Who Are You In Wonderland?
Mentor 1
Kelly Sultzbach
Location
Union 181
Start Date
24-4-2015 2:00 PM
Description
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a prominent text to study when analyzing the issues of identity. Carroll, alter ego of Charles Dodgson, creates a world of illogicalness, while Dodgson’s actual life was stable and cautious. Connecting the instability in his writing to his logical career as a mathematician, the case of identity is questioned due to shifting attributes that satirically correlate to Victorian society as you fall deeper down the rabbit hole into a world as far from reality as you can get. By having the Queen, a political figure, make implausible notions, which can be seen in the crocket and trail scenes, assists in Carroll’s view of the era. This could be seen as a satire for Queen Victoria and his true feelings about her in power. Being that since, in this time period, his inappropriate fascination with a child was seen as culturally improper, he took to his writing to caricaturize and criticize the Victorian society. Carroll writing down his imagination sparked an oasis where there are “gently smiling jaws”, where one person can be a juror, jury, and witness all in one trial, and when a cat has “very long claws and great many teeth” it should be treated with respect; allowing for the issue of identity to flourish and remain inconstant. Is that the reason Wonderland was created, to allow for one’s self to be both sides of himself? The only stable constant throughout his novel is instability. Alice is the epitome of a character with identity issues due to constantly shifting size and how she feels she has changed several times since entering Wonderland. Wonderland is a symbol of the illogical and counteracts the stability of reality. This then points to another question about Wonderland, does Wonderland represent a world outside of reality that is meant for the uncertainty or does each of us have our own type of Wonderland within us that we must eventually come to face because identity is a topic each of us has to confront. This then finally leads us into the ever demanding question that Wonderland holds, “who are you?” /
Who Are You In Wonderland?
Union 181
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a prominent text to study when analyzing the issues of identity. Carroll, alter ego of Charles Dodgson, creates a world of illogicalness, while Dodgson’s actual life was stable and cautious. Connecting the instability in his writing to his logical career as a mathematician, the case of identity is questioned due to shifting attributes that satirically correlate to Victorian society as you fall deeper down the rabbit hole into a world as far from reality as you can get. By having the Queen, a political figure, make implausible notions, which can be seen in the crocket and trail scenes, assists in Carroll’s view of the era. This could be seen as a satire for Queen Victoria and his true feelings about her in power. Being that since, in this time period, his inappropriate fascination with a child was seen as culturally improper, he took to his writing to caricaturize and criticize the Victorian society. Carroll writing down his imagination sparked an oasis where there are “gently smiling jaws”, where one person can be a juror, jury, and witness all in one trial, and when a cat has “very long claws and great many teeth” it should be treated with respect; allowing for the issue of identity to flourish and remain inconstant. Is that the reason Wonderland was created, to allow for one’s self to be both sides of himself? The only stable constant throughout his novel is instability. Alice is the epitome of a character with identity issues due to constantly shifting size and how she feels she has changed several times since entering Wonderland. Wonderland is a symbol of the illogical and counteracts the stability of reality. This then points to another question about Wonderland, does Wonderland represent a world outside of reality that is meant for the uncertainty or does each of us have our own type of Wonderland within us that we must eventually come to face because identity is a topic each of us has to confront. This then finally leads us into the ever demanding question that Wonderland holds, “who are you?” /
