Mad Girls: Creativity and Growing Up in Jane Eyre and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

Even though Jane Eyre, from Charlotte Brontë’s novel of the same title, and Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, are arguably two of the most well-known fictional female characters of Victorian Literature, critics have rarely discussed them within the same context. Different in content, style, and genre, it is perhaps easy to understand why: Jane Eyre is a gothic realist novel for adults, andAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a nonsensical and episodic fairy tale for children. However, my paper reveals that Brontë’s Victorian bildungsroman and Carroll’s Victorian children’s book share a crucial interest in madness, female creativity, and growing up. In both texts, madness is a misunderstood symptom of creative girlhood, not of female sexuality or patriarchal oppression as others have claimed.