Girlhood
by
“Well! WHAT are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!” “I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. “A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland There is no all-encompassing definition of girlhood. Nor is it a static or universal state. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by asserting she is a little girl, Alice demonstrates the mutability of girlhood. The exchange—concluding with the conflation of Alice with the seductive serpent in Genesis—highlights problematic interrelations between girl and girlhood in Anglo-American culture. According to the OED, girlhood has been used from the mid-eighteenth century with overlapping meanings: “the state of being a girl; the time of life during which one is a girl. Also: girls collectively.” The first citation in British literature occurs in Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1748), where the virtuous heroine, barely past childhood, is placed as a...
This essay may be found on page 88 of the printed volume.