Just catching up on this series and in the second episode, did we really get all the way through the "changed in the night" discussion without an acknowledgment of what "changed" actually means in this context?
I think Olsen missed a dialectical trick here. Alice doesn't mean "changed" in the sense that something about her has changed as we would put it, like some external force has modified something about her vision or her mind, some attribute or quality of her; she means she has been EXchanged! For another little girl! She's been replaced! You know? Like a changeling?
She suspects the fairies have "changed" her "for" another little girl, like you would "change" pounds sterling FOR francs ("moneychangers" is another artifact of this sense of the word). Or how like if you "change" a tire, you're replacing it with another similar tire, you're not like painting it yellow or something. She doesn't mean just that something about her has been altered, but that her consciousness has literally been transplanted into the body of one of her friends, and their consciousness into her body. That's why she's trying to figure out which of her friends she "is" now: Ada, or Mabel, who presumably look vaguely similar to her—and not "a 38-year-old man" or anyone else with whom the fairies obviously wouldn't be able to pull off the deception.
This whole passage and its subsequent play on the multiplication tables and so on are all following from the popular folklore about fairies and changelings, where a child of her age or younger would abruptly take on a new personality, as though swapped in the night for some kind of homunculus.
Without this cultural gloss the passage is a lot harder to parse except by ascribing Alice's reaction as a peculiar tendency of hers to immediately assume that her perception of the strangeness around her is due to some "change" in herself, and not the inherent uncanny nature of her surroundings; or (as Olsen does) to jump to the interpretation that Alice likes to imagine herself as being "two people" or like someone else altogether, like that's just a thing she does. I'm surprised nobody in the audience brought up this interpretation, as I think it would have profoundly affected Olsen's reading of the whole section, up through the Caterpillar exchange and beyond where she keeps talking about having "been changed" (not, notably, simply "changed") several times since last night.
I think Olsen missed a dialectical trick here. Alice doesn't mean "changed" in the sense that something about her has changed as we would put it, like some external force has modified something about her vision or her mind, some attribute or quality of her; she means she has been EXchanged! For another little girl! She's been replaced! You know? Like a changeling?
She suspects the fairies have "changed" her "for" another little girl, like you would "change" pounds sterling FOR francs ("moneychangers" is another artifact of this sense of the word). Or how like if you "change" a tire, you're replacing it with another similar tire, you're not like painting it yellow or something. She doesn't mean just that something about her has been altered, but that her consciousness has literally been transplanted into the body of one of her friends, and their consciousness into her body. That's why she's trying to figure out which of her friends she "is" now: Ada, or Mabel, who presumably look vaguely similar to her—and not "a 38-year-old man" or anyone else with whom the fairies obviously wouldn't be able to pull off the deception.
This whole passage and its subsequent play on the multiplication tables and so on are all following from the popular folklore about fairies and changelings, where a child of her age or younger would abruptly take on a new personality, as though swapped in the night for some kind of homunculus.
Without this cultural gloss the passage is a lot harder to parse except by ascribing Alice's reaction as a peculiar tendency of hers to immediately assume that her perception of the strangeness around her is due to some "change" in herself, and not the inherent uncanny nature of her surroundings; or (as Olsen does) to jump to the interpretation that Alice likes to imagine herself as being "two people" or like someone else altogether, like that's just a thing she does. I'm surprised nobody in the audience brought up this interpretation, as I think it would have profoundly affected Olsen's reading of the whole section, up through the Caterpillar exchange and beyond where she keeps talking about having "been changed" (not, notably, simply "changed") several times since last night.
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