About the AuthorErin 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 |
Cheshire Cat & DodoThe first definition you do see here is: “a religious image painted on a wood panel” (The Merriam Webster Dictionary). This has implications for our study for two reasons. First the purpose and goals of children’s literature in the 1800s were typically very prescribed. They were faith-based lessons for children about right and wrong. Carroll and Tenniel were poking fun at the usual moral imperative that is found in children’s literature of the period. In playing with sense and nonsense, Carroll and Tenniel were creating a text where there was no lesson; it was a text purely for fun. The wood panel is also important and has historical significance because Tenniel’s original illustrations for the Alice books were prepared using the woodcut method. This means, after he created the illustrations, he would have had them carved into a block of wood and they were then essentially stamped onto the pages during the printing process. In this way, Tenniel’s Alice images are—literally iconic. Finally, the second definition is one distilled from popular culture. An icon, or something that is iconic, is a representative symbol. President Barack Obama may be considered an icon of the healthcare movement. Madonna could be called an icon of materialism. The Beatles are certainly iconic of the 1960s and 1970s. Notice, however, that these associations are all visual. The word icon always calls up images in our minds. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his book What Do Pictures Want?, provides a helpful explanation of what the icon means culturally. The icon is the “‘fi rstness’ of phenomenological apprehension, the basic play of presence and absences, substance and shadow, likeness and difference, that makes perception and imaging possible” (74). In making perception and imaging possible, the icon proves that visual images affect the way we think about cultural texts. Tenniel’s illustrations, then, are iconic to the Carroll texts. They cannot be separated. The illustrations have become a part of the text over the years and are culturally implicated in more ways that we can ever know.   Thomas Wartenberg has told us that “the illustrations”—and he’s talking about Tenniel’s illustrations specifically—“have become iconic for the various characters, the imaginative activity involved in reading the text-cum-illustrations is now simply part of what the book is” (26). The images shown here demonstrate this. The image on top is the Cheshire Cat as drawn by Tenniel. The image on the bottom is a still taken form the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland. It is easy to see upon even a cursory examination that the Disney illustrators drew on Tenniel’s work during the creation of the Cheshire Cat for Disney. Not only is the cat occupying the same bodily position, but despite being slightly more caricatured, he appears very much the same. The Dodo is another example of where we can see this echo occurring. The image on top is Tenniel’s illustration; the image on the bottom is the Disney version. The Disney illustrators maintained the Dodo’s distinctive shape as well as several small physical markers of sophistication. They could have done something wildly different based upon the fact that not many people know what the extinct dodo bird actually looks like. |
