Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner

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As I have mentioned before, I got my second year reading list a few weeks ago. And so, with due resignation, I signed on to Amazon, and ordered nearly forty novels, that comprises the entirety of the second year of university. My novels arrived and I was rather pleasantly surprised to find Lolly Willowes on my reading list. Unlike many of the novels for the upcoming year, it is rather short, and in comparatively simple prose. It isn’t overtly dense with meaning, because superficially it seems as though it is just a story about a sheltered woman, living in a tiny village, who becomes a witch.

However, I was asleep one night, and I ended up dreaming about the novel, imagining Lolly as a witch. The novel explores not just the parameters of the family unit, but also looks into ideas about marriage and the stigma of spinsterhood. Spinsterhood remains stigmatised even today, whoever was a much more obvious issue at the time of writing, 1926. The novel also discusses the idea of feminism in a rather oblique fashion. By empowering Lolly to go out into the world, alone, Sylvia Townsend Warner created a novel that supported Woolf’s rather more explicit literature, that also empowered women to go out into the world. The novel is significant in its own right, because of the subliminal message of strength it puts across. However it transcends into a network of early twentieth century literature, becoming a part of a literary network that also included Woolf, Mansfield, and other great female modernist writers.

The novel is not a modernist text in terms of linguistic style. It is written in the form of the Victorian novel, following a traditional structure in terms of time constraints, and character construction. This can be related to the fact that the novel itself is set in the patriarchal society of Victorian England. Lolly’s life, up until her move to Great Mop, is controlled by her brother, who represents the height of patriarchal control within England. Lolly is often considered as being passed around, almost as a package of no consequence. By moving along, and reclaiming herself, she becomes a woman in her own right, outside the control of her brother.

Conversely however, Lolly does fall under the influence of another male persona; Satan himself, disguised as a friend. By her assumption of his control over her, something that is never quite clarified for the reader, we see a necessity of patriarchy that structures all of Lolly’s actions. Whilst she is free, and has come under the influence of Satan somewhat willingly, there is still an echo of patriarchal society underpinning her world view.

The power dynamic that exists between Lolly and Satan is extremely interesting, because he is a kind of optional and yet inevitable patriarchal influence. There is a degree of resignation throughout the last couple of chapters in the novel, resigning Lolly to Satan’s eternal influence. To this extent, we can question the feminist tone that flows throughout the novel, and the extent to which it is effective.

If anything however, Lolly Willowes is very entertaining!

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(1) http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2012/3/12/1331563702226/Lolly-Willowes-Virago-Modern.jpg

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Sarah Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has long been a popular children’s story, and has featured on the reading lists of many adults as well. The novel was first published in 1865 and became an institution in itself, inspiring many writers, and production studios. Alice’s adventures even reached into the blogosphere, inspiring one very talented bloggette. Alice’s world is inspirational because it creates the impression that even the nonsensical is sensible, given the appropriate imagination and context; everything can be experienced in technicolour if you have the imagination to think that way.

The Red Queen, in the Tim Burton film. (1)

I loved the film when I was a child, and when I’m not feeling well, I’ll still watch both the Disney original, and the new version, featuring Johnny Depp. I find the latter to be fascinating, with just enough suspense and dragon fighting to capture the audience’s attention, or more specifically, the attention of a slightly older audience. It has always been immensely difficult to write a children’s book that is sufficiently versatile that it will appeal to adults at the same time, however that’s what Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pseudonym Lewis Carroll) managed to do. It is the most critically acclaimed children’s book of all time, widely being hailed as a fantastic example of the nonsense literary genre, by people such as Sir Walter Scott.

Alice’s various explorations, including the episode of the Walrus and the Carpenter, and tea with the Mad Hatter, are adventures that we all really would like to do it, a little bit. We all want to escape, and falling down the rabbit hole, landing without so much of a scratch really is a rather heroic feat. To be able to eat cake, and shrink, or drink something and grow is almost like a superpower; I rather fancy Alice as a kind of superhero for little girls.

However, in the novel, there are some more disturbing images, that even to this day give me the creeps. I find the episode with the pepper and the pig to be consisted of almost grotesque imagery, and for a children’s story, I think that could be considered quite an alarming element. However from a more educationally led perspective, the whole episode could be interpreted as an allegory for not quite understanding the consequences of one’s actions, and being surprised when something distasteful results. We’ve all been there and done it; done some we oughtn’t have, and then been slightly surprised at the awkward or irritating results we left behind.

Figurative language always catches my attention, and none more so than in Alice and Wonderland. The whimsical nature of the prose is something I find profoundly interesting. The poems seem almost meshed together, as if no thought at all went into them, however it becomes clear that the very opposite is true; the nonsense if you like, is an intellectual construction, interested only in creating a whimsical nature. I suppose one could argue then, that the novel isn’t part of the nonsense genre at all, however that presupposes that one considers the genre to be just what it says it is; nonsense.

If you’ve never read the book by itself, I encourage you to. It’s a wonderful trip into fantasy.

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(1) http://media-file.net/6/aliceinwonderland/images/RedQueen_Banner.jpg

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