Wonderland critical essays

In Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, much of the sequence and dialogue seems chaotic and nonsensical, leaving the reader to interpret its meaning and purpose. Being that the entire story occurs within a dream, Carroll has the...

Many people have seen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a prime example of the limit-breaking book from the old tradition illuminating the new one. They also consider it being a tale of the “variations on the debate of gender” and that it’s “continually astonishing us with its modernity”.

But when the chips are down, Alice reveals something to the Queen of Hearts — that is: spunk! Indeed, Alice has all the Victorian virtues, including a quaint capacity for rationalization; yet it is Alice's common sense that makes the quarrelsome Wonderland creatures seem perverse in spite of what they consider to be their "adult" identities.

I t is important to bear in mind that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, however special it may seem and however many different interpretations one thinks one can find, is, after all, but a story written to entertain Charles Dodgson’s favourite child-friends.