Lost Girls - Allusions and References

Allusions and References

The title of the work is a play on the name for Peter Pan's followers, the Lost Boys.

The individual sections dealing with the three titular "girls" all have distinct visual layouts and themes used for their chapters. Alice's sections feature ovals reminiscent of her looking-glass; Wendy's are shrouded in tall, dark rectangles reminiscent of the shadowy Victorian architecture of her time, and Dorothy has wide panels in imitation of the flat landscape of Kansas and prominently featured silver shoes.

Moore attempts to tailor the dialogue to each character's previous experiences and stories. Dorothy Gale, raised on a farm, speaks in a casual Midwestern American dialect. Wendy's speeches are heavy with timidity and clumsiness as a result of the repressive nature of her middle-class upbringing. Alice, having briefly been made queen (in Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There), is more authoritarian in her upper-class English speech patterns and formal manner. Lewis Carroll's nonsense-words also make allusory appearances in Alice's dialogue, including phrases such as "to jab" and "bandersnatch" as well as more overt references to her adventures in phrases like "the reflection is the real thing" and "I made pretence".

Each of the three Lost Girls volumes opens with a quotation from the three "original" authors (Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum). Parts of these citations are used as titles for each book:

1. First volume: Older Children ("We are but older children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near," Carroll.)
2. Second volume: Neverlands ("Of course, the Neverlands vary a good deal," Barrie.)
3. Third volume: The Great And Terrible ("I am Oz, the great and terrible. Who are you and why do you seek me?," Baum.)

Equally, the titles of each chapter naturally point towards the three "original" authors' books: "The Mirror", "Silver Shoes", "Missing Shadows", "A Vice From a Caterpillar", "Which Dreamed It?", "The Cowardly Lion", "You Won't Forget to Wave?", "Queens Together", "Snicker Snack", etc.

Each volume has ten chapters, and each chapter contains eight pages. This format initially derived from its original serialized publication in Stephen R. Bissette's anthology Taboo, but it also reflects Carroll's multi-layered usage of mathematical allusions and links as there are 8 squares in the length of a chess board (a prominent feature of Through The Looking-Glass, and the key to becoming a queen in both game and book) as well as his poem The Hunting Of The Snark being An Agony In Eight Fits.

The regular chapters are interspersed with pornographic pastiches of works by artists and authors of the period, presented as chapters in Monsieur Rougeur's White Book, a collection of illustrated pornographic stories. Each chapter is in the style of different authors and artists of the period: these include presentations in the styles of Colette and Aubrey Beardsley, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfons Mucha, Oscar Wilde and Egon Schiele, and Pierre Louÿs and Franz von Bayros.

(Although the central characters and various supporting characters are based directly on pre-existing fictional characters, Harold Potter is not a reference to Harry Potter, having been named years before J. K. Rowling's first book was published.)