Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are novels written by Lewis Carroll. These two stories are Carroll’s imaginations and fantasies that have been read worldwide and loved by many children. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland talks of Alice when she was still a child while Through the Looking Glass talks of Alice when she was a teenager. In this paper, I am going to write about Alice’s search for identity, the struggles she underwent and the purpose for her struggle. Finally I will talk about the purpose for her struggles and the situations she was in, in the time of her struggles.
In Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, Alice struggles to break away from adult control and have freedom away from them. Alice follows a strange rabbit and falls in its hole without thinking how she will come out. This novel can be seen as an individuals search for identity because when Alice falls in the rabbit hole, she forgets everything about herself including her name and she has to start from here to find her identity. This forces her to create an identity in order to cope with the situations in the wonderland. Alice struggles with her identity because throughout the book, she is ordered by the creatures she meets to identify herself. In most of the cases, Alice does not know who she is but she can be heard saying that if she is determined, she will know who she is. Alice was determined to search for her identity. Alice’s encounter with the caterpillar shows us that she did not know who she was because when the caterpillar asked her to identify herself her response was “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 “(Carroll 38). She did not know exactly who she was because she had doubts about her identity. Alice’s physical appearances changes throughout the story, she grows big and shrinks all the time and this makes her identity unstable. She is even mistaken for a serpent by the pigeon because of her long neck.
In the novel Through the Looking Glass, Alice was sure of her identity but still she questioned it. She forgot her name immediately she entered the woods. This novel can be seen as an individuals search for identity because the fawn made Alice confused by telling her that she was not recognized as a human being and to make it worse, she could not even remember her own name. In addition, Tweedledee and Tweedledum confused her more by showing her the Red king and telling her that she only existed in her dreams and she was not a real person and so she needed to search for her identity (Carroll 59). Alice had to search her identity because everything was confusing to her including being told that she was not a recognized human being. Alice wanted the queen’s identity in this novel and she is seen struggling to attain a higher social position so as to become queen.
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, Carroll does not give a clear picture of what identity Alice woke up with but in Through the Looking Glass, Alice was able to get her identity of being a queen in the wonderland. Carroll’s work was to search a young girl’s identity from childhood into a teenager and also to make her grow into an adult.
Carroll puts Alice in danger because she was only a child and yet in the novels, he exposes her to very harsh conditions. She is exposed to unknown creatures which she speaks to and he even drinks and eats substances she does not know. Carroll exposes her to danger again where her body increases and shrinks severally. An example is after taking the drink at the bottom of the hole marked “Drink Me”, she wanted to find out what it tasted like, so she tried it, finding it to be “very nice”, but it made her grow to be 9 feet tall until she waved a fan the rabbit gave to her “(Carroll 53). This is a great danger she was exposed to, she was exposed o death in the wonderland even though she had fun with the creatures.
Alice’s first struggle that is depicted in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland is the struggle for her own identity. Alice is seen struggling to remember her own self. Another struggle is being unable to cross to the beautiful garden which she desperately wanted to. She is seen crying after noticing that she forgot to pick the key that was to unlock her way to the garden. Her purpose for this struggle was to enter the beautiful garden but she could not access it because she had left the key behind and she could not access the way back to where it was.
When Alice enters the wonderland she experiences different ways of living and reasoning which were very different from her own and by the time the novel ends, she understands many things in the adult world. Her thinking changes and she grows up. Her search for identity succeeds because she is able to learn a lot of things through the interaction with the creatures and wakes up in a real world of adults and leaves the children world in the wonderland. In the novel Through the Looking Glass, Alice is seen struggling to master certain rules and behavior in order to attain a higher social position. Alice wanted to be a queen and she had to struggle to reach the position. The purpose for her struggles in this novel was to have a high position and become the queen in the woodlands. Another struggle is seen where Alice wants to see the view the garden but no matter how she tries to find it, she finds herself returning in the front of the house (Carroll 112). Anytime she tried going somewhere, she ended up going into the opposite direction and so in the novel, Alice struggled to find places. The purpose for her struggle was to see the beautiful garden and to go to different places but she never managed.
In essence in both books, Alice had a struggle in the search for her own identity and also had problems accessing certain places like the beautiful garden. She had to struggle in order to attain whatever she wanted. She met different creatures which she was able to communicate to and learnt a lot from them. She succeeded in coping with the experiences in the wonderland.
Works Cited
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1999. Print.
