Lewis Carroll: Final Thesis

For the first book, read here. For the second book read here. For my thesis on the books, read below.

Carroll’s focus on playing with logic in the Alice books is of significant note in ‘Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there’. The title references a looking glass, which is the Victorian word for a mirror. The entire book thus plays with the concept of reflections, reversals, and duplicates. Within the looking glass, everything works backwards. The texts are reversed - Alice recites the Jabberwocky backwards; the directions are reversed - Alice must run towards the palace to get away from it, and walk away from what she wants in the garden to get into it; and even the states of motion are reversed at times - when the queen and Alice must keep running to stay in one place. 

It can be argued that the brothers' Tweedledum and Tweedledee are also three dimensional mirror images, since they never contradict each others' sentences, but rather complement each other. Tenniel himself illustrated them to be twins, and Gardner argued that Carroll intended them to be enantiomorphs. While the book shows the progression of Alice from pawn to queen (often interpreted as child to adult), it is of note that often there is a reversal in maturity of the characters with respect to Alice as well. Alice comes across as more able than the White Knight, who can't ride his horse; makes more sense than Humpty Dumpty, a master linguist; mediates the duel between Tweedledum and Tweedledee; and even scolds Dinah and lectures the other cats as a mother would.

Carroll critiques the Victorian etiquettes through Alice in her conversations with most of the residents of the Looking Glass world. Given that he has established that this world is backwards, and even Alice observes many of the lifestyle choices in this world would be impossible, it follows that Carroll aims to point out the ridiculousness of some Victorian customs by portraying them as parodies in his world.