An obituary of Carroll in the Saturday Review pointed out that she [Alice] 'moves through her wonder-world with much of the modern spirit, which has now and then to be wholesomely repressed'. The notion that repression of any kind could be wholesome might sound surprising, although it was a standard idea at the time, bound up with a wider celebration of self-sacrifice in public service; hence Tennyson's dedication of Idylls of the King to the recently deceased Prince Albert, in which he praised the 'sublime repression of himself' that had distinguished a life 'modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise' (p. 441).
The same day, I found this written on the side of a cake box:
It reads "Tea does our fancy aid, Repress those vapours which the head invade, And keeps that palace of the soul serene." It's apparently part of "the first English poem which included the word tea," written by Edmund Waller "as a birthday ode to Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II and the first British queen to drink tea c. 1662." How it ended up on a cake box in Taiwan in 2026 is anyone's guess, but it shows that the idea of "wholesome repression" is much older than the Victorian era.
Then today on Synlogos I found a link to a First Things article called "Kinder, Gentler Repression" -- obviously meant sarcastically, but in keeping with our theme if taken literally. It's a review by Helen Roy (whose name will be sadly incomplete if her middle initial isn't T) of Mark B. Smith's Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953–1991.
Soviet repression also figures in The Story of Alice. The Russian translation of Alice was done by none other than Vladimir Nabokov, and Douglas-Fairhurst notes that the courtroom scene in the final chapter -- with "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards!" changed by Nabokov to "Execution first -- sentence afterwards!" -- would be very dark humor for émigrés like Nabokov, since
Alice has become the victim of a show trial -- the sort of nightmare from which many of Nabokov's fellow Russians were unable to wake up.
I somehow never knew that Nabokov had translated Alice, but it is of course perfectly in character for him to have done so. I wonder how much my personal favorite Nabokov novel, Invitation to a Beheading, which was published 11 years after his Alice, owes to Carroll's topsy-turvy courtroom -- which is, it now seems obvious, a much apter comparison than the usual go-to adjective Kafkaesque.
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