Little Girls, Big Dreams

Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates.