Cyborg Alice in Wonderland, and What Donna Haraway Found There

So I'm taking an online course on coursera.org on 'Fantasy and Science Fiction,' and had to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. While I was reading, I started imagining Alice as if she were a cyborg.  Then I started thinking, that though she is clearly not intended to be a cyborg in the 'traditional' 'BIONIC' sense, she really does satisfy some of the same fears and desires as her techno-enhanced buddies.

OK, hear me out, please!

Indeed, Alice is sort of a 'stranger in a strange land,' if you will.  She struggles to make sense of her absurd encounters with the denizens of Wonderland and the looking glass country, while her own body literally unravels.  In her first adventure, Alice changes size and shape more rapidly than she can keep track of.  (My favorite part is when her neck grows like a giraffe's and she's accused of being a serpent [original sin, anyone?]).  As Alice attempts to control her own body, she loses control of the world around her.

Steampunk Alice, though, is another story.
(Picture taken from Rebelakemi, on devientart)

The pivotal cyborg moment, though, comes with the realization that these changes are literally a product of her own design and creation, as she is the creator of her own fantasy.  The cyborg as envisioned by Donna Haraway is equally a product of her own potential, who is limited not by her own abilities, but by the limitations and pressures put on by a society that cannot accept the individuality (read:deviance) of the cyborg's powers.



I read Alice's adventures of being clearly about this tension between the boundlessness of childhood imagination as it encounters the strict and strange manners of English custom.  The characters in both tales, include Alice herself, are therefore the monstrous bastard children of fantasy and reality, of a child who is still young and foolish but who wants to grow up and 'fit in.'  If this is the case, Alice-as-fantasy is a chimera of contradictory forces, and certainly fits the minimum standards of cyborg-dom.  And as a cyborg, she gives me hope, because she does not realize how perverse, deviant, and pleasant she really is.

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On a side note, I realized that Donna Haraway actually alludes to Alice (!!!!) in the Cyborg Manifesto, linked to above (because I obviously reread the Manifesto every time I link to it... uhh).  Because it it Haraway, it's basically impossible to just quote out of context, so I'll try and give some background.

After writing:

(In this post-modern post-textual line of thinking)... Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we? 

She explains that technology allows us to blur the lines between physical and non-physical, with microchips allowing us to 'write' the atom in the same way (or so we claim) that God did.  Then, so powerfully, she explains how small-ness is the new size of power and war, writing: "Our best machines are made of sunshine... cyborgs are ether, quintessence" *shudder*.

OK so here's where Alice comes in- she explains:

The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are “no more” than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, “no more” than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of “Oriental” women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll's houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice [of Wonderland] taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies. 

Wow!  She makes little Alice into a kind of an arbiter into the new Wonderland of technological explosion.  But more importantly, the smallness of these sunshine machines, the same smallness that Alice had to experience as she shrinks so much that she's afraid that she'll disappear, is a kind of power, but a power built by men off of the imposed smallness of women.  The nimble 'oriental' fingers and the doll house are the mythic inspirations for these sunshine machines, making these machines almost like binding corsets, capitalizing on women shrinking, and pushing the process along at the same time.

Based on what I wrote above, though, what are the implications of Alice being the one to mediate these violent and absurd machines?  Is it possible that Haraway is being optimistic, hoping that cyborg Alice, in her innocent but powerful precociousness, that can turn this oppressive practice into a liberating spiral dance?

As cyborg Alice might say - "it's getting curiouser and curiouser... but I'll be back!"

Sorry, couldn't resist :p