hush
On Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.
“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”
Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.
“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”
It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.
Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.
So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.
I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.
6 comments
thanks 
it’s easy to be not enamoured by the books, actually. they do have a sort of inexplicable weirdness about them that i think young children are more sensitive to; i might have been less a fan of them if i read them as a child instead of having been weaned on disney. i don’t really think caterpillars smoking hookah, little girls changing sizes and a plethora of hostile birds, beasts and bizarre humanoids really constitute soothing and happy children’s literature. 
interestingly, they were genuinely seen as good and wholesome children’s entertainment when they first came out. it almost makes me wish i’d been a victorian child 
“Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia”
dude, I would’ve CRIED if he’d said that to me.
haha he didn’t actually say it in those words. he’s harsh, but he’s also very nice about being harsh… i think what he actually said was that he can understand why i overuse and overquote criticism, because we’ve been trained to do that as an academic style of writing, but now it’s so ingrained in us that it’s hard to shake the mentality of “a recognised critic must have said it for it to be correct + critics are always correct” even though we really should have more faith in ourselves as critics.
although, his niceness didn’t stop him from scrawling “4 critics in 1 paragraph! you must stop this!” from my draft…
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All the best for your thesis!!!!
‘because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll’, you said, which makes me kind of curious about the criticism. I know really very little about Carroll, but I’ve never been very enamoured of the Alice books…The word is not “creepy”, or “surreal”, or “haunting”. And “haunting” has a kind of nice feel to it, because it implies “so good it won’t leave you alone, oh, NOOooooooo”. Hmm.
Just…”not enamoured”. (It’s like being the person who isn’t enamoured by Midnight’s Children. Actually, am the same person. Whoops!)
All the best! you can do this.
i am curious about it.
NO! NO! I will not type the “and c…….r”