Limits of Otherworlds: Rules of the Game in Alice's Adventures and the Jungle Books

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Plenary Paper Limits of Otherworlds: Rules of the Game In Alice's Adventures and the Jungle Books. by Carole Scott 'To play a game," says W.H.Auden, "it is essential that the players know and obey its rules. (Auden 35). Psychologists agree that definite rules exist not only in structured games where winning is clearly understood, but in all kinds of play behavior. Unlike real life, where rules are ambiguous and always changing, games can have rules that are absolute and unquestionable. Players must learn and obey them, and must endeavor to become skilful enough to achieve success within the narrow confines of the game-situation. While it is very clear that children learn through all kinds of play, highly structured games hold a special place, for they pull the child into a world of established order where activity is intrinsic, being undertaken for its own sake and directed toward a particular goal. While we all call such goal-oriented activity "play," it seems to me that both children and adults work very hard at it. Game rules may reflect those of the real world by imitation, change or reversal. The most common reversal in children's games is that children take the positions of power. But there are a myriad of possibilities in constructing order, including play whose primary focus is playing with the rules themselves; word play which manipulates the rules of language even to the abandonment of meaning is a wonderful example of this. Although we regard play as an escape from the constraints of the real world, in fact we tend simply to substitute one set of constraints, the rules of the game, for those in real life. Michael Ellis, a noted child psychologist, believes that the rules are "related to the notion of creativity" for they provide the limiting condition, the challenge within whose constraints creativity is inspired (Ellis 278). I am going to consider today works of two authors who have created otherworlds characterized by so great an emphasis on rules that the rules themselves become an essential part of the books' subject matter. Before I turn to the works themselves, I would like to indulge in a little speculation regarding the character of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whose Alice in Wonderland ana Alice Through the Looking Glass I shall be discussing, and of Rudyard Kipling, whose Mowgli stories from The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book I have chosen. I particularly want to speculate as to why both created their structured, stratified, fictional worlds where order is so important. One early experience that both shared was the traumatic ejection from a warm, loving home into an abrasive, frightening, highly unpleasant educational setting. For both boys, the new world, unlike the pleasant informality of the homes they were used to, was a place where rigid, repressive rules governed most aspects of behavior, and individualism was subordinated to group living. Harsh, often brutal regulations were substituted for the familiar customs of home, and bullying of younger boys by the older was built into the system. Doubtless the shock of the change had a profound impact on the boys' young minds, for the obsession with structure and decree seems to have remained with both of them, though the nature of the order each created has different characteristics. Kipling's tends to be benevolent, while Carroll's, though masked by humor, is bitter and frightening. Here again biography offers a clue: Kipling moved on to a more pleasant school, and as an adult he reclaimed childhood experiences first by returning to India and later in his loving relationship with his daughter. Carroll, on the other hand, remained unhappily in school until he was ready for university. There he stayed, unwilling to move ahead with his career, and obsessed with recapturing the world of childhood through photography, stories, games and books and of course in his special relationships with little girls. Alas, like Alice, he had grown too large to reenter his visionary garden. Just as their creators did, both Alice and Mowgli find themselves in a world where they do not 20 belong, and must undertake their childhood task of learning the rules of the...