Boundary-Crossing Girls and Imaginary Worlds: Gender, Childhood, and the Cinematic Spaces of Modernity

This dissertation focuses on the figure of the boundary-crossing girl in late nineteenth and early twentieth century popular culture. She begins to appear in popular texts of the mid-nineteenth century with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and continues to play an important role in negotiating the tensions between spirituality and technology in modernity. From Alice, to Wendy in Peter Pan, to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, this figure looms large in not just children's literature and entertainment, but popular culture in general. I look at some lesser-known adaptations of these canonical texts: the early Alice films in 1903, 1910, and 1915; J.M. Barrie's screenplay adaptation of his wildly successful play; L. Frank Baum's multimedia stage productions and film versions of Oz; and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, a series of live-action/animated shorts that ran from 1923–1927, kicking off his career.;Through analysis of these adaptations, this dissertation contributes to, and diverges from, previous work on modernity, gender, spirituality, and media technology. While work has been done on how women serve as avatars or representations of spirituality or the imaginary (as mediums, for instance), and on the use of female figures to represent emerging technologies, the figure I look at crisscrosses both of these roles and functions to manage the paradoxes and tensions which arise from competing images of femininity and modernity. The use of a pre-pubescent, unfixed, blank slate of a character as a protagonist enables the producers of these texts to engage in spectacular feats of world-building, using cutting-edge technologies to produce imaginary lands with not just unprecedented realism, but the authenticity, innocence, and even spiritual nature associated with the little girl in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western culture. These representations of boundary-crossing girls and the imaginary lands they inhabit evolve alongside developments in religious and occult thought, philosophy, psychology, and consumer culture; looking at the narrative of girls in imaginary worlds allows me to trace the relationships between these discourses and the use of new media technologies over a significant period of change in Western society.