ABSTRACT
If Lewis Carroll’s Alice finally learns to objectify herself by repressing her desire to consume food in order to become sweet, fairy-tale women writers of the 1870s revisited Carroll’s fantasy to highlight more sarcastically and more pessimistically the construction of the feminine ideal. In Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ (1870) and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874), the heroines follow in Alice’s footsteps: they fall underground into worlds designed to teach them how to behave. The fairylands, however, do not provide them with alternative versions of reality. They simply reflect their own natures, which Amelia must learn to tame in Ewing’s tale, and which Rossetti’s heroines have long repressed. Their fantastic journeys confirm that achieving ideal femininity implies denying one’s desires and appearing as good as gold.
