Struggling to resist prior interpellation : the nursery rhyme characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass

Abstract

This article examines what is at stake in the utilisation of traditional nursery rhyme characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Relying on an Althusserian and Butlerian framework, the author shows that, although a sense of déjà vu strikes Alice (and the reader) when she meets them, the nursery rhyme characters’ attempts to resist their predetermined fate endow them with a new form of authenticity. Indeed, they are interpellated as subjects by a cultural Ideological State Apparatus (the nursery rhymes) and even though they cannot reject this interpellation altogether, they can displace and rework it. The Tweedle brothers, Humpty Dumpty, and the Lion and the Unicorn engage in recurrent metaleptic struggles with Alice, which make it possible for them to counter-interpellate their interpellator.