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Oedipal Alice?
E3 Haroun Alice
by oradwan

Children transition smoothly from a real world to a ‘dream world’ early in the beginnings of both Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass. While both children have similar passages between worlds, the immediate effects of the transition on their power are completely different: Alice gains tremendous power over her surroundings while Haroun loses power. This is due to the fact that Alice transitions into a mirror world with no familiar authorities from her real world, while Haroun’s dream world contains his father, which forces him to conform more to the power he held in the real world. This illustrates the competitive aspect of a father son relationship that does not exist in a girl’s relationship with her father.
Both children fare equally well at their transition from the real world to the dream world, but have slightly different journeys. Alice has an easy time transitioning; in fact, she hardly notices that she makes the transition: “In another moment Alice was through the glass” (Alice 143). Alice simply leaps through the mirror and enters her dream world, a painless and fast transition. The transition for Haroun takes a little longer. Haroun does not truly arrive in the dream world until he reaches Gup city, as his travels with Butt and Mali serve as a transition into the new dream world. Apparently however, even this method of transport isn’t too slow: “Gup City dead ahead. Record time! Va-va-va-voom! No problem”(Haroun 87). Haroun might take longer to transition, but he does so on a fast and efficient method of transport, with little energy required on his part. The transition from a real world to a dream world is easy for both children, mirroring the power of a child’s imagination. Haroun’s transition uses the longer transition as a rhetorical device to explain the axioms of the dream world, whereas Alice learns her world’s rules by trial and error once she is already there.
Once Alice enters the dream world, she finds that she has gained great power that she did not have in the real world. When she sees the white queen fretting over her lost daughter, Alice steps in and takes an action that she couldn’t take in her real world: “she hastily picked up the Queen and set her on the table by the side of her noisy daughter” (Alice 145). Alice can act as a savior in this new world, whereas in the real world a young girl has no power to reunite a separated mother and daughter. Alice continues to explore her new powers, as the white king realizes when Alice takes over his pencil: “she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him” (Alice 147). In this way she gains power over the expression of a powerful adult male (a power she surely lacks in the real world). Alice has gained tremendous power in her transition between worlds. She gains control over the actions and thoughts of adults in this new world, as she manipulates their movement and expression.
Haroun on the other hand, loses much of his power when he transitions into the mirror world. During the transition period, he gains some power, as is evident when the water genie doesn’t just take back his disconnector. Yet much of this power is gained by the fact that Butt the Hoopoe is taking his side, and the other character’s respect Butt rather than Haroun. Shortly after Haroun’s arrival at Gup City, he runs into none other than his father, currently suspected of being a spy. Immediately his power returns to that of what he had in the normal world, as the intrusion of his father into his own imaginary world drags him slightly back into reality. And when his father prepares to go on a journey to rescue the princess, Haroun cries “don’t think you can leave me behind” (Haroun 105). His mannerisms have become that of a child again, concerned with being left behind by his father. That very night, Blabbermouth “took the little liberty … of removing, from under [Haroun’s] pillow, the Disconnecting Tool” (Haroun 113). Haroun now has lost all power that he might have gained in this transition and at this point is actually less powerful than he was in the real world. When he was in the real world, as he first talked to Mali, he could retain control of the Disconnecting Tool, and now he cannot even do that.
Haroun fails to gain, and even loses power because of the appearance of his father in his dream world, while Alice has no such issue. The appearance of a familiar adult figure who has control over a child in the real world into a dream world has the effect of enforcing the conventions of the real world in the dream world. Alice gains tremendous power in her dream world as no aspect of the controlling forces from her real world enters her private domain. In this way, these stories illustrate a difference in the relationship between fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. The Oedipal contest present in Haroun and his father’s relationship is manifested in this novel as Haroun loses power to his father in his dream world, mimicking how Haroun as a young man always has some sort of competition and rebellion against his father. Alice doesn’t have such an intrusion into her dream world by a Lewis Carroll type figure (who might have been seen as slightly fatherly), as there isn’t a similar deeply rooted conflict between girls and their fathers. The closest intrusion comes from a character like the white knight, but he appears under the guise of a character from the story, and thusly doesn’t have a similar effect as Haroun’s father does.
Haroun and Alice both transition into mirror worlds in their respective novels, however the authors represent the change in power very differently. Carroll’s novel shows a girl gaining power and succeeding, which makes sense as Carroll wrote the novel for Alice Liddell, a young girl for whom he cared deeply. In Haroun, Rushdie shows a boy who loses power when his father intrudes into his dream world, which seems to hold traces of the innate Oedipal conflict between a boy and his father. Yet Rushdie wrote this novel for his son, so the eventual triumph of Haroun sends a message to the reader that the oppression of a father isn’t actually real, and will not hold one back. Rushdie lets his son see that there is no reason to compete, and that it is possible to gain power (as Haroun indeed does later in the story) while working alongside your father. The intrusion of the adult world into a child’s imagination takes away much of the child’s powers of imagination, and the fact that Carroll’s intrusions come disguised as characters from the dream world closely follows the lack of competition between a father and daughter, while Haroun’s father appears directly, mirroring the oedipal conflict between a boy and his father.

May 12, 2005, 11:46 AM

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