Historical Context

The Victorian Age in England

According to his own account, Lewis Carroll composed the story that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on a sunny July day in 1862. He created it for the Liddell sisters while on a boating trip up the Thames River. Although the book and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There have since become timeless classics, they nonetheless clearly reflect their Victorian origins in their language, their class-consciousness, and their attitude toward children. The Victorian age, named for the long rule of Britain's Queen Victoria, spanned the years 1837 to 1901.

The early Victorian era marked the emergence of a large middle-class society for the first time in the history of the Western world. With this middle-class population came a spread of so-called "family values": polite society avoided mentioning sex, sexual passions, bodily functions, and in extreme cases, body parts. They also followed an elaborate code of manners meant to distinguish one class from another. By the 1860s, the result, for most people, was a kind of stiff and gloomy prudery marked by a feeling that freedom and enjoyment of life were sinful and only to be indulged in at the risk of immorality. Modern critics have mostly condemned the Victorians for these repressive attitudes.

The tone for the late Victorian age was set by Queen Victoria herself. She had always been a very serious and self-important person from the time she took the throne at the age of eighteen; it is reported that when she became queen, her first resolution was, "I will be good." After the death of her husband Albert in 1861, however, Victoria became more and more withdrawn, retreating from public life and entering what became a lifelong period of mourning. Many middle-class Englishmen and women followed her example, seeking to find morally uplifting and mentally stimulating thoughts in their reading and other entertainments.

Victorian Views of Childhood

Many upper-middle-class Victorians had a double view of childhood. Childhood was regarded as the happiest period of a person's life, a simple and uncomplicated time. At the same time, children were also thought to be "best seen and not heard." Some Victorians also neglected their children, giving them wholly over into the care of nurses, nannies and other child-care professionals. Boys often went away to boarding school, while girls were usually taught at home by a governess. The emphasis for all children, but particularly girls, was on learning manners and how to fit into society. "Children learned their catechism, learned to pray, learned to fear sin — and their books were meant to aid and abet the process," states Morton N. Cohen in his critical biography Lewis Carroll. "They were often frightened by warnings and threats, their waking hours burdened with homilies. Much of the children's literature were purposeful and dour. They instilled discipline and compliance." Although the end of the century saw a trend toward educating women in subjects taught to men, such as Latin and mathematics, this change affected only a small portion of the population, specifically the upper classes.

This emphasis on manners and good breeding is reflected in Alice's adventures. She is always apologetic when she discovers she has offended someone, and she scolds the March Hare for his rude behavior. Nevertheless, Carroll seems to share the view that childhood was a golden period in a person's life. He refers in his verse preface to the novel to the "golden afternoon" that he shared with the three Miss Liddells. He also concludes the book with the prediction that Alice will someday repeat her dream of Wonderland to her own children and "feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days." On the other hand, Alice's own experiences suggest that Carroll felt that children's feelings and emotions were fully as complex as any adult emotions. By the end of the novel, she is directly contradicting adults; when she tells the Queen "Stuff and nonsense!" she is acting contrary to Victorian dictates of proper children's behavior.

The Early Development of Children's Literature

"Children's literature" first emerged as a genre of its own in the mid-1700s, when English bookseller John Newbery created some of the first books designed specifically to entertain children. (He is honored today in the United States by the American Library Association, who awards the annual John Newbery Medal to the best children's work of the year.) Prior to that time, works published for children were strictly educational, using stories merely to impart a moral message. If children wished to read for entertainment, they had to turn to "adult" works, such as Daniel Defoe's 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe. Despite Newbery's groundbreaking work, few works of entertainment for children appeared over the hundred years.

Most early Victorian fairy-stories and other works for children were intended to promote what contemporaries believed was "good" and "moral" behavior on the part of children. Carroll's "Alice" books take a swipe at this Victorian morality, in part through their uninhibited use of nonsense and wordplay (a favorite Victorian pastime) and in part through direct parody. Alice recalls in Chapter 1 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that "she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them." Most of the verses and poems Carroll included in the story are parodies of popular Victo-rian (i.e., morally uplifting) songs and ballads, twisted so that their didactic points are lost in the pleasure of wordplay.

Carroll's "Alice" books were part of a flourishing movement throughout the world to write entertaining books for children. English translations of the fairy tale collections of the German brothers Grimm first appeared in the mid-1820s. The tales of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen appeared in English in 1846. The United States saw Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in 1868 – 69, part of a movement to publish realistic stories for children. In England, many noted authors for adults published works for children, including Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose 1883 work Treasure Island is considered a classic children's adventure story. The ground broken by Carroll and other children's authors of the nineteenth century led the way for today's huge market

for children's books, which have their own publishers, critical scholars and journals, and librarians.

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, OxfordHis diary is filled with mysterious, scathing self-reproaches and desperate prayers to God to free his soul from sin. He never explains the origin of these intense feelings of guilt, ....the Alice books, with their charmingly exaggerated presentation of the child's quest to survive and eventually become part of the adult world, are filled with thinly-veiled references to Carroll's affection for his young friend and deep sorrow at losing her to the onset of adulthood. Alice -  An English girl of about seven with an active imagination and a fondness for showing off her knowledge (which often is lacking). She is polite and kind-hearted and genuinely concerned about others. Brave and headstrong, she always follows-through when she gets an idea. She is more confident with her words and sure of her identity in the second book. Alice in Wonderland Cheshire-Cat -  A grinning cat with the ability to appear and disappear at will. He claims to be mad; nevertheless, he is one of the most reasonable characters in Wonderland. He listens to Alice and becomes something of a friend to her. White Rabbit -  A nervous character of somewhat important rank (though not aristocratic) in Wonderland. He generally is in a hurry. He is capable and sure of himself in his job, even to the point of contradicting the King. Queen of Hearts  -  A monstrous, violently domineering woman. She seems to hold the ultimate authority in Wonderland, although her continuous death sentences are never actually carried out, leading us to conclude that she is at least partly delusional. King of Hearts -  An incompetent and ineffectual ruler almost entirely dominated by his wife. He is self-centered, stubborn and generally unlikable. Duchess -  An odd, spiteful woman who mistreats her baby and submits to a shower of abuse from her cook. She is horribly ugly. In her anxiety to remain in the good graces of the queen, she can be superficially sweet to someone she thinks can aid her socially while simultaneously causing her the utmost discomfort. Mad Hatter  -  The crazy hat-seller trapped in a perpetual tea-time. He is often impolite and seemingly fond of confusing people. He reappears in Looking Glass as one of the Anglo-Saxon messengers. March Hare  -  The Mad Hatter's friend and companion, equally crazy and discourteous. He also reappears as an Anglo-Saxon messenger. Dormouse -  The Hare and the Hatter's lethargic, much-abused companion. Caterpillar -  Hookah-smoking insect who gives Alice the means to change size at will. He is severe and somewhat unfriendly, but at least he offers assistance. Through the Looking Glass Red Queen -  Domineering and often unpleasant, but not incapable of civility. She expects Alice to abide by her rules of proper etiquette, even when it should be apparent that she does not know what is happening. White Queen -  Sweet, but fairly stupid. She allows herself to be dominated in the presence of her red counterpart. Red King -  Asleep. Tweedledum and Tweedledee claim that he is the dreaming architect of Looking-Glass world as we know it. White King -  Bumbling and ineffectual, but not altogether unpleasant. He honors his promise to send all of his horses and all of his men with amazing swiftness when Humpty Dumpty (presumably) falls off his wall.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee -  Two little fat brothers dressed as schoolboys who are fond of dancing and poetry. They are very affectionate with one another, but fight over an extremely trivial matter. They are petty and cowardly. Humpty Dumpty -  A pompous and easily-offended sort who fancies himself a master of words. He is rude and foolish and deserves what he gets. White Knight -  Kind, gentle, and strangely noble, despite his extreme clumsiness. He tries to be very clever, but fails in the end. He is terribly sentimental and enjoys Alice's company immensely. He often is read as Carroll's parody of himself. Alice in Wonderland: Chapter 1In the introductory poem, Carroll recreates the story of a boat trip with three girl on the river where he first created the Alice stories.As the book opens, Alice, bored and sleepy, sits on the riverbank with her sister. She sees a White Rabbit run by, wearing a waistcoat and carrying a watch and talking about his lateness. She gets up and runs after him and follows him down a rabbit-hole. She falls down a deep well inside the rabbit-hole, the sides of which are furnished with cupboards and shelves. She falls for a long time and postulates that she may fall right through the earth. Just as she begins to doze off and dream of having a conversation with her cat, she lands on a pile of dry leaves and sticks. Unhurt, she sees the White Rabbit running off along a corridor and chases after him. She loses track of him and finds herself in a long, low hall full of locked doors. She finds a little key on a glass table and finds that it fits a tiny door behind a curtain leading to a lovely garden.Alice cannot fit through the doorway, but she muses that perhaps she might shut herself up like a telescope if only she knew how. She returns to the table and finds a bottle there labeled "DRINK ME." Finding the taste a very pleasant mixture of odd flavors, quickly she finishes the liquid in the bottle and shrinks to a size suitable to walk through the door into the garden. She finds that she has left the key on the tabletop, however, and can no longer open the door, so she sits down and cries. She finds a glass box containing a cake with "EAT ME" written on it in currants and eats it.Commentary. The three children in the boat are the Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith. Alice, Carroll's clear favorite, is here referred to as Secunda, as she is the second oldest (Carroll is employing the Latin method of numbering girls). Also present that day was Carroll's friend, the Reverend E. Robinson Duckworth, who appears later in the story (at the caucus-race) as a duck. Carroll was often in the habit of inventing stories for the girls on their frequent rowing trips up the Thames; it was only at Alice's insistence that he eventually turned this story into a book.At the opening of the first chapter, Alice looks into her sister's book and is annoyed to find that it contains no pictures or conversations. Carroll caters amply to the child's wishes by filling his book with whimsical conversations and illustrations by the famous Punch magazine cartoonist, John Tenniel.Carroll gradually builds the absurdity of the story with a masterful touch, first with the unremarkable event of the White Rabbit running by; next, with the addition of its agitated (yet strangely human) speech, which Alice fails to recognize as unusual at first; and finally, with the White Rabbit's reading a watch which he takes out of his waistcoat-pocket. The encounter with the White Rabbit highlights the sluggish workings of Alice's heat-addled brain, which recognizes things gradually (focusing, for example, on the waist-coat pocket and the watch instead of the larger fact that the rabbit is clothed). This technique also allows for a more acceptable transition from the real to the unreal. Alice is quick to act and throws herself impetuously down the rabbit-hole, "never once considering how in the world she was to get out again." In this way, the opening provides something of a guide for readers. Like Alice, the reader must suspend disbelief, accept each detail for its particular charm, and plunge headlong into the unfamiliar without lingering on ties to the everyday world. As she falls, Alice shows remarkable composure and presence of mind by placing the empty marmalade jar on a shelf as she falls to avoid hitting someone below. Carroll shows for the first time here the dark edge of his humor with his parenthetical affirmation of Alice's statement, "Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I

fell off the top of the house!" The narrator agrees that this is "very likely true," implying that she would not say anything because she would be dead (this is the first of many death jokes in the two books).The narrator pokes fun at Alice's tendency to show off her intelligence as she attempts to figure out how close she is to the center of the earth as she falls, and uses the words "latitude" and "longitude" without knowing what they mean because "she thought they were nice grand words to say." She continues to show the superficial nature of her knowledge as she speculates that she will fall right through the earth and come out among the people who walk with their heads downwards, whom she calls "antipathies." She is grateful that no one is around to hear that she does not know exactly what she is talking about. She shows herself to be very concerned with etiquette as she attempts to curtsey as she falls (Carroll addresses the reader parenthetically here to ask if he--or presumably she--could manage a thing like that), and decides that she cannot ask what country she is in when she gets there for fear of appearing ignorant.Things immediately take on a dream-like quality inside the rabbit hole. Even the landscape shifts about: things such as the curtain and the "drink me" bottle appear out of nowhere. Alice demonstrates the incompleteness of her common sense, gleaned from stories about children who came to nasty ends, by not remembering simple rules their friends taught them about red-hot pokers, knives, and poison. Carroll touches again on death with Alice's musings on what would happen if she continued to shrink and went out like a candle; she then tries to imagine what a candle flame looks like after being extinguished. Alice quickly adapts to the rules of Wonderland, and is even disappointed when she doesn't change immediately after eating a little of the cake, as she has come to expect strangeness and regards regular things as "dull and stupid."Alice grows to over nine feet tall and muses that she will have to send shoes as presents to her feet by mail. She returns to the garden door and finds passing through even more hopeless than ever. She begins to cry and creates a pool of tears in the hall. The White Rabbit approaches hurriedly, finely dressed and muttering about how savage the Duchess will be if he keeps her waiting. He is startled and runs away when Alice asks him for help. Alice picks up his gloves and fan, which he dropped, and begins to fan herself. She sits and wonders what it is that has made this day so different from every other. She decides she must have been changed into someone else in the night. She thinks of all the children her age she knows and decides she must be a poor girl named Mabel, for she cannot remember her multiplication tables or geography correctly, or recite a poem properly. She decides she does not want to be Mabel and that she will stay down in the hole if anyone calls for her until she can be someone more to her liking.Just as she begins to feel very lonely, she realizes that the fan she has been holding has been causing her to shrink and quickly drops it. She runs back to the garden door, only to find it shut again and the key out of reach on the table once more. She slips and is immersed in the pool of tears. She asks a Mouse for help, and decides it must be French when it doesn't answer. She uses the first sentence from her French lesson-book, "Where is my cat?" and frightens the mouse, which protests in English that it does not like cats. She offends it when she talks affectionately of her cat, and again when she changes the subject to a neighbor's dog. Finally, she promises not to talk of dogs or cats to keep the Mouse from swimming off angrily. The Mouse promises to tell its history and Alice leads a band of birds and animals that had fallen into the pool to the shore. The animals gather on shore, and Alice converses familiarly with them about how best to get dry.The Mouse, which seems to have some authority, begins to recite a very dry history of William the Conqueror. The Dodo soon gets up and suggests a Caucus-race to dry-off. The Caucus-race is a confused affair with no clear beginning or end (until the Dodo arbitrarily announces one after everyone has stopped), and no one knows who has won until the Dodo announces that everyone has, and everyone must have prizes. They look to Alice for these, so she distributes comfits which she finds in her pocket. The Mouse declares that she must have her own prize, but all Alice has left is a thimble, which the Dodo ceremoniously presents to her. The Mouse begins to tell its long and sad tale, which Alice's mind shapes into the image of its physical tail. It becomes angry and

storms off when it realizes that she is not really paying attention. The rest of the party disperses hastily when Alice begins talking about her cat, Dinah, again, and how good Dinah is at catching birds and mice.Alice is terribly concerned that she has lost her identity and become a poor girl with few toys, so she decides to wait and hopes that she will eventually become someone else. The idea of losing her identity is less painful to her than the prospect of losing her social status. Questions of class were very important in Victorian England, and Carroll himself was something of a snob. Alice's frequent struggles with issues of identity, especially when tied to physical change, could also be interpreted as representative of every child's search for self as he or she passes into adulthood. Alice's recitation of "How Doth the Little Crocodile" is a parody of theologian and hymn-writer Isaac Watts' poem, "Against Idleness and Mischief," which begins, "How doth the little busy bee." This is the first of Carroll's many brilliant parodies of the overly educational children's literature of the day.The hall has now vanished as Alice sees the White Rabbit approach, searching for his gloves and fan. The Rabbit mistakes her for his maid, Mary Ann, and sends her to fetch a pair of gloves and a fan from his house. She goes into a house with a brass plate on the door which reads: "W. RABBIT," and finds the gloves and fan, along with a bottle. She drinks from it and begins to grow rapidly, and soon fills the whole house. The Rabbit comes angrily looking for Mary Ann, and Alice knocks him down with her hand when he tries to get through the window. He calls for Pat and tells him to get the arm out of his window, and they soon collect a number of others with equipment to help. They send the lizard, Bill, down the chimney, but Alice kicks him back up and out. They throw a barrowful of pebbles in through the window at her, which change into cakes as they lie on the floor. She eats one and shrinks down small enough to get through the door. She runs off past the group of animals into a wood, where she finds a puppy. She is now much smaller than it, and narrowly avoids being trampled as it tries to play with her. She runs off, determined to grow back to her proper size and find her way to the garden.Alice looks about for something to eat or drink, and finds a large mushroom, with a large blue Caterpillar sitting on top smoking a hookah. The Caterpillar asks Alice who she is, and she replies that she does not know anymore. The Caterpillar demands for her to explain herself. She replies that she cannot because she is so confused by all the changes she has been through. They have a brief conversation, in which the Caterpillar shows himself to be quite testy and demanding When Alice complains that she keeps changing size and cannot remember things anymore, the caterpillar tells her to recite "You are old, Father William." She unintentionally recites a parody of the intended poem, and the caterpillar declares that it is entirely wrong. He asks her what size she would like to be, argues with her a little more, smokes silently for awhile, and then tells her that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her shorter, as he crawls away into the grass.She tries the mushroom, and ends up shrinking and then extending violently, until her head and neck shoot far above the treetops and is mistaken by a pigeon for a serpent in search of eggs. Alice remarks hesitatingly that she is a little girl. The pigeon doesn't believe her and argues that little girls must be a kind of serpent anyway if they eat eggs. Eventually, Alice manages to shrink back to her proper height and sets off to find the garden. She comes across a little house and shrinks herself down to nine inches to approach it.Critical AnalysisWonderland's dreamy quality re-emerges with the sudden disappearance of the hall. Alice has mixed feelings about Wonderland. She is adapting well, after figuring-out the relation between eating and drinking and changing size. But all this change has become tiresome, she is intimidated by the creatures and tired of being ordered around. At the same time, she finds her situation peculiarly interesting and decides there should be a book about her.The question of what it means to grow up arises again. (The first time was when Alice told herself, in the previous section, that such a "great girl" like her should not be crying--"great" meaning both mature and, literally, large). Alice's odd habit of pretending to be two people and

having conversations with herself allows her to see both sides of an issue, and perhaps helps to keep her calm and open-minded (even when she does not take the advice she gives herself). Alice's confusion about her identity, induced by all her changes in size, comes to the forefront once again when the Caterpillar demands to know who she is, and also in her confrontation with the pigeon when she hesitates even to say she is a little girl.The connection between physical changes and identity again brings to mind Alice's struggle with issues of self as she passes into adulthood. In contrast, the Caterpillar, a traditional symbol of change (as Alice herself points out), claims that physical change has no disorienting effect on him. Alice's growth is more an extension than a simple enlargement (i.e. she stretches out, as opposed to becoming a giant), and it grants her unforeseen abilities, as when she finds she can twist her neck around like a snake. The Caterpillar's seeming knowledge of what Alice is thinking is believable, given that this is all a dream; the Caterpillar is merely a part of Alice's psyche. "You Are Old, Father William" is a parody of "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them" by Robert Southey.The house belongs to the Duchess. The footman (who happens to be a frog) tells Alice not to knock and that he plans to sit there on the doorstep for the next few days or so. The door opens and a plate flies out and grazes the footman's nose. Alice enters through the door into a smoke-filled kitchen, and sees the Duchess nursing a baby while the Cook stirs a cauldron of soup. The air is full of pepper, which causes everyone but the Cook and a large grinning cat to sneeze, while the Duchess' baby howls continuously. Alice asks why the cat grins, and the Duchess explains that it is a Cheshire-Cat, before screaming "Pig!" at the baby in her arms. Alice tries to start up a conversation about how she had no idea that cats could grin, and the Duchess tells her she must not know much. The Cook takes the cauldron off the fire and starts throwing everything in her reach at the Duchess and the baby. Alice protests, and the Duchess growls that the world would go around much faster if everyone minded his own business. Alice seizes the opportunity to show off her knowledge by explaining how that would make the night and day go by too quickly with the motion of the earth on its axis.The Duchess hears the word "axes" and orders Alice's beheading. The cook pays no attention, and the Duchess begins to sing a brutal lullaby to the baby, shaking him and tossing him about the whole while. Afterward, she leaves to get ready to play croquet and hurls the baby at Alice to nurse. Alice has trouble holding it, and it changes into a pig in her arms and runs off. She asks the Cheshire-Cat which way she should go. He informs her that in one direction she will find a Hatter and, in the other, she will find the March Hare, both of whom are mad. The Cheshire-Cat argues that everyone there is mad, including Alice and himself. He says she will see him later if she plays croquet with the Queen, then disappears. He reappears, a moment later, to ask what happened to the baby. When she tells him that the baby turned into a pig, he says he expected as much and vanishes again.Alice turns toward the March Hare's house, when the Cheshire-Cat reappears and asks if she said "pig" or "fig." Alice arrives at the March Hare's house (after eating a little more of the enlarging mushroom) and finds the Hare and the Hatter sitting at a large table outside, drinking tea with a Dormouse--which they use as a cushion-- asleep between them. They yell, "No room! No room!" as Alice approaches, but she sits down in one of the many empty chairs, anyway.The Hare offers her some wine, and when she protests that it is uncivil to offer wine when there is none, he replies that it wasn't very civil of her to sit down uninvited. The Hatter tells her she needs a haircut. Alice is unable to answer the riddle, and the Hatter asks her what day of the month it is. When she replies "the fourth" (she previously has said the month is "May"), he looks at his watch, which tells the day of the month but not the time, and laments that it is two days off. He complains to the Hare that the butter was not good for its works, as some crumbs must have gotten into it when he put it in with the bread-knife. The Hare gloomily dips it into his tea.Alice remarks how odd it is to have a watch that tells the day of the month but not the hour. The Hatter asks if her watch tells the year, to which she replies, "Of course not," and he retorts that his is the same way, which she does not understand. The Hatter asks if she has the answer to the

riddle. She says no, and the Hatter and the Hare say they don't know, either. She says they shouldn't waste time by asking riddles with no answers. The Hare replies that Time is a "him" and not an "it." Alice doesn't understand this either, but remarks that she has to beat time when she learns music. The Hatter says Time doesn't like to be beaten and explains that, if she were on better terms with him, he would do whatever she liked with the clock. The Hatter tells her that he quarreled with Time, last March, when he sang "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat" at the Queen's concert, and now he keeps it perpetually at six o'clock, tea-time, so that they must always have the things out for tea and never have time to wash them.They wake the Dormouse and make him tell them a story. He tells the story of three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well, living on treacle (molasses) and learning to draw things that start with M. Alice interrupts him periodically, and her three hosts subject her to a continual barrage of verbal abuse. Finally, she becomes offended and walks off. She finds a tree with a door in it, through which she finds the long hall with the glass table. She takes the key, eats a bit of the reducing mushroom, and goes through the door into the garden.Alice says she is glad that she now knows what the word means, as if she had heard the parenthetical comment herself (although her response could conceivably have been to someone in the courtroom using the word and then seeing the subsequent action). Alice gains courage as she grows, her confidence tied to physical power. The mechanics of Alice's dream become apparent in the last chapter, as fragments of her dream-world are given real counterparts. She equates the upset jurors with the earlier real-life event of upsetting a bowl of goldfish, and the shower of falling cards turns out to be a flutter of dead leaves that had fallen into her face. As Alice's sister relives her dream, the sounds of the farm yard become the sounds of Wonderland; presumably the same process took place for Alice while she was dreaming.As the book closes, Alice's sister imagines her growing up to entertain her children with stories drawn from the simple and loving heart of childhood.

These passages share the same theme, that times past are irretrievably lost but haunt our memory forever. The time frame of this nostalgic (and slightly morbid) theme is not exactly the same in each passage: Carroll's nostalgia is that of an adult for childhood (and specifically, the father figure represented by the older, "kindly" Knight), and while Dickens' nostalgia is that of an "old man" for "the pleasures of his youth," the implication seems to be that of an early adulthood or middle age (as the Pickwickians are in the middle of). But both passages share a similar and somewhat unusual structure -- they skip ahead in time to predict a future nostalgia from present events. Carroll's nostalgia comes "years afterwards," Dickens' takes place "many miles distant." And both ultimately portray this "melancholy" remembrance as positive, if bittersweet.

This bittersweet characterization of nostalgia is brought about through remarkably similar imagery in the two passages. Both Dickens and Carroll concentrate on images of light: Carroll describes "the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze," Dickens mentions "the looks that shone so brightly...the eyes we sought, their lustre." Carroll's image is explicitly that of a sunset, and Dickens' implies the same, with looks that "have ceased to glow" and eyes that "hid their lustre." In addition to this sunset imagery, both passages have foreboding images that predict the loss of this happy time. Carroll describes the "black shadows of the forest," and Dickens' descriptions all end in death -- "grown cold," "in the grave." Both passages contrast the positive and the negative imagery to create the bittersweet effect attributed to nostalgia.

Both Charlotte Brontë and Lewis Carroll infuse their work with elements of the fantastic: a fact evident in both Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland. However, a common use of the fantastic does not mean these authors strive for identical imaginative effects. From the moment Alice falls down the hole into Wonderland, many realistic constraints do not apply to her, not even the law of gravity. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, a great fall brings her no harm; in fact she has sufficient time to observe her surroundings while she tumbles. To represent the discombobulating nature of the way children experience life, Carroll creates an entire world in which reality appears slippery. Children move in and out of fairy tales. Indeed, they move in and out of their own skins, in a way that simply cannot be explained. In part, Carroll uses the fantastic in Alice in Wonderland to highlight the absurdity that underlies many supposedly rational adult behaviors.

Brontë incorporates fantastic elements into a more realistic narrative structure by weaving in references to fairy tales, prophetic dreams, mythic imagery and extraordinary plot twists. In part, she uses the fantastic to inform the reader of concealed emotional subtexts in the novel. Her prophetic dreams provide the reader with vital information regarding the state of Jane's emotional health. This use of the fantastic pplays a major role in Jane Eyre , which is not merely a parable or morality tale: Jane's success as a Bildungsroman heroine depends upon satisfying her emotional and spiritual needs, in addition to securing the safe domestic environment requisite at that time for female survival. Brontë's departure from a realistic plot might derive from Emotionalist moral philosophy, a school of moral philosophy which significantly affected nineteenth-century intellectual life in Britain. Brontë uses the fantastic to expand the parameters of societal conceptions of what is comprised by reality. Landow notes the implications of these ideas, "For psychology and theories of human nature: for the first time, philosophers no longer urged that the healthy human mind is organized hierarchically with reason, like a king, ruling will and passions. Reason now shares rule with feelings or emotions." By elevating the importance of emotion in Jane's maturation, Brontë creates a Bildungsroman not exclusively rooted in mastery of the external world, but focused as well on the vitality of the interior life.

Education plays a large role in the Alice books, contributing both to Carroll's characterization of Alice and to our perceptions of Victorian England. Throughout the Alice books, as in this passage, Alice refers to her lessons and her education, usually very proud of the learning that she has acquired. It seems, however, that the information that she remembers from her lessons is usually either completely useless or wrong. For example, although she can remember the how many miles down until the center of the earth, she mistakenly believes that everything will be upside down when she passes through to the other side.

Lewis Carroll seems implicitly to criticise Victorian attitudes towards race, gender, and class throughout Through the Looking Glass. For example, he both created all of Wonderland's characters with a degree of equality and then demonstrates the absurdity of stereotyping in Alice's trek through the "wood where things have no names" when Alice and the fawn "walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms wrapped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm.

"I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And, dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed (Chapter 3). While in the forest, they are blind to names and can find comfort in each other. As soon as Alice and the Fawn leave the forest, however, the Fawn recognizes Alice for what she is -- a human child -- and it scurries away in fear. Carroll makes his point that, as in Victorian England, distinctions were drawn not upon knowledge, but upon ignorance and a label.

Style

Parody

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was originally told to entertain a little girl. One of the devices Lewis Carroll uses to communicate with Alice Liddell is parody, which adopts the style of the serious literary work and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Most of the songs and poems that appear in the book are parodies of well-known Victorian poems, such as Robert Southey's "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them" ("You Are Old, Father William"), Isaac Watts's "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" ("How Doth the Little Crocodile"), and Mary Howett's "The Spider and the Fly" ("Will You Walk a Little Faster"). Several of the songs were ones that Carroll had heard the Liddell sisters sing, so he knew that Alice, for whom the story was written, would appreciate them. There are also a number of "inside jokes" that might make sense only to the Liddells or Carroll's closest associates. The Mad Hatter's song, for instance, ("Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat") is a parody of Jane Taylor's poem "The Star," but it also contains a reference to the Oxford community. "Bartholomew Price," writes Martin Gardner in his The Annotated Alice, "a distinguished professor of mathematics at Oxford and a good friend of Carroll's, was known among his student by the nickname 'The Bat.' His lectures no doubt had a way of soaring high above the heads of his listeners."

What makes Carroll's parodies so special that they have outlived the originals they mock is the fact that they are excellent humorous verses in their own right. They also serve a purpose within the book: they emphasize the underlying senselessness of Wonderland and highlight Alice's own sense of displacement. Many of them Alice recites herself under pressure from another character. "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a parody of the didactic poem "The Sluggard" by Isaac Watts. It is notable that most often Alice is cut off by the same characters that require her to recite in the first place.

Narrator

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice's complaint, "For what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" So most of the story is told through pictures and dialogue. However, there is another voice besides those of Alice and the characters she encounters. The third-person ("he/she/it") narrator of the story maintains a point of view that is very different from that of the heroine. The narrator steps in to explain Alice's

thoughts to the reader. The narrator explains who Dinah is, for instance, and also highlights Alice's own state of mind. He frequently refers to Alice as "poor Alice" or "the poor little thing" whenever she is in a difficult situation.

Point of View

Although the narrator has an impartial voice, the point of view is very strongly connected with Alice. Events are related as they happen to her and are explained as they affect her. As a result, some critics believe that the narrator is not in fact a separate voice, but is a part of Alice's own thought process. They base this interpretation on the statement in Chapter 1 that Alice "was very fond of pretending to be two people." Alice, they suggest, con-sists of the thoughtless child who carelessly jumps down the rabbit-hole after the White Rabbit, and the well-brought-up, responsible young girl who remembers her manners even when confronted by rude people and animals.

Language

Part of the way Carroll shows Wonderland to be a strange place is the way the inhabitants twist the meaning of words. Carroll plays with language by including many puns and other forms of word play. In Chapter 3, for instance, the Mouse says he can dry everyone who was caught in the pool of tears. He proceeds to recite a bit of history — "the driest thing I know." Here, of course, the Mouse means "dry" as in dull; the Mouse's words have no ability to ease the dampness of the creatures. When Alice meets the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, they play with syntax — the order of words — to confuse Alice. When she says "I say what I mean" is the same thing as "I mean what I say," the others immediately contradict her by bringing up totally unrelated examples: "'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'" The power of language is also evident in the way Alice continually offends the inhabitants of Wonderland, often quite unintentionally. For instance, she drives away the creatures at the pool of tears just by mentioning the word "cat." Eventually Alice learns to be careful of what she says, as in Chapter 8 when she changes how she is about to describe the Queen after noticing the woman behind her shoulder.

Lewis Carroll [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898)

http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/

Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Cheshire, on January 27, 1832, the man who would become Lewis Carroll was an eccentric and an eclectic whose varied works have entertained, edified, enlightened, and evaded readers for over a century. The son of a vicar and his first cousin, Dodgson was a precocious child who showed early interest in both writing and mathematics. After studying mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1850-1854, Dodgson was appointed to a lectureship there, where he was to continue studying, remain unmarried, and prepare for holy orders for almost 30 years. Although he never reached the priesthood, he did reach the level of deacon. During his very successful academic career, he wrote extensively on mathematics and logic, among other subjects. However, it is not for his academic work that he is best remembered, but rather the works for children which he created under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

Dodgson's relationship to children has been questioned by recent scholarship, as his photography of young girls is undeniably erotic, and all his close and enduring friendships throughout his life were with young children, mostly girls. Dodgson was intensely interested in and an advocate for the freedom and wisdom of childhood, and wrote his books as pleasurable amusements for he people he admired. His muse, Alice Liddell was the young daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, who he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for in 1865. The work started out as an oral tale which he later wrote down as Alice's Adventures Underground, but later revised into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1872, Carroll published Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Wonderland. The books were illustrated by Sir John Tenniel, a top political illustrator of the day, whose crisp etchings work with Carroll's sly text to create the world of Wonderland still known today. These books brought Carroll great fame and renown during his lifetime, but the shy Dodgson made a great effort to distance himself from the fame of his alterego Carroll. An intensely awkward and introverted man, he was almost unable to have interactions or friendships with adults, but was happy and at peace when around children. He spent most of his later years in the company of young children who he entertained with his stories and documented in his famous photography.

Along with the Alice books, Carroll published Phantasmagoria and Other Poems in 1869, The Hunting of the Snark in 1876, and Sylvie and Bruno in 1893, though none of his other works were ever nearly as popular as the Alice duo either in his lifetime or afterwards. He died January 14, 1898 in Guilford, Surrey.

ContextLewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, who lived from 1832 to 1898. Carroll’s physical deformities, partial deafness, and irrepressible stammer made him an unlikely candidate for producing one of the most popular and enduring children’s fantasies in the English language. Carroll’s unusual appearance caused him to behave awkwardly around other adults, and his students at Oxford saw him as a stuffy and boring teacher. He held strict religious beliefs, serving as a deacon in the Anglican Church for many years and briefly considering becoming a minister. Underneath Carroll’s awkward exterior, however, lay a brilliant and imaginative artist. A gifted amateur photographer, he took numerous portraits of children throughout his adulthood. Carroll’s keen grasp of mathematics and logic inspired the linguistic humor and witty wordplay in his stories. Additionally, his unique understanding of children’s minds allowed him to compose imaginative fiction that appealed to young people.Carroll felt shy and reserved around adults but became animated and lively around children. His crippling stammer melted away in the company of children as he told them his elaborately nonsensical stories. Carroll discovered his gift for storytelling in his own youth when he served as the unofficial family entertainer for his five younger sisters and three younger brothers. He staged performances and wrote the bulk of the fiction in the family magazine. As an adult, Carroll continued to prefer the companionship of children to adults and tended to favor little girls. Over the course of his lifetime he made numerous child friends whom he wrote to frequently and often mentioned in his diaries.In 1856, Carroll became close with the Liddell children and met the girl who would become the inspiration for Alice, the protagonist of his two most famous books. It was in that year that classics scholar Henry George Liddell accepted an appointment as Dean of Christ Church, one of the colleges that comprise Oxford University, and brought his three daughters to live with him at Oxford. Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell quickly became Carroll’s favorite companions and photographic subjects. During their frequent afternoon boat trips on the river, Carroll told the Liddells fanciful tales. Alice quickly became Carroll’s favorite of the three girls, and he made her the subject of the stories that would later became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Almost ten years after first meeting the Liddells, Carroll compiled the stories and submitted the completed manuscript for publication.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland received mostly negative reviews when first published in 1865. Critics and readers alike found the book to be sheer nonsense, and one critic sneered that the book was “too extravagantly absurd to produce more diversion than disappointment and irritation.” Only John Tenniel’s detailed illustrations garnered praise, and his images continue to appear in most reprints of the Alice books. Despite the book’s negative reception, Carroll proposed a sequel to his publisher in 1866 and set to work writing Through the Looking-Glass. By the time the second book reached publication in 1871, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had found an appreciative readership. Over time, Carroll’s combination of sophisticated logic, social satire, and pure fantasy would make the book a classic for children and adults alike. Critics eventually recognized the literary merits of both texts, and celebrated authors and philosophers ranging from James Joyce to Ludwig Wittgenstein praised Carroll’s stories.

In 1881, Carroll resigned from his position as mathematics lecturer at Oxford to pursue writing full time. He composed numerous poems, several new works for children, and books of logic puzzles and games, but none of his later writings attained the success of the Alice books. Carroll continued to have close friendships with children. Several of his child friends served as inspiration for the Sylvie and Bruno books. Like the Alice stories, Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1898) relied heavily on children’s silly sayings and absurd fantasies. Carroll died in 1898 at the age of sixty-six, soon after the publication of the Sylvie and Bruno books. He passed away in his family’s home in Guildford, England.Carroll’s sudden break with the Liddell family in the early 1860s has led to a great deal of speculation over the nature of his relationship with Alice Liddell. Some books indicate that the split resulted from a disagreement between Carroll and Dean Liddell over Christ Church matters. Other evidence indicates that more insidious elements existed in Carroll’s relationships with young children and with Alice Liddell in particular. This possibility seems to be supported by the fact that Mrs. Liddell burned all of Carroll’s early letters to Alice and that Carroll himself tore pages out of his diary related to the break. However, no concrete evidence exists that Carroll behaved inappropriately in his numerous friendships with children. Records written by Carroll’s associates and Alice Liddell herself do not indicate any untoward behavior on his part. Carroll’s feelings of intense nostalgia for the simple pleasures of childhood caused him to feel deep discomfort in the presence of adults. In the company of children, Carroll felt understood and could temporarily forget the loss of innocence that he associated with his own adulthood. Ironically, Carroll mourned this loss again and again as he watched each of his child friends grow away from him as they became older. As he wrote in a letter to the mother of one of his young muses, “It is very sweet to me, to be loved by her as children love: though the experience of many years have now taught me that there are few things in the world so evanescent [fleeting] as a child’s love. Nine-tenths of the children, whose love once seemed as warm as hers, are now merely on the terms of everyday acquaintance.” The sentiment of fleeting happiness pervades Carroll’s seemingly lighthearted fantasies and infuses the Alice books with melancholy and loss.

About Alice in Wonderland

The Alice books were written during the Victorian era, a time now remembered for its stifling propriety and constrictive morals. Carroll had something of an outsider's perspective on this world; he was painfully shy, and he often stuttered. His fondness for little girls has raised more than a few eyebrows, although it is unknown if Carroll ever acted on this obsession. At any rate, these feelings of his served to accentuate his feelings of isolation.

But his position gave him tremendous perspective on his world. The creatures of wonderland have many arbitrary customs. Their behaviors are all defensible with strange

logic, but the customs are still silly or even cruel. There are obvious echoes of the Victorian world, as the animals are opinionated and have strong ideas about what constitutes appropriate behavior. The creatures' preciousness and their arbitrary sensitivities mock the fastidiousness of the Victorian era.

The Alice books also mock the children's literature of the day. In keeping with the character of the time, children's literature was full of simplistic morals and heavy-handed attempts to educate the young. Some of the books supposedly for children were quite dry, and at the least suffered from a lack of imagination.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, and it was an immediate success. Carroll's sense of the absurd and his amazing gift for games of logic and language have made the Alice books popular with both adults and children, and they have remained some of the best-known children's books written in English. The well-known Disney adaptation draws freely from both books, while retaining the basic structure of the first book and remaining faithful to the flavor and central themes of the story.

The Alice books deal with the sometimes precarious world of children; the reader should keep in mind that at the time of their writing, the advent of industrialization had raised people's consciousness of child labor and exploitation. Carroll sees the world of children as a dangerous place, shadowed by the threat of death and the presence of adults who are powerful but often absurd.

The book is refreshingly complex, refusing to take patronize its young audience with simplistic morals or perspectives. A point of comparison is Antoine de St. Exup?ry's The Little Prince: while the The Little Prince sets up a rather simplistic binary between children (who are good, wise and innocent) and "the big people" (who are mean, shallow, and foolish), the Alice books satirize the absurdities of adults while avoiding pat conclusions about the difference between adults and children. Childhood is seen as a state of danger, and although Carroll has an evident fondness for children he never idealizes them. Alice's challenge is to grow into a strong and compassionate person despite the idiosyncrasies of the creatures she meets (the creatures symbolizing the adult world). She has to learn the rules of each new encounter, but in the end she must also retain a sense of justice and develop a sense of herself. Rather than set childhood and adulthood as simple opposites, valorizing the former and disparaging the latter, Carroll shows the process by which a good child can become a strong adult. Alice is also not without "adult" friends along the way: in the first book, for example, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat are two enigmatic creatures who seem to understand how Wonderland works. They help Alice at key points.

The books always retain a sense of mystery and a fondness for the sinister; even the characters who aid Alice have a dark edge to them. The hints of mortality and the sense of fear in the books have only contributed to their popularity. The books stand as evidence that children's literature need not talk down to its audience. In fact, it is the depth and sophistication of the Alice books that has won them recognition as some of the best children's literature ever written.

Character List

Alice: The heroine of the story. Her adventures begin with her fateful jump down the rabbit hole, and the tale is an extended metaphor for the challenges she will face as she grows into an adult. She possesses unusual composure for a child, and she seems bright but makes many charming mistakes. She grows more confident as the book progresses.

White Rabbit: Alice's adventures begin when she follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit-hole. He is a messenger and a herald at the Court of the King and Queen of Hearts. He wears a waist-coat and carries a pocket watch.

Mouse: Alice meets the mouse while swimming in the pool of tears. He hates cats and dogs, and he begins to tell Alice a disturbing story about being put on trial. He is very sensitive.

Bill: A lizard in the service of the White Rabbit. When Alice is a giant and stuck in the White Rabbit's house, she kicks Bill out of the chimney. Bill is also one of the jurors at the trial at the end of the book.

Caterpillar: Wise, enigmatic, and unshakably mellow, the Caterpillar gives Alice some valuable advice about how to get by in Wonderland. He smokes a hookah and sits on a mushroom. He gives Alice the valuable gift of the mushroom (one side making her bigger, and the other making her small), which gives her control of her size in Wonderland.

The Pigeon: The Pigeon is afraid for her eggs, and mistakes Alice for a serpent. Alice tries to reason with her, but the Pigeon forces her away.

Duchess: When Alice first meets the Duchess, she is a disagreeable woman nursing a baby and arguing with her cook. Later, she is put under sentence of execution. The Duchess seems different when Alice meets her a second time, later in the book, and Alice notices that the Duchess speaks only in pat morals.

Cook: Argumentative, and convinced that pepper is the key ingredient in all food. She first appears at the house of the Duchess, where she is throwing everything in sight at the Duchess and the baby. Later, she is a witness at the trial of the Knave of Hearts.

Baby: The baby the Duchess nurses. Alice is concerned about leaving the child in such a violent environment, so she takes him with her. He turns into a pig.

Cheshire Cat: Possessing remarkably sharp claws and alarming sharp teeth, the Cheshire cat is courteous and helpful, despite his frightening appearance. His face is fixed in an eerie grin. He can make any and all parts of his body disappear and reappear.

Hatter: A madman who sits always at tea, every since Time stopped working for him. He takes his tea with the March Hare and the Dormouse. Alice is temporarily their guest,

although she finds the event to be the stupidest tea party she has ever attended. Later, the nervous hatter is forced to be a witness at the trial.

March Hare: Playing with the expression, "Mad as a March Hare," Carroll puts him in the company of the mad Hatter and the narcoleptic Dormouse. Their strange tea party is at the March Hare's house.

The Dormouse: Another guest at the mad tea party. He can't seem to stay awake. He is also one of the observers at the trial.

Two, Five, and Seven: These three unfortunate gardeners are struggling to repaint the Queen's roses, as they planted white roses by mistake and now fear for their lives. Like the other people working for the queen, they are shaped like playing cards. When the Queen orders their beheading, Alice hides them.

Queen of Hearts: Nasty, brutal, and loud, the Queen delights in ordering executions, although everyone seems to get pardoned in the end. The people of Wonderland are terrified of her. Although Alice initially thinks she is silly, she grows frightened of her. In the end, however, a giant-size Alice is able to stand up to the Queen's temper and her threats.

King of Hearts: Somewhat overshadowed by his loudmouthed wife, the King of Hearts is a remarkably dense figure. He makes terrible jokes, and cannot seem to say anything clever. Alice outreasons him quite nicely at the trial.

Gryphon: The Gryphon, mythical animal that is half eagle and half lion, takes Alice to sea the Mock Turtle. He attended undersea school with the Mock Turtle.

The Mock Turtle: The Mock Turtle is always crying, and he and the Gryphon tells stories loaded with puns. His name is another play on words (mock turtle soup is a soup that actually uses lamb as its meat ingredient).

The Knave of Hearts: The unfortunate Knave is the man on trial, accused of stealing the tarts of the Queen of Hearts. The evidence produced against him is unjust.

Alice's sister: She helps to anchor the story, appearing at the beginning, before Alice begins her adventures, and at the end, after Alice wakes up from her strange dream. Her presence lets us know that Alice is once again in the real world, in the comfort of home and family.

Major Themes

Growth into Adulthood: This theme is central to both books. Alice's adventures parallel the journey from childhood to adulthood. She comes into numerous new situations in

which adaptability is absolutely necessary for success. She shows marked progress throughout the course of the book; in the beginning, she can barely maintain enough composure to keep herself from crying. By the end of the novel, she is self-possessed and able to hold her own against the most baffling Wonderland logic.

Size change: Closely connected to the above theme, size change is another recurring concept. The dramatic changes in size hint at the radical changes the body undergoes during adolescence. The key, once again, is adaptability. Alice's size changes also bring about a change in perspective, and she sees the world from a very different view. In the last trial scene, her growth into a giant reflects her interior growth. She becomes a much stronger, self-possessed person, able to speak out against the nonsensical proceedings of the trial.

Death: This theme is even more present in the second Alice book, Through the Looking Glass. Alice frequently makes references to her own death without knowing it. Childhood is a state of peril in Carroll's view: children are quite vulnerable, and the world presents many dangers. Another aspect of death is its inevitability. Since the Alice books are at root about change (the transition from childhood to adulthood, the passage of time), mortality is inescapable as a theme. Death is the final step of this process of growth. While death is only hinted at in the first book, the second book is saturated with references to mortality and macabre humor.

Games/ Learning the Rules: Every new encounter is something of a game for Alice; there are rules to learn, and consequences for learning or not learning those rules. Games are a constant part of life in Wonderland, from the Caucus race to the strange croquet match to the fact that the royal court is a living deck of cards. And every new social encounter is like a game, in that there are bizarre, apparently arbitrary rules that Alice has to master. Learning the rules is a metaphor for the adaptations to new social situations that every child makes as she grows older. Mastering each challenge, Alice grows wiser and more adaptable as time goes on.

Language and Logic/Illogic:

Carroll delights in puns. The Alice books are chockfull of games with language, to the reader's delight and Alice's confusion. The games often point out some inconsistency or slipperiness of language in general and English in particular. The books point out the pains and advantages of language. Language is a source of joy and adaptability; it can also be a source of great confusion.

Just as baffling is the bizarre logic at work in Wonderland. Every creature can justify the most absurd behavior, and their arguments for themselves are often fairly complex. Their strange reasoning is another source of delight for the reader and challenge for Alice. She has to learn to discern between unusual logic and utter nonsense.

Plot OverviewAlice sits on a riverbank on a warm summer day, drowsily reading over her sister’s shoulder, when she catches sight of a White Rabbit in a waistcoat running by her. The White Rabbit pulls out a pocket watch, exclaims that he is late, and pops down a rabbit hole. Alice follows the White Rabbit down the hole and comes upon a great hallway lined with doors. She finds a small door that she opens using a key she discovers on a nearby table. Through the door, she sees a beautiful garden, and Alice begins to cry when she realizes she cannot fit through the door. She finds a bottle marked “DRINK ME” and downs the contents. She shrinks down to the right size to enter the door but cannot enter since she has left the key on the tabletop above her head. Alice discovers a cake marked “EAT ME” which causes her to grow to an inordinately large height. Still unable to enter the garden, Alice begins to cry again, and her giant tears form a pool at her feet. As she cries, Alice shrinks and falls into the pool of tears. The pool of tears becomes a sea, and as she treads water she meets a Mouse. The Mouse accompanies Alice to shore, where a number of animals stand gathered on a bank. After a “Caucus Race,” Alice scares the animals away with tales of her cat, Dinah, and finds herself alone again.Alice meets the White Rabbit again, who mistakes her for a servant and sends her off to fetch his things. While in the White Rabbit’s house, Alice drinks an unmarked bottle of liquid and grows to the size of the room. The White Rabbit returns to his house, fuming at the now-giant Alice, but she swats him and his servants away with her giant hand. The animals outside try to get her out of the house by throwing rocks at her, which inexplicably transform into cakes when they land in the house. Alice eats one of the cakes, which causes her to shrink to a small size. She wanders off into the forest, where she meets a Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah (i.e., a water pipe). The Caterpillar and Alice get into an argument, but before the Caterpillar crawls away in disgust, he tells Alice that different parts of the mushroom will make her grow or shrink. Alice tastes a part of the mushroom, and her neck stretches above the trees. A pigeon sees her and attacks, deeming her a serpent hungry for pigeon eggs.Alice eats another part of the mushroom and shrinks down to a normal height. She wanders until she comes across the house of the Duchess. She enters and finds the Duchess, who is nursing a squealing baby, as well as a grinning Cheshire Cat, and a Cook who tosses massive amounts of pepper into a cauldron of soup. The Duchess behaves rudely to Alice and then departs to prepare for a croquet game with the Queen. As she leaves, the Duchess hands Alice the baby, which Alice discovers is a pig. Alice lets the pig go and reenters the forest, where she meets the Cheshire Cat again. The Cheshire Cat explains to Alice that everyone in Wonderland is mad, including Alice herself. The Cheshire Cat gives directions to the March Hare’s house and fades away to nothing but a floating grin.Alice travels to the March Hare’s house to find the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse having tea together. Treated rudely by all three, Alice stands by the tea party, uninvited. She learns that they have wronged Time and are trapped in perpetual tea-time. After a final discourtesy, Alice leaves and journeys through the forest. She finds a tree with a door in its side, and travels through it to find herself back in the great hall. She takes the key and uses the mushroom to shrink down and enter the garden.After saving several gardeners from the temper of the Queen of Hearts, Alice joins the Queen in a strange game of croquet. The croquet ground is hilly, the mallets and balls are

live flamingos and hedgehogs, and the Queen tears about, frantically calling for the other player’s executions. Amidst this madness, Alice bumps into the Cheshire Cat again, who asks her how she is doing. The King of Hearts interrupts their conversation and attempts to bully the Cheshire Cat, who impudently dismisses the King. The King takes offense and arranges for the Cheshire Cat’s execution, but since the Cheshire Cat is now only a head floating in midair, no one can agree on how to behead it.The Duchess approaches Alice and attempts to befriend her, but the Duchess makes Alice feel uneasy. The Queen of Hearts chases the Duchess off and tells Alice that she must visit the Mock Turtle to hear his story. The Queen of Hearts sends Alice with the Gryphon as her escort to meet the Mock Turtle. Alice shares her strange experiences with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, who listen sympathetically and comment on the strangeness of her adventures. After listening to the Mock Turtle’s story, they hear an announcement that a trial is about to begin, and the Gryphon brings Alice back to the croquet ground.The Knave of Hearts stands trial for stealing the Queen’s tarts. The King of Hearts leads the proceedings, and various witnesses approach the stand to give evidence. The Mad Hatter and the Cook both give their testimony, but none of it makes any sense. The White Rabbit, acting as a herald, calls Alice to the witness stand. The King goes nowhere with his line of questioning, but takes encouragement when the White Rabbit provides new evidence in the form of a letter written by the Knave. The letter turns out to be a poem, which the King interprets as an admission of guilt on the part of the Knave. Alice believes the note to be nonsense and protests the King’s interpretation. The Queen becomes furious with Alice and orders her beheading, but Alice grows to a huge size and knocks over the Queen’s army of playing cards. All of a sudden, Alice finds herself awake on her sister’s lap, back at the riverbank. She tells her sister about her dream and goes inside for tea as her sister ponders Alice’s adventures.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

ThemesThemes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.The Tragic and Inevitable Loss of Childhood InnocenceThroughout the course of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice goes through a variety of absurd physical changes. The discomfort she feels at never being the right size acts as a symbol for the changes that occur during puberty. Alice finds these changes to be traumatic, and feels discomfort, frustration, and sadness when she goes through them. She struggles to maintain a comfortable physical size. In Chapter I, she becomes upset when she keeps finding herself too big or too small to enter the garden. In Chapter V, she loses control over specific body parts when her neck grows to an absurd length. These constant fluctuations represent the way a child may feel as her body grows and changes during puberty. Life as a Meaningless PuzzleIn Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice encounters a series of puzzles that seem to have no clear solutions, which imitates the ways that life frustrates expectations. Alice expects that the situations she encounters will make a certain kind of sense, but they

repeatedly frustrate her ability to figure out Wonderland. Alice tries to understand the Caucus race, solve the Mad Hatter’s riddle, and understand the Queen’s ridiculous croquet game, but to no avail. In every instance, the riddles and challenges presented to Alice have no purpose or answer. Even though Lewis Carroll was a logician, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland he makes a farce out of jokes, riddles, and games of logic. Alice learns that she cannot expect to find logic or meaning in the situations that she encounters, even when they appear to be problems, riddles, or games that would normally have solutions that Alice would be able to figure out. Carroll makes a broader point about the ways that life frustrates expectations and resists interpretation, even when problems seem familiar or solvable. Death as a Constant and Underlying MenaceAlice continually finds herself in situations in which she risks death, and while these threats never materialize, they suggest that death lurks just behind the ridiculous events of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a present and possible outcome. Death appears in Chapter I, when the narrator mentions that Alice would say nothing of falling off of her own house, since it would likely kill her. Alice takes risks that could possibly kill her, but she never considers death as a possible outcome. Over time, she starts to realize that her experiences in Wonderland are far more threatening than they appear to be. As the Queen screams “Off with its head!” she understands that Wonderland may not merely be a ridiculous realm where expectations are repeatedly frustrated. Death may be a real threat, and Alice starts to understand that the risks she faces may not be ridiculous and absurd after all.

Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.DreamAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland takes place in Alice’s dream, so that the characters and phenomena of the real world mix with elements of Alice’s unconscious state. The dream motif explains the abundance of nonsensical and disparate events in the story. As in a dream, the narrative follows the dreamer as she encounters various episodes in which she attempts to interpret her experiences in relationship to herself and her world. Though Alice’s experiences lend themselves to meaningful observations, they resist a singular and coherent interpretation. SubversionAlice quickly discovers during her travels that the only reliable aspect of Wonderland that she can count on is that it will frustrate her expectations and challenge her understanding of the natural order of the world. In Wonderland, Alice finds that her lessons no longer mean what she thought, as she botches her multiplication tables and incorrectly recites poems she had memorized while in Wonderland. Even Alice’s physical dimensions become warped as she grows and shrinks erratically throughout the story. Wonderland frustrates Alice’s desires to fit her experiences in a logical framework where she can make sense of the relationship between cause and effect. LanguageCarroll plays with linguistic conventions in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, making use of puns and playing on multiple meanings of words throughout the text. Carroll

invents words and expressions and develops new meanings for words. Alice’s exclamation “Curious and curiouser!” suggests that both her surroundings and the language she uses to describe them expand beyond expectation and convention. Anything is possible in Wonderland, and Carroll’s manipulation of language reflects this sense of unlimited possibility.Curious, Nonsense, and ConfusingAlice uses these words throughout her journey to describe phenomena she has trouble explaining. Though the words are generally interchangeable, she usually assigns curious and confusing to experiences or encounters that she tolerates. She endures is the experiences that are curious or confusing, hoping to gain a clearer picture of how that individual or experience functions in the world. When Alice declares something to be nonsense, as she does with the trial in Chapter XII, she rejects or criticizes the experience or encounter.

SymbolsSymbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.The GardenNearly every object in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland functions as a symbol, but nothing clearly represents one particular thing. The symbolic resonances of Wonderland objects are generally contained to the individual episode in which they appear. Often the symbols work together to convey a particular meaning. The garden may symbolize the Garden of Eden, an idyllic space of beauty and innocence that Alice is not permitted to access. On a more abstract level, the garden may simply represent the experience of desire, in that Alice focuses her energy and emotion on trying to attain it. The two symbolic meanings work together to underscore Alice’s desire to hold onto her feelings of childlike innocence that she must relinquish as she matures. The Caterpillar’s MushroomLike the garden, the Caterpillar’s mushroom also has multiple symbolic meanings. Some readers and critics view the Caterpillar as a sexual threat, its phallic shape a symbol of sexual virility. The Caterpillar’s mushroom connects to this symbolic meaning. Alice must master the properties of the mushroom to gain control over her fluctuating size, which represents the bodily frustrations that accompany puberty. Others view the mushroom as a psychedelic hallucinogen that compounds Alice’s surreal and distorted perception of Wonderland.

Analysis of Major Characters

AliceAlice is a sensible prepubescent girl from a wealthy English family who finds herself in a strange world ruled by imagination and fantasy. Alice feels comfortable with her identity and has a strong sense that her environment is comprised of clear, logical, and consistent rules and features. Alice’s familiarity with the world has led one critic to describe her as a “disembodied intellect.” Alice displays great curiosity and attempts to fit her diverse experiences into a clear understanding of the world.

Alice approaches Wonderland as an anthropologist, but maintains a strong sense of noblesse oblige that comes with her class status. She has confidence in her social position, education, and the Victorian virtue of good manners. Alice has a feeling of entitlement, particularly when comparing herself to Mabel, whom she declares has a “poky little house,” and no toys. Additionally, she flaunts her limited information base with anyone who will listen and becomes increasingly obsessed with the importance of good manners as she deals with the rude creatures of Wonderland. Alice maintains a superior attitude and behaves with solicitous indulgence toward those she believes are less privileged.The tension of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland emerges when Alice’s fixed perspective of the world comes into contact with the mad, illogical world of Wonderland. Alice’s fixed sense of order clashes with the madness she finds in Wonderland. The White Rabbit challenges her perceptions of class when he mistakes her for a servant, while the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Pigeon challenge Alice’s notions of urbane intelligence with an unfamiliar logic that only makes sense within the context of Wonderland. Most significantly, Wonderland challenges her perceptions of good manners by constantly assaulting her with dismissive rudeness. Alice’s fundamental beliefs face challenges at every turn, and as a result Alice suffers an identity crisis. She persists in her way of life as she perceives her sense of order collapsing all around her. Alice must choose between retaining her notions of order and assimilating into Wonderland’s nonsensical rules.

The Cheshire Cat The Cheshire Cat is unique among Wonderland creatures. Threatened by no one, it maintains a cool, grinning outsider status. The Cheshire Cat has insight into the workings of Wonderland as a whole. Its calm explanation to Alice that to be in Wonderland is to be “mad” reveals a number of points that do not occur to Alice on her own. First, the Cheshire Cat points out that Wonderland as a place has a stronger cumulative effect than any of its citizens. Wonderland is ruled by nonsense, and as a result, Alice’s normal behavior becomes inconsistent with its operating principles, so Alice herself becomes mad in the context of Wonderland. Certainly, Alice’s burning curiosity to absorb everything she sees in Wonderland sets her apart from the other Wonderland creatures, making her seem mad in comparison.

The Queen of HeartsAs the ruler of Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts is the character that Alice must inevitably face to figure out the puzzle of Wonderland. In a sense, the Queen of Hearts is literally the heart of Alice’s conflict. Unlike many of the other characters in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts is not as concerned with nonsense and perversions of logic as she is with absolute rule and execution. In Wonderland, she is a singular force of fear who even dominates the King of Hearts. In the Queen’s presence, Alice finally gets a taste of true fear, even though she understands that the Queen of Hearts is merely a playing card. The Gryphon later informs Alice that the Queen never actually executes anyone she sentences to death, which reinforces the fact that the Queen of Hearts’s power lies in her rhetoric. The Queen becomes representative of the idea that Wonderland is devoid of substance.

Key Facts Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

full title · Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandauthor · Lewis Carrolltype of work · Novellagenre · Fairy tale; children’s fiction; satire; allegorylanguage · Englishtime and place written · 1862–1863, Oxforddate of first publication · 1865publisher · Macmillan & Co.narrator · The narrator is anonymous and does not use many words to describe events in the story.point of view · The narrator speaks in third person, though occasionally in first and second person. The narrative follows Alice around on her travels, voicing her thoughts and feelings.tone · Straightforward; avunculartense · Pastsetting (time) · Victorian era, circa publication datesetting (place) · England, Wonderlandprotagonist · Alicemajor conflict · Alice attempts to come to terms with the puzzle of Wonderland as she undergoes great individual changes while entrenched in Wonderland.rising action · Alice follows the White Rabbit down a well and pursues him through Wonderland.climax · Alice gains control over her size and enters the garden, where she participates in the trial of the Knave of Hearts.falling action · Alice realizes that Wonderland is a sham and knocks over the playing card court, causing her to wake up and dispel the dream of Wonderland. themes · The tragic and inevitable loss of childhood innocence; Life as a meaningless puzzle; Death as a constant and underlying menacemotifs · Dream; subversion; language; “curious,” “nonsense,” and “confusing”symbols · The garden; the mushroomforeshadowing · The Mouse’s history about Fury and the Mouse foreshadows the trial at the end of the story.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-3

The book begins with a poem about a golden afternoon spent rowing on a river; the speaker of the poem is pressed by three girls (Prima, Secunda, and Tertia) to tell them a fantastic story. Each time he tries to take a break and leave the rest for "next time," the girls insist that it is already "next time"; in this way, the speaker tells us, the story of Alice's adventures in Wonderland took shape.

Young Alice is sitting by the river bank with her older sister, feeling bored; her sister's book has no pictures or conversation, and thus holds no interest for Alice. Suddenly, a white rabbit scampers back, proclaims that it is very late, and pulls a pocket watch out of its waistcoat. Though she initially does not notice the strangeness of a talking rabbit, when she sees the rabbit's clothes and watch, she becomes very interested. She follows the rabbit, hopping right down a deep rabbit hole after him, giving no thought of how she plans to get out again.

She seems to fall quite slowly, having time to observe the things around her. There are shelves and maps and pictures hung on pegs; at one point, she picks up a jar of orange marmalade and puts it back into place on another shelf. She seems to fall for an interminable amount of time, and begins to worry that she might fall straight through to the other side of the earth. Although she has no one to talk to, she practices some of the facts she learned in school: she knows the distance from one end of the earth to the other, and she says some of the grand words she has heard in her lessons. She worries about missing her cat, Dinah, at dinner. Finally, she reaches the bottom of the hole. She is in a long hallway, and she is just in time to see the white rabbit hurrying away.

The hallway is lined with doors, but all of them are locked. On a three-legged table made of glass, Alice finds a key, but it is far too small for any of the locks. Then, Alice finds a tiny door hidden behind a curtain. The key works, but the door is far too small. Through the door there is a miniature passageway, leading to a lovely garden; the sight of the garden makes Alice more determined than ever to find a way to get through. Alice goes back to the table, where a little bottle has appeared. The label says "DRINK ME," and after checking to see if it marked "poison," Alice drinks it all. She shrinks to a size small enough for the door, but she soon realizes that she has left the key on top of the glass table. She is now to short to reach it; seeing her dilemma and fooling foolish for her mistake, she begins to cry. But she then finds a piece of cake, on which is a little slip of paper that says "EAT ME." Alice eats, and waits for the results.

Analysis

The poem at the beginning of the book is a reasonably accurate account of how the book came to be. The three girls in the boat are the Lidell sisters, of whom Alice is the second oldest. Carroll often entertained the girls with fantastic stories he made up on the spot. On Alice Lidell's insistence, he took one of his longer tales and wrote it down.

The central theme of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is Alice's struggle to adapt to the rules of this new world; metaphorically, it is Alice's struggle to adapt to the strange rules and behaviors of adults. The rabbit, with his watch and his concern for schedules and appointments, is a representative of this adult world. Alice's story starts when she follows him down the hole.

She is characterized as a bright child who often says or does foolish things; in other words, Alice has much in common with any child who is trying to behave like someone older than she is. Her blunders come about because of unfamiliarity rather than stupidity.

She is also an unusually conscientious child; note the moment when she is falling down the hall, and she puts the marmalade carefully back on the shelf for fear that the jar might kill someone if she were to drop it.

As Carroll sees it, the world of children is a dangerous one. Not knowing the rules, however foolish or arbitrary those rules may be, is a source of great peril. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is shadowed by hints of death, and death is a recurring theme of both of Carroll's books. Through the Looking Glass, the second book about Alice's adventures, is an even darker story; in Through the Looking Glass, reminders of death are inescapable. But even here, at the start of Alice's adventure, we are reminded of the frailty of humans and of children in particular. The first hint of mortality comes with Alice's concern about the marmalade jar; her worry shows that Wonderland is not an escape from all of the limitations of the real world. Death is still a possibility. A moment later, Carroll treats us to a very macabre joke. When Alice is falling, she takes pride in her composure: "ŒWell!' thought Alice to herself, Œafter such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!'" (13). The narrator adds, grimly, "Which was very likely true." The narrator agrees with Alice, but not for the reason she might think: after falling off a house, the reason why she would not say anything is because she would be dead. Alice makes another unknowing allusion to her own death when she peers into the tiny door. She realizes that she cannot even fit her head through the opening, and even if she could, her head "would be of very little use without my shoulders" (16). She is referring, unknowingly, to her own decapitation. The moment is both an allusion to death and a bit of foreshadowing. At the end of the book, the Queen of Hearts will try her best to separate Alice's head from her shoulders.

In Alice's treatment of the little drink, we are reminded of the specific perils that face children. Carroll writes: ". . . [F]or she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up be wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them" (17-8). The challenge of mastering the "simple rules" is going to be Alice's main struggle in Wonderland, and this passage hints at some of worst consequences of not knowing the rules. Innocence is closely connected to ignorance: in this book, it is not an idealized or safe state. While we are charmed by Alice's blunders and know that she will make it home in the end, Carroll is constantly reminding us of the consequences of not knowing the rules. Childhood is partially a state of peril, and Carroll names a few of those perils directly: poison bottles that the child cannot read, falls, burns, wounds from blades that the child is too young to handle (18). Not least of these dangers is an adult world that baffles and confuses. Alice is trained enough to read the bottle before she drinks it. She knows the simple rule in this case, and knows well enough to avoid the label "poison." Her challenge will be to learn more complex rules, reading not only labels but also situations and people as she makes her way through Wonderland.

Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears

Summary:

As the cake takes effect, Alice finds herself growing larger. This time, she keeps growing until she is the size of a giant. Now, getting through the door to the garden will be more difficult than ever, and Alice begins to cry again. The white rabbit comes scurrying down the hall; at the sight of him, Alice dries her tears and tries to talk to him, but one look at Alice and the rabbit runs away in terror. He leaves behind his fan and his white kid gloves. Alice begins to wonder how so many strange things could happen to her. Yesterday was a day like any other, and Alice begins to consider the possibility that she might have changed during the night. If she has changed, there's no telling who she might be. She wonders if she's been changed into Mabel, a girl who is less affluent and less bright than Alice: when she tries to recite her lessons and fails, she fears that she must be Mabel.

Suddenly, Alice realizes that she has put on the rabbit's gloves: if they fit, she must be shrinking again. She soon learns that the cause is the fan that she is holding, which she drops hastily before she shrinks away completely. She is now the right size for the door to the garden, but she has left the key, once again, on the glass table. She soon slips and falls into a vast body of salt water. It is the pool of tears that she cried when she was a giant. She sees a mouse swimming through the little sea, and tries to talk to him, but she unintentionally offends and frightens the creature by talking about her cat. The mouse can talk. Alice offends him again by bringing up a dog that kills rats, and the mouse seems to be swimming away, but when Alice calls out to him and apologizes, the mouse swims back and tells her to swim to shore with him. He promises to tell her his story, after which she will understand why he hates and fears cats. They swim towards the shore, and Alice finds herself swimming at the head of a curious party of animals who have fallen in the water: a Duck, a Dodo, a Lory, an Eaglet, and a few other animals.

Analysis:

Alice's shifts in size and inquiries into her own identity reflect the difficulties of growing up. Just as children on the verge of adulthood sometimes find themselves too small for adult privileges while being forced to talk on the no-fun world of adult responsibilities, Alice finds her body thrown back and forth between two extremes of size. The abrupt, almost violent physical changes might also suggest the sudden physical changes that come with the onset of adolescence.

Her inquiries into her own identity parallel a child's search for herself as she grows older. Alice worries that her identity has been displaced; her fears parallel any child's uncertainty about her place in the world. Note that Alice loathes the idea of being Mabel not only because Mabel is less bright, but because Mabel is less affluent. Alice is aware of differences in wealth, but she is still a young child; she sees class only in terms of how many material objects a little girl is allowed to have.

Chapter 3: A Caucus Race and a Long Tale

Summary:

The animals and Alice make it to the shore, wet and grouchy. The mouse tries to dry them off by telling a dry story: he recites English history in flat, uninspired prose. At some point, he uses the word "it" without an antecedent, which causes confusion as the animals argue about what "it" is. The Dodo suggests another method of getting dry, as everyone seems to be as wet as over. The animals are initially reluctant to follow the Dodo's advice, as his speech is full of grand words that the other animals don't understand: the Eaglet convinces the Dodo of not understanding them either.

The Dodo suggests a Caucus Race. Alice and the animals line up and race around in circles, starting and stopping whenever they please. After a half-hour or so, they are all quite dry. The Dodo declares that they are all winners. Alice is charged with the responsibility of giving prizes to all of them: all she has is a container of little candies. She gives them one candy each. For her prize, the Dodo awards her the thimble that was in Alice's pocket. She thinks it's all totally absurd, but she dares not laugh for fear of offending them.

She asks the mouse to tell his tale, and he begins. But Alice is transfixed by the mouse's tale, and she looks at it as he speaks. Her impression of the tale is merged with her impression of his tale, and on the page the mouse's story, in verse, is written in the shape of a mouse's tail. The mouse accuses her of being inattentive, and wanders off in a huff. Alice is quite upset, and admits that she wishes that Dinah were with her. Dinah could fetch the mouse back so that he might finish his story. The birds ask who Dinah is, and Alice, eager as always to talk about her cat, talks about Dinah's many talents and virtues as a pet. She mentions that Dinah is quite good at catching birds, and at this bit of news the birds all begin to leave. Alice feels quite lonely, and begins to cry again. Soon, she hears the sound of little footsteps coming towards her.

Analysis:

Puns abound. The two meanings of "dry" are played on at the start of the chapter, as the mouse recites from Havilland Chapmell's Short Course of History. Carroll's taste for puns and the playful side of language is a constant source of amusement throughout the book. The mouse quotes a passage where the antecedent for the word "it" is missing (though the meaning is still quite clear), and the result is general confusion among the animals; this is one of many moments where the creatures of Wonderland create confusion by taking language at absolute face-value. They allow themselves to be confused by pronouns without antecedents; they also take figurative language literally, or confuse homonyms. Much of one's ability to understand language comes from the ability to ignore its inconsistencies and incoherencies: for example, the listener can understand the meaning of "it" without hearing its antecedent. The creatures of Wonderland are not merely silly: they always have their own logic, a certain sense and reasoning behind their absurd behavior. Their strange reactions to language point out the potential pitfalls of English, and their bizarre rules and sensitivities parallel the arbitrary nature of any culture's customs and habits. Alice's adventures are wonderful training for adapting to the absurd behavior of adults.

The Caucus Race parodies political process: the participants run around in confused circles, never accomplishing anything. If we can take Alice as a symbol for the average citizen, we see that the Race does very little to benefit her. At the end, Alice is forced to give everyone a prize. Although Alice also receives a prize, she is given something that she already had. More humor comes from the contrast between the animals' sober faces and Alice's secret conviction that the whole process is absurd.

Carroll puns with the homonyms "tale" and "tale," as the shape of the mouse's tail becomes the shape of the mouse's printed story. The pun is playful, and Alice's fascination with the animal's tale makes for a charming moment: the charm of her wandering attention, the shape of the printed words, and the rhyme scheme mask some of the darkness of the mouse's story. He is talking about being cornered by a dog and forced to go on trial. The dog (whose name is Fury) wanted to be prosecutor, judge, and jury; he also wanted to condemn the mouse to death. We never hear the end of the story, as the Mouse, realizing that Alice is paying less than total attention to the meaning of his words, runs off in a huff.

Alice makes more unknowing allusions to death, this time to the death of others. She wishes her cat Dinah was there, so that the cat might fetch the mouse back to finish his story. She seems unaware of the fact that this would mean the mouse's death. And she unthinkingly talks about Dinah's amazing talent for catching birds, not realizing that this kind of talk will offend all of her new avian friends.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 4-6

The White Rabbit comes, fretting about his missing things and the wrath of the Dutchess. Alice looks around for the White Rabbit's gloves and fan, but everything has changed: she sees that hall with its many doors have disappeared completely. The White Rabbit sees Alice and mistakes him for his maid. When he orders her back to his home to fetch his gloves and fan, she hurries off without correcting him. In the White Rabbit's house, she finds a fan and gloves and a tiny bottle, similar to the one she drank from before. There is no sign instructing her to drink, but she begins to drink anyway. Suddenly, she has grown so large that she can barely fit in the house. There is no apparent way out. She hears the rabbit outside the house, calling for Mary Ann. The door is blocked, so the rabbit resolves to go in through the window. Alice, nervous about being caught in her present state reaches out the window with her hand and makes a grab at the air. She hears a shattering of glass; the rabbit must have fallen through a cucumber-frame. The rabbit calls for one of his servants, Pat, and demands that the arm be removed. Alice makes another grab at the air, and this time she hears both animals crash down into a cucumber-frame.

The animals decide to send Bill, another servant, down the chimney. Alice manages to wedge her foot into the chimney, and when she hears Bill scuttling down, she gives a good solid kick. Bill goes flying. The animals and Alice are at a standoff. When she hears them planning to set the house on fire, she calls out that they'd better not. Before long, the launch a barrowful of little pebbles in through the window, some of which hit Alice in the

face. But after they land, the pebbles turn into little cakes. Alice eats one of them, and it shrinks her down to the size of the little animals; she runs as fast as she can out of the house and beyond. As she runs away, she sees Bill (who is a lizard) being supported by two guinea pigs.

She finds herself in a dense forest, and she decides to search for something to restore her to her normal size, after which she will go and find that lovely garden she saw through the little door (Chapters 1-2). Suddenly, Alice finds herself face-to-face with a puppy. She starts to play fetch with it, but she soon realizes that at her present size, the puppy poses a considerable threat. Alice barely manages to escape being trampled.

Wandering through fields of giant flowers and blades of grass, Alice searches for something to eat or drink that will restore her to her full size. She comes upon a mushroom, on which is sitting a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah.

Analysis

More growing. The story plays again with the definition of "growing up." Alice talks to herself when she is stuck in the house, and resolves to write a book about her strange adventures when she is grown up, but then realizes mournfully that she is "grown up" already, in terms of size. In Chapter 2, she made a similar statement when she berated herself, "a great girl," for crying so much. But Alice's size is juxtaposed to her naïve comments and worries; these moments emphasize that growing up is more than a matter of size.

In fact, many of Alice's victories come when she is small, and being large is often a great hindrance. Against the puppy, Alice has nothing but her wits to help her against the animal. She manages to escape. And note that in the house she is impeded by her giant size, and is only able to escape when she shrinks down again. Size doesn't matter as much as adaptability, and Alice's true "growing up" comes with her adaptation to each new challenge.

A recurring theme is Alice's desire to see the garden. Wonderland is in this way similar to dreams with an unfulfilled desire. But the garden itself merely structures Alice's journey: after each new adventure, she presses on toward the garden, but it is the incidents along the way that are making her into a wiser person.

Chapter 5: Advice From a Caterpillar

Summary:

The Caterpillar asks Alice who she is, and she can give no satisfactory reply; she has changed so many times in one day that she feels she can no longer answer the question with certainty. The Caterpillar tells her it is not so confusing to change. They have a conversation in which the very mellow Caterpillar gives important advice to the irritable Alice: she must keep her temper. He asks her to recite "You are old, Father William,"

which Alice does, although afterward they agree that she recited incorrectly. He also tells her that she will grow accustomed to the sensitivity of the animals. Alice expresses a wish to be larger. The Caterpillar contradicts Alice repeatedly, with absolute composure. After a while he crawls off through the grass, telling her that one side of the mushroom will make her grow taller, and the other side will make her grow shorter.

Alice is not sure which side is which, so she bites into one morsel. She is suddenly squashed down, her chin against her feet; she hastily eats the other morsel, and her body elongates tremendously. Her neck becomes so long that she cannot see her shoulders, and she finds she can use her neck as if she were a serpent. Her head makes its way through the lives of a tree, and she happens on a Pigeon, who mistakes Alice for a serpent. The Pigeon fears for her eggs. Alice tries to assure the Pigeon that she is not a serpent, but Alice must answer truthfully when the Pigeon asks if she has eaten eggs. The Pigeon argues that even if Alice is a little girl, if little girls eat eggs then they must be a kind of serpent. Alice is silenced by the novel idea. After some more arguing, the Pigeon shoos Alice off.

Alice eats from each of the mushroom bits, using them to balance each other, until she brings herself to her normal size. She feels strange to be her correct size again, but she is pleased that one part of her plan is now complete. She resolves to go find the garden, but she comes across a charming miniature house. Alice wants to go inside, and she considerately opts not to frighten them with her normal size; she eats mushroom until she is nine inches high.

Analysis:

The conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar is worth a close look, and makes for an excellent paper topic. The discussion brings into focus the themes of change and growing up; for the Caterpillar, for whom dramatic transformation is a natural part of life, change is neither upsetting nor surprising. He is unshakably calm, with the exception of when Alice complains of being only three inches tall (the Caterpillar is exactly three inches tall). He also seems to be less belligerent than many of the creatures of Wonderland, even though he contradicts almost everything Alice says. He is a sage-figure, whose mysterious silences and terse responses provide a sharp contrast to Alice's exasperation and confused replies. The game in Wonderland is change and transformation, and the Caterpillar understands the game that Alice is trying to learn how to play.

The poem Alice recites, "You Are Old, Father William," is a parody of "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them," by Robert Southey. The poem is in line with the theme of change and growth: a young man asks his father how he has maintained so many astounding abilities despite his old age.

The Pigeon's classification of little girls as a type of serpent is one of many humorous logical exercises by the creatures of Wonderland. Remember that Carroll was a mathematician with a love of logic puzzles. The creatures of Wonderland always have a

reason and a method to their nonsense. They are constantly reasoning their way to absurd conclusions, to the reader's delight and to Alice's confusion.

Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper

Summary:

As Alice looks at the house and tries to decide what to do next, a fish dressed as a footman arrives and knocks on the door. A frog dressed as a footman answers, and the Fish-Footman delivers an invitation from the Queen to the Duchess to play croquet. When the two footmen bow, their curls become entangled, and Alice laughs so hard she has to leave; when she returns the Fish is gone and the Frog-Footman is sitting on the ground. When Alice goes to knock on the door the Frog-Footman tells her that it's no use. Alice tries to talk with him, but she finds him quite contrary, and so she goes into the house herself. She's now in the kitchen, where the Duchess is sitting in the middle of the room, nursing a baby, and the cook is busying herself over a large cauldron of soup. There is also a cat, sitting on the hearth, grinning widely. The air is full of pepper, and the baby is crying.

Alice asks why the cat is grinning, and the Duchess responds that he grins because he is a Cheshire cat. Alice tries to talk to the Duchess, but the Duchess is quite rude. The cook begins to throw everything within reach at the Duchess and the baby, and the Duchess takes no notice, even when the objects hit her. Alice is terrified for the child, but the Duchess tells her to mind her business. Alice answers her smartly. The Duchess begins to throw the baby into the air, singing a song about beating children, before she finally tosses the baby to Alice and tells her to nurse the child herself if she likes. The Duchess heads off to get ready for her croquet match. Alice, concerned for the child's welfare, takes it with her when she leaves the house, but before long the baby has turned into a pig. She puts it down and it trots away into the woods.

Alice soon runs into the Cheshire cat, whom she asks for directions. He points the way to the Hatter's home, and to the March Hare's place, but he warns her that they're both mad. He also says that everyone around these parts is quite mad, including himself and Alice; if she weren't mad, she wouldn't have come. They talk, the Cheshire cat disappearing and reappearing the whole while. He finally disappears a final time, tail first and grin last. Alice decides to go the March Hare's place, but she feels a sense of foreboding when she reaches his home. It is covered with fear and has two great ears. She uses the mushroom to rise her height to two feet, but she still feels quite anxious as she enters.

Analysis:

Alice shows a considerable amount of composure in this chapter. She never breaks down crying, and she somehow manages to keep her temper despite the argumentative creatures she meets. The theme of growing up works its way through this chapter. We meet the Duchess, who almost at first glance tells Alice that she knows very little (71); Alice is quite displeased by the insult, but she holds her own. A moment later, she shows

she is adapting to Wonderland's logic when she answers the Duchess smartly. The Duchess says pointedly that the world would go around faster if everyone minded his own business; Alice responds, in Wonderland fashion, that the world going around faster would not be a good thing. The days would become too short. She literalizes the figure of speech and wins another little victory.

Some more of the risks of growing up are apparent in the transformation of the little baby. One of the greatest dangers of making the transition from childhood to adulthood is growing into a disagreeable adult. The child's transformation into a pig (the pig being a symbol for an unpleasant person) is played on for it's full value as a metaphor. The Cheshire cat asks also what became of the child; when Alice tells him that the baby turned into a pig, the cat responds coyly that he thought it would. When the pig trots off into the woods, she thinks of other children she knows who might make good pigs.

Many characters take their names from old expressions. The Cheshire cat's name comes from the phrase, "to grin like a Cheshire cat," an expression of uncertain origin. The March Hare is insane; an old phrase is "mad as a March hare," referring to the animal's wild behavior during mating season. The Hatter's madness makes allusion to the real-life tendency of hatters to go mad; hatters sometimes went insane because of the poisonous mercury used to cure felt.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-9

Alice finds the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse sitting all together at one end of a large table. The Dormouse sits between the other two, fast asleep. They are disagreeable from the start, and Alice's conversation with them is confusing even by Wonderland standards. They contradict Alice at every turn, correcting her with confusing arguments that have their own strange logic. Much of the conversation is about time. The Hatter's watch, which only tells the day of the month, is broken. The Hatter also tells Alice that Time (which he talks about as if it were a person) stopped working for him about a month ago, when the Queen of Hearts accused the Hatter of murdering the time. Since then, it's always been six o'clock, which is why they sit at tea all the time. All the places at the table are set, because they don't have time to do the dishes. When they want a clean plate, they just move to another spot.

The Dormouse begins to tell a strange story about three sisters who live in a well; Alice's questions and contradictions anger the Dormouse, and the Hatter and March Hare grow increasingly rude to her. Finally, Alice leaves, disgusted, turning around as she goes to see the Hatter and the Hare trying to stuff the Dormouse into a pot of tea.

Alice wanders in the woods until she finds a tree with a door in it. She goes inside, and finds herself in the long hallway again. This time, she's prepared: she takes the key from the table and unlocks the door to the garden. She then eats just enough mushroom to step through the door, and she finds herself in the lovely garden.

Analysis

The Mad Tea party is an important scene, as the logic/illogic of the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse reveals some of the peculiarities of language. They are some of the most argumentative of the creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, and their strange remarks show Carroll's talent for word games and logic puzzles. (The readers should take a moment to look at some of these important scenes up-close, as analyzing every pun and bit of mad reasoning would be too time-consuming for this summary. Of particular note are the scenes with the caterpillar, the Cheshire cat, and the Mad Tea Party.) The illogic of language and the relationship between sense, nonsense, and words is an important theme of the book. At one point, Alice protests that she says what she means, or at least, she means what she says. She insists that the two are the same thing. But the creatures correct, using examples of similar flipped sentences where the meanings are totally different. (Example: "I like what I get" and "I get what I like.")

Alice is participating in that most adult of activities, a tea party, and she comes up against some of the most difficult creatures she has ever met. But she generally maintains her composure, holding her own against the three tea-takers and managing to anticipate some of their conclusions and rules. She also is smart enough to leave when she's had enough.

The themes of growing up and learning the rules come up in Alice's triumphant entry into the garden. Unlike the first time, when she cried and couldn't maintain control of herself, she remains calm and uses her head to get to the garden.

Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet Ground

Summary:

Alice enters the garden and finds three gardeners, shaped like playing cards, hurriedly painting the white roses of a rose tree. Alice asks why they are painting the roses red, and one of the gardeners (the Two) admits to her that the tree was supposed to be a red rose tree. If the Queen learned about the error, she would cut off their heads.

The procession of the queen arrives. There are a good many soldiers shaped like cards, like the gardeners; there are also the royal children, various guests, and the white rabbit. Last come the Knave of Hearts and the King and Queen. The procession stops opposite of Alice, and the Queen demands to know Alice's identity. Alice politely introduces herself, but she thinks boldly that she has nothing to fear: they are only a pack of cards. Her replies to the Queen are sassy, and she refuses to be intimidated by the Queen's bluster. The Queen demands to know the identities of the three gardeners, who have thrown themselves, facedown, onto the ground. She has the unfortunate gardeners turned over, so that their numbers and suits are revealed, and when she sees the roses she orders their beheading. The soldiers come forward, and the gardeners run to Alice for protection. Alice secretly hides them in a large flowerpot.

The soldiers report that the gardeners are gone, and the Queen seems to forget about them. She invites Alice to play croquet. Alice follows the Queen and talks to the White Rabbit: from him, she learns that the Duchess is under a sentence of execution. Alice

soon learns that croquet in Wonderland is quite difficult. The balls are live hedgehogs, the mallets are live flamingoes, and the hoops are the card-people, bent over so that their bodies make arches. No one is waiting their turn, and the Queen is soon in a fury. Alice begins to worry that the Queen's fury will be turned against her.

The head of the Cheshire cat appears, to Alice's relief. Finally, she has someone civil to talk to. She complains to him about the quarrelsome players and the difficult game. When the cat asks how she likes the Queen, Alice admits she doesn't like her much at all. When Alice notices that the Queen is eavesdropping, she smoothly makes a save and the Queen walks away, satisfied. The king asks whom Alice is talking to, and from the start the King and Cheshire cat don't get along. The king demands its execution and goes to fetch the executioner himself. Alice tries to play croquet some more, but finds it hopeless; she returns to find the executioner, the King, and the Queen arguing, with the Cheshire cat calmly watching. The executioner argues that since the cat is only a head, he cannot be beheaded. The king argues that anything that has a head can be beheaded. The Queen threatens to behead everyone if they don't find a solution. They ask Alice to mediate, and Alice recommends that they fetch the Duchess; it's her cat, after all. By the time the Duchess is brought forth, the cat has vanished.

Analysis:

Alice initially faces the Court of Cards with great confidence; she boldly says to herself that they are only a pack of cards, and she has nothing to fear. She is much stronger than when she first arrived in Wonderland. Her confidence comes through when she saves the lives of the three gardeners.

But Alice soon realizes that although the people of the Court are only a pack of cards, their nature does not make them any less dangerous. The Court of Cards, like people of power in real life, rely on rank and costume for their status. Carroll turns rank and costume into a game, mocking it; however, he does not deny that ridiculous people can be frightening or dangerous. Alice begins by thinking she has nothing to fear, but as she spends more time with the Queen of Hearts she becomes increasingly anxious.

The theme of games, and learning their rules, is central in this chapter. Alice is learning to get along in a social set of powerful people; Carroll makes this adaptation into a kind of game by turning the court into a deck of cards. Alice also has to adapt to a very difficult game of croquet. Part of her problem is realizing that no one else is paying any attention to the rules; sometimes, learning to play means more than learning the rules.

The argument about beheading the Cheshire cat is more fun with nonsense, as the king argues that anything that has a head can be beheaded and the executioner argues that being beheaded actually requires having a body. Alice is composed enough to mediate.

The Cheshire cat is one of the few animals in Wonderland who treats Alice with courtesy. He is a figure similar to the Caterpillar, in that he seems tranquil and unbothered by the

confusion of Wonderland. He is unimpressed by the King's threats, and he easily escapes when his safety is threatened.

Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle's Story

Summary:

The Duchess is strangely civil to Alice; she walks with her and engages her in conversation. Alice finds it quite unpleasant, as the Duchess keeps digging her sharp chin into Alice's shoulder. The Duchess also talks almost exclusively in cliché morals; she manages find a moral in everything Alice says or notices. They reach the Queen, who tells the Duchess to run off or lose her head. The Duchess runs. Alice returns nervously to the croquet game. The Queen keeps shouting "Off with her/his head," and within half an hour, all of the other players have been taken into custody and put under sentence of execution. Since the Card-Soldiers were acting as the arches for croquet, there are no arches left. The Queen announces that they shall go find the Mock Turtle (the kind of turtle one uses to make Mock Turtle Soup) so that he can tell Alice his story. As they leave, Alice hears the King quietly pardon all of the prisoners.

Alice and the Queen come upon the Gryphon, whom the Queen wakes. She orders the animal to take Alice to the Mock Turtle. The Queen goes back to see after her executions, and the Gryphon assures Alice that they never really execute anybody. She comes to the Mock Turtle, whose eyes are full of tears. He begins to tell his story. Once, he was a real turtle. He and the Gryphon digress and talk about the strange school that they went to at the bottom of the sea. The description is full of puns. Alice's questions irritate the Gryphon and the Turtle, who are at times quite disagreeable.

Analysis:

The Duchess seems different, but her change in behavior actually reflects how Alice has changed. She is no longer the intimidating figure who acted imperiously to Alice; she is instead a rather silly woman, full of cliché wisdom that degenerates into nonsense. Alice is now able to see her clearly. The Duchess' tendency to find a moral in everything satirizes the simplistic moralizing children's literature of Carroll's time; but now, Alice has grown enough to view the Duchess critically.

Mock Turtle is another game with language. Mock turtle soup is actually made of veal, which is why the original illustrations for the book show a turtle with a calf's head. The description of the school is full of puns, with several moment of real cleverness. The Mock Turtle says that the turtle who taught the others was called a Tortoise; Alice asks why he was called a Tortoise if he was a Turtle. The answer is that he was called a Tortoise because he taught the others. This joke is actually an illustration of the disconnection between sign and signified; language, in other words, is arbitrary. Tortoise is an arbitrary sound, and it need not mean the animal. To the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, teaching is part of the definition of "Tortoise." The French thinker Derrida writes

about this quality of language, and his work has had a great influence on linguistics and literary theory.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 10-12

The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon talk with non-stop puns. They talk to Alice about the dances they used to have: among them was the Lobster Quadrille, a dance that sounds somewhat like a square dance, except everyone has a lobster for a partner. They demonstrate for Alice, without using the lobsters, and Alice attends politely but is quite relieved when it's all over. They explain some of the parts of the song, puns raging out of control, and then they ask Alice to tell them about her story. When she gets to the part about not being able to recite her lessons correctly, they ask her to recite; as before, the poems come out completely different from how they were when she memorized them. The Mock Turtle sings a song about Turtle Soup, tears in his eyes the whole while. He is about to repeat the chorus when they hear someone shouting that the trial is about to begin. The Gryphon takes Alice by the hand and runs off to watch the trial. As she is dragged off by the Gryphon, she can hear the Mock Turtle continue his song.

Analysis

The puns are two numerous to go through here; the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle are good characters to examine if writing a paper on language and wordplay. The sea where they grew up is a place where every possible pun is exploited.

Alice continues to show how she has grown. When she first arrived in Wonderland, she managed to offend everyone by talking about how her cat catches and eats certain animals; although she almost mentions that she has eaten lobster to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, she catches herself just in time. She also stops herself from saying that she has had whiting for dinner. She has learned from her previous mistakes, and so she is able to keep things civil between her and her peculiar entertainers.

The Mock Turtle is a strange figure. He is always crying, although the Gryphon says confidentially to Alice in Chapter 9 that the Mock Turtle's sadness is mostly in his own head. But his tears coupled with his song make for a rather eerie moment. Perhaps his sadness comes from the fact that Mock Turtle is meant to be consumed; in real life, it only exists as part of the name of a soup, and in Wonderland Mock Turtles only exists to be made into soup. Remember that the Mock Turtle tearfully told Alice that he was once a real turtle. Though a real turtle need not be eaten, a Mock Turtle probably knows how he will end up. The Mock Turtle's song is about beautiful turtle soup, and even as Alice runs off to the trial she can hear his melancholy chorus. The song is yet another moment that touches on the theme of death.

Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?

Summary:

The King of Hearts is the judge, and the jurors are various animals, some of whom Alice has already met. The White Rabbit recites the nursery rhyme about the knave of hearts stealing tarts from the Queen of Hearts; this is the accusation against the defendant.

The first witness is the Hatter. The king threatens the Hatter all through the cross examination, and that Hatter becomes more and more nervous. During the cross examination, Alice feels herself starting to grow. Also, two guinea pigs, at different points, make noise and are suppressed. The narrator explains that "suppressed" means being stuffed into a large sack and then sat upon. Alice is quite glad to witness it, because she had read the word many times in newspapers and never knew what it meant. The Hatter is excused, and he takes off to go back to his tea. When he gets outside, the Queen calls for him to be executed, but the Hatter manages to escape.

The Cook is the next witness. She is most uncooperative. The Dormouse pipes up during the Cook's cross-examination, and the queen furiously calls for the Dormouse's suppression, expulsion, beheading, etc.; during the scuffle involved in turning the Dormouse out of court, the cook escapes. The king asks the queen to conduct the next cross-examination. The White Rabbit calls the next witness: it's Alice.

Analysis:

Carroll's explanation of "suppression" is another amusing moment of wordplay. He takes advantage of the word's broad range of meanings, as played off against the very specific meaning the word has in the context of newspaper articles reporting trials. Alice makes the mistake (as children often do) of using a very specific example of "suppression" as the best definition of a word.

The proceedings of the trial are obviously unjust, and Carroll is lightly satirizing the justice system. It is not a specific satire of justice as it existed in Victorian England; it can more accurately be read as a satire of some of the dangers involved in trials. The judge and the ever-present queen are tyrannical; the jurors are simpletons who barely know their own names. Alice is appalled by the injustice of the proceedings; it is one of the marks of her basic compassion and her growth as a person that she will refuse to be intimidated or won over by the workings of this court. The theme of growing up is central here. Note that without eating any mushrooms, Alice begins to grow. She also barely notices it. Her growth here is a metaphor for gradually growing into an adult. She entered Wonderland as a tiny version of herself, but she will leave a giant.

Chapter 12:

Summary:

Alice gets up, forgetting how large she has grown; she knocks over the jury box by accident. She puts the box upright again, and puts all the jurors back into place. The king begins to cross-examine her, bombarding her with bad logic; but Alice remains completely composed, and is able to point out some of the inconsistencies in what he

says. The White Rabbit presents a completely ambiguous poem, in an unmarked letter that purportedly was written by the Knave of Hearts. The letter is unsigned, and the characters and objects in the poem are only referred to in pronoun form. What's more, the situation does not seem to fit the Knave's situation. But the King and the others interpret the letter as damning evidence against the Knave.

Alice speaks up through the presentation of this evidence. She denies that there is any meaning in the letter, and she refuses to pipe down. When the Queen calls out for her beheading, Alice declares that she is not afraid; after all, they are only a pack of cards. Suddenly all the cards rise up and fly into her face . . .

And Alice wakes up, with her head in her older sister's lap. She has been dreaming. She tells her sister about all of her strange adventures in Wonderland, and then runs into her house to have her tea.

Her sister remains, half-dosing, dreaming herself about Alice's adventures in Wonderland. She also dreams of Alice in years to come, a grown woman who will retain her childlike goodness and compassion. The adult Alice will have children of her own, and perhaps she will entertain them with the story of Wonderland.

Analysis:

We see Alice at the trial as one who cannot be intimidated, or even outreasoned. She manages to fight her way through the king's poor reasoning, and she also stands up against the unjust evidence. She has grown, in all senses: in size, but also in her capacity for thinking independently. She also has a sense of justice, and she refuses to tolerate the terrible proceedings of the unjust trial. The letter, with its poem full of pronouns, plays again with the ambiguity of pronouns. It also satirizes the use of evidence, not only in trials, but in all situations; as people often do in real life, the people in the trial extrapolate the conclusions they want from evidence that is far from sufficient.

The dream ends darkly, as the cards rise up and fly into her face. Although Alice is then a giant and perhaps has little to fear, this moment still hints at some of the difficulties of the world. Alice makes enemies of the Card Court because she refuses to play their games as they want her to; in a book where Alice learns game after game, this final game is one where Alice must learn the rules but then subvert them. In refusing to be bound by the unjust proceedings of the court, she comes into her own as a developed person with a sense of justice and a capacity for independent thought. The final moment of the dream suggest difficulty, but also Alice's ability to stand up for herself. When the cards fly in her face, she screams, but Carroll tells us that the scream is half-fear and half-anger. The attack is frightening, but Alice is prepared to fight back. The waking world continues with this theme of growth, as Alice's sister imagines Alice in the years to come, a strong adult who retains some of her child-like innocence and compassion.

ESSAY

Trapped in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland provides a physical removal from reality by creating a fantastical world and adventure in the mind of a young girl. In this separation, Carroll is able to bend the rules of the temporal world. Although this is self-evident in Alice's physical transfigurations, language and conventions provide additional means to test if a world can defy the rules which are didactically fed to children and become second nature to adults. Perhaps it might be an inescapable outcome given that Carroll has been educated in a world that operates within structured set of rules, but the "wonderful dream" seems to be peculiarly similar to the "dull reality" which Carroll attempts to escape (98). Fantasies seem to be forever bounded by what reality allows the mind to imagine.

The opening scene provides a possible metaphor for Carroll's artistic endeavor in the face of these constraints:

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of the dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not get her head through the doorway (10).

Alice seems quite capable of seeing that a more beautiful world exists beyond the confines of her environment. By making a distinction that it is her head, the physical location of the mind, which prevents her from proceeding, Carroll suggests that the mind provides the barrier to entering the Eden-like grounds of pure beauty. Alice's subsequent struggle to physically transform herself to squeeze within these boundaries mirrors Carroll's endeavor to gain entry into the unbounded imagination. Adult consciousness becomes comparable to the "rat-hole" in which Alice finds herself trapped. By grounding the narrative in the eyes and imagination of Alice, who is just beginning to be inculcated with lessons and physically removing her from the temporal world, Carroll adjusts the conditions of his adult world to explore if childhood presents the only opportunity or the "key" to the access the imagination. Yet even as he changes the parameters of the world and the eyes of the beholder, his endeavor appears doomed to failure; when Alice finally locates the garden, she finds that her conception of perfection is tainted. As the gardeners paint the red rose-tree white, Carroll's vision of beauty becomes subject to the same forces that dominate reality.

Alice's youth creates the possibility of viewing an alternate world through eyes not completely corrupted by the social conventions of reality, but her efforts to retain Victorian manners when her new environment creates no pressures to do so, suggest how deeply the rules of the world are impressed upon the mind during childhood. Alice's language is steeped in the artificiality of her world. Her stilted words, "You sh'n't be beheaded," reflect that the training of her schooling is not even abandoned in a moment of apparent crisis (65). In many instances, Alice even tries to transfer her conception of

proper manners to this new environment. She finds it "decidedly uncivil" that the Footman looks up at the sky all the time he is speaking (46). She seems to be almost willing to forgive his rudeness if only he could answer her question, "But what am I to do?" (46). Alice's rejection of the Footman's response, "Anything you like," represents Alice's willingness to exchange one set of behaviors for another under the condition that she is told how to behave and act, indicating that it is not the actual manners that she values but the freedom from deciding what to do (46). It is at this moment that Alice seems to be rejecting the opportunity for freedom of the imagination and instead opting for the safer boundaries created by the dictates of reality.

Although Carroll succeeds in altering the content of Alice's new education, her systematic attempt to recall her schooling further indicates that her mind has become so conditioned to being told how to act and respond to situations, that it is unable to break out of this trap, even when the possibility presents itself. Just after Alice recalls, "When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that this kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me," she realizes that "there's no room to grow up any more here" and concludes that this means that will always "have lessons to learn" (29). The transition of Alice's thought from fantastic stories directly to lessons and books suggests that her imagination is never able to escape the confines of a instruction; she believes that as a child it is her duty to be concerned with schooling (29). She even self-imposes lessons as she "cross[es] her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons and began to repeat it." (16). Perhaps Alice will achieve grown-up status when she has been so conditioned that the mantras of the educational systems become immediate responses. It is almost as if in projecting his conception of a nonsensical world, that the child, simply by being a product of what Carroll despises, namely a world of socially constructed regulations, forms an obstacle to escaping reality.

Carroll faces a difficulty in allowing his own imagination to escape reality. He creates a mocking parody of the lessons of Alice's reality in the Mock Turtle's informative speech of the educational material of the Wonderland, but never is able to transcend the idea that a world must be ruled by instruction. Carroll's new world might study "Reeling and Writhing" or "Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision," instead of the traditional subjects, but inhabitants of Wonderland are still trapped by the process of rote which removes free thought from the educational experience (76). The rules, as the lessons, are certainly different in this imaginary place, but only to be replaced by an entire set of new ones. The croquet game epitomizes how Carroll can only create an alternative reality by constructing a world based upon oppositions to that in which he lives. For instance, in normal croquet there are distinct rules, whereas, in Wonderland "they don't seem to have any rules in particular: at least, if there are, nobody attends to them" (67). The new rules consist of disobeying the old ones. Perhaps fantasy can never escape man's tendency to use his own experience as a starting point to craft change. In this case, an author's imagination as well as those of his characters will be forever grounded by reality. In order to examine what a world look like without rules, one must first understand what a world looks like with rules. Alice's preoccupation with rules materializes in her comment "that's not a regular rule: you [the King] invented it just now" (93). Thus, even if Carroll changes the rules, Alice remains trapped in her desire to

define them, creating a further obstacle to exploring how an unlegislated land would operate.

All of the characters which Alice encounters simply seem to be replacements of the adults that Alice encounters in reality, and it is these figure who serve as the teachers of these new lessons and rules. The characters continually change the rules and use language as a weapon which Alice seems to be continually trying to understand. The Duchess is contradictory, condescending, and hopelessly pedagogical. As the Mock Turtle stands on the ledge of a rock to tell his story while Alice sits in front of him, the environment mirrors that of Alice's classroom in which a teacher positions himself in front to deliver lessosn. Tuttle even adopts a schoolmasterish tone of voices as he tells Alice, "Really you are very dull." (75). Leach suggests that "[t]hey behave to her as adults behave to a child-they are peremptory and patronizing" (Leach 92). In creating these characters, Carroll is unable to escape the notion that children require instruction and need adult-like figures to enforce rules. Carroll's criticizes the tradition educational system by using Wonderland to parody its flaws, suggesting that even in his mind he finds issues of the imagination and reality inseparable.

The sardonic tone which accompanies Alice's observation of Wonderland's inhabitants and customs, reflects that Carroll is only too aware of the fact that his dreamland is only a distorted version of reality. Peter Coveney suggests that the "dream takes on a quality of horror because Carroll "is painfully awake in his own dream" (Coveney 334). Although Carroll attempts to veil his dissatisfaction with reality in Alice's innocence, he almost seems to be testing Alice's consciousness of his suffering:

It was all very well to say, "drink me," but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. "No, I'll look first," she said, "and see whether it's marked 'poison' or not"; for she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because the would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," It is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. (11).

The insinuation of both suicide and self-inflicted pain seems an incongruous reflection for a seven-year-old; Alice becomes a vehicle through which Carroll reveals his preoccupation with such tortuous thoughts. As Alice proceeds to drink the bottle that is mysteriously labeled "drink me," Carroll toys with a distorted version of attempted suicide (11). He is able to guise his attempt in Alice's innocence, revealed in her childlike recollections of poisoning, which leaves her unaware of the gravity of the consequences of drinking bottle that might contain poison. It seems quite morbid that Carroll chooses to place Alice in a situation which would cause her to even contemplate such violent images. Rackin suggests that Carroll's particular genius "depends heavily on his uncanny ability to enter fully the mind of childhood, to become the child who dreams our adult dreams" (Rackin 113). Even if Alice can not fully comprehend the suggestions that

Carroll plants in her head, the author appears fully conscious of the consequences of poisoning.

While the incident with the mysterious bottle marks Alice's initiation to Wonderland, Carroll's decision to culminate his tale of Wonderland in a legal courtroom creates a fitting environment to for his final attempt to use youthful imagination to escape reality. The narrative even admits "very few girls of her [Alice's] age knew the meaning of it all," and by placing Alice in the pinnacle of worldly law, he implies that she too, even in her imagination, is answerable to the rules of reality (86). The courtroom scene seems more of a trial of the imagination rather than an investigation of the identity of the tart thief. The Queen's directive, "Sentence first-verdict afterwards," (96) reveals Carroll's own feelings of entrapment. He has been sentenced to growing older and living within the rules of society only to acknowledge that the verdict has always been against the imagination; his construction of "stuff and nonsense" appears to be precluded by a societal conditioning against the imagination (97). It seems odd that Alice awakes to declare this as a "wonderful dream," when moments earlier she is overcome with anger about the injustice of the Queen and King's tyrannical court, potentially creating a serious indictment of the reality she awakes to. A second possibility is that it is Carroll voice pronouncing the word "wonderful," wishing just like Alice that he could respond to society's dictates, "Hold your tongue!"-" I won't" (97) just as Alice had done minutes earlier.

Alice's continued determination to persevere in this world of nonsense, and more specifically, her willingness to point out its weaknesses might help to explain why Carroll undertakes what he consciously seems to believe to be an impossible mission- to escape reality. From the outset, Alice is characterized as believably human- she is rude, impatient, and repeatedly naÔve in her observations. Yet it is her flaws that allow us to identify with her as a representative of our own entrapment in reality. Her youth presents an opportunity for the audience and Carroll to revisit the naÔve belief that there is an escape to our everyday experience and furthermore, that with a methodical, logical approach it is possible to understand our environment. Although Alice is frustrated by the new reality that she encounters and its resistance to her systematic way to comprehend it, in spite of all of her difficulties she optimistically continues her pursuit of the garden. On her second attempt, she confidently asserts with the little golden key in hand, "Now, I'll manage better this time" (61). In her search for escape and understanding, she becomes "the naÔve champion of the doomed human quest for meaning and lost Edenic order" (Rackin 96).

Perhaps Carroll is suggesting that in the face of an earthly surface peppered with disappointment, anger, and frustration, adults must retain the resiliency and unaffected consciousness of Alice. Her ability to awake and immediately go to tea, "thinking while she ran, as well she might what a wonderful dream it had been" provides a demonstration of this survival mechanism in operation (98). There seems to be no distinction between her dreamlike world and her living world; her imagination neatly blends into reality, suggesting that we too must follow Alice's example of how to deal with nonsense as we transition from Alice's world to our own reality. Alice's inability to reflect upon

Wonderland is what allows her to energetically proceed to her next encounter. Her retort, "Who cares for you?"Ö"You're nothing but a pack of cards!," functions as an immediate dismissal of unfairness and injustice and brings the issues to a close (97).

If there was indeed a moral of Alice in Wonderland, believing that Carroll is only trying to tell us that we must all retain our naive innocence in the face of reality, would be to collapse the interpretation of his work into one of the maxims espoused by the Duchess. Carroll appears to recognize the impossibility of such a quest and interestingly enough it is one of the Duchess' statements that provides complications to this hypothesized moral:

'Be what you would seem to be'-or, if you'd like it put it more simply-'Never imagine yourself otherwise that what is might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise' (72).

The use of the world "imagine" recalls the difficulty of avoiding the reality that childhood cannot be an eternal state, and despite our attempt to escape the experiences of reality, they will always prevent us from recreating a state of innocence. The reality is the force that requires us to be true to ourselves; we cannot pretend to be children and Carroll's suicidal frustrations create consequence enough to avoid this disillusion.

Carroll makes a futile attempt to model Alice's optimistic behavior. Although it is Alice's sister who undertakes the effort to enter Wonderland, Carroll's narrative voice appears to pervade her thoughts. Carroll acknowledges that an adult realizes that the dream is based in reality. It is in this way that he creates the relationship between childhood and the imagination. As discussed earlier, like an adult, a child is unable to imagine life much different than his current reality, but the difference is the consciousness of these restraints. Unlike Alice, her elder sister, Lorena, can only "half believe herself in Wonderland," and quickly identifies all of the elements and sounds of Wonderland as ones originating in her own world (98-99). Alice's Wonderland contains these same elements, but she is able to explore them without the awareness that each illusion has a mundane real life parallel; she is unable to see that the Queen's shrill cries is really the voice of the shepherd-boy. It is with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness that Carroll guarantees that Alice will someday find herself removed from these fantasies: "she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days" (99). This is the only passage that Carroll truly believes it is possible to imagine anything removed from his immediate environment, and ironically, this vision serves as an attack on imagination because it projects the inevitable end of Alice's dreamlike fantasies. As Lorena falters in her attempt, it appears that childhood presents the opportunity to believe that one has the freedom to imagine before it becomes evident that the only illusion is that which the child possesses: the belief the imagination is separate from reality.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

Plot OverviewAlice sits in her armchair at home, drowsily watching her pet kitten, Kitty, as she unravels a ball of string. She snatches Kitty up and begins telling her about “Looking-Glass House,” an imaginary world on the other side of the mirror where everything is backward. Alice suddenly finds herself on the mantelpiece and steps through the mirror into Looking-Glass House. On the other side of the mirror, Alice discovers a room similar to her own but with several strange differences. The chessmen stand in the fireplace in pairs, oblivious to Alice’s presence. She comes to the aid of the White Queen’s daughter, Lily, but realizes that the chess pieces cannot see her. Alice becomes distracted by a book on the shelf, in which she reads a nonsensical poem entitled “Jabberwocky.” Frustrated by the strange poem, she sets off to explore the rest of the house.Alice leaves the house and spots a beautiful garden in the distance, but every time she tries to follow the path to the garden she finds herself back at the door to the house. Confused, she wonders aloud how to get to the garden, and to her surprise a Tiger-lily responds. Other flowers join in the conversation, and several of them start to insult Alice. Alice learns from the flowers that the Red Queen is nearby, and Alice sets off to meet her. Alice meets the Red Queen, and the two engage in conversation, but the Red Queen constantly corrects Alice’s etiquette. Alice looks out over a field, sees a great game of chess in progress, and tells the Red Queen that she would like to join. The Red Queen tells Alice she can stand in as a White Pawn and marks a course for Alice, explaining that when she reaches the end of the game, Alice will become a Queen.Alice inexplicably finds herself on a train with a Goat, a Beetle, and a man dressed in white paper. They each nag Alice until the train eventually lurches to a halt. Alice finds herself in a forest, conversing with a chicken sized Gnat, who tells her about the different insects of Looking-Glass World. After learning the names of the insects, Alice sets off again and discovers that she has forgotten the names of things, even her own name. She comes across a Fawn, who has also forgotten the names of things, and the two press on through the forest.When Alice and the Fawn emerge from the forest, their memories of names come back, and the Fawn runs away in fear of Alice. Alice soldiers on alone until she meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, an identical pair of heavyset men. The twins ignore Alice’s repeated requests for directions and recite a poem instead. Tweedledum and Tweedledee notice the Red King sleeping nearby and explain to Alice that she exists only as a figment of the Red King’s dream. Upset at first, Alice decides that the two of them speak nonsense. A fight spontaneously erupts between Tweedledum and Tweedledee over a broken rattle. A giant crow swoops down and interrupts the fight, sending Tweedledum and Tweedledee running.Alice slips away and encounters the White Queen, who explains that time moves backward in Looking-Glass World. As they speak, the White Queen plasters her finger, then screams in pain, and finally pricks her finger on a brooch. After explaining to Alice that she used to practice the impossible daily, she transforms into a sheep in a shop. The

Sheep asks a disoriented Alice what she would like to buy. Though the shop is full of curious things, Alice finds that she cannot fix her eye on any one thing. The Sheep asks Alice if she knows how to row. Before she knows it, Alice finds herself in a boat with the Sheep, rowing down a stream. The boat crashes into something and sends Alice tumbling to the ground. When she stands she finds herself back in the shop. She purchases an egg from the Sheep, who places the egg on a shelf. Alice reaches for the egg and finds herself back in the forest, where the egg has transformed into Humpty Dumpty.Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall and criticizes Alice for having a name that doesn’t mean anything, explaining that all names should mean something. Humpty Dumpty treats Alice rudely, boasting that he can change the meanings of words at will. When Alice learns this, she asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the words of the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” to her. He defines the words of the first stanza and then recites a portion of his own poem. He abruptly bids her goodbye, and Alice storms off, annoyed. All of a sudden, a loud crash shakes the forest and she watches soldiers and horsemen run by.Alice comes across the White King, who explains to her that he has sent all of his horses and men, presumably to put the shattered Humpty Dumpty back together again. The King’s messenger Haigha approaches and informs them that the Lion and the Unicorn are doing battle in the town. Alice sets off with her new companions toward the town to watch the battle. They catch up with another of the King’s messengers, Hatta, who explains the events of the fight thus far. The Lion and Unicorn stop battling and the White King calls for refreshments to be served. The White King tells Alice to cut the cake, but she finds that every time she slices the cake the pieces fuse back together. The Unicorn instructs Alice that Looking-glass cakes must be passed around first before they are sliced. Alice distributes the cake, but before they begin eating, a great noise interrupts, and when Alice looks up, she finds herself alone again.The Red Knight gallops up to Alice and takes her as a prisoner. The White Knight arrives at Alice’s side and vanquishes the Red Knight. Alice and the White Knight walk and talk together, and Alice finds a friend in the eccentric chessman. He promises to bring her safely to the last square where she will become a queen. As they walk, he tells her about all of his inventions before sending her off with a song. She crosses the final brook and finds herself sitting on the bank with a crown on her head. Alice finds herself in the company of the Red Queen and the White Queen, who question her relentlessly before falling asleep in her lap. The sound of their snoring resembles music. The sound is so distracting that Alice doesn’t notice when the two queens disappear. Alice discovers a castle with a huge door marked “QUEEN ALICE.” Alice goes through the door and finds a huge banquet in her honor. She sits and begins eating, but the party quickly devolves into total chaos. Overwhelmed, Alice pulls away the tablecloth and grabs the Red Queen. Alice wakes up from her dream to find herself holding Kitty. She wonders aloud whether or not her adventures where her own dream or the dream of the Red King.

Character ListAlice - The seven-and-a-half-year-old protagonist of the story. Alice’s dream leads to her adventures in Looking-Glass World. Alice has set perceptions of the world and becomes frustrated when Looking-Glass World challenges those perceptions. Alice has good intentions, but has trouble befriending any of the creatures that populate Looking-Glass World.

Red Queen - A domineering, officious woman who brings Alice into the chess game. The Red Queen is civil but unpleasant, hounding Alice about her lack of etiquette and general knowledge.White Queen - An untidy, disorderly mess of a woman. The White Queen explains the properties of Looking-Glass World, including the reversal of time and the need to believe in the impossible.Red King - The sleeping King. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell Alice that she is not real and exists only as part of the Red King’s dream.White King - The White King sends his horses and men after Humpty Dumpty after his fall. The White King takes words literally. He is completely helpless and is terrified of the Lion and the Unicorn. White Knight - A kind and noble companion who rescues Alice from the Red Knight and leads her to the final square. The White Knight is old with shaggy hair, pale blue eyes, and a gentle face. He is an eccentric who has invented many bizarre contraptions.Humpty Dumpty - A contemptuous, egg-like man based on the nursery rhyme character. Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall and treats Alice rudely. He explains the meaning of “Jabberwocky” to Alice but changes the meanings of words.Tweedledum and Tweedledee -  A pair of identical little fat men dressed as schoolboys. Tweedledum and Tweedledee get along well and finish each other’s thoughts, but wind up fighting each other over a broken rattle.Unicorn - A mythical beast that resembles a horse with a long horn. The Unicorn battles the Lion. The Unicorn believes Alice to be a monster and tells Alice that he will believe in her if she agrees to believe in him. The Lion - The Lion does battle with the Unicorn in the town. The Lion’s actions imitate Alice’s nursery rhyme about the Lion and the Unicorn.Haigha and Hatta -  The White King’s messengers. Haigha is the March Hare and Hatta is the Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Their madness is under control in this story. The Sheep - An old shopkeeper. The Sheep is cranky and rude to Alice. The White Queen transforms into the Sheep.The Gnat - Alice’s companion on the train and in the wood. The Gnat grows from normal insect size to become as large as a chicken. He points out potential puns and wordplay to Alice and always seems to be sad.The Fawn - Alice’s companion through her travels through the wood, where she forgets the names of things. The Fawn is beautiful but runs away when it realizes that Alice is a human and might pose a threat.The Red Knight - A knight who attempts to capture Alice. The Red Knight is captured by the White Knight.

The Tiger-lily - A talking flower. The Tiger-lily speaks civilly to Alice and has some authority over the other flowers.The Rose - A talking flower that speaks rudely to Alice.The Violet - A talking flower that also speaks rudely to Alice.The Daisies - Talking flowers. The Daisies are extremely chatty and only quiet down when Alice threatens to pick them.Lily - The White Queen’s daughter. Alice takes Lily’s place as the White Pawn in the chess game. The Goat - A passenger on the train with Alice.The man in white paper -  A passenger on the train with Alice.Frog - The old footman at Alice’s castle.

Analysis of Major CharactersAliceIn Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is a child not yet eight years old. She has been raised in a wealthy Victorian household and is interested in good manners, which she demonstrates with her pet, Kitty. Alice treats others with kindness and courtesy, as evidenced in her various interactions with the Looking-Glass creatures. She has an extremely active imagination but seeks order in the world around her. Alice fights to understand the fantastic dream world that has sprung from her own imagination, trying her best to order her life experiences and connect them to the unusual situations she encounters in Looking-Glass World. Alice’s maturation transforms into a game of chess, in which her growth into womanhood becomes a quest to become a queen. Alice feels lonely, which motivates her to seek out company that she can sympathize and identify with. She creates a structured imaginary world that she can control, and creates Looking-Glass World in order to connect with other individuals and seek out company that she feels comfortable with. She desires a family and in the beginning of the book uses her pets as a substitute family in the “real” world. Alice knows that these are not genuine relationships, as seen when she breaks off conversation with her cats to have an aside to herself. Alice creates Looking-Glass World and desires to become a queen because she craves a sense of control over her surroundings. She relates to the residents of Looking-Glass World in the same way that she relates to her pets, taking on the manner of a good-natured mother figure who behaves with solicitude and deference despite her authority. Alice has occasional bouts of sadness and loneliness throughout her travels, when she acknowledges to herself that the characters that populate Looking-Glass World are not real and cannot show her true compassion or provide her with real companionship.

The Red QueenThe Red Queen behaves like the quintessential Victorian governess. She is overbearing, meticulously obsessive about manners, and civil in a self-righteous and supercilious way. Like the vast majority of the characters in Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen makes definitive statements with little regard for an abiding logic that would support them. Her assertions are often arbitrary recitations of strict behavioral advice, such as, “Speak when you’re spoken to!” When Alice reveals the inadequacy of the logic behind the Red Queen’s statements, the Red Queen asserts her arbitrary position of authority as a

justification. The Red Queen’s constant badgering of and competition with Alice indicates profound feelings of antagonism. She fits into the framework of Alice’s dream as representative arbitrary authority, serving as a caricature of an overbearing governess figure at odds with her young charges.

The White KnightCarroll modeled the character of the White Knight after himself, and the White Knight’s compassionate behavior toward Alice demonstrates Carroll’s feelings toward the real-life Alice Liddell. Like the White Knight, Carroll had shaggy hair, blue eyes, and a mild face. Also like Carroll, the White Knight has a penchant for inventing and compulsively preparing for any kind of contingency, no matter how ridiculous. The White Knight sweeps in at a moment of crisis to rescue Alice from the clutches of the Red Knight, before he helpfully escorts her to the point at which she no longer needs protection and can claim her new title of queen. As he guides her, he sings a song that conjures up feelings of wistful longing, calling attention to the idea of Alice’s transformation into a queen as a metaphor for her sexual awakening into womanhood. The White Knight represents a figure from her childhood who can bring her to the point at which she reaches adulthood before he must let go. The scene between the White Knight and Alice is marked by feelings of nostalgia tinged with regret, since Alice must eventually leave the White Knight and claim her new role alone.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

ThemesThemes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.Chess as Metaphor for FateAlice’s journey through Looking-Glass World is guided by a set of rigidly constructed rules that guide her along her path to a preordained conclusion. Within the framework of the chess game, Alice has little control over the trajectory of her life, and outside forces influence her choices and actions. Just as Alice exerts little control of her movement toward becoming a queen, she has no power over her inevitable maturation and acceptance of womanhood. At the beginning of the game, Alice acts as a pawn with limited perspective of the world around her. She has limited power to influence outcomes and does not fully understand the rules of the game, so an unseen hand guides her along her journey, constructing different situations and encounters that push her along toward her goal. Though she wants to become a queen, she must follow the predetermined rules of the chess game, and she frequently discovers that every step she takes toward her goal occurs because of outside forces acting upon her, such as the mysterious train ride and her rescue by the White Knight. By using the chess game as the guiding principle of the narrative, Carroll suggest that a larger force guides individuals through life and that all events are preordained. In this deterministic concept of life, free will is an illusion and individual choices are bound by rigidly determined rules and guided by an overarching, unseen force.Language as a Means to Order the WorldIn Through the Looking-Glass, language has the capacity to anticipate and even cause events to happen. Alice recites nursery rhymes on several occasions, which causes

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, and the Lion and the Unicorn to perform the actions that she describes in her rhymes. Rather than recording and describing events that have already happened, words give rise to actions simply by being spoken. Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s quarrel begins only after Alice recites the rhyme about the broken rattle. Similarly, Humpty Dumpty’s fall does not happen until Alice describes the events in the classic nursery rhyme. Language covers actions in Looking-Glass World, rather than simply describing them. The flowers reinforce this principle by explaining that a tree can scare enemies away with its “bark.” In our language, there is no relationship between the bark of a dog and the bark of a tree, but in Looking-Glass World, this linguistic similarity results in a functional common ground. Trees that have bark are thus able to “bark” just as fiercely as dogs.

The Loneliness of Growing UpThroughout her adventures, Alice feels an inescapable sense of loneliness from which she can find no relief. Before she enters Looking-Glass World, her only companions are her cats, to whom she attributes human qualities to keep her company. Once she enters Looking-Glass World, she seeks compassion and understanding from the individuals that she meets, but she is frequently disappointed. The flowers and Humpty Dumpty treat her rudely, the Red Queen is brusque, and the Fawn flees from her once it realizes that she is a human. She receives little compassion from others and often becomes sad. The one character who shows her compassion is the White Knight, who must leave her when she reaches the eighth square and must take on her role of Queen. Alice’s dreams deal with the anxieties of growing up and becoming a young woman. Since Alice believes that loneliness is an inherent part of growing up, even in her dreams she must face the transition into womanhood alone.

MotifsMotifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.Inverse ReflectionsMany of the basic assumptions that Alice makes about her environment are reversed in Looking-Glass World. Outcomes precede events, cakes are passed out before being cut, destinations are reached by walking in the opposite direction, and characters remember the future and think best while standing on their heads. These strange phenomena challenge the way Alice thinks and in some cases expose the arbitrary nature of her understanding of her own world. Many of Alice’s experiences exist as meaningless parodies of aspects of her own familiar world back home. Alice becomes aware of a new, inverted perspective on life as she travels forward and backward through Looking-Glass World.DreamAlice falls asleep at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, just as she did at the outset of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so that the resulting fantastical adventures occur in her dreams. The story follows Alice through the various episodes of Looking-Glass World so that we experience her adventures through her impressions of Looking-Glass House, the chess game, and her quest to become a queen. The characters and scenes that she encounters exist as a combination of her memories and impressions of the

waking world and the random, illogical inventions of her dreaming mind. Carroll emphasizes the dream motif by basing some of the denizens of Looking-Glass World on individuals from the life of his real-life muse, Alice Liddell. For example, the Red Queen is based on Alice’s governess Miss Prickett, while the White Knight is closely based upon Lewis Carroll himself. ChessThe chess game that Alice participates in becomes the organizing mechanism for her adventure in Looking-Glass World. Alice’s journey closely follows the rules of a traditional game of chess. The perspectives and movements of the individual characters correspond to the movements of their respective chess pieces. The Red and White Queens have an unlimited view of the board, since queens can move in any direction and as many spaces as they want in a single turn. The Red and White Kings can only move one space at a time in any direction, so while they have the same perspective as the queens, they have limited mobility. This limitation explains why the White King cannot follow the White Queen as she runs away from the other chessmen, since she moves “too fast.” As a pawn, Alice can only move forward once space at a time, with the exception of her first move, in which she can move two spaces. Like a pawn, Alice can only “see” one square ahead of her. When she reaches the final square and becomes a queen, she can “see” the whole board because now she has the full mobility of the queen chess piece. Alice’s move to take the Red Queen results in a checkmate of the Red King, ending the chess game and causing Alice to wake up. Train ImageryTrains and train imagery appear frequently to underscore the feeling of unstoppable forward motion that governs Alice’s journey toward womanhood. The Red King’s somnolent snoring resembles a train engine, while the White Queen screams like a train whistle before she pricks her finger. Alice skips forward several spaces when she finds herself unexpectedly on a train, shooting through the forest toward her destination and mimicking Alice’s forward movement as a pawn in the chess game. The train imagery suggests the irreversible and unstoppable movement toward adulthood that Alice becomes subject to in her journey through Looking-Glass World.

SymbolsSymbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.The RushesThe rushes that Alice pulls from the water in Chapter V represent dreams. Rushes are plans that grow in riverbeds and poke through the surface of the water. The rapid fading of the rushes’ sweet scene after being picked corresponds to the fleetingness of the memory of a dream after a person wakes up. The Sleeping Red King Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell Alice that she is only a creation of the Red King’s dream, which implies that Looking-Glass World is not a construction of Alice’s dream. The Red King becomes a divine figure who dreams up all of Alice’s adventures, fostering the idea that she does not actually have any identity or agency beyond what she is allowed in the context of the dream. The idea that we are all just aspects of the dream of a

divine power comes from Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher who wrote during Carroll’s lifetime and who believed that man and the universe exist as part of God’s imagination.

Chapter I: Looking-Glass HouseSummaryAlice rests at home in an armchair, talking drowsily to herself as her black kitten, Kitty, plays with a ball of string at her feet. Alice lovingly scolds the kitten for unraveling the ball of string that she had been winding up. She goes on to scold Kitty’s mother, Dinah, who is busy bathing the white kitten Snowdrop. Alice begins an imaginative conversation with Kitty, pretending that her pet talks back, and asks her to pretend that she is the Red Queen in a chess game. Alice attempts to arrange Kitty’s forelegs to better resemble the chess piece. When Kitty does not comply, Alice holds her up to the mirror above the mantle and threatens to put Kitty into the world on the other side of the mirror, which she calls “Looking-Glass House.” Alice thinks about what Looking-Glass House must be like, wondering aloud to Kitty if there might be a way to break through to the other side of the mirror. All of a sudden, Alice finds herself on the mantle, staring into the mirror. She magically steps through the mirror into Looking-Glass House.On the other side of the mirror, Alice looks around and finds that the room she is standing in resembles the mirror image of the room in her own house. However, several parts of the room look quite different. The pictures on the wall near the mirror seem to be alive, and the mantle clock has the face of a grinning little man. Alice notices a group of chessmen inside the fireplace among the cinders, walking in line two-by-two. Alice examines them closely and determines that she is invisible to them. She hears a squeak behind her. Alice wheels around to find a White Pawn on the table. Out of the fireplace charges the White Queen, who knocks over the White King in her haste, rushing to grab her child. Alice helpfully lifts the White Queen onto the table, and the White Queen gasps in surprise as Alice grabs the Queen’s child Lily. The White King follows, but he quickly grows impatient. Alice lifts him up, dusts him off, and places him down next to the White Queen. The White King lies on his back, stunned in surprise, which causes Alice to realize that she is invisible to the chessmen. Once the White King recovers, he pulls out a pencil and begins jotting his experience down, but Alice snatches the pencil from him and writes something down in his book. The White King comments that he must get a new book, since strange words seem to appear on the pages of his current one.Alice picks up one of the books from the table and discovers that the text is backward. She holds the book up to the mirror to read it properly and reads the poem on the page. The poem, entitled “Jabberwocky,” describes a knight’s travels to vanquish a hideous monster known as the Jabberwock. Perplexed by the poem, Alice sets the book down and decides to explore the rest of the house. As she leaves the room and begins heading down the stairs, she finds herself floating until she finally catches hold of the door-post to the door that leads outside of Looking-Glass House.

AnalysisIn his stories, Carroll blurs the boundaries between being awake and being asleep so that it becomes difficult to tell where reality ends and dreaming begins. At the beginning of the chapter, Alice enjoys a drowsy winter nap near the fire. She leaves her chair only to

snatch up Kitty and place her on her knee. Alice dozes off in this position, and her step through the mirror happens in her dream. Since she is only half asleep, Alice’s experiences combine elements from the waking world and her dreams. The dream motif of Through the Looking-Glass differs from the one found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for here Alice exercises some control over what she encounters in her fantasy world. Alice’s repeated pleas to Kitty to play pretend emphasize her desire to exert some control over her imagination.Alice discovers that the room on the other side of the mirror is nearly identical to her old room, showing the motif of inversion that reappears throughout the text. The alternate dimension is not just a mirror image, but a comprehensive inversion of reality. In Looking-Glass House, Alice no longer needs a fire, since the winter of the real world becomes summer in the imagined world, where the gardens are in bloom and the trees are filled with leaves. Even the inanimate objects in Alice’s old room, such as the pictures and the mantle clock, spring to life. Alice appears invisible to the chess pieces, which is one aspect of the inversion that occurs in Looking-Glass House. In Alice’s world, she is alive while the chess pieces are inanimate, but Looking-Glass World belongs to the chess pieces, where they have a working order to their lives. Like the chessboard, their lives are highly symmetrical and controlled. Alice’s invisibility suggests that she maintains a godlike power over the chessmen of Looking-Glass World, which stems from the fact that the whole universe exists as part of her imagination. Alice picks up the White King as if she were a divine power manipulating the lives of the chess pieces. This establishes the idea of the chessboard as a plane of existence upon which individuals are positioned like chess pieces and moved around according to predetermined rules. Inside the house, Alice’s invisibility allows her to be an unseen hand, but the image of the chessboard gains its full significance in the next chapter when she joins the chess game outside. There, Alice becomes a chess piece herself, manipulated by an unseen hand, presumably the authorial hand of Carroll. The imposition of this hand starts to become apparent when Alice loses control over her body and floats down the stairs, propelled forward toward her destiny by the unseen hand of the author.

Chapter II: The Garden of Live Flowers SummaryOnce outside, Alice climbs a nearby hill to get a better look at the garden near the house. However, every time she begins to follow the path to the hill, she finds herself back at the door to the house. Dismayed, she mentions her frustration to Tiger-lily, who surprises her by responding in perfect English. The Tiger-lily explains that all flowers can talk. The Rose chimes in and mentions that Alice does not look very clever. Alice asks them if they feel at all vulnerable. They explain to her that they are protected by a nearby tree that will bark at any approaching threats. The Daisies begin caterwauling and Alice silences them by threatening to pick them.The Rose and the Violet continue to insult Alice, but the Tiger-lily reprimands them for their rudeness. Alice learns from the flowers that there is another person like her in the garden. They describe the Red Queen, who now looks human and stands a head taller than Alice. The Rose advises Alice to walk the other way, but Alice sets off toward the

Red Queen, ending up back at the door of Looking-Glass House. Once she sets off in the opposite direction, she eventually reaches the Red Queen.The Red Queen is friendly but overbearing when she strikes up a conversation with Alice. Alice explains her plight to the Red Queen and mentions the garden, which prompts the Red Queen to remark that she has seen gardens that would make this one seem like a wilderness. When Alice mentions the hill, the Red Queen states that she has seen hills to make this hill look like a valley. Frustrated, Alice tells the Red Queen that she speaks nonsense, but the Queen responds that she has heard nonsense that would make her claims seem as sensible as a dictionary. The Red Queen takes Alice to the hill, where she notices that the surrounding countryside resembles a giant chessboard. Alice spots a game of chess happening on the chessboard and expresses her desire to join the game. The Red Queen tells Alice that she may stand in for the Tiger-lily as a White Pawn. The two begin a brisk run but remain in the same place. Once finished with their run, the Red Queen explains the chess game to Alice. Alice starts at the second square and must travel through the other squares. A different character owns each square, and once Alice reaches the eighth square she will become a queen herself. With a few final words of advice, the Red Queen bids Alice goodbye and disappears.

AnalysisJust like in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice acts as an explorer in Looking-Glass World, recalling other explorers discovering new territories in the late Victorian era. Like the English Imperialist explorers of Carroll’s time, Alice intrudes on foreign lands with preconceived notions about language, manners, and the way the world works. When she meets the living flowers, she discovers not only that others do not share her assumptions, but that the native population perceives her as foolish. Alice’s lack of knowledge about Looking-Glass World creates a culture clash in which her confusion over the flowers’ explanation of why trees have “bark” and “boughs” inspires scorn in the flowers. Alice fails to understand that in Looking-Glass World she must do everything backward. She gets confused when the Rose advises her to “walk the other way” to reach the Red Queen. Alice relates to the Red Queen how she is “lost” because she does not realize that in the mirror one has to move away from an object to get closer to it. The path seems to actively punish her for failing to understand the properties of Looking-Glass World, deliberately rearranging itself to get her off track. The principles of inversion do not solely affect space and distance, but also movement. The faster Alice moves, the less distance she covers, so that when she runs she never seems to leave her initial position.Alice becomes a pawn in the game of chess and discovers that Looking-Glass World closely follows the strict rules of chess. Alice can only move forward one “square” at a time, despite the fact that she seems to wield a degree of imaginative control over Looking-Glass World. While the Queen seems to “vanish” because she can travel quickly across the board, just as a Queen has greater mobility in a game of chess. As a pawn, Alice has much more restricted mobility and line of vision. Alice is not only a pawn in the game of chess, but also in the text of the book. The author has absolute control over Alice’s actions and can move her around at will in the context of the story as if she were a pawn.

Chapter III: Looking-Glass Insects SummaryAlice surveys her surroundings, spotting a group of elephants in the distance that seem to be pollinating flowers and making honey. She sets off in the direction of the elephants, but changes her mind and starts heading down the hill in the other direction. Before she knows it, she finds herself riding inside a carriage, and she explains to the Guard present that she doesn’t have a ticket. She hears various voices in the carriage badgering her, as the Guard examines her with a telescope, a microscope, and opera glasses. The other passengers in the carriage begin to discuss Alice. A man dressed entirely in white paper comments that she ought to know where her ticket is, while a goat interjects that she should know the location of the ticket office. A beetle comments that Alice will have to make the return journey as luggage. Alice hears a hoarse voice in her ear that suggests various jokes she can make using wordplay. As the train prepares to jump over a brook, Alice speaks back to the voice. The train jumps and Alice finds herself sitting quietly in the shade of a tree.The strange voice turns out to be the voice of a gnat, who has grown to the size of a chicken since they landed in the forest. Alice and the Gnat discuss the difference between the insects in Alice’s world and Looking-Glass World. He explains that the horsefly becomes a rocking horsefly, the dragonfly becomes a snapdragon fly, and the butterfly becomes a Bread-and-butter-fly. Alice wonders what would happen to the Bread-and-butter-fly when it cannot find its chosen diet of weak tea and cream. The Gnat informs her that this is a regular occurrence, which means that Bread-and-butter-flies frequently die. The Gnat then warns Alice that she will lose her name if she travels into the wood. The Gnat discusses lost names and then vanishes as mysteriously as he appeared. Alice journeys into the wood and finds that she cannot remember the name of anything. In her confusion, she thinks that her name begins with the letter “L.” She comes across a Fawn, who helps her through the wood. Once they exit the forest, the Fawn runs away now that it remembers that it is a fawn and Alice is a human. Alone again, Alice notices a series of signs pointing the way to Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s house. She heads off in that direction but bumps into them before she reaches her destination.

AnalysisAlice fully understands the lack of control that she exerts over herself and where she wishes to go in Looking-Glass World. Despite her strong attraction to the elephants, she pulls back from going to meet them in favor of remaining on the chessboard and following the rules of the game. Back on the chessboard, her movements become measured and predictable. Alice’s train ride allows her to skip the third “square,” propelling her forward two spaces, mimicking the fact that pawns move two spaces forward on their first move. From this point on, Alice’s movement and geographical position are charted in the chess diagram provided at the beginning of the book.Alice and the Gnat discuss in detail how one’s name should relate to one’s identity or physical characteristics. As they discuss the names of different insects in their respective worlds, the Gnat asks Alice about the purpose of names if the insects do not respond to the names when called by them. Alice explains that the names are not necessarily for animals and objects to identify themselves by and respond to, but rather, names help those with powers of language to label, classify, and organize what they experience. In

Looking-Glass World, humans are not the only species with powers of language, which changes Alice’s perceptions about the act of naming and the properties of names. Alice’s interactions with the Fawn are initially friendly, but he bolts upon learning that it is a Fawn and she is a human child. Alice discovers that names do not simply label, but convey information about how something operates in the world in relation to other things. The Bread-and-butter-fly, as its name suggests, lives on weak tea with cream, and Fawns fear humans, their conditioned enemies.The Fawn’s fear of Alice suggests Carroll’s preoccupation with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Carroll was a deeply religious man who felt threatened by Charles Darwin’s research on evolution, which was published at the same time that Carroll was writing. To Carroll, the theory of evolution challenged the Christian belief in a harmonious universe created by God in the manner described in the book of Genesis. As in Genesis, the forest resembles Eden, in which men and animals coexisted harmoniously. Alice and the Fawn exit the forest just as Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden after tasting from the Tree of Knowledge. Just like the story of the Fall of Eden, the Fawn becomes afraid once it remembers that Alice is a human and that she presents a threat to his safety. The reference to the Fall calls attention to Carroll’s anxiety about Darwin’s theories of evolution, which in his perception sought to undo the idea of a harmonious universe that might bring about a second Fall.

Chapter IV: Tweedledum and TweedledeeSummaryAlice approaches the portly twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who stand side by side with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Upon seeing them, Alice begins reciting a poem that she knows about them. The poem describes Tweedledee and Tweedledum fighting over a broken rattle until a crow frightens them, causing them to forget their argument. They deny that this has ever happened, and though they ignore Alice’s questions about how to get out of the wood, they do extend their hands to her in greeting. Alice does not want to choose one over the other, so she grabs each man’s hand and the three begin dancing in a ring. After a short dance, they stop, and though Alice continues to ask how to get out of the wood, Tweedledee and Tweedledum ignore her. Tweedledee begins reciting “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem that describes the story of a Walrus and a Carpenter who trick a group of young oysters into leaving their home underwater and coming to shore with them. Once the oysters get to shore, the Walrus and the Carpenter eat them. When Tweedledee finishes, Alice states that she prefers the Walrus because he feels sympathy for the oysters. Tweedledee points out that the Walrus ate more oysters than the Carpenter, and Alice changes her mind, stating her new preference for the Carpenter. Tweedledum observes that the Carpenter ate as many oysters as he could, which causes Alice to doubt her feelings. As she tries to sort out her feelings, Alice becomes distracted by the Red King sleeping under a tree and snoring like a train engine. Tweedledee tells Alice that the Red King is dreaming about her, and if he stops, she will vanish. Alice starts to cry at the thought that she is real, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum try to comfort her by telling her that her tears are not real.

Alice decides that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are talking nonsense and that she is indeed real. Alice changes the subject and starts to leave when Tweedledee grabs her wrists and points to a broken rattle on the ground. Tweedledum recognizes it as his new rattle, and explodes in anger while Tweedledee cowers in fear. Tweedledee calms down and the two agree to a battle to determine ownership of the rattle. Alice helps them put on their battle gear, but before they can begin fighting, a great crow comes and scares them off, and Alice slips away into the wood alone.

Analysis Tweedledum and Tweedledee are mirror images of one another, reintroducing the theme of inversion. With the exception of their names, the two little fat men are identical in looks, manner, and stance. They exhibit perfect symmetry, standing together with their arms around each other, so that when they extend their free hands they each reflect the other’s body position. Their conversation also displays a symmetrical position designated by Tweedledee’s favorite expression, “contrariwise.” “Contrariwise” functions as a transitional word that flips the premise of the conversation. Tweedledee usually addresses the other side of whatever Tweedledum just said. The twins’ reversal of language becomes apparent in the following exchange with Alice:TWEEDLEDUM: I know what you’re thinking about . . . but it isn’t so, nohow.

TWEEDLEDEE: Contrariwise . . . if it was so, it might be . . . That’s logic.The inversion motif appears on a larger scale in the fight between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, since it appears at the beginning of the chapter in Alice’s recitation and ends the chapter as an actual event. Their scripted quarrel reveals the power of language to affect outcomes. Language has an almost magical effect on Tweedledee and Tweedledum in creating a rattle that did not exist before the two met Alice. Language also seems to cause their battle. Tweedledum and Tweedledee must play out the events of Alice’s rhyme, and their lives are destined to imitate the events in the poem.The episode with the sleeping Red King causes Alice to question whether or not she actually exists. The possibility that she may be a figment of the Red King’s dream complicates her already slippery hold on reality. Tweedledee’s suggestion questions the stability of reality itself. Alice has already experienced the loss of her name, a fundamental aspect of her sense of self. Here, she loses the security of her material existence in the world. If the Red King is in fact dreaming Alice into existence, then he is the only thing in Looking-Glass World that truly exists. The only way to test this hypothesis would be to wake the Red King up, but if he has imagined Alice, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee, none of them would be able to ask him about it, since they exist only in his dreams and thus cannot affect his waking life. Even Alice’s emotions are artificial, since her tears are only real to her. Though the tears serve as evidence of real emotion, that real emotion exists as a figment of the King’s dream.The episode of the Red King’s dream opens up greater implications for Alice and the readers about reality and the nature of God. The presence of the Red King suggests the notion that no person actually exists, but lives solely as a fragment of a divine imagination. The chessboard motif makes sense as a tool for organizing the story since it functions as an allegory for human life in general. The characters in the story live a deterministic existence in which they have no free will and move about according to the

will of their creator. Free will is an illusion in this world, since the residents of Looking-Glass World must follow the rules of the chess game in all of their actions. The idea of free will as an illusion challenges our understanding of Alice’s adventures, since we have understood that they exist as part of Alice’s own imagination. By introducing the possibility that Alice acts under the manipulation of a larger divine force, Carroll presents the idea that human life exists as an abstraction of the imagination of a larger divine force.

Chapter V: Wool and WaterSummaryAs Alice runs through the forest, she comes across a shawl blowing about in front of her. She grabs the shawl and bumps into the White Queen, who has been chasing through the wood after her missing shawl. In thanks, the White Queen offers Alice a job as her maid, promising “twopence a week, and jam every other day.” Alice respectfully declines. The White Queen tells Alice that she lives backward and remembers events before they happen. She goes on to inform Alice that the King’s Messenger will be in prison the week after next, that his trial begins next Wednesday, and that his crime will come last of all. As the two discuss the merits of punishment for a crime that may not be committed, the White Queen starts screaming like an engine whistle. She tells Alice she will prick her finger, and then pricks it as she refastens her shawl.Alice feels lonely and begins to cry. The White Queen cheers her up by telling her to consider things such as her age before admitting that she is over one hundred years old. When Alice states that to live to a hundred is impossible, the White Queen counters that Alice cannot believe the impossible because she has not had any practice. The White Queen’s shawl blows away again, and she chases after it over a brook. As Alice crosses the brook to catch up with her, the White Queen transforms into a sheep, and Alice finds herself suddenly in a shop.The Sheep asks Alice what she would like to buy and Alice begins looking around the shop. Though filled with curious items, every shelf that Alice sets her eyes upon appears to be empty. The Sheep then tells Alice she must begin “feathering,” which means rowing. Alice looks around and finds herself in a boat with the Sheep on a river. Alice rows until the boat reaches sweet-scented rushes, which she pulls up from the water and lays at her feet. She begins rowing again, but the oar gets caught, jarring the boat so that Alice falls down to the floor of the boat. When she stands up again, Alice finds herself back in the shop, where the Sheep asks her again what she would like to buy. Alice pays for an egg, which the Sheep places on a shelf for her. Every time Alice moves toward the egg on the shelf, it seems to get progressively farther away from her. She continues to walk toward the egg as the shop transforms back into the wood.

Analysis Time moves backward in Looking-Glass World, further challenging the assumption that people have control over the choices they make. Time does not move backward toward a final point of origin. Instead, characters move forward while the order of events moves backward. The White Queen illustrates this principle by explaining that the King’s Messenger will be sentenced before he commits his crime. Her wounds heal and she experiences pain before she becomes injured. All of the characters, the White Queen

included, “remember” both the past and the future. They have knowledge of events before they happen, which reinforces the deterministic aspect of Looking-Glass World. Causal relationships are inverted, so that every effect experienced leads back to a cause that eventually occurs. Characters commit actions for which they have already experienced the consequences. Because of this, the concept of free will in Looking-Glass World becomes tenuous at best. As the White Queen attempts to cheer Alice up, she points some of the arbitrary conventions that Alice lives by. The White Queen chastises Alice for refusing to believe that she is over a hundred years old on the grounds that it is “impossible.” Alice does not know what is possible in this fantasy world, especially since her adventures thus far have repeatedly challenged her preconceived expectation. Even under the assumption that Alice’s doubts are justified, the White Queen’s claim to be a hundred years old is not impossible, merely unlikely. Regardless, Alice should know by now that individuals in Looking-Glass World are capable of doing the impossible.

Chapter VI: Humpty DumptySummaryAlice approaches the egg, which has grown large and transformed into Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty idly sits on a wall, taking no notice of Alice until she remarks how much he resembles an egg. Irritated by this remark, Humpty Dumpty insults Alice. She starts to softly recite the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, and he asks for her name and requests that she state her business. Alice tells Humpty Dumpty her name and he tells her that her name is stupid. In Humpty Dumpty’s opinion, names should mean something, offering his own name as an example since it alludes to the shape of his body. He goes on to remark that with a name like Alice, she could be any shape at all. Concerned for his safety, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty why he sits atop the wall. He replies that the King made him a promise, which spurs Alice’s memory of the rhyme stating that the King’s horses and the King’s men put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Alice’s allusion to the poem angers Humpty Dumpty, who insists that he is well protected and changes the subject.Humpty Dumpty seems to make a riddle out of every part of their conversation. Alice compliments his cravat, which he explains he received from the White King and Queen for his un-birthday. He explains that an un-birthday is a day that is not his birthday. Humpty Dumpty declares that un-birthdays are better than birthdays and starts to use words that make no sense in the context of what he says. Alice questions what he means, to which he retorts that he can make words do anything that he wants, though he pays words extra if he requires them to do a lot of work. Alice remembers the poem “Jabberwocky,” and she asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the words to her. She recites the first stanza, which he picks apart word by word. Humpty Dumpty then begins his own poem for her, which abruptly ends with a goodbye. Annoyed, Alice walks off, complaining about his behavior when a great crash resounds through the wood.

Analysis Humpty Dumpty reintroduces the idea of naming and the role it plays in shaping identity. Unlike the Fawn and the Gnat, Humpty Dumpty has a nuanced understanding of naming. However, Humpty Dumpty maintains an understanding of language that reverses Alice’s

understanding of the way language works. Alice believes that proper names do not have profound significance, while names for universal concepts such as a “glory” or “impenetrability” have fixed meanings that all people understand. Humpty Dumpty believes the opposite, stating that he finds the name Alice to be stupid since it fails to connote anything about who she is. Humpty Dumpty continues this manipulation of language, taking liberties with the meanings of known words and establishing definitions for them that suit his purposes. Words become characters under Humpty Dumpty’s employment, an idea he promotes with the claim that he literally pays the words more when he makes them do a lot of work.Humpty Dumpty’s philosophy of naming demonstrates both the arbitrariness of lanugage and the capacity of literature to convey meaning. Humpty Dumpty redefines the meanings of words at will, but he must use other words that have presumably stable meanings to explain the new definitions. If too many words have fluid meanings, their meanings will change erratically, and language will cease to function as a system capable of communicating ideas. Humpty Dumpty’s ideas about language will fall apart if multiple people adjust the meanings of words to suit their individual fancy. When applied to literature, Humpty Dumpty’s ideas are more appropriate. Authors manipulate the multiple meanings of words they use when writing, giving their language a richness that has the potential to fascinate and delight readers. Carroll’s frequent use of puns and wordplay shows how attuned he was to this property of language. Even in this section, Carroll plays with the pun on the “richness” of language, indicating that Humpty Dumpty pays words more when they work harder.

Chapter VII: The Lion and the Unicorn Summary Alice sees soldiers and horses running through the forest as she walks into the wood. She comes across the White King, who is jotting notes down in his memorandum book. He delightedly tells Alice that he has sent out all of his horses and men, with the exception of two horses needed for “the game,” and his messengers, Haigha and Hatta, who are in town on errands. The White King asks Alice if she passed Haigha or Hatta on the road, but she declares that she has seen nobody. The White King expresses amazement that she can see “Nobody” at all, admitting that he has difficulty seeing real people. Confused, Alice looks around, and finally catches sight of Haigha wriggling toward them. When Haigha (the March Hare) arrives, the White King asks him for a hand sandwich. After devouring the sandwich, the White King munches on hay given to him by Haigha and asks his messenger if he passed anyone on the road. Haigha says he passed “nobody,” prompting the White King to declare that Alice saw Nobody too, and that Nobody must be a slow walker. Haigha asserts that he is sure that nobody walks faster than he does. The White King disagrees, explaining that Nobody would be with them now if Nobody did indeed walk faster.Haigha informs the White King that the Lion and the Unicorn are fighting in town. As they run to town to watch, Alice repeats a nursery rhyme about the Lion and the Unicorn. In the rhyme, the Lion and the Unicorn fight for a crown, stop to eat bread and cake, and are then drummed out of town. When they arrive in town, Alice and her companions stand with Hatta (the Mad Hatter). Hatta informs them of the events of the fight thus far. The Lion and the Unicorn stop their fighting for a moment. The White King calls for a

refreshment break, so Hatta and Haigha pass bread around. Alice notices the White Queen dart through, observing that someone seems to be chasing her. The White King realizes that Alice has caught sight of the White Queen and points out that she runs so quickly that following her would be fruitless.The Unicorn approaches Alice, staring at her in disgust as it asks her what she is. Alice states that she is a child, but the Unicorn decides that she is a Monster. The Unicorn strikes up a bargain with Alice that they will believe in each other now that they have seen each other. The Unicorn calls for cake, which Haigha produces. The Lion joins them, and orders Alice to cut the cake. Despite her repeated slicing, the cake persists in coming back together. The Unicorn explains that Alice must pass the cake around first and cut afterward. Alice begins passing the cake, and it splits into three pieces, leaving her with nothing to cut. Just then, she hears a deafening drumbeat that scares her and causes her to run off in terror. She crouches on the other side of a brook, imagining that the noise also caused the Lion and the Unicorn to flee.

AnalysisAlice again sees the power language has to dictate outcomes, for the events described in her nursery rhymes come true both for Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn. The crash that begins the chapter is the fall that Alice described in her nursery rhyme, an assumption reinforced by the fact that the White King sends (almost) all of his horses and men, presumably to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Similarly, the battle between the Lion and the Unicorn unfolds in the same way as the nursery rhyme. The White King’s literalist tendencies reinforce the idea that language dictates outcomes. He mistakes Alice and Haigha’s unspecific “nobody” for a real person named “Nobody.” The White King portrays Nobody as a character who takes words at their face value, which reaffirms the inversion motif. For the White King, things and events are not explained through words, but words themselves become literal things and events.

Chapter VIII: “It’s My Own Invention”SummaryAs the pounding of the drums dies away, Alice starts to wonder if she still exists as part of the Red King’s dream. At this moment, the Red Knight barrels toward her, screaming “Check!” The White Knight comes to Alice’s rescue, and the two chess pieces fight furiously until the Red Knight gallops off. The White Knight happily tells Alice that he will bring her safely to the next brook, explaining that once she crosses the brook she will become a queen. As they walk, the White Knight describes all of the items that he carries with him. He carries a box to keep clothes and food, a beehive for keeping bees, a mousetrap to protect his horse from mice, and horse-anklets to guard against shark-bites. As he speaks to Alice, he repeatedly falls off of his horse. She questions his riding ability, which offends him. The White Knight explains that he has practiced riding frequently, which is the key to good horsemanship. Alice finds his claims to be ridiculous.As the White Knight and Alice continue traveling toward the brook, he explains several of his inventions to Alice. He has developed a new kind of helmet, several ways to jump a fence, and a new kind of pudding, which he considers to be his greatest invention. All of the White Knight’s inventions seem to have something wrong with them. Alice becomes increasingly puzzled by his explanations as they approach the forest’s border.

The White Knight mistakes Alice’s confusion for sadness, and proposes that he sing a song that has several different names. Upon finishing the song, the White Knight points to the brook that she must jump over to become a queen. He asks her to wait to jump until he reaches a turn far off down the road. Alice waits for him to pass out of sight, waving her handkerchief after him, and jumps over the brook. On the other side, she finds herself sitting on a lawn wearing a crown.

AnalysisWith the exception of the White Knight, the characters of Looking-Glass World have no understanding of the rules of the chess game that organize their lives. Alice has finally reached the seventh square and will become a queen with her next move. Since she moves as a pawn, she has no sense of the squares around her. She learns of her impending transformation into a queen from the White Knight, who comes to rescue her from the Red Knight. With the help of the chessboard diagram provided by Carroll, it becomes obvious that Alice faced no danger from the Red Knight, who had recently moved to the square adjacent to Alice. The Red Knight’s cry of “Check!” is not intended for Alice, whom, based on the rules of chess, he cannot capture, but for the White King, whom the Red Knight has put in check. The Red Knight has no understanding of the game, and upon seeing Alice, believes that he is meant to capture her. The White Knight arrives and enters the Red Knight’s square, defeating the Red Knight. The White Knight guides Alice to the eighth square, but before leaving she must see him off in his next move. Carroll follows the rules of chess closely, requiring Alice to watch the White Knight as the turns the bend in the road, following the one-across, two-over movement of the Knight in chess.The White Knight appears as a fictional manifestation of Lewis Carroll. Critics have pointed out similarities between the two, noting the physical resemblance between them. Both the White Knight and Carroll have shaggy hair, mild blue eyes, and kindly smiles. Like Carroll, the Knight invents curious contraptions to help provide for any contingency. While the White Knight readies himself for a shark attack, Carroll created devices such as an object to allow him to take notes in the dark. More importantly, Alice finds in the White Knight and individual who truly esteems and cares for her. He soothes her loneliness, but this does not stop her from leaving him to become a queen. This decision imitates how Alice Liddell grew apart from Carroll as she matured. The song that the White Knight sings to Alice serves as Carroll’s heartfelt, if misdirected, tribute to the real life Alice. Carroll implies that Alice does not feel sadness, only confusion. Alice’s dismissal of the White King in her final remark about him affirms that she has grown up: “‘I hope it encouraged him,’ she said, as she turned to run down the hill.” Alice dismisses the White Knight’s offer of love and friendship as she goes off to become a queen, just as Alice abandoned Carroll when she became a young woman.

Chapters IX–XII: Queen Alice; Shaking; Waking; Which Dreamed I?SummaryAfter realizing that she has become a Queen, Alice finds herself in the company of the Red Queen and the White Queen. The two queens begin questioning her relentlessly, telling her that she cannot be a queen until she passes the proper examination. They ask her strange questions about manners, mathematics, the alphabet, how to make bread,

languages, and the cause of lightning. The Red Queen frustrates Alice by correcting every incorrect answer. Alice mistakenly remarks that thunder causes lightning, but when she attempts to reverse her statement, the Red Queen snaps that once she says something, she must live with the consequences. The White Queen changes the subject to a thunderstorm that occurred on the last set of Tuesdays. Confused, Alice listens to a sneering explanation that in Looking-Glass World, days are taken two or three at a time. The White Queen continues her foolish story, while the Red Queen apologizes to Alice for the White Queen’s behavior, explaining to Alice that the White Queen wasn’t brought up well. The Red Queen asks Alice to sing a lullaby to the White Queen, but Alice claims that she doesn’t know any. The Red Queen begins singing instead, causing the White Queen to fall asleep on Alice’s shoulder. Soon, the Red Queen falls asleep, too, and both queens slump their heads into Alice’s lap. The snoring sounds like a song to Alice. She becomes distracted by the music and doesn’t notice when the two queens vanish inexplicably. When Alice looks up, she finds herself standing in front of a door emblazoned with the words “QUEEN ALICE.” Alice wants to enter but only finds a visitor’s bell and a servant’s bell, and no bell for guests. She knocks on the door and it flies open. The words “NO ADMITTANCE UNTIL THE WEEK AFTER NEXT!” boom out of the open door. Alice continues to knock to no avail, until eventually an old frog approaches from behind her and asks her what she wants. Alice explains that no one will answer the door. The confused Frog asks what the door has been asking and whether it would need an answer. The door flies open again and Alice hears a song about Queen Alice’s grand party. Alice finds a large table set before her with fifty guests seated around it. She sits down at the head of the table between the White Queen and the Red Queen. A servant brings out food and the Red Queen formally introduces Alice to the food. After the introduction, the Red Queen sends the food back to the kitchen, commenting that it is impolite to eat something after one has made acquaintance with it. Alice becomes frustrated and asks to get the pudding back, which she slices and serves to the guests. As the pudding is passed around, Alice asks the guests why there are so many poems in Looking-Glass World on the subject of fish. The White Queen responds by telling a riddle that asks whether answering the door or uncovering a dish of fish is more difficult. The queens toast Alice, who rises to give thanks to her guests. As she stands up, the room spontaneously erupts into chaos. Candles rise to the ceiling, guests become stuck to their plates, the White Queen tumbles into a soup tureen, and a soup ladle storms around the table. Alice grabs the tablecloth and tugs it off of the table, sending all of the guests flying to the ground. Alice turns to the Red Queen, whom she considers responsible for the chaos, and grabs her. The Red Queen shrinks down to the size of a doll and Alice begins shaking her. Before Alice’s eyes, the Red Queen seems to transform into her kitten Kitty. Alice realizes that she has woken up. She scolds Kitty for waking her up and then grabs the small Red Queen off of the nearby chess table, trying to get Kitty to admit that she had transformed into the Red Queen. Alice addresses Snowdrop, stating her suspicion that the white kitten is the White Queen. Lastly, Alice tries to guess who Dinah might be before deciding that she’s probably Humpty Dumpty. She turns back to Kitty and tells her all about the fish-themed poetry she heard in her dream.

Analysis

The chess motif becomes highly pronounced in this chapter, and the various movements of the pieces signify the conclusion of the game. As Alice becomes Queen, the movements and positions of the individual pieces become clear. Flanked by both queens, Alice can see the entire chessboard. As she sits at the head of the table in her castle, all of the guests stretched out before her represent the other chess pieces. The table in this scene represents the table in Alice’s house on which the chessboard rests, adjacent to the “real” Alice asleep in her chair. The White Queen’s move to the soup tureen sets up the Red King’s “checkmate,” and when Alice slides over to seize the Red Queen, she puts the Red King in checkmate herself and ends the chess game. Now that the game has ended, Alice wakes up from her dream and finds herself holding Kitty.Alice seems unsure of herself at the start of the game, but once she exerts her power as a queen, she exposes the façade and liberates herself from the confines of the chessboard. The Red and White Queens’ relentless questioning represents an attempt to flatten Alice into submission so that she becomes part of their two-dimensional lives in Looking-Glass World. Alice resists this flattening, which manifests itself literally when the guests at the table become stuck to their plates. Alice rises to give thanks and in doing so becomes three-dimensional, setting off the chaos that allows her to seize the Red Queen and end the chess match.Some critics see the moment when Alice wins the chess game to be the moment of her sexual awakening. In this reading, Alice’s standing up represents a moment of orgasmic realization. The rising candle flames imply erection imagery, while the repetition of the word “moment” in the scene underscores the fleeting sensory intensity that causes Alice to tear away the tablecloth and attack the Red Queen. This orgasmic moment leads to the checkmate of the Red King, so that Alice experiences a sexual awakening. At this point, Alice has nowhere else to go in her dream, and abruptly wakes up. The fact that Dinah continues to wash Snowdrop when Alice regains consciousness supports the fact that the dream has happened in a single “moment.” This realization also prompts Alice to wonder whether it was she or the Red King who had had the dream. By leaving off at this moment, Carroll comments that life is nothing but a dream, a blinking moment in God’s mind.

Through the Looking-Glassfull title  · Through the Looking-Glassauthor · Lewis Carrolltype of work · Novellagenre · Fairy tale; children’s fiction; satire; allegorylanguage · Englishtime and place written · 1867–1871, Oxforddate of first publication · 1871, though the first copies were dated 1872publisher · Macmillan & Co.narrator · The narrator is anonymous, and does not use many words to describe events in the story.point of view · The narrator speaks in third person, though occasionally in first and second person. The narrative follows Alice around, voicing her thoughts and feelings.tone · Straightforward; avunculartense · Past

setting (time) · Victorian era, a decade before publication datesetting (place) · England, Looking-glass worldprotagonist · Alicemajor conflict · Alice attempts to become a Queen in the massive chess game being played in the Looking-Glass World.rising action · Alice, as a pawn, moves forward square by square, meeting many different characters as she advances through the chessboard.climax · Alice becomes a queen.falling action · Alice seizes the Red Queen, puts the Red King in checkmate, and, having ended the game, wakes up wondering about her dream.themes · Chess as a metaphor for a deterministic conception of life; Language as a means to order the world; The inescapable loneliness a child feels growing upmotifs · Dream; Inversion; Chess; Train imagerysymbols · Rushes; The sleeping Red Kingforeshadowing · Alice’s recitation of the rhymes about Tweedledum and Tweedleedee, Humpty Dumpty, and the Lion and the Unicorn foreshadow each of their fates within the story.

Important Quotations Explained

1. “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle.Explanation for Quotation #1Alice asks this question of herself in Chapter II of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, just after she has grown to a giant size and frightened the White Rabbit away. Alice realizes that she is not just trying to figure out Wonderland, but also attempting to determine who she is and what constitutes her identity in a world that actively challenges her perspective and sense of self. Wonderland has already begun to affect Alice, and she rightly understands that her self perception cannot remain fixed in a world that has drastically different rules from her own. In Wonderland, Alice has a slippery grasp of her identity. Since Wonderland is a byproduct of her own imagination, it becomes clear that it is Alice’s identity and not Wonderland itself that is being called into question. The nonsensical features and characters that make up Wonderland extend from Alice’s own psyche, so her quest to understand Wonderland becomes a quest to understand the forces and feelings that comprise her identity. The idea of the great puzzle also supports Carroll’s notion that life is an unduly complicated mystery that human beings must use rational thought and intelligence to understand.

2. Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.Explanation for Quotation #2

This quote is the very final sentence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice has gone inside for tea, leaving her sister by the riverbank to muse over Alice’s wondrous dream. This passage has a tone of long winded, golden nostalgia and differs dramatically from the rest of the story, which is generally economical in words and nightmarish for Alice. This tonal shift results from the shift in perspective from Alice to her sister, which in turn alters the reader’s perception of Alice’s adventures. While she experiences her adventures, Alice finds her journey to be confounding and nightmarish. On the other hand, Alice’s sister sees her story as a strange tale from a simple heart. She trivializes Alice’s identity shattering journey, distancing the trauma Alice experienced in her dream with her own aboveground faith in an orderly universe. In a story studded with subversion, Alice’s sister becomes the ultimate subversion who undermines Alice’s search for meaning and identity as she imagines Alice growing up and mystifying other simple-hearted children with her stories.This quote also serves as Carroll’s commentary on the character of Alice, the fictionalized version of his muse Alice Liddell. Carroll became deeply preoccupied with the dissolution of his friendship with Liddell as she reached maturity and grew apart from him. This final line has a nostalgic, wistful longing for “the happy summer days” in which he would visit with the Liddell sisters and delight them “with many a strange tale.” Ultimately, Carroll realizes that these happy summer days cannot last, and like Alice’s dream or even Alice’s sister’s dream, the simple hearted love of a child will fade, leaving him only with memories of “child-life.”

3. It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.Explanation for Quotation #3This quote occurs in Chapter II of Through the Looking-Glass, as Alice looks out from the hill and sees a landscape checkered like a chessboard and different characters stationed on the board like chessmen. Carroll has already introduced the theme of chess, but Alice’s musing suggest that chess functions as a metaphor not only for the world of the novel but for our world as well. Carroll frequently espoused the idea of life as a game. Like Alice, we are pawns in our own lives, condemned to move forward through time with little knowledge and understanding of the wider world. Within our limited perspective, the world seems eminently ordered and explainable by nature and logic, much like a chessboard’s symmetrical and geometrical nature evokes a sense of determinable order.

4. Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterward she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in

like a picture, as, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.Explanation for Quotation #4This sentence appears in Chapter VIII of Through the Looking-Glass. Not only is it the longest sentence in either book, but it is also the most photographically vivid image in either book and brings to mind Carroll’s hobby as a photographer. The image is poignant given the White Knight’s role in the story. The White Knight is an aberration among the characters, since he is the only character who treats Alice with true kindness and compassion. He does not seem to be part of Alice’s dream at all, since the characters in her dream behave disagreeably and induce profound feelings of loneliness and isolation in Alice. The White Knight seems more real than the absurd personages she has met before, which is one reason why Alice remembers his image so clearly after many years have passed. The photographic quality of the passage indicates that Carroll has inserted himself and his desires into the text, since Carroll created the White Knight as his literary counterpart. Carroll crosses into the pages of the book to burn his image into Alice’s mind as the most authentic and memorable character, an effect he wished to have on the mind of the real-life Alice Liddell.

5. Life, what is it but a dream?Explanation for Quotation #5This question ends the poem that concludes Through the Looking-Glass, reminding us that one can never be sure that life is more than a dream, since it is made of fleeting memories, arbitrary machinations, and essentially meaningless conclusions. Alice’s adventure in Through the Looking-Glass is a dream, even though it dramatizes her journey to young womanhood. Even as she wakes, Alice finds that the order of her room seems just as arbitrary and tenuous as the dream world from which she has emerged. Additionally, this quote brings to mind the Red King’s dream and the implications that human life exists as dream in the mind of a greater divine being. With this final question, Carroll suggests that we do not in fact exist as we imagine, and ultimately are no more than the shadowy dreams of a greater consciousness.