Alice’s Adventures in Taiwan: Rewriting Alice’s Female Image and Femininity

Abstract

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by John Tenniel and first published in 1865, has been translated and adapted numerous times. This has resulted in many versions of Alice, a character who has left her original Victorian context to acquire new traits in many other scenarios, including the Taiwanese ones. In this light, this thesis asks ‘how has Alice travelled across media and cultures?’ and ‘what has Alice become in Taiwan?’, a context where this female character has gained popularity and recognition. The aim of this thesis is to understand Alice’s transformations with a focus on Alice’s female image and ideas of femininity. My objectives are to investigate how Alice’s female image is shaped and reconstructed in translations and adaptations and to find out what the Taiwanese publications of Wonderland can tell us about femininity, girlhood, and/or womanhood in Taiwan. I argue that the ideologies of femininity and the media used to host Wonderland play central roles in shaping Alice’s female image, an image that becomes malleable and is constantly changing. I look at selected examples from three major types of publications of Wonderland in Taiwan: abridged publications, comic books produced by fans, and unabridged versions. I adopt André Lefevere’s rewriting theory ([1992] 2017) to study these three types of translations and adaptations, firstly because rewriting theory considers different transformations of texts that affect a pre-existing literary work without being limited to linguistic and textual manifestations; secondly, the theory highlights the impact of ideology on the fame of literature; thirdly, the theory brings the effect of culture on translation into the foreground, suggesting that translation is not just a linguistic exercise. I also adopt girlhood studies, especially Catherine Driscoll’s concept of feminine adolescence (2002) and Heather Warren-Crow’s notion of plasticity (2014), to shed further light on Alice’s female image. Driscoll helps to explain Alice’s transformation, i.e., the idea of ‘becoming’, while Warren-Crow helps to investigate the malleability of Alice’s female image. The findings suggest that Alice’s female image is subject to various ideologies of femininity and imply that, in Taiwan, there are multiple ideas about femininity that sometimes contradict each other. This thesis therefore provides an alternative way to understand the various publications and productions surrounding Wonderland and a way to map out a dialogue between the translations and adaptations of an iconic Victorian girl within the Taiwanese context.