Victorian Visual Culture

While reading Alice and looking at the images by Tenniel, I was really interested by the way he chose to illustrate her hair. I couldn’t help but find it to be remarkably suggestive of the styles shown to represent women’s madness, as we briefly discussed in class. It appears that there is a thin line being drawn between childhood and the untamable.

But this is not only limited to Alice. It seems that every female character has some sort of wild and exaggerated hairstyle.

This is not to say that the male characters aren’t exaggerated, they are just as much, but it is interesting to notice that there is so much emphasis placed on the use of hair when pertaining to women.

While I was looking around for some images on the internet, I came across an article written in The Vancouver Sun about an Annual Hair show from last year. They decided to have the shows theme be based on Alice in Wonderland. I think it’s interesting to look at how these hairstyles went from representing lunacy to representing fashion and something desirable (or at least fashionable).

These are two of the images from the “Blonde Events’ fourth Annual Fantasy Hair Show”