could ever have existed alone. They are intertwined in their very existence, just as all images and texts are not so separate as we might think.