Interpretation of Alice in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland By: Lewis Carroll

Sarrah Passe Oral interpretation Final Camillia Monet Spring 2014

Victorian author Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. He was the son of Clergy man, Reverend Charles Dodgson and his wife, Francis Jane Lutwidge, and the third of eleven children. “The parents were descended from two ancient and distinguished North Country families. From the Dodgsons, the son inherited a very old tradition of service to the Church and a tradition that he belonged to one of the most respected lineages in England” (Alice’s).

In 1854 he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford. He was successful in his study of mathematics and writing and remained at the college after graduation to teach. While teaching, he began to pursue photograph; often choosing children as the subject of his portraits. One of his favorite models was a young girl named Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean at Christ's Church, who later became the basis for his fictional character. By 1881, he discontinued other hobbies to primarily focus on his writing.

Carroll primarily wrote comic fantasies and humorous verse that was often very childlike. While writing for The Train, Dodgson proposed "Dares," after his birthplace, Daresbury for his pen name. But, the editor thought that the name was too journalistic, so after struggling over a number of choices, Dodgson wrote to his editor and suggested a number of variations and anagrams, based on the letters of his actual name. "Lewis Carroll" was finally decided on, derived from a rearrangement of most of the letters in the name "Charles Lutwidge Dodgson" (Alice’s).

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Alice Pleasance Liddell was the fourth child of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and Lorina Liddell. The family moved to Oxford in 1856, where they met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson while he was photographing the cathedral. Alice was only four years old at the time.

In every study of Carroll's life, one finds that Carroll had only the most formal encounters with mature women. There was seemingly no romantic interest in adult women. Some biographers have attributed this asexual interest to Carroll's stammering and his self-conscious shyness about it. On the other hand, Carroll's diaries and contemporary accounts about him are full of his encounters with children, nearly always with little girls. He obviously delighted in the company of little girls twelve years old and younger, and his diary records in great detail the aesthetic pleasure that he took in viewing "nice little children." Carroll's attractions for little girls were honorable and above reproach; at least there is not, almost a century later, absolutely no evidence to the contrary.

On July 4, 1852, Carroll and a friend, Rev. Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell children up the Isis River. As they made their way upstream, Carroll began telling a story of a young girl named Alice on an adventure that he continued to make up as they went along to keep the girls entertained. By the end of the trip Alice asked Carroll to write out the story for her and he promised to do so. From an initial length of 18,000 words, Carroll's manuscript expanded to 35,000 words, and the famous English illustrator, John Tenniel, read it and consented to draw illustrations for it (Alice).

Alice was an immediate critical success when it appeared in 1865. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was his first novel published in 1865. Seven years later in 1872, Through the Look Glass and What Alice Found There was published.

Both novels were considered children’s novels that were mocking in nature and an example of Carroll’s wit. About 180,000 copies of Alice in various editions were sold in England during Carroll's lifetime; by 1911, there were almost 700,000 copies in print. Since then, with the expiration of the original copyright in 1907, the book has been translated into every major language, and now it has become a constant best seller.

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Lewis Carroll led something of a double life: to the readers of his Alice books he was “Lewis Carroll”, while to the world of mathematics and to his colleagues at the University of Oxford he was Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician. The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community.

Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing concepts to mock these radical new ideas. It leaves modern readers to question was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland intended as a scathing satire on these radical new ideas in nineteenth-century mathematics?

Scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers, the square root of a negative number, which don't represent physical quantities in the same way that whole numbers or fractions do. “No Victorian embraced these new concepts wholeheartedly, and all struggled to find a philosophical framework that would accommodate them” (Interesting). But, they gave mathematicians a freedom to explore new ideas and some were prepared to go along with these strange concepts. Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction; “he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics” and mocked its weakness.

For example, the chapter, "Advice from a caterpillar” begins with Alice shrunk to a height of just three inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah pipe, which shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. The catch, of course, is that one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions. While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, Melanie Bayley, a literary scholar wrote an article in 2009, which states she believes it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra; which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry.

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Dodgson's doubts are reflected in the way Alice's height fluctuates between 9 feet and 3 inches. Alice, bound by conventional arithmetic where a measure such as size should be constant, finds this troubling: "Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing," she complains. "It isn't," replies the Caterpillar, who lives in this absurd world” (Carroll).

Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically. She loses her temper in the hallway while trying to remember her multiplication tables, but they were no longer based in the 10 number system. Upset now, she wonders into the Hatter’s tea party; compared to Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and his discovery of quaternion; which was based on a three terms. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of disinterest he won't let the Hatter move the clocks past six... “Reading this scene with Hamilton's math in mind, the members of the Hatter's tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers” (Interesting). The Hatter's nonsensical riddle in this scene: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" may more specifically target the theory of pure time. Since cause and effect are no longer related, the Hatters’ unanswerable question reflects this.

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Beginning with the fathers of the field, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychoanalysts have turned to fairy tales in an effort to understand the human mind. Just as many fairy tales hinge upon a revelation of the truth about those who have been somehow disguised, so do, fairy tales cut to the essence of the human psyche. A fairy tale is a little snippet of life. It can be said to be a fantasized stray portraying the goodness and evil in life. It is often told in a manner in which children can relate and understand. We adults have forgotten what it was to be a child. But the fairy tales appeal to our imagination as we focus on the hard facts of reality with a relaxed and positive attitude.

Freud suspected that dreams and fairy tales stem from the same place, and the relaxation of inhibition that occurs in the dream state is also true of many story tellers. So fairy tales might prove, like dreams, windows into the unconscious.

The reason film and books are popular in society is because we want to be involved in scenarios and experiences that would never happen to a living creature in a million years. Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people play, authority, time, and death. The events that occur in the story actually have a direct correlation with how one grows and progresses through childhood and adolescence.

In the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, Alice daydreams and is unable to pay attention while her .

mother reads an advanced novel to her. This shows how child-like Alice’s mindset it. She then begins to piece together the perfect world of her own while her imagination runs wild. Later in the story, she is told the tale of the Curious Oysters by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum which is about how curiosity can lead to terrible things. This bares a strong resemblance to how adults will often tell children to grow up, destroying a child’s sense of imagination and curiosity. From this deduction, we can assume that Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum symbolize parents and are trying to keep Alice in check.

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Later in the book, Alice gets in more trouble because of her curiosity.

The white rabbit tells Alice to run into the house to quickly fetch his gloves.

While searching for the gloves, she opens a cookie jar only to find a cookie with ‘Eat Me’ written on it. Without thinking twice, she consumes the cookie.

This situation possibly stands for peer pressure as well. Inside the cookie jar, were many cookies with different labels such as “Eat Me”; essentially, they were all telling her what to do. Just like everyone does at some point, she gives into the peer pressure.

As a consequence, she grows rapidly into a giant. The white rabbit, as well as a few other characters she encountered, perceive her as a monster instead of a little girl. This possibly represents how society perceives people who give into peer pressure as monstrous. There are many occasions where Alice shows her true colors of child-like thinking and confusion. Shortly after Alice enters Wonderland, she encounters something else that makes no sense to her. When she is extremely wet after being washed to shore, she listens to a dodo bird who tells her to run in a circle with everyone else in order to dry off while the water keeps engulfing them. What he is telling her to do make no sense whatsoever, but she continues to do it anyway.

By blindly obeying the adult figure, she exposes her child-like ignorance.

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Alice has reached an age where she has lost her identity and adolescence which is a transitional adulthood.

There is a period where everyone must find themselves; young adults gradually ease into responsibilities and they become serious. By the end of the story, Alice learns to deal with her problems and gains sight of her identity.

The story of Alice is one as a child, and currently, I connect to. Although I have never fallen down a rabbit hole into a fictional wonderland, I was forced to deal with an event at a young age that made me question everything I knew at the time. Like many children, my parents divorced when I was young. It is not something I really thought affected me too much, but as I have grown older and try to find myself I realize how much it made me the way I am now. My whole world was split into two very different parts. Many of the different characters Alice meets in Wonderland I had given personal faces too; all the way down to her cat, Dinah, only mine was named Flash.

I identified the Red Queen with my mother, although not nearly as severe and domineering, nor continually screaming for someone to be beheaded, she was always vocal and stood up for me; which is why it took me a long time to learn to stand up for myself. She is my mother and is always there to protect me. I know one of the reasons that I am a reserved person is because I relied on her to talk for me. Additionally, I see the perpetually grinning Cheshire Cat who appears and disappears at will, as the detached, clearheaded logic or my personal brain. Who know what the smart thing to always do is, but constantly hesitates to makes decisions.

Growing up with the story allowed me to escape for a little bit into my own Wonderland where I was able to escape the events and people that would make me a little bit mad.

Alice in Wonderland is a perfect, down-to-earth example of childhood through adolescence. Just as my life is filled with good and bad choices, hers is too. As most do, Alice learns from her experiences and ultimately becomes more mature. She matures emotionally by how she thinks, how she deals with her problems, and how she perceives different situations, all of which are encompassed in the progression of a child into an adult.

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Works Cited “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland By Lewis Carroll Lewis Carroll Biography." Lewis Carroll Biography. Web. 25 Apr. 2014.

"Interesting Facts about Lewis Carroll." Interesting Literature. 5 June 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.

"Lewis Carroll." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, Web. 28 Apr. 2014. <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/78>.

"When Reality Isn't Enough." Teen Ink.Web. 28 Apr. 2014. <http://www.teenink.com/opinion/pop_culture_trends/article/456795/When-Reality-Isnt-Enough/>.

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