Suspicion and Belief: The Tenuous Ground of Carol Mavor’s Dream-Rushes: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Little Girls, Article Critique Example

In her 1996 Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, author Carol Mavor not unexpectedly devotes an enormous chapter to the images of young girls as both embraced and employed by Lewis Carroll. Quite simply, the author of the Alice tales has become as legendary for this predilection as he has for his whimsical classics, and Carroll has in modern times frequently been accused of pedophilia in intent, if not in actual practice.

To her credit, Mavor gives serious attention the a necessary fact often overlooked by critics seeking a sexual component in Carroll’s photographs, and certainly in his motivations to take them; she looks at Carroll’s activity in this sphere in the context of Victorian sensibilities, and this is crucial if Carroll’s work is to be judged fairly. While what we consider ‘Victorian’ England in fact encompassed many decades of changing values and cultures, the prevalent and lasting hallmark of it was a repressed, if not dismissed altogether, conception of sexual activity. This translated to another, famous Victorian characteristic, its fascination with violence. To the Victorian mind, which was of course Carroll’s mind, sex could only be approached in either a very oblique or grudgingly acknowledged manner.

Having given this issue space, however, Mavor loses no time before jumping into Freud, for clearly Freudian analysis suits her topic. She does not so much suggest in her article that Carroll was a victim of severe repression, turning to portraiture as a form of release for a sexuality unthinkable and actually unknown to his consciousness, as she simply lays out both the impact of Freud at this time and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions. It works because it is done in a scholarly fashion, yet it fails because the approach shies away from what the reader feels Mavor’s beliefs to be.

Similarly, other representations of young girls at the time are discussed, with emphasis on nudity and posing. Mavor as well places all of this within the strictly legal framework of Victorian policy regarding the protection of children, and how the people viewed safeguarding young girls more as a family property right than as an upholding of the rights of the young girls themselves. Additionally, Mavor refers to the slanderous ways in which Carroll has been seen, including James Joyce’s notorious reference to him as ‘Lewd Carroll’.

Ultimately, however, Mavor devotes most of her attention to the pictures themselves. She does not ignore any elements of them, nor does she emphasize any to validate any opinions of her own. They are presented as facts, which remain puzzling to herself as they are to any scholar seeking to enter into the mind of an artist from another age. Mavor implies suspicion yet, in a courtroom sort of way, she accepts that belief in Carroll’s innocence of pedophilial motives must be manifest.

The reader then is left, basically, with the pictures. There is no denying what Mavor points out repeatedly: the young girls in them, clothed or semi-nude, consistently adopt expressions and postures of grown women. Their faces are flirtatious, coy, or arrogant. They appear to be little girls pretending to be women. If this was Carroll’s means of satisfying repressed sexual urges, it was, as far as we know, restricted to the portraits. If it was merely another facet of the Victorian impatience with childhood and its general refusal to give rein to it, Carroll, as Mavor presents him, was simply a man of his era with perhaps an excessive fondness for lovely young girls. Mavor ultimately, again, reaches no conclusions. The reader may detect suspicion in her article but is given no real sense of the author’s either exonerating Carroll or condemning him.