Lewis Carroll

This study will provide a critical analysis of three works by Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and the poem "A Sea Dirge." In the two fantasy novels, Carroll depicts young Alice and her loss of contact with the commonplace reality to which she was accustomed. Alice finds the world of nature not as reliable as she had once believed and yet discovers that she can act with adaptability and courage in that strange world. The poem, conversely, shows the poet's hatred toward the sea and his inability to adapt to what he sees as its threat to his reality or even sanity. Unlike Alice who is constantly besieged with new and startling realities, the poet assumes that he knows all there is to know about the milieu of the sea, and there is nothing about it which strikes his fancy. Nevertheless, the poem is meant to be humorous, as are the two fantasy novels. Alice may stumble into a bewildering realm and the poet may despise the sea, but in the end Carroll means to entertain, to lighten the heart of his readers rather than add to their burden with a pessimistic or anarchic vision of the world.

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire in England. In his teens he contributed pose, poetry and drawings to various periodicals, entered Oxford at 18, graduated with a B.A. four years later, and lectured in mathematics for the next 16 years. He lived at Oxford for most of his life, where he wrote technical mathemati

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a maturing person to keep contact with the innocence and wonder of childhood. The immediate appearance of the talking rabbit reveals to Kelly that In Wonderland all things are possible. . . . Like Alice, the reader is continually astonished, surprised, and puzzled. It is a world made up of contradictions, violence, jokes, anxiety, puns, puzzles, rudeness, rules and anarchy shaped by a dream vision. The chaos that rules in Wonderland is not unfamiliar to us. it is evident in the behavior of children who have not yet been restrained by the rules of decorum (Kelly 73). What might be seen as the negative aspects of Wonderland--violence, chaos, anarchy--are in fact merely part of what is necessary to snap Alice--and the reader--out of the rut of conformity, socialization, social decorum, and the death of the imagination and of wonder that comes with adulthood. Just as there are those critics who take the Alice books too seriously and miss the humor, so are there those who focus too much on the humor and miss the more serious aspects. In Through the Looking-Glass, for example, there are several passages which may indeed seem to be over the heads of children, but children, too, are aware of death, even though its full import ma

Category: Literature - L