The Illusion of Rescue in Alice or The Wild Girl - GD Dess

Literature loves to celebrate rescue as salvation. From Greek myth and the Bible through medieval romance, saving someone is framed as heroic deliverance—Perseus unchains Andromeda, knights free maidens from dragons and wed them. Scripture promises salvation as the ultimate rescue. When you look closely, however, rescue in Western literature is rarely rescue pure and simple, it is conquest wearing the mask of benevolence: the trope conceals domination, dependency, and desire. Crusoe “rescues” Friday only to rename, convert, and enslave him. In Richardson’s Pamela, Mr. B rescues the heroine from seduction by turning her into his wife—her virtue preserved at the cost of her autonomy. And in Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert recasts his abduction as a chivalric rescue from her mother, a stifling small town, and the predator Quilty.   

Across centuries, these stories suggest that the power to rescue and the power to dominate are disturbingly intertwined and morally ambiguous. Michael Robert Liska’s debut novel Alice or The Wild Girl (Heresy Press, 2025) extends this lineage through a story at once historical and disturbingly modern. It is a novel about captivity disguised as protection, about the ways power feeds on its own illusions of virtue.

The story begins in 1856, when Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird, failed naval officer and alcoholic dreamer, finds a shipwrecked feral girl on a remote Pacific island. Alice Kelly appears to be about ten years of age and is naked, silent, and traumatized. She is the very image of helplessness, but to Bird she becomes an opportunity. He carries her aboard his boat, not into freedom but into confinement. He locks her in a closet. He doses her with laudanum (the tincture of opium) to sedate her and gain her compliance so he can teach her manners and civilize her— “a reward more effective than food.” As a "civilizing influence" Bird gives her a piglet hoping that “the animal might stimulate her maternal feelings” but it does nothing to improve her behavior, and he continues to keep her locked in the closet, now with the piglet as a companion, letting them out at his sole discretion. The ostensible moral good of rescue has already been transformed into the evil of captivity.   

What follows is as much a story of Alice as it is an indictment of the culture that feasts on her. Back in America, Bird reinvents himself as a heroic explorer, and transforms Alice into a spectacle. He puts together a lecture series “The Wild Girl of the Pacific” and they tour the eastern seaboard selling out lecture halls everywhere they go. Bird is feted as an adventurer even as he profits from Alice’s humiliation when she is dragged on stage as an exhibit. When Alice’s uncle — the sole character in the book who might actually care for her — threatens to reclaim her, Bird flees with her to California, clinging to both his meal ticket and his self-image as protector.  

In San Francisco, Bird agrees to allow his tale to become theater piece. A promoter turns his story into a hit play, and Bird basks in his wealth and new-found respectability. He begins hosting in his home an exclusive gentlemen’s club, “The Group,” consisting of the upper social echelon of San Francisco. To these compatriots Bird has achieved the American dream of becoming a self-made man, but, ironically, as Liska shows, his identity depends on a woman whose life he has stolen. His success parasitically feeds upon Alice, who cannot escape and whom he continues to dose with laudanum to inflict discipline and to shield her from outside influences that might give her ideas about freedom. In the club, with its rituals of cigars, he retells his stories, endlessly repeating the “momentous occasions” of his life. The approval and applause of his companions become for Bird a kind of narcotic, weaker than the laudanum he doles out to Alice, but just as necessary for his self-image. He becomes a man who can only live inside the echo of his own mythos, reinforced night after night by his bragging of his heroism and the rescue that has resulted in Alice’s captivity.

For a brief moment Alice slips free. Bird commissions the bohemian painter Billy Swain to make a series of paintings to represent scenes from his life, the “momentous occasions” that he would like to commemorate. Alice falls for Billy and manages to escape from Bird’s house. She moves in with Billy who seems at first to offer her a different kind of life, and freedom from “that awful lieutenant.” He promises her a trip to Paris. But Billy rapidly replicates the same pattern instituted by Bird: captivity and control through opium. He abandons her after he gets her pregnant. As Liska shows, Alice’s escape from Bird to Billy is only a transfer to another captivity. In a patriarchal, capitalistic society built on spectacle, even would-be rescuers repeat the harm they pretend they are undoing. 

Time withers Bird as it does all of us. His lectures flatten into routine, his club grows stale and stinks of cigar smoke, his nights end in cocaine-snuffed stupors. His lectures, his gentlemen’s club, his commissioned paintings—momentary props against anonymity—are shown to be meaningless when the city itself collapses and burns in the1906 earthquake. For Alice, now an aging woman called “grandmother” by strangers, the catastrophe is another shipwreck. She floats through refugee camps, trading sex for food and shelter. 

Liska writes refined and restrained prose that doesn’t trip over itself trying to show off and finds apt metaphors for acute events, as, for example, when he describes Bird’s dying days: “Eventually, so little remained that death seemed like no great change. Just a tiny step over a threshold, a slight movement from one room to another.”  While the narrative does sail into the horse latitudes and languish from time to time (especially in the first part) Liska manages to navigate his way out before tedium sets in. He weaves historical detail seamlessly into the story. Interspersed italicized passages, styled as historical reportage, mimic the partial, mediated way history records the lives of the powerless such as Alice. 

There are, throughout the tale, moments when Alice appears to have a grasp on a situation and is able to express herself in a way that demonstrates she knows what is going on, such as when she tells the painter Billy Swain “I am not wild, you know” or when she convinces one of the doctors treating the casualties of the earthquake to give her a shot of morphine. But generally, her grasp of reality appears to be tenuous and intermittent, whether due to the morphine, to her lack of education (she is illiterate), or to her “illness” as she calls it, the “madness” that the ship’s doctor diagnosed when she was first found. 

What keeps the novel from lapsing into melodrama is its restraint. Bird’s behavior toward Alice is morally questionable, if not reprehensible, but Liska neither demonizes him as a cartoon villain nor redeems him as a misunderstood hero. While Bird exploits Alice for his own money-making project, he protects her from other unscrupulous predators. Bird is basically a man of moderate opinions, “a man of the people” as his real estate agent calls him, but mostly he is an old navy man, more comfortable with the “sturdy bulwark of an unbroken routine.” 

Alice or The Wild Girl joins the tradition of novels exposing rescue as control. Alice exists largely as a projection: a curiosity, a muse, a spectacle—much like André Breton’s eponymous Nadja, whom the author rescued only as a literary figure while abandoning her to her madness in reality. Liska shows that the stories societies tell about rescue—whether in myth, romance, or frontier adventure—are often stories about the rescuer’s need for meaning, reputation, or self-mythologizing. 

Liska leaves unanswered the question whether Alice’s “madness” is genuine illness, trauma, or a manifestation of resistance produced by Bird’s domination. What is certain is that Bird and Alice live entangled in a Gordian knot of co-dependency. For Bird, Alice’s “madness became his compass, her routines becoming his own and giving shape to his days.” Even though he has held her captive for most of her life, to the outside world he appears admirable, a noble guardian, caring for her, as one of his friends notes, “As if she were your own child.” For her part, after the failed affair with Billy, Alice returns to Bird of her own volition and tends to him through his old age: “She even came to love him, in the way one could love a helpless thing, like a pet or a child.” Is Alice acting out of affection, resignation, survival, or all at once? Her gesture confounds judgment, leaving the reader unsettled, unsure whether to pity, admire, or condemn. Liska resists telling us what to feel, and that resistance is what makes the novel linger.

This symmetry in their caring for each other is poignant but leaves unresolved the issue of whether over the arc of her life Alice was “saved” or irreparably harmed like Lolita. Certainly, both suffer tragic ends. Finally, it should not go without mention that the lieutenant’s name is Bird: perhaps an ironic reference that to take someone under one’s wing is not always with the intension to let them fly on their own.

***

GD Dess is an author, essayist, and literary critic. His work has appeared in LARB, The Millions, KGB LitMag, Serpent Club Press New Writing, The Metropolitan Review, Compact Magazine, and elsewhere. He publishes (ir)regularly on Substack at gdess.substack.com On Twitter @gdess