44 pages • 1-hour read
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
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Themes
Critique of Victorian-era Children’s Education
Carroll satirizes both the methods and the content of Victorian-era education. Frequently, Alice tries to apply her book knowledge to her experiences in Wonderland, usually in vain. Her very first observation initiates this theme, when she laments that her sister’s book contains neither drawings nor dialogue (5). Alice longs for imagination and creativity; the activity that she considered doing before falling asleep was making a daisy chain, a simple but creative and whimsical activity. It is presumably a weekend, since Alice is not in school. It is ironic, then, that so much of her experience in Wonderland focuses on her education.
The education system in Britain expanded rapidly in the Victorian era, establishing public schools and providing educational opportunities for girls. School subjects were primarily taught through memorization and recitation, and the emphasis was placed on forming children’s moral character. Children in general were not supposed to speak unless spoken to, and could be punished for speaking their mind or answering back. Carroll’s choice of an opinionated young heroine signals that he is challenging the accepted role of children in society.
In the 1860s, education for girls of the upper class still mainly consisted of subjects in the arts and homemaking to prepare them for their future roles as wives and mothers. Alice is likely from a wealthy middle-class family because she attends day school, a fee-paying public school that teaches basic subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. Alice also stated that she had “extras” (subjects that required extra fees) of French and music (130).
Throughout the novel, Alice wants to apply the knowledge she has learned in school. When she falls down the tunnel into Wonderland, she tries to calculate the distance she is falling: “Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, […] [and] it was good practice to say it over” (8). When she wonders about the latitude and longitude of her location, the narrator notes: “Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say” (8). Carroll is showing that even when Alice wants to use her school knowledge, she cannot because she has memorized words and terms she does not understand. The next passage shows her sleepily repeating the phrase “Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?” (9) until the sentence has lost all meaning. The shift from trying to apply school knowledge to playing with language and meaning show Wonderland’s subversive effects on Alice and Carroll’s goal of challenging the real-world application of knowledge that has been memorized by rote.
The various characters that Alice meets in Wonderland are, on the one hand, fanciful talking animals such as Cheshire cats or hares, but on the other hand, they are recognizable as British adults. Each takes on either an instructional or antagonistic role towards Alice—sometimes both. They task Alice to recite school verses and quiz her on abstract subjects. The nonsense that derives from these encounters is a parody of classroom education, in which the stricter the “lesson,” the further devolved the “knowledge” becomes.
This is most noticeable in Chapters 9 and 10, when Alice meets the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. After their pun-filled discussion of their former school subjects they show Alice the Lobster Quadrille, which is one of the most nonsensical episodes in the novel. After Alice begins to recite another verse (about an Owl and a Panther eating a pie), the Mock Turtle interrupts her: “What is the use of repeating all that stuff […] if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most confusing thing I ever heard” (144). These words could have come from the author’s mouth. As a mathematician, Carroll was aware of the need for rigorous study, but his critique of children’s education shows that he believes it stultifies children’s minds rather than expanding them.
Wordplay and the Deconstruction of Meaning
The most striking element of the book, beyond its absurdity, is the frequent clever wordplay. Wonderland is a children’s book, and the language is accessible, but Carroll uses rhyme, rhythm, repetition, puns, and a wealth of other rhetorical devices to defamiliarize everyday words and make readers question their own assumptions about usage and meaning.
Defamiliarization or ostranenie (literally, “making it strange”) is a technique identified by the 20th-century Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in which a writer uses language to present everyday objects in an unusual way, forcing the reader to alter their perception. Literary and poetic language are the tools of defamiliarization, and a work that relies heavily on rhetorical devices and linguistic experimentation produce the most striking effect of making the everyday strange.
Reversal and repetition are two important techniques Carroll uses to defamiliarize language. Alice’s repetition of “Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?” makes the phrases seem nonsensical, and rhyme, rhythm, and the sounds of words begin to take precedence over their meaning. “Cat” and “bat” eventually become irrelevant: “[F]or you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it” (9). Instead of a question leading to an answer, Alice’s lack of an answer nullifies the question or at least renders it open-ended.
A similar situation occurs at the “Mad Tea-Party” when the Hatter tells Alice she might as well have said that “I see what I eat” and “I eat what I see” mean the same thing (91). In creating these mirrored statements with the parts switched, Carroll makes the reader consider the relationship between the two statements, what each means on its own, and what it would mean for them to be equivalent. The March Hare’s and Dormouse’s examples of “I get what I like, and I like what I get” and “I breathe when I sleep, and I sleep when I breathe” serve the same function.
These nonsense passages and their wordplay are more than intellectual or logical games, however. The prevalence of rhymed pairs and of rhythmic repetition remove the reader’s attention from the meaning of the statements which recedes as their sounds take over. Language usually functions transparently to convey the sense of the words, but here Carroll is bringing to the fore what is sometimes called the materiality of language and putting the sense in the background. Doing so provokes a feeling of childlike delight in the anarchic non-sense of language.
To say that there is an anarchic quality in wordplay suggests at least the possibility that something subversive could be going on here, no matter how measured or contained—it is a children’s book, after all. The idea appears in other parts of the story, too. When Alice reaches the bottom of the tunnel, she attempts to reorient herself by reciting the well-known poem, “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” (1715) by Isaac Watts. The poem is a didactic children’s verse about the virtues of hard work. However, her version—featuring a crocodile instead of a bee—is about the joys of consumption and entrapment, hardly good Victorian morals. Rather than harvesting honey and laboring to make the hive like the bee, the crocodile sits idly and smiles, as fish swim into its open jaws. Alice’s version celebrates enjoyment and easy pleasure, and even a kind of violence, rather than self-control.
For these reasons (and some others) a prominent critical approach to Alice in Wonderland has relied on Freud’s theories of the ego, id, and superego to explain the book and its delights, both linguistic and otherwise. This is addressed a bit more in the Themes section of this guide.
The wordplay and twisted logic of the Wonderland creatures often confuse and frustrate Alice because the conventions that make language meaningful are being altered or done away with. Through these acts of defamiliarization and anarchic confusion, Carroll invites readers to question their relationship to language, knowledge, and education as defining traits of self and society.
Coming-of-age Narratives and the Nature of Identity
The typical arc of coming-of-age novels is the protagonist’s journey to selfhood and maturity. Encountering challenging situations, the protagonist must alter beliefs held as a child, leading to the formation of new beliefs and self-concepts. Carroll literalizes this process of “growth” by making Alice grow or shrink when she encounters different situations. The changes in her size both reflect and produce disorientation for Alice, and they change the way she sees the world around her. What really matters in the changes are the shifts that they create in her perspective and not whether she will, for example, fit into a house.
Alice begins to question her identity after she drinks the bottle labeled “Drink me.” As she decreases in size, she says, “‘[I]t might end […] in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?’” (14). The narrator notes that she would be like a flame that has gone out, something that Alice—nor anyone—has ever seen. The scene moves on, but this existential conundrum is akin to the koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Alice does not dwell on the thought, as she faces a more immediate dilemma, but her first question into the nature of identity is deeply philosophical.
The next time she questions her identity is after the White Rabbit runs by and drops the Duchess’s gloves and fan. Alice’s reasoning is if things were ordinary yesterday and strange today, then she must have changed overnight. If she has changed, her next question is: Who has she become? Her childlike thinking takes the questions literally, assuming that she has turned into another person she knows rather than a new version of herself.
The greatest challenge to Alice’s identity is her interaction with the Caterpillar in Chapter 5. She cannot explain the changes she has undergone, and the Caterpillar does not show any signs of understanding. His advice is to get used to being the size she is now, but Alice does not accept that. She is not finished growing—literally and metaphorically. When the Caterpillar asks her to determine the size she wants to be, she cannot answer that question either. In a coming-of-age story, the child protagonist cannot foresee the conclusion of their personal journey. Likewise, Alice cannot yet define who she wants to become, only that she knows she is no longer recognizable to herself and is not content to stay as she is.
This theme reaches its conclusion in the final Wonderland scene in which Alice has begun to grow to her natural height without the aid of any substance. She no longer has to change her size to suit the new situations she encounters; she can deal with Wonderland on her own terms, rather than reacting to the other characters’ wishes and demands.
Alice does not perceive herself to be different when she awakes from her dream, but her sister’s thoughts fill in the way that Alice’s dream will affect her. The arc of coming-of-age stories is typically a journey from innocence to experience. Carroll’s variation on this convention proposes that the goal for Alice’s journey into adulthood is to retain the “loving heart” and “simplicity” of childhood, affirming that childhood innocence has value and is not something to simply outgrow.
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