Man about town

Alice in Blunderland

In much the same way that Dubya had that thing on his desk asking “What

Would Jesus Do?” — a little surprisingly, the answer always turned out to be “Vaporise random bits of the world, duh!” — most laughingly-named “world leaders” these days evidently have something similar featuring, instead of the Son of The Man, characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice, most typically the maniac Queen of Hearts or the Duchess’s anger-issues Cook.

In fact there’s plenty of larfs to be had guessing who has which: Boz would be the shambolic and random White Queen, le petit craporal the officious small contrarian Mad Hatter, Uncle Vovik Humpty Dumpty. And Joe would have to be the Dormouse: send that man a teapot!

Good timing then, for the V&A to launch its new show on the pinafored moppet, cataloguing her influence through art and design. At the press launch they couldn’t help themselves from wittering on about what a terrific role-model Alice is, as if the books were some kind of self-help manual in the sex-war, rather than the daydreams of an old Oxford perv. Nobody can stop themselves spouting this kind of drivel now, can they?

Anyway, it’s great to be able to report that Alice turns out to be a strong feminist icon, empowering little girls (big and small!) with amazing resourcefulness when confronted by caterpillar-based glass ceilings, furthermore overcoming all manner of other patriarchal bullshit, albeit the really heavy authoritarians in the books all appear rather inconveniently to be women. Frankly it seems a bit much for these people to co-opt old Dodgson’s harmless sex fantasies for their dubious purposes. Will they leave us nothing? Is nothing sacred?