By Victoria Livingstone
Last week my daughter’s preschool sent an email with a link to a lockdown training video they planned to show the children in the school auditorium. The video was a five-minute clip of a cartoon rabbit, clad in a yellow waistcoat and green necklace, teaching a class. The bunny-teacher’s body remained rigid, but her head wobbled as she explained that the children would be playing “quiet mouth” and folding their little bodies into rabbit yoga poses. During the bunny-teacher’s lesson, cartoon children named Alice and Timmy periodically popped up on the screen to ask or answer questions.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice follows the White Rabbit who, like the bunny-teacher, wears a waistcoat and seems to be in a position of authority. The literary Alice chases the creature into darkness and falls into Wonderland, where an impatient Gryphon insults her for not knowing the meaning of uglify, a baby turns into a pig, and an erratic queen calls for the execution of nearly every character. Wonderland is a violent place, and Alice faces death several times: when she shrinks, when she grows, when she nearly drowns in her own tears, and when the queen puts her on trial. Before the end of the first chapter, Alice is already wondering what her own death might look like: “it might end, you know . . . in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?”
At the university where I teach, I am required to take a yearly lockdown training called ALICE, an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. “Manage your fear,” a voice instructs over PowerPoint slides with frightening images. Captions appear on the slides with certain words bolded: time, for instance, and survivability. The ALICE training video shows a college student with a stern expression, but it is not clear if he is meant to be a shooter or a potential victim. Perhaps that is the point. ALICE reminds me that we could all face death at any time. Death can interrupt, for instance, a lesson on literature.
In the preschool lockdown video, cartoon Alice looks worn and panicked. Her eyes are unnaturally shaped; they look like large, vertically oriented eggs with horizontal lines underneath. The lines are probably meant to illustrate the roundness of a young girl’s cheeks, but to me they look like bags under her eyes. The background music is ominous: slow and high-pitched. At one point, a photograph of a real bunny comes on screen, followed by real preschoolers huddled under desks.
“Let’s call him fuzzy-head bunny,” I suggest when my four-year-old daughter asks for a name for her stuffed animal. “I have a good name!” she responds. “Let’s call him bunny-loves-with-his-heart-love-everyone-loves-his-mommy.” The names for her animals are often full sentences or almost sentences, and generally include references to love or hearts and sometimes sparkles. Then we read Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama and the Bully Goat. In the book, the bully throws sand at a classmate. A fictional character intentionally throwing sand at someone might be one of the cruelest behaviors my daughter has observed. Unlike Carroll’s Alice, who is insulted by several characters, my daughter has never, as far as I know, been mistreated.
The email from the preschool said that the teachers would avoid words like “gun” and “intruder.” Instead, they would present the lockdown drill as a game. In the training video, the children cheer when the bunny teacher sets a timer for the “quiet mouth” game, and they celebrate again when she offers carrots as rewards. The lockdown-as-game approach, however, did not assuage my fear that the training would destroy my daughter’s sense of security. Play does build resilience, but children are perceptive; I worried that the drill would stress my daughter and her classmates. To validate my concerns, I found an article by child psychologist Nancy Rappaport, who argues that lockdown drills can be detrimental because young children cannot distinguish between fiction and reality. A threat presented as hypothetical, Rappaport argues, will seem immediate to young students, leading them to feel anxious and depressed in an environment that is meant to be safe.
Carroll’s Alice transforms several times. Shortly after going down the rabbit hole, she worries that she has become another child: “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?” The question is one she asks herself throughout the book. When she tries to convince a pigeon that she is a girl and not a bird-eating serpent, she realizes she is unsure of her answer: “‘I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.” The transformations she undergoes, however, are temporary. When she grows so uncontrollably that her body becomes trapped by the house she had entered, nibbling on cakes and mushrooms allow her to control her size. Carroll’s Alice can become a little girl again at will.
In the real world, major changes tend to have long-lasting effects. Once introduced to threats of violence, my daughter may be forced to grow in ways that cakes and mushrooms cannot reverse. I therefore decided to have my child sit out the lockdown drill. Her teachers agreed, so while her classmates practiced bunny yoga poses and played quiet mouth, my daughter colored in another classroom. A few hours later, my phone buzzed with the news of a school shooting in Nashville. A former student had entered the building and killed six people, including three children.
Alice leaves Wonderland with a “scream, half of fright and half of anger” as a murderous deck of cards descends upon her. Wonderland, however, is a dream within a fictional work and Alice awakes with her head on the lap of her older sister, who brushes dry leaves away from Alice’s face and kisses her. Alice then runs off for tea and her sister briefly enters Wonderland where she dreams of “the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution.”
I, too, close my eyes and envision executioners: in Nashville, in Sandy Hook, in Uvalde. Since Columbine, here have been 435 school shootings in the U.S. I want to protect my daughter as long as possible from awareness of this brutal reality. I still worry about the emotional impact of lockdown training, but the shooting in Nashville—just hours after the drill at my daughter’s school—convinced me that such trainings are necessary even if my daughter has to grow up too quickly. The next time her preschool practices lockdown, my daughter will play quiet mouth and huddle in a bunny pose.
For Alice and her sister, Wonderland—even in its violence—represents a welcome change from “dull reality.” Once fully awake, the girls easily separate dream from reality. Their visions are harmless; they both feel safe. The sister, who is clearly in a caretaking role, is so relaxed that she closes her eyes and drifts into a dream as her young charge runs off alone. Carroll’s novel concludes with the sister imagining that when Alice becomes an adult, she will retain “the simple and loving heart of her childhood.”
I watch my daughter play outside. I am never relaxed enough to take my eyes off her when she plays in a public place. I am a vigilant mother, happy but not at ease. My child tosses dry leaves into the air and squeals. She is not hiding and she is not quiet. She is a little girl. I am not yet ready for her to prepare for possible violence, but the world gives me little choice. We are not adventuring in a dream, and this is not a work of fiction.
Victoria Livingstone’s essays, poetry, journalistic pieces, and translations have appeared in Time, The Washington Post, Guernica, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Pablo García’s Song from the Underworld, a book of contemporary Maya poetry. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic literature, was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil, and is currently the managing editor of MLN, a peer-reviewed journal of literary scholarship. She publishes a newsletter called Human Generated. Her book Before the Boom: Harriet de Onís and the Translation of Latin American Literature is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.