"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

This text document on this and the following pages is a companion text to the multimodal presentation of the same title.  The multimodal presentation, included in the YouTube movie below, lets readers experience the visual aspects of this work and represents the normalization of new and innovative formats.

This presentation asserts that John Tenniel’s illustrations were and are integral to the Alice books and that those illustrations changed text-image relationships in history. First, we note that Tenniel’s illustrations cannot be divorced from the cultural meanings that Alice carries today. Later in this presentation, we will discuss the social importance of a practice called appropriation. The importance of Tenniel’s work to modern multimodal composing practices is apparent because of the continued appropriation of his work today in the venues of Disney movies and the world of art. Secondly, the context of Tenniel’s life changed how people read the Alice books, therefore playing into the aforementioned point about texts and images today, and also affecting the way that the Alice books went down in history. Finally, then, I suggest that the context and importance of Tenniel’s images altered the way texts with images are read, foreshadowing the Internet era and the multimodal composing possibilities that are available today.

This is the first page of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Readers can see right away that images are important because it is an image that first appears. In fact, the only thing preceding this page in the work is the introductory poem by Lewis Carroll. This first paragraph demonstrates very early on that Carroll knows how important images will be to his text. At the end of the paragraph, we see, “And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?” This is Carroll explicitly telling us that illustrations are vitally important to his work. Furthermore, Carroll originally wrote this story for his child friend, Alice Liddell; he also did his own illustrations for this version. When he later decided to publish the work, he sought out a professional illustrator—but not just any professional illustrator. Carroll sought the services of John Tenniel, because Tenniel was the best, and Carroll knew that illustrations would be highly important.

The illustration of the white rabbit is iconic today. I argue that a great many of Tenniel’s illustrations—especially those from the Alice works—are iconic in modern times. The use of the word icon today brings to mind a computer screen. Although this is not the main usage I am interested in here, my thesis certainly has implications for the usage of computers.