The Beggar's Maid
Feb. 12th, 2005 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philthecowFergie says this is my magnum opus; either she only said that in order to alleviate some of my embarrassment over handing it in, or masturbation and pedophilia are my strong points. I'm not sure which explanation I prefer.
Did they use words like nipple in the nineteenth century? Because she worries about Alice Liddell’s exposed nipple more than maybe she should. She knows that Lewis Carroll was a deacon, that he took an oath of chastity, that there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was a pedophile, but somehow whenever she comes back to that portrait the hair on her neck rises. He took pictures of little girls, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and he took naked pictures of little girls, but he asked the parents’ permission, so it is perhaps even worse that he took pictures like this one? Her leg lifted and turned ever so slightly towards him, the arm placed on her hip so defiantly, her right hand cupped upwards in a gesture of what? Of welcome? Of promise? Of suggestion? Of seduction? It’s ultimately all about seduction, isn’t it? Bedroom eyes from a girl who’s never been in the bedroom, that collarbone jutting forward so nakedly, that dress that looks like it’s just about to fall off, or at least about to be torn off, that nipple. It all comes back to that nipple.
Carroll’s genius was supposed to be in allowing the true child to come through, not treating them as overgrown babies or as miniature adults but as children, individuals with a spirit all their own. But isn’t a nipple—isn’t a nipple awfully adult? Why would anyone think to show a nipple in a childhood photograph? Isn’t an exposed nipple false to what a little girl is?
Or is this what Alice Liddell was? Not the idealized Victorian girl, but the bold Victorian girl, the brazen Victorian girl, the—and she thinks this before she admits it to herself, the word runs around her mind a million times before she can speak it out loud—the sexual Victorian girl?
Today Mr. Dodgson came to the Deanery at three o’clock to tutor us, really to tutor us, he admonished, telling Lorina that she was not to distract him into a game of Whist or croquet, not that we could have played croquet because it was raining outside, but between Lorina and I there’s always a way to distract him, and he really makes a jolly companion in spite of being our tutor. He told us that he was going to write us a series of logical proofs and we were going to have to tell him where he went wrong. I was a bit nervous, just because we haven’t learned anything in the longest time, and we never do proofs with more than three propositions and he was already writing up eight! But he gave the paper to Lorina first, as she’s the oldest and should know these things, and she peered at it very intently for a minute or so and I thought we were in the greatest trouble if Lorina couldn’t do it, not that Mr. Dodgson would ever hurt anyone but that he would be disappointed in us and that feels like punishment enough, but she broke into a peal of laughter and cried “Why, it doesn’t make any sense at all!”
I picked up the scrap of paper and on it was written:
(1) No kitten, that loves fish, is unteachable;
(2) No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla;
(3) Kittens with whiskers always love fish;
(4) No teachable kitten has green eyes;
(5) No kittens have tails unless they have whiskers.
And I laughed, and Mr. Dodgson laughed, and Lorina laughed, and little Edith laughed hardest of all and then he told us a story about Dinah the grey tabby in his quiet voice with his curious stutter, and the beginning was simply capital but then he pretended to fall asleep and we grabbed his arms and begged of him to wake up but he wouldn’t and then it was time for five o’clock tea and he promised to finish the story next time but right now he had to go.
She sits curled in her armchair with The Annotated Alice in her lap and a mug of hot chocolate on her desk and the rain clattering outside and she looks at the water and all she can think of is rowing. Not that she has ever been rowing, but it sounds so leisurely and golden the way the footnotes describe it. She wants to sit at Carroll’s feet and beg of him a story, not that she would have much begging to do but it is what she wants to do, to sit in the sun and listen to the swishing of the oars and to lean over Carroll’s lap and stare dreamily into his stories. She went on a sailboat with her uncle once but he wouldn’t tell her stories and even if he had they wouldn’t have meant anything. She doesn’t want to be told stories out of duty, but told stories because she’s special, because somebody cares about her and thinks she’s smart and funny and maybe even pretty in spite of her mousy hair and her blocky bangs. Maybe he loves her so much that even though people would laugh at him and warn him away from her and think that he was dangerous and forbid him from ever seeing her ever again—a pedophile, they might say—maybe he loves her so much that he has to see her anyway, that he has to talk to her, to pet her hair, to—to see her all alone and not to want to see anybody else and to—to kiss her. To kiss her and to write her secret love notes hidden in books for only the two of them to read that she won’t have to share with anyone and they will be all her own, the entire book will be all her own, her own stories and her own facts and her own flashes of insight and her own jokes—how desperately she wants her own jokes—and her own joys. Forbidden joys because they’re secret and nothing is secret when you’re eight years old but nobody has to know about her footnotes and so she reads them breathlessly, lingeringly, her fingers tracing the raised ink over and over and over again, she reads them like love notes from the lover she will never have.
Mr. Dodgson knew everything about photography and he used to love to take pictures of us, all three of us together sometimes. He would sit us on either side of him, I always on his left side and Edith and Lorina crowded in on the other, and tell us stories to put us in a good mood, sketching fantastic cartoons on a piece of paper the whole time and then posing us. We would have to stand still for a minute or more while the picture took hold but it was never a trouble because nothing was ever a trouble when you were doing it for Mr. Dodgson. Afterwards he would allow us to go into the darkroom one at a time, but only if we were very good and did not touch anything. It was close and secret in that room and I always felt that anything could happen there in the dark, watching him rock the plates in the bath, back and forth, back and forth, his hands steadier than they were anywhere else and the picture appearing out of the acid like magic and then he would pull it out and we all got to marvel over our likenesses.
Another day, another chapter, another mug of hot chocolate sitting ignored while she reads furiously through another page of footnotes. The writing is small even for her eyes, and she rubs at her temples as she pounds down the pages. She realizes before long that the rubbing is more distracting than helpful, her eyes feeling jiggled and strained instead of refreshed, but a little girl sitting for four hours in the same place has to divert her energy somewhere and so she starts to rub at the crick in her shoulder and at the wrinkled skin on the outside of her elbow and at the smoothness of her inner forearm and at her collarbone, such a funny little jutting out bone, and not even noticing where her hand is moving to but knowing that she has to keep moving it from place to place or she will simply explode with excess energy she is rubbing her nipple and the hair on her neck is rising and it is raising and she didn’t expect this but it is raising small and hard and part of her wants to try the other nipple to make sure it’s OK but the other part is much too excited about the footnotes she has left to finish and so her hand keeps darting and darting down and down from place to place and so her eyes keep dashing and dashing down and down from footnote to footnote and in the middle of page 343, footnote 42, her eyes stop dashing and her hand stops darting and she drops the book and she’s just found the one thing that could take her mind off of footnotes.
One summer he took a picture of me as the beggar maid in a shallow nook with brambles about my feet and he wanted to get the costuming just right, he said, so he brought out a ragged dress and I put it on and he arranged all the rags just so. He wanted my collarbone to jut out, he said, so that I would look like I was barely eating at night, and he wanted the dress to hang off, he said, so that I would look like I only had one dress in all the world, and he pulled a piece of fabric aside and my breast was uncovered and suddenly his hand started shaking the way it did sometimes but violently. He took it away and he looked at me with a pained expression on his face like he wanted to be here right now but he also wanted to be a million miles away and he didn’t really know what he wanted but he knew he didn’t have it and I wanted to say that it was OK, whatever it was, that I still loved him, that he didn’t have anything to worry about when he was with me, but my throat caught because his eyes were tearing up and now I wanted to say something even more but now I knew that nothing I could say would make it any better and we stayed like that for a minute and he closed his eyes and he took a deep breath and then he put his hand back and he tucked the fabric back to where it had been and he whispered something that I couldn’t even hear. He stepped back to the camera but he hadn’t tucked it in very well and it fell back down and you could see my breast after all but I didn’t say anything about it and he didn’t say anything about it and nobody ever said anything about it but I wish we had—I wish I had told him that I didn’t mind and I wish I had told him how I felt and I wish my mother hadn’t torn up all of his letters and I wasn’t with him when he developed the photograph but I always wonder what he said when he saw the way that photo came out, wonder how he felt about it a day and a month and a decade later, wonder what he whispered to himself in that moment, wonder if there was any way it all could have turned out differently.
She is riding on the Dover—Hoboken train when she sniffles her way through the end of The Annotated Lolita (Nabokov always said that Humbert Humbert was based on Lewis Carroll) and then she reads the end again and she’s sobbing now and the conductor walks by and she tries to hand him the money for her fare but he must see her cold and huddled against the brown leather seat and he must assume that something horrible has just happened to her—that her boyfriend has broken up with her, or that she has been diagnosed with cancer, or perhaps that she has been recently orphaned—and he smiles sadly and he walks away and he won’t take it and she gulps and she sniffles and she tries to whimper that it’s not her tragedy she’s crying about, that it’s somebody else’s tragedy, that to be quite honest it’s a made up tragedy in a book, that she will give him her money and that it doesn’t matter because she’s OK, even though she doesn’t look OK she really is and she will be better tomorrow and a week from now she’ll have forgotten all about it and she feels horrible benefiting off of somebody else’s tragedy like this, but he waves her off and he says “Don’t worry about it, hon,” and in that instant it becomes her tragedy and hers alone and a weight strikes her from behind and she keels over face in lap and she couldn’t stop crying even if she wanted to.
Did they use words like nipple in the nineteenth century? Because she worries about Alice Liddell’s exposed nipple more than maybe she should. She knows that Lewis Carroll was a deacon, that he took an oath of chastity, that there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was a pedophile, but somehow whenever she comes back to that portrait the hair on her neck rises. He took pictures of little girls, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and he took naked pictures of little girls, but he asked the parents’ permission, so it is perhaps even worse that he took pictures like this one? Her leg lifted and turned ever so slightly towards him, the arm placed on her hip so defiantly, her right hand cupped upwards in a gesture of what? Of welcome? Of promise? Of suggestion? Of seduction? It’s ultimately all about seduction, isn’t it? Bedroom eyes from a girl who’s never been in the bedroom, that collarbone jutting forward so nakedly, that dress that looks like it’s just about to fall off, or at least about to be torn off, that nipple. It all comes back to that nipple.
Carroll’s genius was supposed to be in allowing the true child to come through, not treating them as overgrown babies or as miniature adults but as children, individuals with a spirit all their own. But isn’t a nipple—isn’t a nipple awfully adult? Why would anyone think to show a nipple in a childhood photograph? Isn’t an exposed nipple false to what a little girl is?
Or is this what Alice Liddell was? Not the idealized Victorian girl, but the bold Victorian girl, the brazen Victorian girl, the—and she thinks this before she admits it to herself, the word runs around her mind a million times before she can speak it out loud—the sexual Victorian girl?
Today Mr. Dodgson came to the Deanery at three o’clock to tutor us, really to tutor us, he admonished, telling Lorina that she was not to distract him into a game of Whist or croquet, not that we could have played croquet because it was raining outside, but between Lorina and I there’s always a way to distract him, and he really makes a jolly companion in spite of being our tutor. He told us that he was going to write us a series of logical proofs and we were going to have to tell him where he went wrong. I was a bit nervous, just because we haven’t learned anything in the longest time, and we never do proofs with more than three propositions and he was already writing up eight! But he gave the paper to Lorina first, as she’s the oldest and should know these things, and she peered at it very intently for a minute or so and I thought we were in the greatest trouble if Lorina couldn’t do it, not that Mr. Dodgson would ever hurt anyone but that he would be disappointed in us and that feels like punishment enough, but she broke into a peal of laughter and cried “Why, it doesn’t make any sense at all!”
I picked up the scrap of paper and on it was written:
(1) No kitten, that loves fish, is unteachable;
(2) No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla;
(3) Kittens with whiskers always love fish;
(4) No teachable kitten has green eyes;
(5) No kittens have tails unless they have whiskers.
And I laughed, and Mr. Dodgson laughed, and Lorina laughed, and little Edith laughed hardest of all and then he told us a story about Dinah the grey tabby in his quiet voice with his curious stutter, and the beginning was simply capital but then he pretended to fall asleep and we grabbed his arms and begged of him to wake up but he wouldn’t and then it was time for five o’clock tea and he promised to finish the story next time but right now he had to go.
She sits curled in her armchair with The Annotated Alice in her lap and a mug of hot chocolate on her desk and the rain clattering outside and she looks at the water and all she can think of is rowing. Not that she has ever been rowing, but it sounds so leisurely and golden the way the footnotes describe it. She wants to sit at Carroll’s feet and beg of him a story, not that she would have much begging to do but it is what she wants to do, to sit in the sun and listen to the swishing of the oars and to lean over Carroll’s lap and stare dreamily into his stories. She went on a sailboat with her uncle once but he wouldn’t tell her stories and even if he had they wouldn’t have meant anything. She doesn’t want to be told stories out of duty, but told stories because she’s special, because somebody cares about her and thinks she’s smart and funny and maybe even pretty in spite of her mousy hair and her blocky bangs. Maybe he loves her so much that even though people would laugh at him and warn him away from her and think that he was dangerous and forbid him from ever seeing her ever again—a pedophile, they might say—maybe he loves her so much that he has to see her anyway, that he has to talk to her, to pet her hair, to—to see her all alone and not to want to see anybody else and to—to kiss her. To kiss her and to write her secret love notes hidden in books for only the two of them to read that she won’t have to share with anyone and they will be all her own, the entire book will be all her own, her own stories and her own facts and her own flashes of insight and her own jokes—how desperately she wants her own jokes—and her own joys. Forbidden joys because they’re secret and nothing is secret when you’re eight years old but nobody has to know about her footnotes and so she reads them breathlessly, lingeringly, her fingers tracing the raised ink over and over and over again, she reads them like love notes from the lover she will never have.
Mr. Dodgson knew everything about photography and he used to love to take pictures of us, all three of us together sometimes. He would sit us on either side of him, I always on his left side and Edith and Lorina crowded in on the other, and tell us stories to put us in a good mood, sketching fantastic cartoons on a piece of paper the whole time and then posing us. We would have to stand still for a minute or more while the picture took hold but it was never a trouble because nothing was ever a trouble when you were doing it for Mr. Dodgson. Afterwards he would allow us to go into the darkroom one at a time, but only if we were very good and did not touch anything. It was close and secret in that room and I always felt that anything could happen there in the dark, watching him rock the plates in the bath, back and forth, back and forth, his hands steadier than they were anywhere else and the picture appearing out of the acid like magic and then he would pull it out and we all got to marvel over our likenesses.
Another day, another chapter, another mug of hot chocolate sitting ignored while she reads furiously through another page of footnotes. The writing is small even for her eyes, and she rubs at her temples as she pounds down the pages. She realizes before long that the rubbing is more distracting than helpful, her eyes feeling jiggled and strained instead of refreshed, but a little girl sitting for four hours in the same place has to divert her energy somewhere and so she starts to rub at the crick in her shoulder and at the wrinkled skin on the outside of her elbow and at the smoothness of her inner forearm and at her collarbone, such a funny little jutting out bone, and not even noticing where her hand is moving to but knowing that she has to keep moving it from place to place or she will simply explode with excess energy she is rubbing her nipple and the hair on her neck is rising and it is raising and she didn’t expect this but it is raising small and hard and part of her wants to try the other nipple to make sure it’s OK but the other part is much too excited about the footnotes she has left to finish and so her hand keeps darting and darting down and down from place to place and so her eyes keep dashing and dashing down and down from footnote to footnote and in the middle of page 343, footnote 42, her eyes stop dashing and her hand stops darting and she drops the book and she’s just found the one thing that could take her mind off of footnotes.
One summer he took a picture of me as the beggar maid in a shallow nook with brambles about my feet and he wanted to get the costuming just right, he said, so he brought out a ragged dress and I put it on and he arranged all the rags just so. He wanted my collarbone to jut out, he said, so that I would look like I was barely eating at night, and he wanted the dress to hang off, he said, so that I would look like I only had one dress in all the world, and he pulled a piece of fabric aside and my breast was uncovered and suddenly his hand started shaking the way it did sometimes but violently. He took it away and he looked at me with a pained expression on his face like he wanted to be here right now but he also wanted to be a million miles away and he didn’t really know what he wanted but he knew he didn’t have it and I wanted to say that it was OK, whatever it was, that I still loved him, that he didn’t have anything to worry about when he was with me, but my throat caught because his eyes were tearing up and now I wanted to say something even more but now I knew that nothing I could say would make it any better and we stayed like that for a minute and he closed his eyes and he took a deep breath and then he put his hand back and he tucked the fabric back to where it had been and he whispered something that I couldn’t even hear. He stepped back to the camera but he hadn’t tucked it in very well and it fell back down and you could see my breast after all but I didn’t say anything about it and he didn’t say anything about it and nobody ever said anything about it but I wish we had—I wish I had told him that I didn’t mind and I wish I had told him how I felt and I wish my mother hadn’t torn up all of his letters and I wasn’t with him when he developed the photograph but I always wonder what he said when he saw the way that photo came out, wonder how he felt about it a day and a month and a decade later, wonder what he whispered to himself in that moment, wonder if there was any way it all could have turned out differently.
She is riding on the Dover—Hoboken train when she sniffles her way through the end of The Annotated Lolita (Nabokov always said that Humbert Humbert was based on Lewis Carroll) and then she reads the end again and she’s sobbing now and the conductor walks by and she tries to hand him the money for her fare but he must see her cold and huddled against the brown leather seat and he must assume that something horrible has just happened to her—that her boyfriend has broken up with her, or that she has been diagnosed with cancer, or perhaps that she has been recently orphaned—and he smiles sadly and he walks away and he won’t take it and she gulps and she sniffles and she tries to whimper that it’s not her tragedy she’s crying about, that it’s somebody else’s tragedy, that to be quite honest it’s a made up tragedy in a book, that she will give him her money and that it doesn’t matter because she’s OK, even though she doesn’t look OK she really is and she will be better tomorrow and a week from now she’ll have forgotten all about it and she feels horrible benefiting off of somebody else’s tragedy like this, but he waves her off and he says “Don’t worry about it, hon,” and in that instant it becomes her tragedy and hers alone and a weight strikes her from behind and she keels over face in lap and she couldn’t stop crying even if she wanted to.
