On Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

On Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

I. Introduction.................................................................................................................2
II. Characteristics of Fantasy..........................................................................................2
A. Good vs. Evil......................................................................................................2
Connection of Our World.......................................................................................2
Hybrid of Natural and Unnatural Worlds...............................................................3
III. Perception of Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland from Angles of the
Readers...........................................................................................................................3
A. Necessity as Literature for Children...................................................................3
B. Adults..................................................................................................................4
IV. Historical Background of Fantasy of Carroll...........................................................5
A. Literal Atmosphere in Victoria Era.....................................................................5
B. Personal Style of Carroll.....................................................................................6
1. Nonsense or logic.........................................................................................6
2. Slippery reality ............................................................................................7
3. Identity issue in Carroll’s work....................................................................7
4. Symbolism....................................................................................................7
V. Conclusion.................................................................................................................8
VI. Reference.................................................................................................................8

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 On Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

I. Introduction
Children’s books gain its popularity through fantasy. However, how and why it is
attractive is worth working out. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland was one of the most
famous novels in nineteenth century, a book that didn't have to be didactic or
moralistic, that didn't teach children lessons. Fantasy is not Lewis Carroll’s personal
style. It flourished in Victoria Era in Britain influencing the works of many writers.
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland is a typical one among the literature at that time. It
is not only a children’s book but also offer a fantastic world for adult readers to think
and experience. What is noticeable is that the way how Carroll access to the mind and
thinking style of children. With such basic idea can help to gain an angle on education
methods. In this essay, features of fantasy literature will also be explored and contexts
in Alice will be analyzed in order to perceive knowledge about fantasy.
II. Characteristics of Fantasy
A. Good vs. Evil
A. Fantastic world has its rules and appreciated certain values. This is rather
important in a children’s book. How figures behave in a story can influence a child a
lot. Thus, good vs. evil style can easily tell who to follow and who to fight against.
Queen of Hearts, in Alice, obviously represented the bad side. She is a monarch who
is foul-tempered. She abuses her power to sentence death at the slightest offense. The
most famous line of her is “Off with their heads!” Actually, evil is a harsh word to
describe such characters. It is more proper to call them obstacles that one has to
conquer.
Connection of Our World
All forms of fantasy depend on laws as tightly structured as those of the ‘real’ world.
No literature is completely invented for it will be totally nonsense. All art forms
imitate life at different degrees. What separate fantasy writers from most is their
choice to present real life messages and lessons through unrealistic or fantastical
means. Fantasy, largely cooked up, is actually an obscure reflection of the reality.
Fantasy literature either gets its inspiration from life or indicates contemporary issues.
About story in wonderland, the real Alice in Carroll’s life is frequently talked about.
She was a little girl who was the daughter of Carroll’s working acquaintance. The
love for lassocks leads the works of Lewis Carroll. The Alice’s Adventure in
Wonderland was only impromptu when he went boating with Alice, her sister and one

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 On Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

of his colleagues. It was a summer afternoon. Physically, the heat, the stillness, and
slight bodily exercise; and emotionally, the adored little girls, and adult friend
engaged with something else who could not even see the face of the storyteller. These
are the ideal conditions for daydreaming, and also for the confessions of the analyst’s
couch.
Hybrid of Natural and Unnatural Worlds
II. One common characteristic of the fantasy genre is the blending of
the natural world alongside an 'unnatural' one in order to describe supernatural events.
Authors of fantasy are aware of the laws of the universe but decide to mainly
disregard them completely, focusing instead on the supernatural and 'nonrational' to
guide their story. Animals can talk. The body size of Alice can change easily. These
are all strategy to create unnatural atmosphere. These modification of the real world
can achieve the effect that the whole world has been changed.
III. Perception of Fantasy in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland
from Angles of the Readers
A. Necessity as Literature for Children
Today, fantasy is not a peculiar word for children. Harry Potter owns fans that some
just have the ability to understand it and adults in their twenties. We modern people
don’t know how things happened in the past. As to Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland,
it originally was a story told extempore by a man to entertain his little audiences.
Alice, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church where Carroll studied and worked, is
considered to be the origin of the story. Because of the initial purpose of the stories,
the work shares some major features with other children’s books. Fantasy is one of
them. However, why is fantasy so important in stories for children?
People have empathy with stories in literature due to that they have the same
experience with the author or the hero in a book. It is also true of children. Children
create their own world in their minds. There are rules about everything like the real
world such as politics, economics and sociology. Some adults are addicted to fantastic
world to escape the real competitive life which is not the situation of children. In fact,
the happier and healthier children had more daydreams than the ones who suffer their
childhood lives. In fact, cognitive science suggests that children may love fantasy not
because they can't appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult, but for
precisely the opposite reason. Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary

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just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because
their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so. Imagination is a practice for
people in their early age to learn about the society in an interesting way. In this sense,
we can look close to the fantasy in Alice and find out the proof.
The most important issue for Alice is to find out who she is. This is a rather rare
subject in children’s book. Alice keeps asking questions and conquers different
obstacles. During the process, she learns to communicate with different ‘people’ and
remains polite. At last, she finds out she just had a dream.
The most obvious evidence of this view that child explore through fantasy is that
every child himself or herself is the leading role in their imaginary world. At least, it
is the guise of oneself. How fantasy takes place represents how a child experiences
and experiments. Alice in Wonderland is often regarded as the adventure of the Alice
in Carroll’s real life. However, it is more accurate to say this is the adventure of
Carroll himself as the story teller. Alice liked the stories and asked Carroll to write it
down for her only because that the fantasy in the stories were close to the one in
children’s mind. Thus we can find out clues how one experiences life in fantasy. In
Alice’s adventure, animals can talk, think and act like humans. This is because that
child has limited access to social activities but they have already begun to recognize
animals.
Each character appears is vivid and of human natures not only the good ones. The
White Rabbit seems to shift back and forth between pompous behavior toward his
underlings, such as his servants, and grovelling, obsequious behavior toward his
superiors, such as the Duchess and King and Queen of Hearts. And there are master
and servant like the reality. These arrangements in return teach children about the real
world.
B. Adults
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland shows how a child looks at adults’ world. Mature
people think they are acting their age without knowing that how absurd and ridiculous
they are sometimes. Some abuse their power like the queen and some bow and scrape
without dignity. Apparently, adults need rules to live by. But most people adhere to
those rules blindly now, without asking themselves 'why'. This leads to the
incomprehensible and sometimes arbitrary behavior that Alice experiences in
Wonderland.
However, both Alice and Carroll can not reverse the reality. More and more she starts

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to understand the creatures that live in Wonderland. From the Cheshire cat she learns
that 'everyone is mad here'. She learns to cope with the crazy Wonderland rules, and
during the story she gets better in managing the situation. She tells the Queen of
Hearts that her order is 'nonsense' and prevents her own beheading. In the end Alice
has adapted and lost most of her vivid imagination that comes with childhood. She
realizes what the creatures in Wonderland really are 'nothing but a pack of cards'. At
this point, she has matured too much to stay in Wonderland, the world of the children,
and wakes up into the 'real' world, the world of adults. This is, to some extent, a sad
ending. We adults can not be simple and disregard the rules of the world just because
of a children’s book.
IV. Historical Background of Fantasy of Carroll
A. Literal Atmosphere in Victoria Era
The Victorian Era was an age of great contradictions, often hypocritical in nature. The
Victorians had an obsession with high moral standards even as large portions of the
population were consigned to live in abject poverty and squalor. The Victorian world
was filled with dark corners and grim alleys that hid the shadowed underbelly of their
society, an aspect of their world that most of the citizenry chose to ignore, if they
could. And let’s face it; all those dark, hidden corners are wonderful places for the
human imagination to flourish. The classic ideal of nineteenth-century realism was
one of order, coherence and limitation. This book is about a counter-tradition. It
attempts to describe a variety of writers who came, more or less accidentally, to adopt
a quite different approach, not in opposition to the prevailing realism, but in addition
to it.
There is a Latin quotation from the seventeenth-century theologian, Thomas Burnet.
In English it runs:
I can easily believe that there are more invisible than visible beings in the universe.
But of their families, degrees, connections, distinctions, and functions, who shall tell
us? How do they act? Where are they to be found? About such matters the human
mind has always circled without attaining knowledge. Yet I do not doubt that
sometimes it is well for the soul to contemplate as in a picture the image of a larger
and better world, lest the mind, habituated to the small concerns of daily life, limit
itself too much and sink entirely into trivial thinking.
As Lewis Carroll struggled to do justice to the richness and complexity of their worlds
he shades off imperceptibly into fantasy. Fantasy is ultimately the most philosophic

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form of fiction, giving scope to man’s deepest dreams and most potent ideas.
B. Personal Style of Carroll
A. For some, fantasy was a means of creating other worlds in order to escape
from this one. Repression and inhibition played little part in the works of Lewis
Carroll. For him the popular tradition, with its zany humour, and delight in puns,
irony, and double meanings offered the seeds of a new art form.

1. Nonsense or logic

1. The distinguishing feature of Carroll’s work is the tight logic. This is

largely due to Carroll’s personal experiences. Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a professor of mathematics at Oxford University. The
subject he learns add interesting logic puzzles in his work, especially in Alice.
Fantasy of ‘nonsense’ was a way of dealing with feelings of insecurity and loneliness.
Wonderland, for all its problems with time, is still playing with the conventions of our
world. Alice’s long fall down the rabbit hole has taken her to the centre of the earth:
she lands safely because, of course, there is no gravity to pull her further. But in
Wonderland, at the centre of the earth, there is also no rotation of the earth, no
alternation of day and night and therefore no ‘solar time’ at all. What we do still have,
however, is lunar time, based on the phases of the moon. But the lunar month is only
twenty-eight days, whereas the calendar one- based on an arbitrary division of the
solar year- is thirty or more. The Mad Hatter’s watch, we recall from Alice’s surprised
comment, tells not hours, but days of the month. When he asks her ‘What day of the
month is it?’ she replies ‘The fourth.’
‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter. ‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!’ he
added looking angrily at the March Hare.
We already know from the previous chapter that the month is May, so the date is May
4th 1862, we find, as might be guessed, that on that day there was exactly two days’
difference between solar and lunar time. In other words, the Mad Hatter’s watch read
the sixth.
This is a good example how logic and nonsense work together. There is a rule in
Carroll’s mind. At this point, writing becomes a private pleasure for Carroll, a ‘math
geek’.

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2. Slippery reality

To represent the discombobulating nature of the way children experience life, Carroll
creates an entire world in which reality appears slippery. In part, Carroll uses the
fantastic in Alice in Wonderland to highlight the absurdity that underlies much
supposedly rational adult behaviour.

3. Identity issue in Carroll’s work

In Carroll’s case, the pseudonym represented far more than just a pen name: it
transformed Dodgson’s entire life. But it did not split it in two, as many people have
suggested. The question about identity takes on runs through the whole book.
"No, I've made up my mind about it: if I'm Mabel, I'll stay down here! It'll be no
use their putting their heads down and saying 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only
look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that
person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else.'"
(Wonderland 2.9)
Wonderland is a place of fluctuation and change. Alice determines to let her identity
keep shifting until she's happy with it, and only then to return to the "real world"
where identity is static.
"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather
shyly, "I – I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I
got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since
then." (Wonderland 5.2-3)
Alice doesn't know who she is because she doesn't know where she is – and because
she can't remember what she's been taught, in school or beyond.

4. Symbolism

Symbolism has been analyzed a little in Ⅲ.B. All the animals and characters can
represent the society of the time. Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Here are another two examples.
Nearly every object in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland functions as a symbol, but
nothing clearly represents one particular thing. The symbolic resonances of

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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.
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.
V. Conclusion
Lewis Carroll opened a new age for fantasy literature by complementing its features
with combination of nonsense and logic. His success is also because of the use of
general fantasy techniques. There are values clash and hybrid of reality and
supernatural phenomenon. Also, it indicates the chaos in the real world. The book is
suitable for both children and adults. Young people follow it to experience life while
grown-ups can rethink about their living attitudes. The emergence of this book is due
to the rebellion against the serious literature condition. It states Lewis Carroll’s own
style. It shows how a ‘math geek’ juxtaposes nonsense and logic and explores his
identity.
VI.Reference
Stephen, P., 1979. Victorian Fantasy. Great Britain: The Harvester Press.
Jo, E.J. and J. Francis, G., 1998. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll’s
Alice Books. London: Macmillan Press LTD.
Donald, J.G. ed., 1992. Alice in Wonderland. 2nd edition. United States of America: W.
W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Slate, 2005. The Real Reason Children Love Fantasy. [Online] Available at:
<http://www.slate.com/id/2132725/> [Accessed in 28 February 2011]