While Alice upholds the qualities of an ideal Victorian woman, and Babs challenges this ideal, both characters demonstrate similar concerns regarding the glorification of small, slender female bodies. In Babs the Impossible, Grand highlights Miss Spice as the ideal feminine woman by romanticizing “her heroic little half-starved face” (309). Though the “long-term effects of malnutrition” should be deemed as anything but heroic, Miss Spice is idealized in her ability to suppress her appetite and discipline her body. Within the same scene, Babs expresses a concern for the idealization of meagre women in saying, “I don’t feel any pride in an attenuated body. Nor shall I shirk my food for the sake of my figure, nor squeeze a foot, nor cramp a hand”…show more content… Despite the variance between Alice’s passivity Babs’s active role, both girls expose the flaws of the ideal woman through their collective anxiety surrounding the praise of slender women. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll excludes Alice’s hunger and instructs her to consume without appetite to successfully shape her into the ideal Victorian woman. As a result, Alice embodies the suppressed appetite and small figure expected of Victorian women and is further denied agency in her lack of control over her body. In contrast with Alice, Grand’s Babs has a voracious appetite which goes against the emphasis on regulation and suppression to maintain purity. Though male characters attempt to feminize her appetite, Babs rejects glorified female passivity and asserts herself as a powerful figure of agency and control. Both Alice and Babs share a similar concern regarding the small figure expected of Victorian women, thus questioning the validity of the model of femininity and suggesting a more realistic, healthy model of femininity. As such, both Alice and Babs raise various problems about the Victorian era’s feminine ideologies, especially its singular version of femininity. Instead of recognizing that there can be many different versions of femininity or what it means to be a woman, the novels place the idea of the frail, passive woman on a pedestal and this proves to be very limiting. In this sense, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Babs the Impossible ask their readers to question what it means to be a woman and endeavor towards women’s emancipation from the strict gender confines of Victorian
