Post your ideas here about Alice and Through the Looking Glass. Consider the ways in which each character, each tableau challenges our assumptions about life. Consider Carroll's use of "nonsense" to illuminate the world of "sense."
The Fawn When Alice first encounters the Fawn, they are in a wood which causes one to forget names; therefore, they both have no idea that he is a fawn and she is a human child. As long as they unaware of who they are, they are able to stroll in harmony together, “Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the neck of the Fawn” (154). Yet, when they emerge from the wood and suddenly remember who they really are the Fawn breaks free from her embrace and bounds off, as naturally fawns and humans do not generally associate with one another. A valuable point that can be taken away from this scene lies in the idea that it is the very labels we place upon others, which carry the weight of our preconceived notions about these groups of people, that serve to separate humankind. Whether it is a different race, gender, or religion, we form opinions about the names that identify these groups, and judge those who fall into each category accordingly. Giving oneself and others defining labels results in exclusion; one may decide, for whatever reason, (whether it has been passed down for generations or whether he has formed this opinion from his own life experience), that his particular group does not mingle with a different particular group. If human beings could only forget about those names, which categorize people into tiny boxes into which they do not fit, and focus instead on the notion that we are all living, breathing beings who, when it comes down to it, actually want many of the same things, perhaps we could all live in greater harmony together. We must treat this world as a world with no names in order to experience greater peace and equality among people, both at a day to day level as well as in global matters.
Jabberwocky in many ways resembles the journey that Alice is going on through Wonderland. Both characters venture, into the pastoral, in order to complete a journey or task and grow as individuals. Alice must mature and explore her self identity while the Jabberwocky boy must overcome this large beast and destroy it in the woods. In the structure of this poem, Carroll seems to be breaking away from the pattern of parodying other poems and creating his own style altogether that has none of the formal aspects one would think a formal Victorian poem to have. I like that the poem ends where it begins as this is similar to the circular pattern of speech discussed in last class where a lot of the Alice story seems to be in a circular motion. There is no real answer to what the heck the jabberwocky is and it is some giant beast that is really different than anything else in the story. Alice meets mostly strange but comical creatures where this one, although she only reads it, seems to be barbaric and gruesome as to warrant a beheading. The young boy must wield and ax and destroy it almost like a right if passage in the woods. I think that it is also important to realize that Alice is reading this book and perhaps Carroll is poking fun at the gruesome children’s stories told to kids at that time like from Grimm’s. Whereas his stories have a cute and fun setting (even the queen is laughable) Jabberwocky is almost like from a different and darker book. The tone has certain sharpness to it but at the same time Carroll makes it his own by implanting the silly language and playfulness. I’m sure that most Victorian kids would have loved to read and memorize this poem with friends in contrast to the stiff old poems of Marlowe and Spenser that they would have probably had to learn by heart in school. One more key that I want to allude to is the pastoral in Jabberwocky as seen in the fairy tales we read where the forest is important for a child’s growth and quest that he must fulfill to adapt. It’s possible that the ugly Jabberwocky is a manifestation of the real world and all the ugliness of maturity and cruelty that takes away the innocence and by killing this figure the boy has managed to keep onto his youthfulness almost like a Pan character as much Carroll himself would have wanted. At the same time though the boy has become a man when he kills the beast and goes back home carrying the head in a fatherly way that a hunter would return with his kill=parallel this with Alice who becomes a mother (Pig and Pepper) when taking the baby pig and adopting a maternal sense about her. In each case the youngster has grown up in a certain sense and taken on their respective maternal and parental roles.
In the Garden of Talking Flowers, Alice encounters, as the title would suggest, flowers that talk. They are rather rude to her and they find Alice foolish because she does not understand the conventions of the looking glass world. Alice is a bit annoyed but more hurt by the way they speak to her. This scene is particularly interesting because you can see how "Through the Looking Glass" departs from "Alice in Wonderland." In this second book, there are rules to the looking glass world, they are simply opposite, a mirror of Alice's world. When she moves forward she ends up going the wrong direction, the flowers tell her to walk the "opposite way" to reach the red queen. Alice and the red queen then sprint leaving Alice breathless, but they don't go anywhere. Alice fails to understand that in Looking-Glass World she must do everything backwards, she does not understand that in a mirror she has to move away from something to get closer to it. The path seems to punish her for misunderstanding the conventions of Looking-Glass World.
I think in this book and chapter there is more a sense of intrusion on an already established world which Alice misunderstands and so thinks it to be "nonsense," somewhat of a culture clash. Caroll's commentary in this book is slighty diffferent than in the first. In "Alice in Wonderland" he aimed to say something like, "everything is nonsense, there is no certainty," but by portraying the looking glass world I think Carroll aims to comment on the intrusion of nations upon one another. We are often quick to assume that "our way is the right/logical way" but if everything is in fact nonsense (as we learned from Alice) then one way is as good as any other, and so we should reserve judgement.
My son says Alice in Wonderland is a “funny, not-making-sense, adventure story.” When I ask him why he thinks Lewis Carroll wrote the story the way that he did, he answers, “He is trying to say that adults take things too seriously. They should take some things as being funny.” “It’s My Own Invention” at the end of Through the Looking Glass offers insight into the absurd and the emotional, a different tone than the rest of the story and one which reveals more about Alice and her need to grow up. After the Red Knight takes Alice prisoner, she is rescued by a White Knight. A Victorian version of Pretty Woman: a damsel in distress and the hero that whisks her off to safety. There are fascinating layers to this chapter as Alice ends her adventures on the chessboard and finds herself set to become a Queen. First, the White Knight is interesting in and of himself. He is portrayed as kind and even loving to Alice in a way she has not experienced in this alternate world. They have a sweet relationship and Alice is attentive to not wanting to hurt his feelings despite being mystified by his peculiarity. He is fairly powerless as a knight. He prepares himself for all manners of mishaps, but in ways that expose his ineffectiveness. He has invented a box which is carried upside down to keep the rain out, but which results in his possessions being lost. A beehive is attached to his saddle so he can have a supply of honey, but has yet to attract any bees. There are mousetraps and shark protectors (unlikely complications), a new type of helmet to cushion his many falls, and a bag filled with all types of odd accessories. He exists in a world that is unstable and the constant falling off of his horse demonstrates a lack of competence and makes him seem feeble. Two parts strike me as particularly informing the distinctive nature of their relationship: one, just before the Knight sings Alice his song, Carroll says, “Of all the strange things Alice saw in her journey through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly...the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight,” and, two, the Knight wants her to watch after him until he leaves. There is something poignant and revealing about his need for her to see him off. It is as if he knows that her next move of becoming Queen means she won’t be coming back to this side of the looking glass. The Knight is growing older (interestingly, the introduction tells us that Carroll often referred to himself as the aged, aged man, the song the Knight sings to Alice), and Alice needs to grow up.
The thematic shift from cards to chess, paralleling Alice's physiological and psychological growth, is Carroll's acute commentary on the nature of life and aging.
Cards themselves are not a game. They are a raw medium from which humans have shaped many games. This is an interesting analogy to childhood, in which one exists yet lacks autonomy and agency. Like a game of cards, childhood experience is tragically conjoint to luck: socioeconomic luck, emotional luck; the luck of parents, etc. By drawing an analogy between early childhood and cards, Carroll suggests that a child has two opponents: humanity and shear luck.
Chess, on the other hand, exists as a game. Chess is a process and not a formative tool. It has a definite beginning and a certain end. In chess, power lies in foresight and strategy. The opponent is singular and luck is factored out of the equation. Extending Carroll's analogy, the bloom of adolescence is paired with the gaining of agency. The start of a chess game is the endowment of autonomy. The player is now the general.
Adolescence the embrace of the protective/obstructive/helpful/hurtful hand life deals us and a rejection of being defined by that hand. A new awareness is then born and one is no longer led through life but rather leads oneself.
Before I even started reading Through the Looking Glass, I knew the two queens would have opposing physical appearances, verbal manners, and personal characteristics, since these would be literary requirements. Sure enough, the Red Queen is portrayed as skinny, domineering, and dictatorial, while the the White Queen is portrayed as plump, untidy, and helpless. Carroll uses "wildly" (128, 170, 173) to describe her most.
The Red Queen is a caricature of the classic Victorian governess. She represents the Victorian propriety of Alice's real world, which is full of arbitrary rules, manners, and etiquette. From the first encounter, the Red Queen tells her to curtsy, to open her mouth wider, always say "your Majesty" (140), etc. I was surprised that the Red Queen's patronizing attitude does not change when Alice becomes queen, but then I realized this must be so for Alice to actively identify and renounce the ever useless rules. Only when Alice identifies the uselessness of rules, such as "speak when you're spoken to," and renounces them, such as the act of bringing back the pudding, does she suddenly wake up from her dream. Alice defies convention and socialization, as represented by the Red Queen.
The White Queen might be a caricature of the typical citizen of Alice's dream world because she teaches Alice how memory works in the opposite way. She is "dreadfully untidy" (170) and looks in a "helpless frightened sort of way" (170). Alice, in intentional and stark contrast, pins the queen "gently" (17) and releases the queen's brush "carefully" (181). Even this interaction is the reverse of the Red Queen, or of Alice's real world, but the typical behavior of her crazy dream world. By the end, Alice defies the White Queen as well. When the White Queen offers her support at dinner, Alice replies that she can do "quite well without" (232). The two queens' pushing Alice to flatten her represent society's desire to control and mold people, but Alice's growth reveals her power to resist different social confines, both of the real world and of the dream world.
As for the roles of the two queens as mother figures, I'm not too sure. Despite the Red Queen's despotic mannerisms, she does smile pleasantly (141), speak kindly and good-naturedly (143), and gives helpful advice, including "remember who you are!" (144). These acts seem very motherly and thoughtful. While the White Queen has motherly qualities, Alice seems more like the mother figure to her. This reversal might be another manifestation of the "opposite-ness" of the dream role. Yet, although Alice is the one who tends to the White Queen's physical needs-- her shawl and her hair-- the White Queen tends to Alice's emotional needs when she cries. Both queens help Alice but in very different ways.
Though I see Vadim’s point in the shift from cards to a chess setting; which help to represent the growth that little Alice has undergone as a result of natural process after each encounter with the odd citizens of Wonderland. Although her setting has changed I feel we are still very much attached to the same self-important Alice. We can see how the personality of Alice tries to take over in some of her new encounters in Through the Looking Glass, such as in the talking garden and later on with Humpty Dumpty. Unfortunately for Alice, she encounters personalities even greater than hers leaving her unable to spread her wings as much as she did in Wonderland. We see that she always exit unsatisfied at the end of each encounter. The flowers antagonized her, the fawn and the Tweedle brothers abandon her, then Humpty Dumpty says she will not be remembered (p.192). The concept of sense should not be applied when talking about the journey of Alice through a dream land, the fact that it is a dream is enough to suggest that things will not be entirely as we perceive it. The most accurate way to describe the passage of Alice through these fantastical worlds is exactly that, a child’s play thing. They are simple representations of the adult world through a growing child’s eye, there obviously would be chaos due to sensory overload from a surrounding to a brain that is eager to take everything in; but has not developed the necessary skills to detect and properly assimilate sensory data into logic. This is taken from a point found in Theresa’s post where she says “They find Alice foolish because she does not understand the conventions of the looking glass world.” There is obviously a repetitive pattern that we see in the different encounters that Alice had starting from wonderland. The repetitiveness is the defining factor which lets us know that non-sense is in fact sensible in these fantastical worlds. In repetitiveness I mean at every encounter we share with Alice, all the characters possess both an otherworldly appearance and manner of understanding. When these figures talk to Alice – and to us the readers – some of what comes out is utter bleep and to some level childish. But, what do you really expect; you take a rational being and place it in what seem to you irrational, of course there are bound to be inconsistencies. All I am really trying to say is the same thing others before me have said and more will continue to say, we are not all alike.
short comment...My friend (Dave Lampert) just posted a note on his facebook profile that reminded me of this blog: "If I had a cat and a dog, I would name the cat "Dog", and the dog "Cat". I would do this to mess with humans" ...so 'Through the Looking Glass'...
The Fawn
ReplyDeleteWhen Alice first encounters the Fawn, they are in a wood which causes one to forget names; therefore, they both have no idea that he is a fawn and she is a human child. As long as they unaware of who they are, they are able to stroll in harmony together, “Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the neck of the Fawn” (154). Yet, when they emerge from the wood and suddenly remember who they really are the Fawn breaks free from her embrace and bounds off, as naturally fawns and humans do not generally associate with one another.
A valuable point that can be taken away from this scene lies in the idea that it is the very labels we place upon others, which carry the weight of our preconceived notions about these groups of people, that serve to separate humankind. Whether it is a different race, gender, or religion, we form opinions about the names that identify these groups, and judge those who fall into each category accordingly. Giving oneself and others defining labels results in exclusion; one may decide, for whatever reason, (whether it has been passed down for generations or whether he has formed this opinion from his own life experience), that his particular group does not mingle with a different particular group.
If human beings could only forget about those names, which categorize people into tiny boxes into which they do not fit, and focus instead on the notion that we are all living, breathing beings who, when it comes down to it, actually want many of the same things, perhaps we could all live in greater harmony together. We must treat this world as a world with no names in order to experience greater peace and equality among people, both at a day to day level as well as in global matters.
Jabberwocky in many ways resembles the journey that Alice is going on through Wonderland. Both characters venture, into the pastoral, in order to complete a journey or task and grow as individuals. Alice must mature and explore her self identity while the Jabberwocky boy must overcome this large beast and destroy it in the woods. In the structure of this poem, Carroll seems to be breaking away from the pattern of parodying other poems and creating his own style altogether that has none of the formal aspects one would think a formal Victorian poem to have. I like that the poem ends where it begins as this is similar to the circular pattern of speech discussed in last class where a lot of the Alice story seems to be in a circular motion. There is no real answer to what the heck the jabberwocky is and it is some giant beast that is really different than anything else in the story. Alice meets mostly strange but comical creatures where this one, although she only reads it, seems to be barbaric and gruesome as to warrant a beheading. The young boy must wield and ax and destroy it almost like a right if passage in the woods. I think that it is also important to realize that Alice is reading this book and perhaps Carroll is poking fun at the gruesome children’s stories told to kids at that time like from Grimm’s. Whereas his stories have a cute and fun setting (even the queen is laughable) Jabberwocky is almost like from a different and darker book. The tone has certain sharpness to it but at the same time Carroll makes it his own by implanting the silly language and playfulness. I’m sure that most Victorian kids would have loved to read and memorize this poem with friends in contrast to the stiff old poems of Marlowe and Spenser that they would have probably had to learn by heart in school. One more key that I want to allude to is the pastoral in Jabberwocky as seen in the fairy tales we read where the forest is important for a child’s growth and quest that he must fulfill to adapt. It’s possible that the ugly Jabberwocky is a manifestation of the real world and all the ugliness of maturity and cruelty that takes away the innocence and by killing this figure the boy has managed to keep onto his youthfulness almost like a Pan character as much Carroll himself would have wanted. At the same time though the boy has become a man when he kills the beast and goes back home carrying the head in a fatherly way that a hunter would return with his kill=parallel this with Alice who becomes a mother (Pig and Pepper) when taking the baby pig and adopting a maternal sense about her. In each case the youngster has grown up in a certain sense and taken on their respective maternal and parental roles.
ReplyDeleteIn the Garden of Talking Flowers, Alice encounters, as the title would suggest, flowers that talk. They are rather rude to her and they find Alice foolish because she does not understand the conventions of the looking glass world. Alice is a bit annoyed but more hurt by the way they speak to her. This scene is particularly interesting because you can see how "Through the Looking Glass" departs from "Alice in Wonderland." In this second book, there are rules to the looking glass world, they are simply opposite, a mirror of Alice's world. When she moves forward she ends up going the wrong direction, the flowers tell her to walk the "opposite way" to reach the red queen. Alice and the red queen then sprint leaving Alice breathless, but they don't go anywhere. Alice fails to understand that in Looking-Glass World she must do everything backwards, she does not understand that in a mirror she has to move away from something to get closer to it. The path seems to punish her for misunderstanding the conventions of Looking-Glass World.
ReplyDeleteI think in this book and chapter there is more a sense of intrusion on an already established world which Alice misunderstands and so thinks it to be "nonsense," somewhat of a culture clash. Caroll's commentary in this book is slighty diffferent than in the first. In "Alice in Wonderland" he aimed to say something like, "everything is nonsense, there is no certainty," but by portraying the looking glass world I think Carroll aims to comment on the intrusion of nations upon one another. We are often quick to assume that "our way is the right/logical way" but if everything is in fact nonsense (as we learned from Alice) then one way is as good as any other, and so we should reserve judgement.
My son says Alice in Wonderland is a “funny, not-making-sense, adventure story.” When I ask him why he thinks Lewis Carroll wrote the story the way that he did, he answers, “He is trying to say that adults take things too seriously. They should take some things as being funny.” “It’s My Own Invention” at the end of Through the Looking Glass offers insight into the absurd and the emotional, a different tone than the rest of the story and one which reveals more about Alice and her need to grow up.
ReplyDeleteAfter the Red Knight takes Alice prisoner, she is rescued by a White Knight. A Victorian version of Pretty Woman: a damsel in distress and the hero that whisks her off to safety. There are fascinating layers to this chapter as Alice ends her adventures on the chessboard and finds herself set to become a Queen. First, the White Knight is interesting in and of himself. He is portrayed as kind and even loving to Alice in a way she has not experienced in this alternate world. They have a sweet relationship and Alice is attentive to not wanting to hurt his feelings despite being mystified by his peculiarity. He is fairly powerless as a knight. He prepares himself for all manners of mishaps, but in ways that expose his ineffectiveness. He has invented a box which is carried upside down to keep the rain out, but which results in his possessions being lost. A beehive is attached to his saddle so he can have a supply of honey, but has yet to attract any bees. There are mousetraps and shark protectors (unlikely complications), a new type of helmet to cushion his many falls, and a bag filled with all types of odd accessories. He exists in a world that is unstable and the constant falling off of his horse demonstrates a lack of competence and makes him seem feeble.
Two parts strike me as particularly informing the distinctive nature of their relationship: one, just before the Knight sings Alice his song, Carroll says, “Of all the strange things Alice saw in her journey through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly...the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight,” and, two, the Knight wants her to watch after him until he leaves. There is something poignant and revealing about his need for her to see him off. It is as if he knows that her next move of becoming Queen means she won’t be coming back to this side of the looking glass. The Knight is growing older (interestingly, the introduction tells us that Carroll often referred to himself as the aged, aged man, the song the Knight sings to Alice), and Alice needs to grow up.
The thematic shift from cards to chess, paralleling Alice's physiological and psychological growth, is Carroll's acute commentary on the nature of life and aging.
ReplyDeleteCards themselves are not a game. They are a raw medium from which humans have shaped many games. This is an interesting analogy to childhood, in which one exists yet lacks autonomy and agency. Like a game of cards, childhood experience is tragically conjoint to luck: socioeconomic luck, emotional luck; the luck of parents, etc. By drawing an analogy between early childhood and cards, Carroll suggests that a child has two opponents: humanity and shear luck.
Chess, on the other hand, exists as a game. Chess is a process and not a formative tool. It has a definite beginning and a certain end. In chess, power lies in foresight and strategy. The opponent is singular and luck is factored out of the equation. Extending Carroll's analogy, the bloom of adolescence is paired with the gaining of agency. The start of a chess game is the endowment of autonomy. The player is now the general.
Adolescence the embrace of the protective/obstructive/helpful/hurtful hand life deals us and a rejection of being defined by that hand. A new awareness is then born and one is no longer led through life but rather leads oneself.
The Two Queens
ReplyDeleteBefore I even started reading Through the Looking Glass, I knew the two queens would have opposing physical appearances, verbal manners, and personal characteristics, since these would be literary requirements. Sure enough, the Red Queen is portrayed as skinny, domineering, and dictatorial, while the the White Queen is portrayed as plump, untidy, and helpless. Carroll uses "wildly" (128, 170, 173) to describe her most.
The Red Queen is a caricature of the classic Victorian governess. She represents the Victorian propriety of Alice's real world, which is full of arbitrary rules, manners, and etiquette. From the first encounter, the Red Queen tells her to curtsy, to open her mouth wider, always say "your Majesty" (140), etc. I was surprised that the Red Queen's patronizing attitude does not change when Alice becomes queen, but then I realized this must be so for Alice to actively identify and renounce the ever useless rules. Only when Alice identifies the uselessness of rules, such as "speak when you're spoken to," and renounces them, such as the act of bringing back the pudding, does she suddenly wake up from her dream. Alice defies convention and socialization, as represented by the Red Queen.
The White Queen might be a caricature of the typical citizen of Alice's dream world because she teaches Alice how memory works in the opposite way. She is "dreadfully untidy" (170) and looks in a "helpless frightened sort of way" (170). Alice, in intentional and stark contrast, pins the queen "gently" (17) and releases the queen's brush "carefully" (181). Even this interaction is the reverse of the Red Queen, or of Alice's real world, but the typical behavior of her crazy dream world. By the end, Alice defies the White Queen as well. When the White Queen offers her support at dinner, Alice replies that she can do "quite well without" (232). The two queens' pushing Alice to flatten her represent society's desire to control and mold people, but Alice's growth reveals her power to resist different social confines, both of the real world and of the dream world.
As for the roles of the two queens as mother figures, I'm not too sure. Despite the Red Queen's despotic mannerisms, she does smile pleasantly (141), speak kindly and good-naturedly (143), and gives helpful advice, including "remember who you are!" (144). These acts seem very motherly and thoughtful. While the White Queen has motherly qualities, Alice seems more like the mother figure to her. This reversal might be another manifestation of the "opposite-ness" of the dream role. Yet, although Alice is the one who tends to the White Queen's physical needs-- her shawl and her hair-- the White Queen tends to Alice's emotional needs when she cries. Both queens help Alice but in very different ways.
The sense in non-sense
ReplyDeleteThough I see Vadim’s point in the shift from cards to a chess setting; which help to represent the growth that little Alice has undergone as a result of natural process after each encounter with the odd citizens of Wonderland. Although her setting has changed I feel we are still very much attached to the same self-important Alice. We can see how the personality of Alice tries to take over in some of her new encounters in Through the Looking Glass, such as in the talking garden and later on with Humpty Dumpty. Unfortunately for Alice, she encounters personalities even greater than hers leaving her unable to spread her wings as much as she did in Wonderland. We see that she always exit unsatisfied at the end of each encounter. The flowers antagonized her, the fawn and the Tweedle brothers abandon her, then Humpty Dumpty says she will not be remembered (p.192). The concept of sense should not be applied when talking about the journey of Alice through a dream land, the fact that it is a dream is enough to suggest that things will not be entirely as we perceive it. The most accurate way to describe the passage of Alice through these fantastical worlds is exactly that, a child’s play thing. They are simple representations of the adult world through a growing child’s eye, there obviously would be chaos due to sensory overload from a surrounding to a brain that is eager to take everything in; but has not developed the necessary skills to detect and properly assimilate sensory data into logic. This is taken from a point found in Theresa’s post where she says “They find Alice foolish because she does not understand the conventions of the looking glass world.” There is obviously a repetitive pattern that we see in the different encounters that Alice had starting from wonderland. The repetitiveness is the defining factor which lets us know that non-sense is in fact sensible in these fantastical worlds. In repetitiveness I mean at every encounter we share with Alice, all the characters possess both an otherworldly appearance and manner of understanding. When these figures talk to Alice – and to us the readers – some of what comes out is utter bleep and to some level childish. But, what do you really expect; you take a rational being and place it in what seem to you irrational, of course there are bound to be inconsistencies. All I am really trying to say is the same thing others before me have said and more will continue to say, we are not all alike.
short comment...My friend (Dave Lampert) just posted a note on his facebook profile that reminded me of this blog:
ReplyDelete"If I had a cat and a dog, I would name the cat "Dog", and the dog "Cat". I would do this to mess with humans"
...so 'Through the Looking Glass'...