Subjectivizing children: melancholy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter and Wendy

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the subjectivation of children in children’s literature and film, and the melancholy caused to child characters as they are forced down a path of growing up as conceived by adults. Engaged in a close reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Peter and Wendy (1911), as well as their select film adaptations Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Return to Never Land (2002), Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and finally Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), the thesis is also committed to a discourse analysis of the concepts of childhood and growing up. As the thesis is concerned with works occupying a timeframe of over a century, the shifts in Western children’s literature and film, as well as their introduction into the Disney machinery is also considered. Approaching this multitude of attitudes towards how child characters relate to adulthood and growing up, the thesis connects this issue in relation to the dynamic between the Western colonizer and the colonized subjects, as the former desubjectivizes the latter in a similar dynamic to the one between adults and children.