Heere may men seen that dremes been to drede: The Dream from Chaucer to Milton

As A. C. Hamilton writes in his introduction to the Faerie Queen, Spenser is “our contemporary,” one who “who need not have been recognizable to his first readers as their contemporary, for we recreate his poem within our culture, in our image rather than theirs […] It speaks to us directly in our time” (1). Classic texts are in dialogue with each generation of reader both as a creation of the past, but as mirrors to our contemporary selves. This is the context I want to pull on one the thematic threads of these texts to look at the think about them as texts themselves and in dialogue with current readers by mirroring  timeless themes.  In the remainder of the essay, we will consider the role of dreams and explain what they add to Chaucer’s "The Nun’s Priest’s Tale", Book 1, canto 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Book V of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Specifically, we will see how dreams in all three texts relate to themes of gender and believability, the existence of free will, and how dreams are interpreted.

The conceit of the larger Canterbury Tales is the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Each of these pilgrims will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The reader does not see the full Canterbury Tales. Chaucer had the misfortune of dying before he finished his work, and there is controversy over if the initial plan in the prologue was scaled back as Chaucer was in composition of the work (“Introduction” x). What we do have in existence are several complete tales: from a Knight telling of love and a Miller telling tales of seduction. The structure of the Canterbury tales allows Chaucer as the poet to inhabit many different narrative voices and to show off his virtuosity in terms of genre, writing from romance to epic to mock epic beast fables.

The reader is introduced to the dreamer Chauntecleer and his wife in a prologue where the Knight is asking for a counterpoint to the Monk’s tale. Instead of tragedy, he wants to see a story of someone not brought low, but “As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, / And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunate” (VII.3572-3). This segues into the introduction of a cottage yard, where an old woman lives with her daughters, but that is just the setting. The center of the tale is Chauntecleer. He is described in heroic terms with a fine red comb and a black beak. The reader also meets Pertelote, a very lovely hen as well and they were both in love, even though Chauntecleer has many concubines. The action of the tale can be boiled down simply. One night, Chauntecleer has a bad dream where a beast “bitwixe yellow and reed” (VII.3699) comes upon him and wanted to kill him. Later, when he is happily walking around, he has a “sorweful cas” (VII.4002) and that night a fox comes into the yard. The fox flatters our hero by saying what a good singer he is, and when Chauntecleer goes to sing he is taken up the neck and grabbed by the fox. But that is not the end of our hero. The table turns when the fox is convinced to turn towards his pursuers and brag that Chauntecleer is his. Chauntecleer flees and the narrator tells the reader that the ultimate moral is that these are things that happen when you “truste on flaterye” (VII.4234).

A summary of the plot, however, glosses over the key event in the story. What is at the center of the tale is the dream of Chauntecleer and his conversation with Pertelote about the ultimate meaning of that dream with the beast. D. P Baker calls this “a playful comment on a particular philosophical and theological problem of recurrent interest to Chaucer: namely, the question of whether future events are still undecided ('contingent') or happen by necessity, especially given God's foreknowledge of the future” (236). In the conversation there are two different interpretations of what a dream means. On the side of Chauntecleer, he runs through many stories telling his wife about how one should pay attention to the meanings of the dreams in terms of premonitions. He gathers evidence from the sources and tells stories of travelers who were separated and then one traveler dreamed of his friend warning him and he was able to show his murder. There is another story of other travelers, and dreams of a ship falling apart, and being saved by listening to the dreams. On the other side of the argument is Pertelote. She has her own authorities to cite, but she is not arguing for a Chauntecleer as a seer, but as one of physical causation. She tells her husband that he needs a laxative and get his humors in balance, as Pratt notes, “both Rhazes and Petrus de Abano state that too much "red cholera" causes men to dream of strife” (544).

  What the tale does is present a ambiguity in how to read it. Chauntecleer has his dream and has his argument about why he should trust this dream, but ultimately, lets the argument drop in favor of his lover’s more physical argument in favor of humoral imbalances. The problem is that for the reader, there is no clear right or wrong. The woman is listed to, but at the expense of not being prepared when later the fox is in the cottage yard and chasing after Chauntecleer. This sets her up as either negligent or as a traitor to the man, prefiguring the fall. But the fall is not purely biblical, though foregrounded in the text (VII.4054-5). There is a mirroring in terms of pride. When the fox comes into the yard, he can trick Chauntecleer by his pride as well as Chauntecleer tricking the fox. The ultimate result being that Chauntecleer was right to be wary of the beast in his dream, but also that the dream did not set reality in stone. He was, through his own wiliness, able to change the facts of his premonitions. For the world of the cottage yard, dreams are not destiny, but should be heeded.

Like the Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen was an ambitious text that was pared back from its initial designs as it saw its way into print. In the “Letter to Raleigh,” a preface to the first edition, Spence mapped out his plan as “I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelue priaute morall vertues.” (Spenser 715). From this initial ambition, the completed text as it comes down to us is in six books, with two more short cantos added at the end.

There are several dreamers in Spenser’s poem, but here we want to explore the Redcrosse Knight, the personifications of “Holinesse”. The larger arc of his story is the whole of book one, where he is tasked with killing a dragon (I.i.3). This dragon and the task will win him honor from Gloriana, the queen of the book, and the alternate-reality Queen Elizabeth I, to which the work is dedicated.  In the first cantos, we can find Redcrosse wandering with a woman and a dwarf. After a breaking storm, they find they are in a forest and by a cave, in which they find Error, “A monster vile, whom God and man does hate” (I.i.13.7). Once the beast is defeated, they continue until they meet a man who seems to be a hermit who invites them to rest at his home. While there, our heroes fall asleep and the reader finds that the hermit is in fact a sorcerer.  The sorcerer, Archimago, calls spirits to tempt Redcrosse. The first gives him a dream of “lustful play”, the second takes the form of Una, “Her all in white he clad” (VI.i.45.8), to beguile our hero.

Spenser’s first book sets up some allegorical tales for the reader. Redcrosse, as the representation of Holiness, cannot be wholly holy without having faced temptation and turned away from it. It is in the first canto where he battles with Error and her whole brood, where it is noted her “vomit full of books and papers was,” (I.i.20), noted in the gloss as both catholic and pagan tracts as well as the books of the sorcerer Archimago later in the canto. By defeating this error and going on the way to meet Archimago himself in the guise of the hermit who is alone biding his beads like the rosary, the reader sees the dichotomy of the Roman Catholic church and that of the Church of England headed by the Queen, the font herself of Holiness.

Archimago’s attempt to beguile and tempt Redcrosse are a second potential way to pull the Holy Knight away from his quest. Like the dream of Chauntecleer, it hinges on interpretation. If Redcrosse believes either his dream, or his vision upon waking are real, then he has been removed from his quest of Holiness and of killing the dragon. There is an interesting turn in that he dismisses the first instance of waking up next to Una after his dream but falls for the false image and runs off. Redcrosse was able to trust in his faith and ignore the dream but was unable to deduce the truth behind the evidence of his eyes, as he did when not seeing through the hermit to begin with in this section of the poem. The episode at the hermitage is also one that brings into questions of omniscience and free will for the characters, as Broaddus notes, “the action in the episode at Archimago’s hermitage says as much about how God allows Satan to tempt and entrap one of his elect as preparation for the time when he will extend the inward calling as it does about Redcrosse’s culpability” (582). Archimago as an agent of evil can separate Redcrosse from Una though his machinations. The challenge to the faith is a question of Theodicy as this evil exists in a world where Holiness should be attainable, but it is only through tribulation that it can be reached, a holiness that needs to be earned through actions and not automatically conferred upon the characters.

The last of our dreamers comes from Paradise Lost. In this poem, John Milton takes a familiar story in the western canon even today and dramatizes it. He takes the first couple pages of Genesis and makes it more real, by doing what the author of Genesis fails to do – he takes Adam and Even and makes them human. Milton also makes Satan human in a way that makes him a more interesting and complex character than that of the absolutely flip side of the all good creator God presented in the bible.  The poem opens after the war in heaven, Satan and his allies are trying to figure out what to do next. Instead of fighting again, they take another tack to trick man. Entering the garden of man, Satan tempts Eve to defy the Lord’s one commandment, to not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Adam then follows Eve in disobedience, and their innocence is lost and both tempter and tempted are punished, Adam and Eve expelled from paradise.

What is interesting structurally about the poem is that it is bookended by two falls. The first fall is the fall of Lucifer and the third of the heavenly host that followed Lucifer in the poem in his desire to no longer serve the God. The fall at the end being the second disobedience where Adam and Eve, tempted by the first sinner, become aware of their humanity and must venture out into the postlapsarian world. Satan’s fall prefigures the fall of our first parents and leads to it directly, as Satan is the first sinner and the first tempter.  David Mikics brings to attention Stanley Fish’s insistence "the fall is not a moment in the poem, that it has, instead, always-already "occurred," as a frame for our every interpretive move. But Milton's point is precisely to dramatize the fall, to act as if it were not always-already there” (33). What this structure does with the familiar narrative is to create a dramatic irony for the reader. We already know about the fact of the fall, but how it comes to be is a surprise in the more developed world of Paradise Lost as compared to its biblical sources.

How it comes to be starts in a dream. Satan, in the garden in book IV, transforms himself into a toad to whisper in Eve’s ear. The dream, as she relates it to Adam, being one where she finds herself alone and follows a voice to the tree of knowledge. There she finds and angel who eats from the tree and eats the fruit takes Even on a flight above the earth with him (V.31-93).  Eve’s dream is a prefiguration of the ultimate fall and brings into question what it means to know good and evil in a world without sin as of yet. Here the plot again hinges upon the interpretation of what that dream means, as Adam comforts Eve with the knowledge that humans are a creature capable of reason. Milton shows that there is a knowledge of good and evil: “Evil into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave” (V.117-8). Here Adam is dismissive of Eve’s dream by allowing a knowledge of evil to be possible. It is not through the mind that the fall happens but only in the act of eating the fruit when the fall truly comes. Like Redcrosse, Adam and Eve have been tasked in the poem to be people, but also symbols. Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but there is a problem of how you know sin, and what is wrong and understand what consequences are without having a sense of the dichotomy between right and wrong. Redcrosse had to be challenged in his faith as Adam and Eve must be challenged in their obedience, but it is more a gradation. As Howison notes, “When Milton's God forbids the tree, it is clear that he

does not, as Satan assumes, also forbid knowledge, for knowledge is in fact provided - in other ways - to the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve” (530-1). What it means to have knowledge of good and evil is to make the sinner more culpable in a way because then they do understand just what it means to be evil, even if “what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream, / Waking thou never wilt consent to do' (v, 120- 1). Eve’s dream can be read either as a prophecy or a warning against falling into temptation, as well as the temptation itself since the author of the dream was Satan himself. Were this read as a warning by Eve or interpreted as such by Adam, perhaps our ancestors could have avoided the fall. Unfortunately for them, the reader carries with them the knowledge of the fall. Had they not fallen, the poem would never have been written. Man, as Adam said, has reason, but he also has free will, the best and the worst of our gifts from our creator.

The England of any time before the nineteenth century can be other place.  As context is lacking which can make act of reading these texts isolated to the text themselves and not as part of a conversation with the author and history and the intertextual reading of the poems in dialogue with their sources and inspirations have a missing link to a more modern reader. The themes move you beyond that surface level of plot and to read into the text, as those barriers fall away. What we need to do to is pull these threads to realize what really ties these works and their authors together is that they are classic in the canon, for better or worse. They continue to be passed down not because they are exemplars of the craft in their time. Instead, they tell stories that hit on universal themes. And they tell these stories in the English tongue, our common tongue.

Works Cited

Baker, D P. A Bradwardinian Benediction: The Ending of the Nun's Priest's Tale Revisited. Medium aevum 82.2 2013: 236. Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. 21 Jan 2019.

Broaddus, James W. "Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the Order of Salvation." Studies in Philology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2011, pp. 572-604. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:2048/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:8443/docview/906491755?accountid=28518, doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.roosevelt.edu:2048/10.1353/sip.2011.0024.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, and A. C. Cawley. Canterbury Tales. Knopf, 1992.

Hamilton, A. C. “General Introduction”. The Faerie Queene. Longman, 2001.

Howison, Patricia M. "Memory and Will: Selective Amnesia in "Paradise Lost"." University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, 1987, pp. 523.

Mikics, David. "Miltonic Marriage and the Challenge to History in Paradise Lost: Document View." Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Austin, TX), vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 20.

Milton, John, and Alastair Fowler. Paradise Lost. Longman, 1998.

Pearsall, D. “Introduction”. Canterbury Tales. Knopf, 1992.

Pratt, Robert A. “Some Latin Sources of the Nonnes Preest on Dreams.” Speculum, vol. 52, no. 3, 1977, pp. 538–570. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2854898.

Spenser, Edmund, et al. The Faerie Queene. Longman, 2001.

Notes on the Victorian Construction of Childhood

The idea of “childhood” itself is a fraught idea. Though it can be spoken of in the singular, as a universal event that all of us who have made it to adulthood have gone through, each of us has had our own childhood. This childhood is different based on so many socioeconomic and demographic factors, as well as gender, and geographic, considerations.

 So of course, we really speak of childhood in the abstract, as a separate place, free from adulthood and as a place to be a child and to practice being an adult. This practicing is both in the games of play that children and the stories that we tell them. By constructing a world outside the day to day realities of the world outside, the world of the imagination is a safe space to be anything and to do anything.  But it is also important not to give wholly instrumental values to the idea of play. It does recreate the world but play itself is also very important for its own sake. As Robert Louis Stephenson notes in his essay “Child’s Play”:

For children think very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and marriageable women.  No one is more romantic.  Fame and honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the business man’s pleasure in method, all these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play hours.  Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction.  Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. 

What we do have as universals now about a broad-stroke unifying “childhood” is an invention that correlates with the rise of industrial capitalism. These are the stories that arose in the nineteenth century with the brothers Grimm and Edward Lear and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. This flowering of Victorian Era was in the next century taken in by Walt Disney and painted in technicolor.

The Victorian Era was not all prefiguring technicolor. In his examination of the Manchester of the early Victorian era, Friedrich Engels notes that the life is hard, where the working-class lives in “enfeebled conditions” that cause people to “age prematurely and die early” (116). This pushes the mortality rates to the point where there is a mortality rate for children of the working classes where 57 percent of their children die before they turn five. This is opposed to the upper classes, where a frighteningly high 20 percent of children will die (120). Added to the privations of the living conditions, many children are put to work, so that a child of nine is sent to work in the mill for six and a half hours daily, increasing to twelve-hour days when they become what we would call teenagers (160). Children, in their masses, were forced to become adults in terms of entering the workforce because of need in their families for another worker and the lack of formal education options for most lower-class children. The stories that are passed down to us for consumption by children do not show this working-class life. The closest we come to realistic portrayals that remain in the popular imagination of this other side comes from the pen of Charles Dickens, where we see the suffering of Tiny Tim or the wiliness of Pip or Oliver Twist.

 It is through writers like Nesbitt and Graham and Milne via Disney that an ideal childhood is drawn. It is idyllic and pastoral. Importantly, there are no adults. The common theme of child alone is highlighted later by the English Author Roald Dahl in his book “James and the Giant Peach,” where on the very first page we see James living a happy life, up until his parents are “suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo” (Dahl 1). Although the Golden Age of Children's Literature constructs the child as an "other" separate from adults, children in our texts frequently play adult roles. The situations in the text forces children to play-act these roles, so that the characters learn and grow through taking on the adult role as well as presenting the reader with the situation to model in their minds the reactions they would have – both an escapist and a didactic function for the readers. In the rest of this essay, we will examine two examples of children behaving as adults by discussing the situation, the presence or absence of adults, and the effect such behavior has upon the child and on those around him or her in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, as well as Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. We will explore such issues on how the adult role presented as a developmental step, a game, or a combination of the two, and what it implies about "real" adults and the children as grown-ups. In both texts we will see that there is a central turning point where the main character must take an adult role and gain agency which becomes the crux of the story.

We begin with Alice. For the Alice books, there are a lot of different levels of creation and points for interpretation and analysis. We have the creation of the stories, as Charles Dodgson making up fanciful scenes for little Alice Liddell and his other pre-pubescent muses, stories “made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves (281 from Alice on Stage). Then these stories were put to paper and published as the original 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There coming six years later. It received its Disney version in 1951, in a version of Alice evolved from the original Tenniel illustrations of the original publication.

There are a couple of things that are very striking at looking at the texts and their evolution over time. The first is that the individual scenes in the chapters are incredibly episodic. The movie version of the story that American children are first presented with is one where there is no separation between the first adventure in Wonderland and the second adventure in the looking-glass world. The writers of the Disney can conflate the two stories and pick and choose to create their own arc for Alice as well as excising the stories that do not necessarily fit into a context of what an American child is supposed to know. Animators will not be able to draw footnotes to explain why a lion and a unicorn would be fighting, but at the time same time, Carroll’s writing is such that on the face a fight between a lion and a unicorn is entertaining on the surface level and would translate to the absurd action that is present in so much more of the book.

As a follow-on from this episodic nature is that there is very little natural arc to speak of. The logic is that of a dream. As Peter Coventry puts it, it is a commentary on Victorian life, “But it is not simply that. It is not simply anything. Even in this first and greatest work, there is a content not far removed from nightmare. Alice in Wonderland has the claustrophobic atmosphere of a children’s Kafka. It is the frustrated ‘quest’ for the ‘Garden’ which in the event is peopled with such unpleasant creatures” (from Escape 331). What defines the Alice books from the very beginning is this nightmare logic. As the reader first meets Alice, they see Alice “beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister in the bank and of having nothing to do (Wonderland 7). It is there wild dreaming of the book her sister is reading that the famous white rabbit streaks by, and “burning with curiosity she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit hole under the hedge,” following the rabbit down the hole “never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” (Wonderland 8). Though there is no clear demarcation for the reader or for Alice that Alice has gone asleep, this dream logic and the episodic nature takes hold as Alice tries to go home. The creatures that she meets are never very helpful, from a confounding caterpillar to the Duchess giving Alice a child that turns out to be a small pig, to meeting the Cheshire Cat, foregrounding the nightmare logic: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. // “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. // “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here” (Wonderland 51).

This madness of the Cheshire cat, and his claimed madness of Alice makes the reader question what we are doing in Wonderland or in the Looking-Glass world at all. There is a casual cruelty with which the world treats Alice and tosses her on to her next adventure so that Alice herself becomes as like the red queen: “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Looking glass 127). Being in these separate places is heightened by the fact that there are few recognizable and identifiable adult figures around except those identified by royal title. And even those characters, given hierarchical titles, are drawn as somewhat fanciful and grotesque by Carroll and Tenniel. Even at this level, once the queens are running Alice through mock-lessons, they are diminished, as Gillian Avery says, to a “manganese absurdity” (326).

Both the Looking-Glass world and Wonderland are mirrors to the world of the bourgeoise Victorian child, where adults were absent and absurd if present. The main choice that Alice makes is the fact of following the white Rabbit down the rabbit hole where she finds herself upside-down. These episodes that characterize the Alice books are scary and absurd while Alice is passed around to experience these scenes without a knowledge of what is happening, or even a real knowledge of a goal. The central point of the entire story comes just at the end. Alice has been brought to give evidence in a mock-trial, mock as all things are in the adult world and as all things are in wonderland. She has been growing, and then she realizes the absurdity of the entire situation and cries out ““Who cares for you?” Said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time).  “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (Wonderland 98).  Of this scene, Nina Auerbach writes “Although her size changes seem arbitrary and terrifying, she in fact directs them; only in the final courtroom scene does she change size without first wishing to, and there, her sudden growth gives her the power to break out of a dream” (338). Here the reader sees the character’s the physical and mental growth into a more mature person. Alice is no longer just following the episodes, but she has taken control of the world that she had created in her own mind by calling it out and recognizing the fact that the dream world is just that, one created in the slumber.

On the other side of Wonderland is Treasure Island. Where Alice tried to navigate a world of strange creatures dictating to her actions, the world of Treasure Island, and the hero Jim Hawkins, the world is one made up of adults, and predominately male adults at that. Treasure island is an adventure tale, but also one where there are several possible figures to emulate and to follow. What the reader finds in Treasure is a moral ambiguity between the world of the Pirate and the world of respectable culture. This is drawn, as Bradley Deane writes, instead of a clear black and white, but in Treasure Island “Stevenson offers what amounts to an alternative ethical code, one that frames the characters' incessant judgments of one another and of themselves, and one which sets the terms in which masculinity can be defined” (365).  What is notable about Jim’s developing moral system is that even as the narrator of his own tale, there is a desire to live in both camps – whipping clean those distinctions between the black and the white and living in a world of gray.  The author Avi, writing in the introduction of the Aladdin edition of Treasure Island, notes that there is draw to the character of Long John Silver, one that made Stephenson think to title the book after Silver originally. Silver is supposed to be a bad guy, as Avi writes, “there is very little good to say about Long John Silver. He’s a thief and a killer. He lies. He switches allegiance often, depending on who is winning at the moment. And yet, and yet…he is a wonderful, truly loveable rogue, who gives more life to the tale than any other character” (xvi). The reader sees Jim as the protagonist because he is the narrator. The story is his, but again like in the Alice books, we find a character that is largely a victim of circumstance. In one of the key scenes of the book, Jim sees Silver murder a sailor who is reluctant to join the mutiny. There exists in the book a larger narrative plot that Jim is a part of, but not necessarily the driving force behind the events. This is not bad for Jim or Stephenson’s young readers. Treasure Island, like Wonderland, exists as a separate place where the protagonist can put on mom and dad’s clothes but are only on the surface of this secondary world. For Deane, this secondary world for Jim is the very nature of the play ethic that Stephenson describes in his essay quoted the introduction to this essay – play itself as both mirroring the adult world, but entirely separate from the adult world:  Their game accommodates horror and brutality, and its score is kept by counting the lives of the remaining players. When Jim is given the chance to score a kill of his own, the scene emphasizes both the continuity between pirates and boys and the subversion of Christian moralizing by the play ethic” (399). 

It is with this scorekeeping that we see Jim playacting the adult role in what is the moral center of the book. Though surrounded by other deaths, Jim has not been the agent for one until his skirmish with Israel Hands in chapter 26. The fight-as-play is noted by Jim in his narration of the tale: “It was such a game as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove” (251). In a fight to the death, even then Jim’s reflections show his childish nature. As Alexandra Valint notes: “In general, adult characters openly and proudly take responsibility for their kills, but Jim’s slaying of Hands is oddly disassociated from him. He shoots his weapons without “my own volition” and “without a conscious aim.”” (12). Jim is ultimately successful in the fight. Israel Hands dies at Jim’s hands, but it is oddly passive voiced. Here is the moment of the highest action, the one where Jim Hawkins has the chance to join the world of the adults, and his first murder just…happens. This scene reinforces the character’s immaturity and he again fades back into a participant but not a driver of his own plot.

Jim’s reticence to act and his own agency are reflected in the very end of the novel as well. The ship returns with only and handful of the people whop set out to go to Treasure Island, this other place. They have been successful in their venture, “All of us had an ample share of the treasure, and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures” (339). It is as if the act of returning erases the whole adventure as anything but a story that the reader had just read. Jim as the narrator tells what others did with their share, but the reader is left to wonder how much Jim had or what he did with his, other than setting aside and telling his story.

With both the Alice books and Treasure Island, the reader can see that the idea of Victorian Childhood as constructed through the texts aimed at those children have several commonalities. Both for the female Alice and the male Jim, the world of childhood is a separate place, but the imagination makes it such that the riverbank or home at your mom’s inn is not enough. The characters are mostly passive, as participants in their own stories. What is notable is in comparing the make up of the world around them. For Alice, the world is dominated by nonhuman creatures or if they are humanoid, grotesque simulacra of mostly female adults. For Jim, the ideal world is one where there are no women. This is a world where even the bad guy is a loveable rogue, but it allows the reader to live in the adult world of moral ambiguity much more than they would get from reading Pilgrim’s Progress. This gendered difference between the worlds is on the second level of acculturation. If theses stories are on the surface about action, and creating fun universes, they do reflect the larger world that the author was trying to create. As Nina Auerbach writes in the introduction to Forbidden Journeys, “women lived the condition Carroll, MacDonald, and Barrie longed for. If they were good, they never grew up” (1). Not entering the world of men, however, is not an option for male children, so books like Treasure Island allow the reader to be observers in that world. The reader lives Jim’s story as they do Alice’s, but Wonderland is much harder to find.

Bibliography

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