2ºESO A/B: Alice in Wonderland Study Guide

Hi guys, here you are going to find a further analysis about Alice in Wonderland. As I told you, it is more than a children´s story. Please read it at home during these days to comment in class. 

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

CHARACTERS

•    Alice  

•    Caterpillar      

•    Cheshire Cat  

•    Dormouse      

•    Mad Hatter     

•    March Hare   

•    Queen of Hearts        

•    Tweedledum and Tweedledee           

•    Tulgey Wood inhabitants       

•    Walrus and Carpenter

•    White Rabbit 

THEMES

1. The Tragic and Inevitable Loss of Childhood Innocence:

Throughout 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 1, she becomes upset when she keeps finding herself too big or too small to enter the garden. In Chapter 5, 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.

2. Life as a Meaningless Puzzle: In 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.

3. Death as a Constant and Underlying Menace:

Alice 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 1, 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

1. Dream

Alice’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.

2. Subversion

Alice 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.

3. Language

Carroll 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.

4. Curious, Nonsense, and Confusing

Alice 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 12, she rejects or criticizes the experience or encounter.

SYMBOLS

The Garden

Nearly 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 Mushroom

Like 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.

CONTEXT

Lewis 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.

n 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.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Discuss the significance of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

As the ruler of Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts functions as Alice’s primary antagonist, controlling the realm that thwarts Alice at every turn. As the suit of hearts suggests, she is the heart of Alice’s conflict with Wonderland. When Alice exposes the Queen as a fraud who is nothing more than a playing card, the dream of Wonderland ends abruptly and Alice regains the world of sense and order she has known since birth. Though Alice guesses the Queen of Heart’s secret midway through the book, she hesitates to call her out, demonstrating the power that the Queen of Heats has over the characters in Wonderland. Though the Queen’s threats are, like Wonderland itself, devoid of substance, she still instills fear in her subjects and Alice alike.

The Queen of Hearts poses an additional threat to Alice in her journey toward womanhood. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recounts Alice’s metaphorical journey to adulthood. Over the course of her adventures, she faces several threatening situations with sexual overtones, but the Queen of Hearts’s threat is both the most direct and the most subtle. In screaming “Off with her head!” to Alice, the Queen of Hearts threatens her life but also her sexuality, since the word refers both to Alice’s literal head and her maidenhead, or maidenhood (virginity). The Queen of Hearts violently attempts to force Alice’s sexual awakening against her will, and only with Alice’s growing power and sense of self can she stand up to the Queen and “call her hand” by revealing her to be a mere playing card.

2. What role does the garden play in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

The garden in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland exists as an Edenic object of desire for Alice. The sight of the garden draws Alice in with its “beds of bright flowers” and “cool fountains,” and her inability to enter sets the tone for the exasperating detours that follow one after the other. When viewed in terms of the metaphorical onset of Alice’s puberty, the garden initially symbolizes the Biblical Garden of Eden, a place of childlike grace and innocence that precedes the knowledge of good and evil. Alice’s desire to enter the garden corresponds to her desire to remain a child indefinitely.

When she finally enters the garden, Alice discovers that it is not a picturesque childhood paradise, but a flimsy sham where the roses are painted and the inhabitants are dangerous and ill tempered. The garden falls short of Alice’s expectations largely because of the experiences that have preceded her arrival there. By the time she reaches the garden, she has grown up metaphorically and gained control over her fluctuating size. Her growing wariness of Wonderland allows her to perceive the garden with a critical, observant eye. The garden initially exists as a manifestation of Alice’s desire to remain a child, but she realizes it is a poor mimicry of adulthood, in which two-dimensional adults follow arbitrary manners and conventions that parody the conventions of the aboveground world.