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.
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Renaissance Era
Tenniel also knew enough about art, as did readers of the day, to be able to parody shifts in the art scene. For example, in this image from the beginning of Through the Looking Glass that looks out over the chessboard landscape of Wonderland, Tenniel was parodying Renaissance perspective (Carroll, Haughton, and Tenniel xlviii). During the Renaissance artists grew more concerned with accurate perspectives in their work rather than assigning size based on importance (“Renaissance Perspective”). In the image at left, Madonna and Child, one can see that the Madonna is the most important part of the work and therefore is depicted as largest. In the Renaissance-era image on the right, perspective is the more important part of the painting. Tenniel parodied this historical shift in his work on the Alice books.  Finally, Tenniel drew connections to the corpus of his work through his Alice illustrations. Tenniel was aware that people would know his name and the context of his work. Critics have noted unmistakable similarities between the image shown here, from Through the Looking Glass, and a cartoon Tenniel drew twenty years earlier in which he depicted Gladstone as a lion and Disraeli as a unicorn (Carroll, Haughton, and Tenniel 348). The symbols, of course, are drawn from the United Kingdom’s coat of arms. Readers at the time would have known Tenniel’s past work and would have picked up on the commentary that he was inserting into his work for Alice.Tenniel also spoofed classical texts, often picking up on Carroll’s cues to do so. For example, the Tweedles’ battle is a parody of the classical arming-for-battle scene. In many classical texts, the hero would arm himself for battle before the climactic scene, and the author would go into great detail describing the hero’s armor as he put it on. Carroll was obviously spoofing this trope in his work and Tenniel picked up on this with his accompanying illustration.  |