Alice Fougeray is one of the leading lights of our Nationality genre and has achieved almost cult status in her native France. Born in Lorraine, a region in Eastern France, Alice was a very young child of the prosperous French countryside where she would have seen, as a child, the poverty and eminence of the French nobility. As she grew up, her biographer, Andree Flemons, found that throughout Alice’s younger years there were deep hints of her ancestral nationality in the quiet yet discomfited manner in which she addressed her fellow students, the teachers at the prestigious University of Lorraine. And in these times, when the intelligentsia tended to be either absorbed by the culture of the city-state or aloof from it as in England, she never concealed her French heritage and nor did she try to disguise her French nationality. She remained true to her origins and this served to influence her art and, most importantly, her view of womanhood, identity and gender.
In “Alice in Wonderland” there is a clear allusion to both the peasantry and the intellectual intelligentsia but it is Alice’s aristocratic English friend, Quilp, who is the most influential. Quilp tells Alice that nationality is nothing more than a label, telling a girl who is not aware that she is French or German or Italian that she is a national: “And what’s more, it isn’t worth a cent. Nationality is nothing but an image.”
Alice’s aristocratic friend, Madame Defargere, a French intellectual whom Alice greatly admires, explains to her, “All nationality is nothing but an artificial creation, the invention of men.” This is the strongest and most meaningful comment Alice receives from this knowledgeable intellectual. But it is this insight that leads Alice to conclude that, “all these people are only playing games.” This is the secret behind the difference between men and women in general, and the reason why we should always support the efforts of girls and women who aspire to climb the ladder of success in whatever career they choose. Through the experience of Alice in Wonderland we come to recognize that there are differences among the classes of humans, and we are bound to recognize the difference among our own social groups, between our personal identity and that of our country or nationality, and even among our race or color.