Lewis Carroll wrote the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and continued to alter forever children’s literature by omitting any moralizing from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, just as he had in the original Alice book.

He well realized his goal of writing stories for the pure amusement of their readers that lacked the traditional preachy nature of didactic literature, a common narrative approach with books for the young. Alice is again caught up in an absurd fantasy world where its inhabitants seem not to adhere to the same rules that govern Alice’s world.

In reality, the fantasy world represents a chess game, a logical outgrowth of Carroll’s love for math and puzzles. That very fact allows Carroll’s emphasis on the absurdity of humans, or their representatives in this instance, adhering to rules controlling their movements, when they understand neither the rules nor know the identity of the force making them move. It proved a brilliant concept, one that speaks to adult readers just as clearly as absurdist writings by later philosophers Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The story makes simple fodder for critics of all schools. Psychoanalytic critics examine various sexual references, such as that suggested by the unicorn, particularly from a Freudian perspective. In addition, Carroll’s shaping of the Red Queen as cruel and heartless and the White King as a more kindly being—characterizations that appear to reflect on his fondness for his father and his dislike of his mother—may be reversed in the looking-glass world to suggest an Oedipus complex on Carroll’s part. One more of many interesting psychological aspects is the fact that the entire incident occurs as Alice’s dream.

Feminist critics find of interest Alice’s logical approach to problem solving, which counters stereotypes of females who depend on intuition to guide their actions, as well as the querulous natures of the two most powerful females, the queens.

Marxist critics find the Queen and King’s rule over their subjects in the interest of material gain pertinent, as well as the fact that Alice seeks a crown in hopes of changing her commoner status through the donning of a traditional class symbol.

New Historicists may posit that the abundant use of red and white suggests the War of the Roses, an interpretation also applied to the first Alice story. They may share the interest of psychoanalytic critics in Carroll’s interest in girl children and how that preference surfaces in the Alice tales.

Deconstructionists could examine Carroll’s use of puns and the language as controlled by the chess game in progress, applying their theory that language developed through its own internal system of sounds that act as signifiers, suggesting concepts, which are what is signified.

While not as successful in later centuries as Carroll’s first Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass proved quite popular in its own day with both young and adult readers. For children removed by time and geography from Victorian England, the book became a challenge, as many cultural references proved confounding. It remains popular with aficionados of Victorian literature, of children’s literature, and of humorous literature, a supremely constructed jest to those who understand that Carroll’s story is not at all random, but instead achieves a unity based on mathematical principles unique before Carroll.

Bibliography
Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. New York: Norton, 2000.
Jones, Jo Elwyn, and J. Francis Gladstone. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Reichertz, Ronald. The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Categories: British Literature, Children's Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: absurdist fiction, absurdity in fiction, alice and logic, alice companion, alice cultural references, alice dream analysis, alice feminist analysis, alice humor, alice in wonderland sequel, alice interpretation, alice literary criticism, alice marxist critique, alice psychoanalysis, alice satire, annotated alice, carroll and chess, carroll and girl children, carroll’s narrative structure, chess in literature, children’s literature, class symbolism in literature, deconstruction and language, dream narrative, fantasy literature, female logic in fiction, feminist readings of alice, freudian analysis of alice, language as signifier, Lewis Carroll, lewis carroll and mathematics, literary puns, literary theory alice, Marxist Literary Criticism, new historicism alice, oedipus complex in literature, psychoanalytic criticism, red queen symbolism, Through the Looking Glass, through the looking-glass themes, victorian culture in children’s books, Victorian humor, Victorian Literature, war of the roses alice, what alice found there, white king character